Sebastian Junger - War

Margins were so small and errors potentially so catastrophic that every soldier had a kind of de facto authority to reprimand others — in some cases even officers. And because combat can hinge on the most absurd details, there was virtually nothing in a soldier’s daily routine that fell outside the group’s purview. Whether you tied your shoes or cleaned your weapon or drank enough water or secured your night vision gear were all matters of public concern and so were open to public scrutiny. Once I watched a private accost another private whose bootlaces were trailing on the ground. Not that he cared what it looked like, but if something happened suddenly — and out there, everything happened suddenly — the guy with the loose laces couldn’t be counted on to keep his feet at a crucial moment. It was the other man’s life he was risking, not just his own. Another time a couple of squads were lying in ambush outside Karingal and a man rolled to the side to urinate. You could smell it ten feet away, which meant he wasn’t well hydrated, and when Patterson caught a whiff he chewed the man out in an irritated growl. If you’re not hydrated you’re that much closer to being a heat casualty, and that could slow a patrol down long enough to get cornered and overrun. There was no such thing as personal safety out there; what happened to you happened to everyone.

The attention to detail at a base like Restrepo forced a kind of clarity on absolutely everything a soldier did until I came to think of it as a kind of Zen practice: the Zen of not fucking up. It required a high mindfulness because potentially everything had consequences. Once I attended a shura at the KOP with a cast-off Army shirt that Anderson had given me, and when I left the building I forgot to take it with me. A few hours later I realized I couldn’t find it and went into a controlled panic: if one of the elders picked it up and gave it to an enemy fighter, that man would be able to use it to pass himself off as an American soldier. Potentially someone could get killed. Eventually I found the shirt, but it was clear from the looks I was getting that I’d fucked up pretty badly and that it had better not happen again.

Frontline soldiers have policed their own behavior at least since World War II and probably a lot longer than that. In a study of bravery conducted by the U.S. military in the forties, the author, Samuel Stouffer, had this to say about personal responsibility: “Any individual’s action which had conceivable bearing on the safety of others became a matter of public concern for the group as a whole. Isolated as he was from contact with the rest of the world, the combat man was thrown back on his outfit to meet the various affectional needs… that he would normally satisfy with his family and friends. The group was thus in a favored position to enforce its standards on the individual.”

In the civilian world almost nothing has lasting consequences, so you can blunder through life in a kind of daze. You never have to take inventory of the things in your possession and you never have to calculate the ways in which mundane circumstances can play out — can, in fact, kill you. As a result, you lose a sense of the importance of things, the gravity of things. Back home mundane details also have the power to destroy you, but the cause and effect are often spread so far apart that you don’t even make the connection; at Restrepo, that connection was impossible to ignore. It was tedious but it gave the stuff of one’s existence — the shoelaces and the water and the lost shirt — a riveting importance. Frankly, after you got used to living that way it was hard to go home.

There was carelessness and then there were real mistakes, and once it crossed that line, discipline came down from above and was relentless. Once I woke up in the middle of the night to grunts and shouting and went outside to find Staff Sergeant Alcantara smoking his entire squad. Whoever was on guard duty had let the batteries run down on a thermal sight called a PAS-13 that allowed them to scan the hillsides at night. On a dark night the PAS-13 was the only way they could see if the enemy was creeping close for a surprise attack, and dead batteries could literally put the base at risk of getting overrun. The best way to ensure that no one fucked up was to inflict collective punishment on the entire squad, because that meant everyone would be watching everyone else. Al had them out there in stress positions lifting sandbags and essentially eating dirt for so long that I finally just went back inside and went to sleep. The next morning I asked him if the punishment had wiped the slate clean — or was there some residual stigma that would take longer to erase?

“There are no hard feelings after everyone gets smoked,” he said. “They’re more pissed that they all let each other down. Once it’s over it’s over.”

With dark the cold comes down like some kind of court sentence and the men drift inside to sit around the diesel stoves until it’s time to go to sleep. Each squad built their own hooch from plywood and two-by-fours slung in by Chinook and the construction is straight ghetto: uninsulated plywood and gaps in the walls and strange patchwork solutions to elementary problems. Some colonel upstream decided that Restrepo would be an “outpost” rather than a “base,” so Second Platoon was restricted to using tools and materials that would barely have been adequate for a ten-year-old making a tree fort. They cut their wood with a four-inch folding Gerber saw and pulled nails out of old pieces of wood to reuse on new pieces of wood and leveled floors by guess and plumbed walls by eye. Third Squad didn’t dig out the hillside enough, so their hooch, nicknamed “the Submarine,” wound up so narrow that there was no room for the stove. It was stuck in a drafty alcove and barely raised the inside temperature above freezing. Weapons Squad built their hooch on an angle and then overcompensated with the angle of the bunks, which in turn were angled differently from the shelving and the roof. The result was an optical illusion that left you disoriented and not entirely sure where the horizon line was. You could put a marble on one of the bunks and swear to God it was rolling upward.

I’m staying with O’Byrne and the rest of First Squad. The bunks are plywood and stacked two high and the aisle between them is just wide enough for two men to pass turning sideways. Lying on your bunk you could reach out and touch three other men without much trouble. Weapons and full ammo racks hang from nails pounded into the walls and socks dry on “550 cord” that has been strung between rafters, and combat packs and boots and packages from home are stuffed under the bunks. Most of the men have photographs of women nailed to the walls — magazine photos, not personal ones; you wouldn’t really want to subject your girlfriend to that kind of scrutiny — and a few have blankets nailed over their bunk for privacy. Others simply escape with sleeping pills.

I take a lower bunk near the stove and unpack my gear. Around me the men are eating MREs and talking about their plans in the military, about the troubles in Third Platoon, about how everything fell apart once the fighting stopped. Friends started arguing and a sour discontent crept through the company that was almost as threatening to their mission as the enemy. The lull was much harder on group dynamics than combat and caught everyone by surprise, even the commanders. Prophet recently picked up radio chatter that a hundred men had come into the valley with the intention of overrunning Restrepo, but that almost seemed too good to be true.

“I hope they try it,” one guy told me; it was a common sentiment. “I hope they try it because if they do, they’re all going to die.”