WAR EPUB ED EB

Sebastian Junger

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780007337712
• eBook ISBN: 9780007352265
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

From the author of The Perfect Storm, a gripping book about Sebastian Junger's almost-fatal year with the 2nd battalion of the American Army.

They were known as "The Rock." For one year, in 2007-2008, Sebastian Junger accompanied a single platoon of thirty men from the storied 2nd battalion of the U.S. Army, as they fought their way through a remote valley in Eastern Afghanistan. Over the course of five trips, Junger was in more firefights than he can count, men he knew were killed or wounded, and he himself was almost killed. His relationship with these soldiers grew so close that they considered him part of the platoon, and he enjoyed an access and a candidness that few, if any, journalists ever attain.

War is a narrative about combat: the fear of dying, the trauma of killing and the love between platoon-mates who would rather die than let each other down.

Gripping, honest, intense, War explores the neurological, psychological and social elements of combat, and the incredible bonds that form between these small groups of men. This is not a book about Afghanistan or the 'War on Terror'; it is a book about the universal truth of all men, in all wars. Junger set out to answer what he thought of as the 'hand grenade question': why would a man throw himself on a hand grenade to save other men he has probably known for only a few months? The answer elusive but profound, and goes to the heart of what it means not just to be a soldier, but to be human.

BOOK TWO
KILLING

We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

—Winston Churchill (or George Orwell)

1

SQUAD AND PLATOON LEADERS GATHER IN AN unfinished brick-and-mortar at the top of the KOP, tense and quiet in the hours before the operation. It’s called Rock Avalanche—a play on the battalion nickname—and will probably be the biggest operation of the deployment. The men will be going into some of the most dangerous places in the valley looking for weapons caches and infiltration routes, and what happens over the course of the next week could well determine the level of combat in the valley for the coming year. The men sit on a low bench next to an orange Atika cement mixer under steel rafters that do not yet have a roof and wait for Kearney to begin the meeting. In the front row is Rougle, the Scout leader, and then Stichter and Patterson and Rice and McDonough and Buno, all from Second Platoon. Men from the other two platoons stand and squat along the walls. They’re in their body armor and most of them have wads of chew under their lower lip. They’re so clean and well-shaven, they could almost pass for rear-base infantry.

Kearney stands before them with a rake in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other and reading glasses jammed crookedly under the rim of his helmet. At his feet is a sandbox that has been sculpted into a rough three-dimensional model of the Korengal. Cardboard cutouts of Chinooks dangle from strings where the air assaults will go in. The first phase of the operation is a sweep of Yaka Chine, one of the centers of armed resistance in the Korengal. Much of the weaponry that comes into the valley passes through Yaka Chine, as do most of the local commanders, and there is every reason for the men of Battle Company to think they’ll wind up in the fight of their lives. Second Platoon will get dropped off at a landing zone code-named Toucans and move in from the south. First Platoon will get dropped east of town and hook up with Second Platoon near a building complex nicknamed the “Chinese Restaurant.” From a distance, through binoculars, the building’s cornices are ornate and seem to curve upward in a way that suggests the Far East. It’s supposed to be the location of a major weapons depot.

“The other area we’re going to have to focus some of our efforts on is going to be the lumberyard,” Kearney says, pointing with his rake. “The lumberyard is where we believe that there is a lot of the caches, and it’s kind of the battle handover spot for the guys coming from the Chow-kay Valley into the Korengal and then pushin’ it through Yaka Chine, where they end up divvying it up to the different subcommanders.”

Piosa comes forward and explains what Second Platoon’s task and purpose will be, then calls on Rice and McDonough and Buno to go into more detail for each squad. Rougle stands up and walks around to the top of the sandbox and points where the Scouts will come in and what their role will be in the operation. The radio call sign for the Scouts is “Wildcat,” and Rougle tells the rest of the company what the Wildcat element will be doing: “We’ll be occupying somewhere in this vicinity,” he says, gesturing with a pointer. “We’ll find a good place where we can set up the Barrett and the twenty-five. We’ll also be holding overwatch on the lumberyard.”

The Yaka Chine operation is expected to take twenty-four hours, and then the men will be picked up by helicopter and dropped on the upper slopes of the Abas Ghar and an intersecting ridge called the Sawtalo Sar. There’s intel about cave complexes up there and weapons caches and supply routes that cross over to the Shuryak and then on into Pakistan. The largest cave is supposed to have electricity and finished walls and a boulder at the entrance that can be moved into position with a car jack. When the fighters want to disappear, they supposedly jack the boulder into place from the inside and wait until the danger has passed. Chosen Company will be blocking enemy movement in the Shuryak Valley, to the east, and Destined will be in the Chowkay, to the south. The men of Battle Company will be on unfamiliar terrain with enormous loads on their backs chasing a fluid and agile enemy, and almost every advantage enjoyed by a modern army will be negated on the steep, heavily timbered slopes of the Abas Ghar.

