Sebastian Junger - War

That was Jones’s take. At night I put my vest and helmet at my feet and kept my boots tied loosely so that I could jam my feet into them but not trip over the laces. Waking up to them doing a “Ranch House” on us was by far the most terrifying thing I could imagine, and arranging my things so that I could be out the door in thirty seconds was how I coped with those fears. It didn’t work very well. I’d lie awake at night amazed by the idea that everything could change — could, in fact, end — at any moment. And even after I went to sleep those thoughts would just continue on as dreams, full-blown combat sequences that I wallowed through like a bad action movie. In those dreams the enemy was relentless and everywhere at once and I didn’t have a chance.

As a civilian among soldiers I was aware that a failure of nerve by me could put other men at risk, and that idea was almost as mortifying as the very real dangers up there. The problem with fear, though, is that it isn’t any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy — anxiety, dread, panic, foreboding — and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another. Before the firefights everyone got sort of edgy, glancing around with little half-smiles that seemed to say, “This is what we do — crazy, huh?” and those moments never really bothered me. I trusted the guys I was with and usually just concentrated on finding cover and getting the video camera ready. The fights themselves went by in a blur; if I remembered even half of what happened I was doing well. (I always watched the videotape afterward and was amazed by how much dropped out.) I truly froze only once when we got hit unexpectedly and very hard. I didn’t have my body armor or camera near me — stupid, stupid — and endured thirty seconds of paralyzed incomprehension until Tim darted through fire to grab our gear and drag it back behind a Hesco.

Combat jammed so much adrenaline through your system that fear was rarely an issue; far more indicative of real courage was how you felt before the big operations, when the implications of losing your life really had a chance to sink in. My personal weakness wasn’t fear so much as the anticipation of it. If I had any illusions about personal courage, they always dissolved in the days or hours before something big, dread accumulating in my blood like some kind of toxin until I felt too apathetic to even tie my boots properly. As far as I could tell everyone up there got scared from time to time, there was no stigma to it as long as you didn’t allow it to affect the others, and journalists were no exception. Once I got completely unnerved when Second Platoon was standing by as a quick-reaction force for Firebase Vegas, which was about to get attacked. This was my last trip, I was days from leaving the Korengal forever, and there was a chance that in the next few hours a Chinook would drop us off in the middle of a massive firefight on the Abas Ghar. I was getting my gear ready for the experience — extra water, extra batteries, take the side plates off my vest to save weight — but I guess my face betrayed more anxiety than I realized. “It’s okay to be scared,” Moreno said to me, loud enough for everyone else to hear, “you just don’t want to show it…”

There are different kinds of strength, and containing fear may be the most profound, the one without which armies couldn’t function and wars couldn’t be fought (God forbid). There are big, tough guys in the Army who are cowards and small, feral-looking dudes, like Monroe, who will methodically take apart a SAW while rounds are slapping the rocks all around them. The more literal forms of strength, like carrying 160 pounds up a mountain, depend more obviously on the size of your muscles, but muscles only do what you tell them, so it still keeps coming back to the human spirit. Wars are fought with very heavy machinery that works best on top of the biggest hill in the area and used against men who are lower down. That, in a nutshell, is military tactics, and it means that an enormous amount of war-fighting simply consists of carrying heavy loads uphill.

I was always amazed at the sheer variety of body shapes in the platoon, the radically different designs for accomplishing the same thing. Donoho was six-three and built like an ironing board but carried a full SAW kit, 120 pounds. Walker was an ample, good-natured kid who just sort of trudged along but was essentially unstoppable. (Once the guys quietly filled his ruck with an extra fifty pounds of canned food on top of the eighty he was already carrying; he just hoisted it onto his shoulders and walked to Restrepo without even commenting.) Bobby Wilson was a 240 gunner from Georgia with fingers like sausages and feet that were literally square: size 6, quadruple-E. He straight up described himself as fat but had some kind of crazy redneck strength that was more like hydraulics than musculature. He was known for not even bothering to duck punches when he got into bar fights, he just walked straight into whatever the other guy had for him until he got close enough to clinch. Once the platoon needed to get something called an LRAS down from Restrepo and there were no helicopters to sling it out. An LRAS is a thermal-optical device the size of a filing cabinet that weighs well over a hundred pounds. They just strapped it to Bobby and off he went with a bottle of water in one hand and his 9 mil in the other.

On and on the list went, scrawny guys like Monroe or Pemble carrying as much as big, rangy guys like Jones or the outright mules like Wilson or Walker. The only man who was truly in his own category was Vandenberge, a specialist in Weapons Squad who stood six foot five and arrived in the Korengal weighing three hundred pounds. His hands were so big I was told he could palm sandbags as if they were basketballs. He could pick up a SAW one-handed — twenty-three pounds plus ammo — and shoot it like a pistol. I saw him throw Kim over his shoulder, ford a stream, and then climb halfway up Honcho Hill without even seeming to notice. Once someone wondered aloud whether Vandenberge could ready-up the .50, meaning put it to his shoulder and fire it like a rifle. The .50 weighs almost a hundred pounds and is never fired off its tripod or carried by less than two men. Vandenberge wrapped his huge paws around it, brought it to his shoulder, and sighted down the barrel like he was shooting squirrels with a .22. He rarely spoke but had a shy smile that would emerge from time to time, particularly when men were talking about just how damn big he was. “Vandenberge you big bastard,” someone said to him in passing once. Vandenberge was sitting on a cot doing something. “My bad,” he said without even looking up.

O’Byrne wasn’t big but it was like he was made out of scrap metal, scars here and there, and nothing seemed to hurt him. Walking point on patrols he had to slow himself down so that he didn’t outwalk the rest of the platoon. Once they were clawing their way up Table Rock after a twenty-hour operation and a man in another squad started falling out. “He can’t be smoked here,” I heard O’Byrne seethe to Sergeant Mac in the dark, “he doesn’t have the right to be.” The idea that you’re not allowed to experience something as human as exhaustion is outrageous anywhere but in combat. Good leaders know that exhaustion is partly a state of mind, though, and that the men who succumb to it have on some level decided to put themselves above everyone else. If you’re not prepared to walk for someone you’re certainly not prepared to die for them, and that goes to the heart of whether you should even be in the platoon.

There was no way to overhear a comment like O’Byrne’s without considering one’s own obligation to keep up. You slow down a patrol, the enemy has time to get into position and then someone gets shot. Trying to imagine being the cause of that scenario was like trying to imagine crashing in a Chinook: at some point my mind just refused to participate in the experiment. I reassured myself with the thought that I was twice the age of the soldiers but carried half the weight they did, so in some ways it was a fair fight. I also ran track and cross-country in college, and, twenty-five years later, I still remembered how to negotiate the long, horrible process of physical collapse. It starts with pain, of course, but that pain is at the edge of what I thought of as a deep, dark valley. At the bottom of the valley is true incapacitation, but it might take hours to get down there, working your way through strata of misery and dissociation until your muscles simply stop obeying and your mind can’t even be trusted to give commands that make sense. The most valuable thing I knew from all that running was that when you start hurting you’re not even close to the bottom of the valley, and that if you don’t panic at the first agonies there’s much, much more of yourself to give.