Sebastian Junger - War

“And Mendoza’s a fuckin’ hero, right?” he said. “He’s an American hero, right?”

“Yeah, he’s a hero.”

“And Brennan was dead, right?” O’Byrne said. “I mean, they weren’t dragging him off alive, were they?”

I wasn’t sure what to say. Soldiers can seem pretty accepting of the idea that they might die in combat, but being taken alive is a different matter. “No, he didn’t die until later,” I said. “He was alive at the time.”

O’Byrne looked around the room. I tried to think what I should do if he started crying. He concentrated and gathered himself and finally asked how many enemy fighters were killed.

“They killed a lot,” I told him. “Like fifty. Thirty of them were Arabs. The A-10s really messed them up.”

“Yeah, kill those fuckers,” O’Byrne said. He repeated that a few times and took another drink. I asked him how he felt about going back.

“I got to get back there,” he said. “Those are my boys. Those are the best friends I’ll ever have.”

He was gripping my arm and trying to look at me, but his eyes kept needing to refocus. They never got it quite right. I got up to go, and O’Byrne stood up as well and hugged me several times. I wished him luck and told him I’d see him back out there in a month or two. On the way out I told Addie, the bar manager, that I’d like to pick up their check. Later she told me she had to shut them off after the next drink because O’Byrne fell out of his chair and the girl could hardly talk.

“He was so polite, though,” Addie said. “I mean, drunk as he was, he still took off his hat whenever I walked up.”

FORWARD OPERATING BASES ARE A SPECIAL KIND OF hell, none of the excitement of real war but all the ugliness: rows of plywood bee huts and weapons everywhere and Apaches jolting you awake at all hours running the flight line ten feet off the ground. Journalists usually moved around the theater on scheduled resupply flights, but even minor problems can ripple outward through the logistics web and leave you stuck at a FOB for days. At least Bagram had decent food and a huge PX; Jalalabad had absolutely nothing. In winter the wind drove you mad with the rattling of tent flaps and in summer it got so hot — 130 in the shade — that you almost couldn’t make it across the parade ground without drinking water. I stayed in the VIP tent, all the journalists did, and one afternoon I tried to escape the flamethrower heat by lying down on my bunk and going to sleep. I woke up so disoriented from dehydration that someone had to help me to another tent with better air-conditioning. There was nothing to do at JAF but hit your mealtimes and pray that if the enemy somehow mustered the nerve to attack it would be while you were stuck there and could report on it.

In the Korengal the soldiers never talked about the wider war — or cared — so it was hard to get a sense of how the country as a whole was faring. And the big bases had the opposite problem: since there was almost no combat, everyone had a kind of reflexive optimism that never got tested by the reality outside the wire. The public affairs guys on those bases offered the press a certain vision of the war, and that vision wasn’t wrong , it just seemed amazingly incomplete. There was real progress in the country, and there was real appreciation among the Afghans for what America was trying to do, but the country was also coming apart at the seams, and press officers didn’t talk about that much. During the year that I was in the Korengal, the Taliban almost assassinated Afghan president Hamid Karzai, blew up the fanciest hotel in Kabul, fought to the outskirts of Kandahar, and then attacked the city prison and sprang scores of fellow insurgents from captivity. More American soldiers were killed that year than in any year previous, but if you pointed that out, you were simply told that it was because we were now “taking the fight to the enemy.” That may well have been true, but it lacked any acknowledgment that the enemy was definitely getting their shit together.

I thought of those as “Vietnam moments.” A Vietnam moment was one in which you weren’t so much getting misled as getting asked to participate in a kind of collective wishful thinking. Toward the end of my year, for example, the Taliban attacked an American base north of the Pech and killed nine American soldiers and wounded half the survivors. When I asked American commanders about it, their responses were usually along the lines of how it was actually an American victory because forty or fifty enemy fighters had also died in the fight. Since the Army had already admitted that this was not a war of attrition, using enemy casualties as a definition of success struck me as a tricky business.

And we reporters had our own issues. Vietnam was our paradigm as well, our template for how not to get hoodwinked by the U.S. military, and it exerted such a powerful influence that anything short of implacable cynicism sometimes felt like a sellout. Most journalists wanted to cover combat — as opposed to humanitarian operations — so they got embedded with combat units and wound up painting a picture of a country engulfed in war. In fact, most areas of the country were relatively stable; you had to get pretty lucky to find yourself in anything even vaguely resembling a firefight. When you did, of course, other journalists looked at you with a kind of rueful envy and asked how they could get in with that unit. Once at a dinner party back home I was asked, with a kind of knowing wink, how much the military had “censored” my reporting. I answered that I’d never been censored at all, and that once I’d asked a public affairs officer to help me fact-check an article and he’d answered, “Sure, but you can’t actually show it to me — that would be illegal.”

That wasn’t a story anyone really wanted to hear, and I almost felt like a bit of a patsy for telling it. Vietnam was considered a morally dubious war that was fought by draftees while the rest of the nation was dropping acid and listening to Jimi Hendrix. Afghanistan, on the other hand, was being fought by volunteers who more or less respected their commanders and had the gratitude of the vast majority of Americans back home. If you imagined that your job, as a reporter, was to buddy up to the troops and tell the “real” story of how they were dying in a senseless war, you were in for a surprise. The commanders would realize you were operating off a particular kind of cultural programming and would try to change your mind, but the men wouldn’t bother. They’d just refuse to talk to you until you left their base.

Once in a while you’d meet a soldier who didn’t fit into any clear category, though. These were men who believed in the war but also recognized the American military’s capacity for self-delusion. “We’re not going to win the war until we admit we’re losing it,” one of these guys told me in the spring of 2008. He was in a position of moderate influence in the U.S. military, and his pessimism was so refreshing that it actually made me weirdly optimistic. And then there was the sergeant from Third Platoon whom I recognized at the Bagram air terminal while waiting for a flight. I said something vague about the progress in the valley and he didn’t even bother masking his disgust. “What are you talking about, it’s a fucking quagmire,” he said. “There’s no progress with the locals, it’s just not happening, and I don’t even trust the S-2 — he’s full of shit. I was at an intel briefing and the S-2 was talking about how the Iranians were funding the Taliban. I asked about all the money coming from Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, and he said that those are private donations that are harder to trace. Harder to trace than money sent by the Iranian government? ”