Sebastian Junger: War

One afternoon, O’Byrne saw a National Guard recruiter at his high school and signed up. The unit was about to deploy to Iraq and O’Byrne realized he would be spending a year with a bunch of middle-aged men, so he managed to transfer into the regular Army. The Army wanted to make him a 67 Hotel — a tank mechanic — but he protested and wound up being classified as 11 Charlie. That’s mortars. He didn’t want to be a mortarman, though — he wanted to be 11 Bravo. He wanted to be an infantryman. His drill sergeant finally relented after O’Byrne got into a barracks fight with someone the sergeant didn’t like and broke the man’s jaw. The sergeant was Latino and spoke English with such a strong accent that often his men had no idea what he was saying. One afternoon when they were filling out information packets, the sergeant started giving instructions that no one could understand.

“He’d be like, ‘Take your motherfucker packet and put it in your motherfucker packet,’” O’Byrne said. “And we’re all like, ‘What the fuck is he talking about? What’s a “motherfucker packet”? And then he starts pointing to things he’s talking about: ‘Take your motherfucker packet ’ — which is a packet — ’and put it in your motherfucker packet !’ — and he points to his pocket. Oh, okay! You put your packet in your pocket!”

O’Byrne wanted to go to Special Forces, and that meant passing a series of lower-level schools and selection courses. Airborne School was a joke; he passed SOPC 1 (Special Operations Preparation Course) with flying colors; got himself selected for Special Forces; tore through SOPC 2; and then was told he couldn’t advance any further without combat experience. ‘You can’t replace combat with training,’ a black E7 at Fort Bragg told him. ‘You can’t do it. You can’t replace that fucking experience. Get deployed, and if you want to come back, come back after that.’

O’Byrne thought that made sense and joined the 173rd Airborne, based in Vicenza, Italy. He’d never been out of the country before. He wound up in Second Platoon, Battle Company, which was already thought of as one of the top units in the brigade. Battle Company had fought well in Iraq and had seen a lot of combat in Afghanistan on its previous deployment. There were four platoons in the company, and of them all, Second Platoon was considered the best-trained and in some ways the worst-disciplined. The platoon had a reputation for producing terrible garrison soldiers — men who drink and fight and get arrested for disorderly conduct and mayhem — but who are extraordinarily good at war. Soldiers make a distinction between the petty tyrannies of garrison life and the very real ordeals of combat, and poor garrison soldiers like to think it’s impossible to be good at both.

“I used to score three hundreds on my PT tests shit-canned… just drunk as fuck,” O’Byrne told me. “That’s how you got sober for the rest of the day. I never got in trouble, but Bobby beat up a few MPs, threatened them with a fire extinguisher, pissed on their boots. But what do you expect from the infantry, you know? I know that all the guys that were bad in garrison were perfect fucking soldiers in combat. They’re troublemakers and they like to fight. That’s a bad garrison trait but a good combat trait — right? I know I’m a shitty garrison soldier, but what the fuck does it matter? Okay, I got to shine my fucking boots. Why do I care about shining my goddamn boots?”

The weekend before they deployed to Afghanistan, O’Byrne and three other soldiers took the train to Rome for a last blowout. They drank so much that they completely cleaned out the café car. Traveling with O’Byrne were two other privates, Steve Kim and Misha Pemble-Belkin, and a combat medic named Juan Restrepo. Restrepo was born in Colombia but lived in Florida and had two daughters with a woman back home. He spoke with a slight lisp and brushed his teeth compulsively and played classical and flamenco guitar at the barbecues the men threw on base. Once in garrison he showed up at morning PT drunk from the night before, but he was still able to run the two-mile course in twelve and a half minutes and do a hundred sit-ups. If there was a guaranteed way to impress Second Platoon, that was it.

On the train Restrepo pulled out a little one-chip camera and started shooting video of the trip. The men were so drunk they could barely speak. Kim was propped against the window. Pemble tried to say something about putting a saddle on a miniature zebra and riding it around. O’Byrne said his job in Rome was to just keep Restrepo out of trouble. “Not possible, bro,” Restrepo said. “You can’t tame the beast.”

On the far side of the window the gorgeous Italian countryside slid past. “We’re lovin’ life and getting ready to go to war,” Restrepo said, his arm around O’Byrne’s neck. His face was so close to the camera there was almost a fish-eye effect. “We’re goin’ to war. We’re ready. We’re goin’ to war… we’re goin’ to war.”

The Korengal Valley is sort of the Afghanistan of Afghanistan: too remote to conquer, too poor to intimidate, too autonomous to buy off. The Soviets never made it past the mouth of the valley and the Taliban didn’t dare go in there at all. When 10th Mountain rolled into the valley in 2006, they may well have been the first military force ever to reach its southern end. They were only down there a day, but that push gave 10th Mountain some breathing room to finish building the KOP at the site of an old lumberyard three miles in. The lumberyard was not operational because the Afghan government had imposed a ban on timber exports, in large part because the timber sales were helping fund the insurgency. Out-of-work timber cutters traded their chainsaws for weapons and shot at the Americans from inside bunkers made out of the huge cedar logs they could no longer sell.

They were helped by Arab and Pakistani fighters from across the border in Bajaur Province and local militias run by a veteran of the Soviet jihad named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Video made by insurgents during one attack shows tiny figures — American soldiers — sprinting for cover and trying to shoot back from behind ragged sandbag walls. The KOP is surrounded by high ground, and to mount an attack local fighters only had to scramble up the back sides of the ridges and pour machine-gun fire down into the compound. This is called “plunging fire,” and it is hard to suppress or take cover from. The only way to fix the problem was to take over the high ground with small outposts, but those positions then also became vulnerable to attack. The battle plan for the valley became a game of tactical leapfrog that put the Americans into the village of Babiyal by the spring of 2007.

Babiyal was about half a mile south of the KOP and had ties to the insurgents, though it was not overtly hostile. American soldiers with 10th Mountain rented a residential compound from a local schoolteacher and fortified it with enormous cedar logs that locals had cut on the upper slopes of the valley. The position was named Phoenix, after the city in Arizona, and had its counterpart in Firebase Vegas across the valley. Unfortunately, all you had to do to figure out the tactical problems at Phoenix was to tilt your head upward at Table Rock. Insurgents could pound Phoenix from there and then just run down the back side of the ridge when the Americans started hitting back. One American was killed by an 88 mm recoilless round that shrieked through the narrow opening of his bunker and detonated; another was killed while running to one of the machine-gun positions during an attack. A soldier at the KOP was shot while standing at one of the piss tubes. An American contract worker was shot and wounded while taking a nap on his cot. Another soldier stumbled and drowned while wading across the Korengal River in his body armor.