Sebastian Junger - War

Midafternoon and we’re sitting in the shade of concealment netting that’s been draped over the courtyard. There hasn’t been a firefight in weeks and the men are getting a little weird: disputes with a strange new edge to them and a sullen tension that doesn’t bode well for the coming months. April is supposed to be the start of fighting season, and the fact that nothing has happened yet produces a cruel mix of boredom and anxiety. If the men were getting hammered they’d at least have something to do, but this is the worst of both worlds: all the dread and none of the adrenaline. A visiting combat medic named Doc Shelke is talking about the Hindu religion and Abdul, the Afghan interpreter, happens to overhear him.

“Hindu is bullshit,” he says.

Shelke looks like he might be from India. He maintains his calm. “The last time a terp said something like that, I talked shit about Islam until he cried,” he says.

It was a stupid thing for Abdul to say and he doesn’t speak English well enough to make this a fair fight, or even interesting. In an attempt to head off another hour of boredom O’Byrne weighs in with his own religious views. “I don’t believe in heaven or hell and I don’t want an afterlife,” he says. “I believe in doing good in your life, and then you die. I don’t believe in God and I’ve never read the Bible. I don’t believe in that shit because I don’t want to.”

An awkward silence. Another sergeant says something irrelevant about an upcoming patrol.

“What — the conversation gets serious and you change the subject?” O’Byrne says. “We’re talking about religion . You can’t have a half-assed conversation about religion.”

More silence. No one knows what to say. “Mommy hit Daddy and then Daddy hit Mommy,” a private finally tries.

The mood eases when Airborne, a puppy that Second Platoon took from the Afghan soldiers, wanders into the courtyard. They named him Airborne because the soldiers who are going to take over in July — Viper Company of the First Infantry Division — are just regular infantry, and the idea was to remind them of their inferiority every time they called for the dog. (It backfired: I was told someone from Viper just took Airborne out to the burn pit and shot him.) Airborne usually hangs around the base barking whenever anything moves outside the wire, but a few days ago he went missing and eventually turned up at the KOP. Someone tied him up with 550 cord, but he quickly chewed through that and followed the next switch-out up to Restrepo.

Now Airborne wanders from man to man, chewing on their boots and getting rolled in the dust by rough hands. “So you think you’re tough, huh?” Moreno says, cuffing him in with quick boxer jabs. “Take that, you little bastard.” Company net suddenly intrudes from the radio room: “Be advised that they dropped a thirty-one and a thirty-eight in Pakistan,” a voice says. Everyone stops watching Airborne and looks up: thirty-ones and thirty-eights are bombs. They’re not supposed to land in other countries.

The only men I ever saw pray at Restrepo were Afghans, and the topic of religion came up only once the entire time I was out there. It was a beautiful evening in the spring and we were sitting on the ammo hooch smoking cigarettes and talking about a recent TIC. One by one the men left until I was alone with Sergeant Alcantara, who decided to tell me about a recent conversation he’d had with the battalion chaplain. Heat lightning was flashing silently over the valley and we could hear Apaches working something farther north along the Pech.

‘Father, basically God came down to earth and in the form of Christ and died for our sins — right?’ Al asked.

The chaplain nodded.

‘And he died a painful death, but he knew he was going to heaven — right?’

Again the chaplain nodded.

‘So how is that sacrifice greater than a soldier in this valley who has no idea whether he’s going to heaven?’

According to Al, the chaplain had no useful response.

Religion gives a man enough courage to face the overwhelming, and there may have been so little religion at Restrepo because the men didn’t feel particularly overwhelmed. (Why appeal to God when you can call in Apaches?) You don’t haul your cook up there just so that he can be in his first firefight unless you’re pretty confident it’s going to end well. But even in the early days, when things were definitely not ending well, the nearly narcotic effect of a tightly knit group might have made faith superfluous. The platoon was the faith, a greater cause that, if you focused on it entirely, made your fears go away. It was an anesthetic that left you aware of what was happening but strangely fatalistic about the outcome. As a soldier, the thing you were most scared of was failing your brothers when they needed you, and compared to that, dying was easy. Dying was over with. Cowardice lingered forever.

Heroism is hard to study in soldiers because they invariably claim that they acted like any good soldier would have. Among other things, heroism is a negation of the self — you’re prepared to lose your own life for the sake of others — so in that sense, talking about how brave you were may be psychologically contradictory. (Try telling a mother she was brave to run into traffic to save her kid.) Civilians understand soldiers to have a kind of baseline duty, and that everything above that is considered “bravery.” Soldiers see it the other way around: either you’re doing your duty or you’re a coward. There’s no other place to go. In 1908, five firemen died in a blaze in New York City. Speaking at the funeral, Chief Ed Croker had this to say about their bravery: “Firemen are going to get killed. When they join the department they face that fact. When a man becomes a fireman his greatest act of bravery has been accomplished. What he does after that is all in the line of work.”

You don’t have to be a soldier to experience the weird comfort of that approach. Courage seems daunting and hard to attain, but “work” is mundane and eminently doable, a collective process where everyone takes their chances. My work was journalism, not war, but the same principles applied. I was constantly monitoring my fear levels because I didn’t want to freeze up at the wrong moment and create a problem, but it never happened, and after a couple of trips I felt my fear just kind of go away. It wasn’t that I was less afraid of dying; it was that dying made slightly more sense in the context of a group endeavor that I was slowly becoming part of. As a rule I was way more scared in my bunk at night, when I had the luxury of worrying about myself, than on some hillside where I’d worry about us all.

Because I didn’t carry a gun I would always be relegated to a place outside the platoon, but that didn’t mean I was unaffected by its gravitational pull. There was a power and logic to the group that overrode everyone’s personal concerns, even mine, and somewhere in that loss of self could be found relief from the terrible worries about what might befall you. And it was pretty obvious that if things got bad enough — and there was no reason to think they couldn’t — the distinction between journalist and soldier would become irrelevant. A scenario where I found myself stuffing Kerlix into a wound or helping pull someone to safety was entirely plausible, and that forced me to think in ways that only soldiers usually have to. When Chosen got hit at Aranas they suffered a 100 percent casualty rate in a matter of minutes, and the firefight went on for another three hours. The idea that I wouldn’t start helping — or fighting — in that situation was absurd.

The offers of weapons started on my first trip and continued throughout the entire year. Sometimes it was a hand grenade “just in case.” Other times it was an offer to jump on the 240 during the next contact. (“We’ll just show you where to shoot.”) Once I told Moreno that if I weren’t married I’d have been out there the full fifteen months, and he laughed and said that in that case, they’d definitely have me carrying a weapon. The idea of spending long stretches in the Korengal without shooting anything made as little sense to the soldiers as, say, going to a Vicenza whorehouse and just hanging out in the lobby. Guns were the point , the one entirely good thing of the whole shitty year, and the fact that reporters don’t carry them, shoot them, or accept the very generous offers to “go ahead and get some” on the .50 just made soldiers shake their heads. It was a hard thing to explain to them that maybe you could pass someone a box of ammo during a firefight or sneak 100 rounds on a SAW down at the firing range, but as a journalist the one thing you absolutely could not do was carry a weapon. It would make you a combatant rather than an observer, and you’d lose the right to comment on the war later with any kind of objectivity.