Sebastian Junger - War

The second night is spent again in thick spruce forests high up on a spur of the Abas Ghar called the Sawtalo Sar. Second Platoon orients themselves toward the north, with the ANA to the south, headquarters to the west, and Rougle and his Wildcat element to the east. Rice and his gun team — Jackson, Solowski, and Vandenberge — are up there with Wildcat as well, on a hill that has been designated 2435, for its altitude in meters. From their positions some of the men can see the remains of the Chinook that was shot down in 2005. That night the shadow people arrive, weird hallucinations that occur after too many nights without sleep. The men have slept a total of eight or ten hours in the past hundred and their judgment couldn’t be more impaired if they were piss-drunk. Trees turn into people and bushes shift around on the ridgelines as if preparing to attack; it’s all the men on guard can do to keep from opening fire.

Dawn of the second day: a raw wind sawing across the ridgetops and the ground frozen like rock. On a trail above the camp the men line up and eat MREs while waiting for orders to move out. “We eat our boredom,” Jones says while watching Stichter put cheese spread on a chocolate energy bar. They’ve got four days’ growth on their chins and their faces are dark with dirt and it’s so cold that everyone is wearing ski caps under their helmets. Enemy fighters are still whispering on their radios, but they haven’t fired a shot since Yaka Chine and the men are just starting to think this isn’t going to happen. Chosen Company will be clearing villages in the Shuryak, and Battle’s job is to support them by making sure no fighters cross the Abas Ghar in either direction. They’ll spend another night in this area and then probably start their exfil the following day.

That’s more or less what the men are thinking about when the first smattering of gunfire comes in.

At first no one knows where it’s coming from, and then bullets start clipping branches over people’s heads and smacking the tree trunks next to them. The men jump off the trail into a steeply sloped spruce forest and Jones gets his 240 going and Donoho starts popping 203s across the draw to their south. They’re taking heavy, accurate fire from an adjacent ridgeline and it’s so effective that much of Second Platoon is having trouble even getting their guns up. It’s during these first few minutes of confusion that Buno comes sprinting down the line with a strange look on his face. It occurs to Hijar that he’s never seen Buno look scared before.

‘An American position is getting overrun,’ Buno tells him.

Hijar grabs a LAW rocket and starts running up the line with the rest of his fire team. Piosa is on the radio to Kearney and Stichter is calculating grid coordinates for mortars and the men are crawling around in the forest trying to find cover. Pemble is behind a tree stump and he looks to his right and sees rounds chopping the branches off a tree next to him. ‘Shit, it’s really close,’ he thinks. Bullets are coming from so many directions that there’s no way to take cover from everything. Upslope toward Wildcat someone starts screaming for a medic and Pemble passes word down the line, but nothing comes back up so he and Cortez start running up there. They sprint through heavy fire, keeping to the treeline as long as they can and then breaking across an open patch right below Wildcat’s position. The first man they see is Vandenberge, who’s sitting on the ground holding his arm. Blood is welling out between his fingers. ‘I’m bleeding out, you gotta save me,’ he says. ‘I’m dying.’

He’s been hit in the artery and will be dead in minutes without medical help. Pemble kneels down and starts unpacking his medical kit, and while he’s doing that he asks Vandenberge where the enemy is.

‘The last guy I saw was about twenty feet away,’ Vandenberge says.

Pemble starts stuffing the wound with Kerlix until he’s knuckle-deep in Vandenberge’s huge arm. Vandenberge is soaked with blood from his boots to his collar and soon Pemble is too, and when he cuts the sleeve off Vandenberge’s uniform another two or three cups of blood spill out. “You could see it in his face that he’s slowly dying,” Pemble said. “He was turning really ghost-looking. His eyes started sinking into his head, he started to get real brown around his eyes. And he kept saying, ‘I’m getting really dizzy, I want to go to sleep.’ That’s some rough shit to hear, coming from one of your best friends and you’re watching him die right in front of you, that’s some fucking shit. All I did was block everything he was saying out except what I needed to hear, like where the Taliban was at and checking for all his wounds.”

Jackson shows up with nothing but a rifle in his hand — no helmet or vest. He’d been pushed off the hilltop along with Solowski, who’d emptied a whole magazine at the enemy and then fallen back under continuous heavy fire. By now Cortez has made it to Rice, who’s sitting in some brush holding his gut. He’s taken a bullet through the back of his shoulder that ricocheted strangely inside him and came out his abdomen, just below the ballistic plate of his vest. The last thing he remembers was a Taliban fighter aiming an RPG at him from forty yards away. He had time to think that it was the last thing he’d ever see, but now Cortez is kneeling in front of him asking where he’s wounded. He’s already done a quick assessment on himself — which more or less consists of realizing that if he hasn’t died yet he probably isn’t going to — and he knows the enemy has just overrun a critical hill in the middle of the American line. If they get set in up there they can shred any Americans coming to help.

‘Just take back the hill,’ he says.

Cortez, Jackson, and Walker assault up the hill but the enemy has already retreated and there’s no one to fight, no one to kill. Cortez goes to one knee behind cover with his rifle up and glances to the right and sees a body lying facedown — an American. Walker runs to him and shakes him to see if he’s all right and finally rolls him over. It’s Staff Sergeant Rougle, shot through the forehead and his face purple with trauma. “I wanted to cry but I didn’t — I was shocked,” Cortez said. “I just wanted to kill everything that came up that wasn’t American. I actually didn’t care who came up — man, woman, child, I still would’ve done something.”

They’re joined by Hijar, Hoyt, and Donoho. Someone has thrown a poncho liner over Rougle, but it’s clear from the boots protruding at the bottom that it’s an American soldier. Rougle was hit multiple times on one side of his body in a way that made Kearney think he was caught midstride and had turned to meet a sudden threat from behind. Cortez worried that Rougle was still alive when the enemy overran the position and that they had executed him where he lay, but there was no evidence to support that. Nevertheless, the thought was to torment Cortez in the coming months. Every night he’d dream he was back on the mountain trying to run fast enough to make things turn out differently. They never would. “I’d prefer to not sleep and not dream about it,” Cortez said, “than sleep with that picture in my head.”

Rougle’s men arrive minutes later. Shortly before the attack Rougle left their position to talk to Staff Sergeant Rice and his men have no idea what happened to him. There was so much gunfire that they thought they were about to get overrun, so a Scout named Raeon broke down the Barrett sniper rifle and scattered the pieces around the position so the enemy couldn’t use it against American forces. Now the Scouts come running forward looking for their commander and all they find is blood and gear all over the hilltop and a body covered by a poncho liner. Next to the body is an empty MRE packet and a water bottle. “Is Rougle and them up?” a Scout named Clinard asks. Hoyt glances at him and looks away.