Sebastian Junger - War

Mac’s made himself comfortable against the sandbags and doesn’t even bother getting up. “Apparently we didn’t do enough damage to them and they want some more,” he says. “They want their seventy-two virgins.”

Prophet says a group of foreign fighters has just come into the valley, and local commanders wanted to provide them with a good fight. And once the foreigners use up their ammo they’ll have to pay locals to carry more from Pakistan, so there’s even a financial incentive to keep shooting. Sometimes the fight in the valley could seem like a strange, slow game that everyone — including the Americans — were enjoying too much to possibly bring to an end.

Half an hour later another convulsion of firepower sweeps through the American positions. Olson pins someone down with his 240 on Spartan Spur and I can stand directly behind him, his shoulder vibrating with the recoil, and watch tracers arc and wobble across the draw and finger their way around the ridge. Now it’s dusk and the men sit in the courtyard, faces still dirt-streaked from the patrol, talking about the TIC. It’s the best thing that’s happened in weeks, and there probably won’t be another like it for at least that long. Murphy starts wondering aloud which side the sherbet spoon goes on at a formal table setting. He is a forward observer and is still amped from having spent the afternoon calling in corrections to 2,000-pound bomb strikes. He’s from a well-off family and had already made the mistake of telling the others that he’d gone to etiquette school.

“Sherbet spoons? Are you fucking kidding me?” Moreno says. Moreno grew up in Beeville, Texas, and worked as a corrections officer at a state prison.

“Like when you go to a country club or something,” Murphy says.

“Well that explains it.”

Murphy ignores him and tells a story about how his grandfather built him a train set when he was young. It’s hard to know if this is a misguided attempt to impress or some strange eruption of post-TIC openness.

“Well, my grandfather was shot in a bar fight,” Moreno says. “Different fuckin’ lives.”

Mefloquine dreams, the unwelcome glimpses into your psyche that are produced by the malaria medication everyone takes. The medic distributes the pills every Monday, and that night is always the worst: I’m sawing someone in half with a carpentry saw for no reason that I can explain; I’m choking with sorrow and remorse over something that ended twenty-five years ago; I’m preparing for combat and the men around me are glancing at each other, like, “This is it, brother, see you on the other side.” I always wake up without moving, my eyes suddenly wide open in the darkness. Men snoring softly around me and the generator thumping in some kind of frantic heartbeat. The side effects of mefloquine include severe depression, paranoia, aggression, nightmares, and insomnia. Those happen to be the side effects of combat as well. I go back to sleep and wake up the next morning edgy and weird.

There are two months left to the deployment and the men devise all kinds of ways to quantify that: number of patrols, number of KOP rotations, number of mefloquine Mondays. It’s starting to dawn on them that they’ll probably never walk to the top of Honcho Hill again or get dropped onto the Abas Ghar. When they’re down at the KOP they use the communal laptops to try to arrange girlfriends for themselves when they get back. The men who already have girlfriends arrange to have them stock up on beer, steak, whatever they’ve been craving for the past year. The men will fly into Aviano Air Base, take a two-hour bus ride to Vicenza, turn in their weapons, and then form up on a parade ground called Hoekstra Field. As soon as they’re discharged they can do whatever they want. The drinking starts immediately and continues until unconsciousness and then resumes whenever and wherever the men wake up. They find themselves at train stations and on sidewalks and in police stations and occasionally at the medical facilities. In past years one drunken paratrooper was struck by a train and killed and another died of an overdose. They’d made it through the dangers of combat and died within sight of their barracks in Vicenza.

“Y’all will only be remembered for the last thing you ever did,” Caldwell warned them one warm spring night. He’d hiked up to Restrepo to make sure the men were all squared away for the return home, and he left them with his own story about why he quit drinking. (“My kids were upset, my wife wasn’t talking to me… I just told her, ‘Don’t worry, it’s taken care of,’ and I never drank again.”)

With summer come the twin afflictions of heat and boredom. A poor wheat harvest creates a temporary food shortage in the valley, which means the enemy has no surplus cash with which to buy ammo. Attacks drop to every week or two — not nearly enough to make up for the general shittiness of the place. The men sleep as late as they can and come shuffling out of their fly-infested hooches scratching and farting. By midmorning it’s over a hundred degrees and the heat has a kind of buzzing slowness to it that alone almost feels capable of overrunning Restrepo. It’s a miraculous kind of antiparadise up here: heat and dust and tarantulas and flies and no women and no running water and no cooked food and nothing to do but kill and wait. It’s so hot that the men wander around in flip-flops and underwear, unshaved and foul. Airborne panting in the shade, someone burning shit out back, a feeble breeze making the concealment netting billow and subside like a huge lung.

The men ran out of things to say about three months ago, so they just sit around in a mute daze. One day I watch Money come out of the hooch, look around, grunt, and go back inside for another three hours’ sleep. A summer shower comes through, briefly turning the air sweet and pungent, but the raindrops are small and sharp as needles and do almost nothing for the heat. “I used to live a thousand feet above sea level, and we’d find seashells in the rocks along the side of the road,” O’Byrne finally says. No one answers for about five minutes.

“You ever go to military school?” Murphy finally asks.

“Fuck no, my parents couldn’t afford that shit,” O’Byrne says. “Getting locked up was my military school.”

Boredom so relentless that the men openly hope for an attack. One crazy-hot morning Lieutenant Gillespie wanders by muttering, “Please, God, let’s get into a firefight.” I think it was Bobby who finally came up with the idea of sending Tim and me down to Darbart wearing burkas made out of American flags. (Surely that would kick something off.) Every American sniper in the valley would cover us from the hilltops.

“That’s a weird image,” Tim finally says, shaking his head.

Bobby is a 240 gunner from Georgia and Jones’s best friend: one black guy and one unreconstructed Georgia redneck wandering around Restrepo looking for trouble like a pair of bad guys in a spaghetti western. Bobby has a tattoo of a sunburst around one nipple and a massive branding scar in the shape of a heart above the other. The heart has an arrow through it. He says he joined the Army because his girl left him while he was on a bender, which sent him on another bender, which eventually put him unconscious on his father’s front lawn. When he woke up he and his father got drunk, and then Bobby went down to the recruiter’s office and tried to join the Marines. The Marines wouldn’t take him so he walked down the hall and joined the Army instead.

Bobby’s scene was so far out there that even his fellow soldiers had trouble wrapping their minds around it. “Just a pile of fuck, a big stupid redneck,” as Jones described him, except that he wasn’t: his aunt had adopted a black child and Bobby — slow-speaking, foul-mouthed, and outrageous — was one of the smartest and most capable guys in the entire company. One day the generator wouldn’t start and Bobby told O’Byrne to kick it halfway up the side, just above the fuel filter. The machine started immediately. “He had what I call ‘man knowledge,’” O’Byrne told me. “He wasn’t very polished but he had all the knowledge a man needs to get by in the world.”