Sebastian Junger - War

I GO TO SLEEP ONE NIGHT MENTALLY PREPARED FOR a twenty-four-hour operation called Dark City, but at three in the morning Donoho comes through the hooch announcing that it’s been canceled because of the weather. Third Platoon was going to cross over to the far side of the valley, and Second Platoon was going to support them from Table Rock with a lot of firepower. We all roll over and go back to sleep and the next time I wake up it’s full light and Jones is sitting on a bunk eating an MRE. Jones ordinarily sleeps in the Submarine, but last night was so cold that he moved in with us. He’s picking the mushrooms out of his Thai Chicken and muttering to no one in particular, “Not a big fan of mushrooms. Only people you ever see eating mushrooms are white folks. ‘What you want on your pizza, sir?’ ‘Mushrooms.’ ‘What else do you want on your pizza?’ ‘More mushrooms.’”

The door opens and O’Byrne walks in. He’s looking for Money, who’s still asleep in his bunk. O’Byrne sits next to him and puts him in a headlock. “I just don’t understand,” he says. “If you were Hajj, why would you want to wake up in the morning and shoot at us?”

Money doesn’t answer. He’s not interested in this conversation. “Money, why would Hajj want to do that? Why would he climb up onto the hilltops to start shooting at us?”

The immediate answer was that we built a firebase in their backyard, but there was more to the question than that. Once in a while you’d forget to think of the enemy as the enemy and would see them for what they were: teenagers up on a hill who got tired and cold just like the Americans and missed their families and slept poorly before the big operations and probably had nightmares about them afterward. Once you thought about them on those terms it was hard not to wonder whether the men themselves — not the American and Taliban commanders but the actual guys behind the guns — couldn’t somehow sit down together and work this out. I’m pretty sure the Taliban had a healthy respect for Second Platoon, at least as fighters, and once in a while I’d hear someone in Second Platoon mumble a kind of grudging approval of the Taliban as well: they move like ghosts around the mountains and can fight all day on a swallow of water and a handful of nuts and are holding their own against a brigade of U.S. airborne infantry. As a military feat that’s nothing to sneeze at. The sheer weirdness of this war — of any war — can never entirely be contained and breaks through at odd moments:

“I went out to use the piss tubes one night,” O’Byrne admitted to me once, “and I was like, ‘What am I doing in Afghanistan?’ I mean literally, ‘What am I doing here?’ I’m trying to kill people and they’re trying to kill me. It’s crazy…”

The enemy had to have their piss-tube moments as well — how could they not? In January, Prophet overheard two Taliban commanders discussing the American presence in the valley by radio. One of them was making the point that if the Americans were willing to build roads and clinics in the valley, maybe they shouldn’t be attacked. The other guy didn’t quite agree, but at least someone was asking the question. The number of firefights in the battalion area of operation had dropped from five a day to one a day, the number of shuras with local leaders had quadrupled, and the Americans hadn’t been shot at from inside a village in the Korengal since the end of October. That was an important gauge of local sentiment because it meant that the villagers were telling the fighters to take their insurgency elsewhere. There was even a story going around that one of the valley elders had slapped a Taliban commander across the face for refusing to leave the area, and the commander didn’t dare retaliate. The human terrain in the Pech and the Korengal was changing so fast that Colonel Ostlund felt confident a little more development money would allow NATO forces and the Afghan government to absolutely “overrun” the area. “The arguments I’ve heard against the American presence here are all economically based,” he told me. “Which is the good news, because economic arguments are arguments we can win.”

Kearney is convinced that in the spring the fight is going to move northward, out of the Korengal and into the Pech, which would allow him to create a little breathing room for the incoming unit. As far as he knows that will be Viper Company of the First Infantry Division, which is a mechanized unit, and the new soldiers will probably be out of shape and used to riding in trucks. They’ll be faced with foot patrols on some of the steepest terrain in the entire war, and Kearney wants to make sure that at least the northern half of the valley has bought into the idea of government control. He’s going to build another outpost, called Dallas, more or less at the spot where Murphree lost his legs last month. That will extend American firepower deep into the central Korengal and prevent the enemy from digging bombs into a crucial section of road. He’s going to put Third Platoon down at Dallas and hand Phoenix over to the Afghan National Army, which is coming into the valley with two full companies — 300 men. The idea is to have the ANA start conducting their own patrols in the safer villages, like Babiyal and Aliabad, which would free up the Americans to push farther down-valley.

“We’re still gonna take casualties, unfortunately,” Kearney says. “We’ll probably lose another soldier, if not more, but I think the kinetic activity will drop. The people of the valley will hopefully start seeing some changes, and we’ll hopefully have a food distribution center set up. That way I can bring the local villagers in and empower them rather than the elders, who are working with the Taliban.”

Kearney wants to start issuing identity cards so that locals can come to the KOP and pick up food and other types of humanitarian aid. Until now those supplies have been distributed through village elders who make huge profits by taking most of it for themselves. Identity cards will also enable the S-2, the intelligence officer, to conduct a crude census of the valley, and the food pickups will give locals an opportunity to tip the Americans off to upcoming attacks without the Taliban knowing about it. Kearney also wants to buy three or four jingle trucks, put benches in the back, and start running a bus service up and down the valley. Right now it costs around a hundred dollars in fuel to drive a truck from Babiyal, at the center of the valley, up to the nearest market town and back. A bus service would allow commerce to start flowing more freely into and out of the valley, which would take control out of the hands of the village elders and put it into the hands of ordinary people.

“The villagers are almost like indentured servants,” Kearney says. “I got to bring these people up so they’re not reliant on the elders, so they’re taking some ownership of themselves and their families. Right now the elders are the only ones getting out to Asadabad, they own gas stations on the A-bad-J-bad road. They don’t let the people out because then they’ll lose their free labor.”

As the most exposed base in the Korengal, Restrepo is exquisitely attuned to social changes in the valley. If the price of wheat goes up because of a bad harvest, the amount of fighting drops because the fighters have less money to spend on ammo. Second Platoon hasn’t been shot at in weeks, they can walk into Loy Kalay without any problem, and old men are stopping patrols to tip them off about Taliban movements. Everything is starting to shift. One night I find O’Byrne sitting on one of the lower bunks framed in blinking Christmas lights slowly picking out “Paint It Black” on his guitar. He says he’s trying to imagine Restrepo as some kind of ski lodge and health spa. The locals could be ski instructors — it would pay better than fighting the Americans. Hijar and Underwood could run the gym. They could shoot blank rounds over the outpost once in a while, just so people would get a feel for what it was like during the war. You could make it down to Phoenix on a snowboard in about sixty seconds and take a ski lift back up.