Sebastian Junger: War

Hunter was not from a military family, and he told me that his decision to join up left his parents proud but a little puzzled. It didn’t matter, he was out here now and getting home alive was the only important issue. It was a weird irony of the war that once you were here — or your son was — the politics of the whole thing became completely irrelevant until very conservative families and very liberal ones — there were some — saw almost completely eye to eye. Misha Pemble-Belkin’s father was a labor organizer who had protested every American war of the past forty years, yet he and his wife were wildly proud of their son. Pemble-Belkin wasn’t allowed to have toy guns when he was young, even squirt guns, so he and his brother picked up crooked sticks and pretended to shoot those instead. The men of Second Platoon shortened Pemble-Belkin’s name to “PB,” which inevitably became “Peanut Butter” and then just “Butters.” He spoke slowly and very softly, particularly on the platoon radio, and he played guitar and drew pictures of the valley on a sketch pad. He claimed it was the only thing he knew how to draw. Butters could easily have been an art major in college except that he was a paratrooper in the Korengal Valley. He joined the Army after spending a year living in his car, snowboarding.

For the first six months of the deployment, the men of Second Platoon squeezed into a tent and then a small brick-and-mortar building at the bottom of the KOP. There was a plywood bin full of two-quart water bottles outside the door and a broken office chair and some ammo crates to sit on, and the guys would collect there to smoke cigarettes and talk. The rest of the KOP was uphill from there — the landing zone and the mess tent and the latrines — and to get anywhere when there was shooting you had to thread your way through some trees and then climb past the burn pit and the motor pool. The only other route was across the LZ but that was wide open to both sides of the valley. The broken office chair had pretty good cover, though, and the men would sit there smoking even when the KOP was taking fire. The shooting had to get pretty intense before anyone went inside.

One afternoon I was sitting out there working on my notes when a soldier named Anderson walked up. He was a big blond kid who said he joined the military after a series of problems with the law (a lot of the men wound up here that way). Anderson’s mother was a jazz singer, and Anderson had grown up playing saxophone in adult bands. There’d been a lot of fighting in the previous weeks and the men were under a lot of stress: Pemble kept dreaming that someone had rolled a hand grenade into the hooch, and when Steiner went home on leave, he instructed his mother to only wake him up by touching his ankle and saying his last name. That was how he got woken up for guard duty; anything else might mean they were getting overrun.

The fact was that the men got an enormous amount of psychiatric oversight from the battalion shrink — as well as periodic “vacations” at Camp Blessing or Firebase Michigan — but combat still took a toll. It was unrealistic to think it wouldn’t. Anderson sat on an ammo crate and gave me one of those awkward grins that sometimes precede a confession. “I’ve only been here four months and I can’t believe how messed up I already am,” he said. “I went to the counselor and he asked if I smoked cigarettes and I told him no and he said, ‘Well, you may want to think about starting.’”

He lit a cigarette and inhaled.

“I hate these fuckin’ things,” he said.

Battle Company was one of six companies in “The Rock,” an 800-man battalion that was given its name after parachuting onto Corregidor Island in 1942. The Rock was part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, an infamously tough unit that has been taking the brunt of the nation’s combat since World War I. The men of the 173rd performed the only combat jump of the Vietnam War, fought their way through the Iron Triangle and the Cu Chi tunnels, and then assaulted Hill 875 during the battle of Dak To. They lost one-fifth of their combat strength in three weeks. By the end of the war, the 173rd had the highest casualty rate of any brigade in the U.S. Army.

The brigade was decommissioned after Vietnam and then activated again in 2000. They were dropped into Bashur, Iraq, to open a northern front that would draw Iraqi soldiers away from the southern defense of Baghdad. Two years later The Rock was sent to Zabul Province, in central Afghanistan, and saw limited but exceedingly intense combat in the wide-open moonscape around the newly paved Highway 1. The Taliban insurgency was just gaining traction that year, and the men of The Rock were surprised to find themselves in real combat in a war that was supposed to be more of a security operation. I was told that during one battle, a lieutenant colonel who was directing things from the air started throwing hand grenades out the bay door of his helicopter. When he ran out of grenades he supposedly switched to his 9 mil. A medic whose gun jammed during a firefight flipped it around and beat an attacker to death with the buttstock. I met him a few weeks later; on his helmet liner he’d drawn a skull for each of his confirmed kills. By the time the tour was over, half of Battle Company was supposedly on psychiatric meds.

The brigade was slated to go to Iraq for their next deployment, but a last-minute decision sent them back to Afghanistan instead. Insurgents were filing across the Pakistani border, in the northeastern part of the country, and infiltrating toward Kabul along the Pech and Kunar valleys. The Rock’s job would be to occupy the main mobility corridors and try to stop them. Many of the Zabul veterans expected to see the same kind of wide-open terrain they had seen down south — terrain that favored airpower and armor — but instead they watched mountain peaks and knife-edge ridges slide past the windows of their Chinook. Even the privates knew this was bad.

The Rock inherited a string of bases and outposts throughout the Pech, Waygal, Shuryak, Chowkay, and Korengal valleys. The positions had been built by the Marines and the 10th Mountain Division that preceded them. It was some of the most beautiful and rugged terrain in Afghanistan and for centuries had served as a center of resistance against invaders. Alexander’s armies ground to a halt in nearby Nuristan and stayed so long that the blond and red-haired locals are said to be descendants of his men. The Soviet army lost entire companies — 200 men at a time — to ambushes along the Kunar River. (“They sent two divisions through here and left with a battalion through the Pech River Valley,” The Rock’s commander told me when I first arrived. “At least that’s what the locals say.”) The Americans didn’t enter the area until 2003 and maintained no sizable presence there for another two or three years. There were rumors that 9/11 had been planned, in part, in the Korengal Valley. There were rumors that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri passed through the area regularly on their way in and out of Pakistan.

Battalion headquarters was at Camp Blessing, in the upper Pech, and there were two howitzers there that could throw 155s all the way into the southern Korengal, ten miles away. Two more howitzers at the Special Forces camp in Asadabad covered just about everything else. Brigade headquarters was fifty miles west at Jalalabad Airfield, and the entire American effort was staged out of Bagram Airfield, thirty miles north of Kabul. Bagram is considered a forward operating base, or FOB, and grunts in places like the Korengal refer to soldiers on FOBs as Fobbits. Soldiers on those bases might go an entire tour without ever leaving the wire, much less firing a gun, and grunts look down on them almost as much as they look down on the press corps. Grunts claim that they’re constantly getting yelled at by Fobbit officers for coming off the flight line dirty and unshaven and wandering around the base with their uniforms in shreds. (“We look like combat soldiers,” as one guy put it. “We look like guys just getting out of the shit.”) It’s only on rear bases that you hear any belligerent talk about patriotism or religion and it’s only on rear bases where, as a journalist, you might catch any flak for your profession. Once at Bagram I found myself getting screamed at by an 82nd Airborne soldier, a woman, who was beside herself because my shirt was covering my press pass. I’d just come out of two weeks in the Korengal; I just shrugged and walked away.