Sebastian Junger: War

We don’t get hit but it happens soon enough. The men are coming out of Aliabad at dusk and suddenly there’s a disorganized tapping sound in the distance that could be someone working on their car. The first tracer goes by the lieutenant’s head and he turns around almost in annoyance, and then the rest of the burst comes in so tight everyone practically falls to the ground. The lieutenant’s name is Matt Piosa, the first of three who will lead Second Platoon. We knew we were going to get hit — Prophet had already called us up with the news — but on some level it’s always shocking that someone out there actually wants you dead. “Prophet” is the call sign for the American eavesdropping operation in the valley; they listen in on enemy radio communications and have Afghans translate them into English. That gets sent to commanders and rebroadcast across the company radio net. This can take place in minutes, seconds.

Piosa had gone to Aliabad to talk to the elders about a water pipe project. The project was left over from 10th Mountain Division’s time in the valley and clearly isn’t going to happen this year either, though no one dared admit that. Piosa broke off the meeting when Prophet called — the elders knew exactly what was going to happen; you could tell they couldn’t wait to get out of there — and the men started bounding up the trail by squad. Bounding means one group runs while the next group covers them, then the first group covers while the second one runs. It’s a way of making sure there’s always someone in a position to shoot back. It’s a way of making sure you don’t lose the entire patrol all at once.

I’m carrying a video camera and running it continually so I won’t have to think about turning it on when the shooting starts; it captures everything my memory doesn’t. We’re behind a rock wall that forms part of the village school when we get hit. “Contact,” Piosa says, and a squad leader named Simon adds, “I’m pushing up here,” but he never gets the chance. Rounds are coming straight down the line and there’s nothing to do but flatten yourself against the wall and grit your teeth. The video jerks and yaws, and soldiers are popping up to empty magazines over the top of the wall and someone is screaming grid coordinates into a radio and a man next to me shouts for Buno. Buno doesn’t answer.

Every man in the patrol is standing up and shooting, and later, on the video, I can see incoming rounds sparking off the top of the wall. I keep trying to stand up and shoot video but psychologically it’s almost impossible; my head feels vulnerable as an eggshell. All I want to do is protect it. It’s easier to stand up if I’m near someone, particularly if they’re shooting, and I put myself next to Kim, and every time he pops up to shoot I pop up with him. He goes down, I go down. Below us is the Korengal River and across the valley is the dark face of the Abas Ghar. The enemy owns the Abas Ghar. Tracer fire is arcing out of American positions up and down the valley and converging on enemy positions along the ridge, and mortars are flashing silently on the hilltops, and then long afterward the boom goes galloping past us up the valley. Dusk is closing down the valley fast. O’Byrne is above us with his gun team, and tracer fire from their 240 streaks reassuringly overhead. Every fifth round is a tracer and there are so many that they form continual streams that waver and wobble across the valley and disappear into the dark maw of the mountains.

It’s almost full night before we leave the safety of the wall, moving one by one at a run with the machine-gun fire continuing overhead. The men are laboring under the weight of their body armor and ammo and sweating like horses in the thick summer heat. The SAW gunners carry 120 pounds and the shortest runs leave them doubled over and gasping. One man shouts and stumbles and I think he’s been hit — everyone does — but he’s just twisted his ankle in the dark. He limps on. The last stretch is an absurdly steep climb through the village of Babiyal that the men call “the Stairmaster.” Locals build their villages on the steepest hillsides so that everything else can be devoted to agriculture. Pathways are cut out of the rock like ladders, front doors give out onto neighbors’ rooftops; in places you could literally fall to the bottom of town.

The men grind their way up the Stairmaster and file through the wire into Phoenix, dark shapes in the hot night staggering in circles, unlimbering their loads. Mortars are still thudding into the Abas Ghar and rivulets of white phosphorus burn their way down the slopes like lava. The fires they start will smolder for days. The men collect at the mortar pit to smoke cigarettes and go over what happened. After a while we see lights moving on the slopes of the Abas Ghar, almost certainly Taliban fighters gathering up their wounded and dead. A soldier radios that in and suggests dropping artillery on them. Battalion is worried the lights might be shepherds up in the high pastures and denies the request.

“Put the .50 all over it, we just had a fucking TIC, fuck those people,” someone says.

A TIC means “troops in contact” — a firefight. The “.50” is a .50 caliber machine gun. After a while the lights go out; whoever it is has probably disappeared over the back side of the ridge. “Dude, that’s it, they’re leaving,” someone says. A little while later a soldier walks up and tells me to hold out my hand. I do, and he drops something small and heavy into it: an AK round that smacked into a rock next to him during the fight.

“That,” he says, “is how you know it was close.”

The enemy fighters were three or four hundred yards away, and the bullets they were shooting covered that distance in about half a second — roughly two thousand miles an hour. Sound doesn’t travel nearly that fast, though, so the gunshots themselves arrived a full second after they were fired. Because light is virtually instantaneous, illuminated rounds — tracers — can be easily perceived as they drill toward you across the valley. A 240 gunner named Underwood told me that during the ambush he saw tracers coming at him from Hill 1705 but they were moving too fast to dodge. By the time he was setting his body into motion they were hitting the cedar log he was hiding behind. The brain requires around two-tenths of a second just to understand simple visual stimuli, and another two-tenths of a second to command muscles to react. That’s almost exactly the amount of time it takes a high-velocity round to go from 1705 to Aliabad.

Reaction times have been studied extensively in controlled settings and have shown that men have faster reaction times than women and athletes have faster reaction times than nonathletes. Tests with soccer players have shown that the “point of no return” for a penalty kick — when the kicker can no longer change his mind about where to send the ball — is around a quarter of a second. In other words, if the goalkeeper waits until the kicker’s foot is less than a quarter second from the ball and then dives in one direction, the kicker doesn’t have enough time to adjust his kick. Given that quarter-second cutoff, the distance at which you might literally be able to “dodge a bullet” is around 800 yards. You’d need a quarter second to register the tracer coming toward you — at this point the bullet has traveled 200 yards — a quarter second to instruct your muscles to react — the bullet has now traveled 400 yards — and half a second to actually move out of the way. The bullet you dodge will pass you with a distinctive snap. That’s the sound of a small object breaking the sound barrier inches from your head.

Humans evolved in a world where nothing moved two thousand miles an hour, so there was no reason for the body to be able to counter that threat, but the brain still had to stay ahead of the game. Neurological processes in one of the most primitive parts of the brain, the amygdala, happen so fast that one could say they compete with bullets. The amygdala can process an auditory signal in fifteen milliseconds — about the amount of time it takes a bullet to go thirty feet. The amygdala is fast but very limited; all it can do is trigger a reflex and wait for the conscious mind to catch up. That reaction is called the startle, and it is composed of protective moves that would be a good idea in almost any situation. When something scary and unexpected happens, every person does exactly the same thing: they blink, crouch, bend their arms, and clench their fists. The face also sets itself into what is known as a “fear grimace”: the pupils dilate, the eyes widen, the brow goes up, and the mouth pulls back and down. Make that expression in front of a mirror and see not only how instantly recognizable it is, but also how it seems to actually produce a sense of fear. It’s as if the neural pathways flow in both directions, so the expression triggers fear as well as being triggered by it.