Sebastian Junger - War

O’Byrne tried to raise the point with the lieutenant, but Sergeant Mac finally told him to stop being a bitch. ‘If I was a bitch I wouldn’t have joined the Army in the first place,’ O’Byrne answered. The other side of the coin was that they were deep in enemy territory without much cover, and if they stayed where they were all day, they’d probably get attacked as well. It was a shitty deal all the way around. The men started down the steep slopes of 1705 and as soon as they moved out of position, a single gunshot cracked through the valley. “Right then we should have fucking held back and stopped moving,” O’Byrne told me later. “It wasn’t our first day. We all knew what the fuck that shot meant.”

The road north of 1705 has no cover at all and is exposed to almost every enemy position in the southern half of the valley; it’s the kind of place soldiers literally have bad dreams about. When everyone got down to the road, O’Byrne told the men behind him that he was simply going to run, and then he turned and headed for the next bit of cover three hundred yards away. O’Byrne made it to a low rock wall south of Aliabad without taking fire and took a knee to cover everyone else. The rest of his team came tumbling in after him and then Gillespie and Patterson gasped past and finally Weapons Squad came into view. They were staggering under their loads and still strung along the road when the first burst came in. That was followed by a massive barrage from virtually every enemy position in the southern valley, and O’Byrne watched the rock wall he was hiding behind start to disintegrate from the impacts. He was still furious they hadn’t waited until dark. ‘This is the day I’m going to die,’ he thought.

The rest of O’Byrne’s team was pinned down just as badly. Steiner was lying flat on the ground next to Stichter, and when he tried to get up a burst from a PKM rattled into the wall in front of him and lacerated his face with stone shards. He dropped down to regain his composure and then sat up again just in time to catch the next burst. A round drilled straight into his helmet and snapped his head back so hard that he hit Stichter in the face and almost broke his nose. Stichter screamed for a medic and someone else yelled that Steiner had taken a round in the head, and Steiner slumped to the ground with a hole in his helmet and blood running down his face.

Steiner lay there unable to see or move, wondering whether the things he was hearing were true. Had he been hit in the head? Was he dead? How would he know? The fact that he could hear the men around him should count for something. After a while he could see a little bit and he sat up and looked around. The bullet had penetrated his helmet to the innermost layer and then gone tumbling off in another direction, looking for someone else to kill. (The blood on his face turned out to be lacerations from stone fragments that had hit him.) The other men glanced at Steiner in shock — most of them thought he was dead — but kept shooting because they were still getting hammered and firepower was the only way out of there. Steiner was in a daze and he just sat there with a bullet hole in his helmet, grinning. After a while he got up and started laughing. He should be dead but he wasn’t and it was the funniest thing in the world. “Get the fuck down and start returning fire!” someone yelled at him. Steiner laughed on. Others started laughing as well. Soon every man in the platoon was howling behind their rock wall, pouring unholy amounts of firepower into the mountainsides around them.

“It was to cover up how everyone was really feeling,” Mac admitted to me later.

Three Humvees drove down from the KOP to pick up Steiner, but he refused to go with them — he wanted to stay with his squad. When the platoon finally started running up the road toward Phoenix, Steiner found himself floating effortlessly ahead of the group despite carrying sixty pounds of ammo and a twenty-pound SAW. It was one of the best highs he’d ever had. It lasted a day or two and then he sank like a stone.

“You start getting these flashes of what could’ve been,” Steiner said. “I was lying in bed like, ‘Fuck, I almost died.’ What would my funeral have been like? What would the guys have said? Who’d have dragged me out from behind that wall?” Steiner was doing something known to military psychologists as “anxious rumination.” Some people are ruminators and some aren’t, and the ones who are can turn one bad incident into a lifetime of trauma. “You can’t let yourself think about how close this shit is,” O’Byrne explained to me later. “Inches. Everything is that close. There’s just places I don’t allow my mind to go. Steiner was saying to me, ‘What if the bullet — ’ and I just stopped him right there, I didn’t even let him finish. I said, ‘But it didn’t. It didn’t .’”

In some ways the incident took more of a toll on O’Byrne than on Steiner himself. O’Byrne thought he could protect his men, but behind that rock wall in Aliabad he realized it was all beyond his control. “I had promised my guys none of them would die,” he said. “That they would all go home, that I would die before they would. No worries: you’re going to get home to your girl, to your mom or dad. So when Steiner got shot I realized I might not be able to stop them from getting hurt, and I remember just sitting there, trembling. That’s the worst thing ever: to be in charge of someone’s life. And then if you lose them? I could not imagine that. I could not imagine that day.”

It wasn’t even fighting season, and the men at Restrepo were having one close call after another. Olson was on overwatch with the 240 when a round hit a branch above his head and the next one smacked into the dirt next to his cheek. He thought it was from the sniper rifle that the enemy took off Rougle on Rock Avalanche. A round splintered wood next to Jones’s head in the south-facing SAW position. O’Byrne was leaning over to help an Afghan soldier who’d just taken a sniper round through the stomach — he died — when a second one came in and missed him by inches. Buno was doing pull-ups when a Dishka round went straight through the hooch he was in. On and on it went, lives measured in inches and seconds and deaths avoided by complete accident. Platoons with a 10 percent casualty rate could just as easily have a 50 percent casualty rate; it was all luck, all God. There was nothing to do about it except skate through on prayers and good timing until the birds came in and took them all home.

The men had been out there talking on the radios for almost a year and found themselves saying “break” and “over” while on the KOP phones to their girlfriends and wives. Relationships frayed and ground to an end and old pickup lines were dusted off and evaluated for future use. The men would never say they were in the Army when they met women; far better to go with “dolphin trainer” or “children’s book writer.” One guy had a lot of success claiming he was Alec Baldwin’s son. Every time Cantu rotated down to the KOP, men would come in to get inked up in ever more outlandish ways. Vengeful dragons started to curl around men’s torsos and bombs and guns sprouted from their biceps. “Living to die/Dying to live”; “Soldier for God”; “Soldier of Fortune.” A new private nicknamed Spanky overreached a bit and tattooed his left arm with a face that was half angel, half devil. When Sergeant Mac saw it he demanded to know what the fuck it meant.

“It represents the angels and devils I have to wake up to every morning, Sar’n,” Spanky said.

After the laughter died down Mac told him he was better off saying he got really fucked up one night and doesn’t remember getting it. “Now repeat that a few times so it sounds believable,” Mac said.