Caldwell tells the men that if there’s no air they’ll be walking, but no one laughs because they’re not sure it’s a joke. Could the Army be dumb enough to make them walk the entire valley and then climb the Abas Ghar with 120 pounds on their backs? Each man will carry enough food, water, and ammo for a day or two, and after that they’ll be resupplied by “speedball”: body bags of supplies thrown out of moving helicopters. There will be two full platoons on the mountain as well as Kearney and his entire headquarters element, a squad of scouts, and a couple of platoons of ANA. There will be long-range bombers and F-15s and -16s from Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, as well as Apache helicopters flying out of JAF and A-10 Warthogs and an AC-130 Spectre gunship based at Bagram. It’s a huge, weeklong operation, and it’s virtually certain that some men who are alive at this moment will be dead or injured by the time it’s over. Even without an enemy it’s hard to move that many men and aircraft around a steep mountain range and not have something bad happen.

The men spend the last hours of daylight packing their gear and making sure their ammo racks are correctly rigged. Chuck Berry is playing on someone’s laptop inside the brick-and-mortar. Donoho helps Rice adjust his rack, cinching it down in the back until it’s balanced and snug. Rice’s assault pack weighs seventy pounds and his weapon, ammo, and body armor will be at least another forty or fifty on top of that. Buno has a pack that looks so heavy, Rueda can’t resist coming over and trying to lift it. Moreno bets Hijar ten bucks that Hoyt can’t do twenty pull-ups on one of the steel girders in their barracks. He does, barely. The men paint their faces with greasepaint but Patterson makes them wipe it off and then they just sit and talk and go through the slow, tense countdown until the birds arrive. Some men listen to music. Some just lie on their cots staring at the ceiling. In some ways the anticipation feels worse than whatever may be waiting for them down in Yaka Chine or up on the Abas Ghar, and every man gets through it in his own quietly miserable way.

Shortly after eight o’clock the first Chinooks come clattering into the KOP from the north, rotors ablaze with sparks from the dust that they kick up as they land. First Platoon hustles on with their gear and the huge machines lift off and make the run south with their Apache escorts and then they come back to the KOP for the next load. At 8:41 p.m. the men of Second Platoon file into the back of their Chinook and sit facing each other on web seats with their night vision scopes down. The infrared strobes on the outside of the aircraft pump light out into the night in a long slow heartbeat. The aircraft fights its way up into the sky and tilts south and puts down ten minutes later at LZ Toucans. The men move out, grabbing their packs as they go, and a minute later they’re on the mountainside listening to the wind in the trees and the occasional squelp of the radios. Yaka Chine is three or four clicks away. The men fall into line and start walking north.

Kearney has signal intelligence teams scattered around the valley, three LRAS devices watching the town, and surveillance drones circling overhead. He is directing everything by radio from the summit of Divpat, a flat-topped mountain to the east. Almost immediately, drones spot two fighters moving toward Kearney’s position and a Spectre gunship, circling counterclockwise overhead, drills them with 20 mm rounds. That begins a game of cat-and-mouse where American airpower tries to prevent fighters from crossing open ground and gaining the protection of the houses in town. Later that night a group of fighters make it to a house outside Yaka Chine, and Kearney is granted permission by the brigade commander to destroy it with cannon fire from a Spectre gunship. Later, a B-1 bomber drops 2,000 pounds of high explosive on a ridgeline, where more insurgents had been observed positioning themselves for an attack.

The men of Second Platoon walk most of the night to the rip and boom of ordnance farther up the valley, and at dawn they find themselves close enough to human habitation to hear roosters crowing. A surveillance drone motors endlessly overhead. The men move slowly and awkwardly along the hillsides under their heavy loads but eventually come out onto a corduroy road built of squared-off timbers that serves as a skidway for the enormous trees that get cut on the upper ridges. The walking is easy but they’re wide open and after a while they leave the road and climb a brutally steep hillside to a grassy upland plateau. First Platoon comes into contact from a farm complex above town and they return fire, and then Second Platoon clears the buildings and waits in the bright fall sunlight while chickens peck past them in the dirt and cows groan from the alleyways.

Eventually a delegation of village elders tracks down Piosa and his men and leads them to a house with three children with blackened faces and a woman lying stunned and mute on the floor. Five corpses lie on wooden pallets covered by white cloth outside the house, all casualties from the airstrikes the night before. Medics start treating the wounded while Piosa’s men continue sweeping the village for weapons. They find eight RPG rounds and a shotgun and an old German pistol and some ammo and a pair of binoculars and an old Henri-Martin rifle—all contraband, but not the huge cache they were expecting. Prophet picks up radio traffic of one Taliban fighter asking another, “Have they found it, have they found it?” Obviously, they have not.

The civilian casualties are a serious matter and will require diplomacy and compensation. Second Platoon spends the night at a hilltop compound overlooking Yaka Chine, and the next morning Apaches come in to look around and then a Black Hawk lands on a rooftop inside the village. Ostlund jumps out like a strange camouflaged god and climbs down a wooden ladder to the ground. With him is a member of the provincial government—the first time a representative of any government, past or present, has made it past the mouth of the valley. Kearney arrives with Ostlund and quickly moves to the front of twenty or thirty locals with the weapons arrayed at his feet. There are old men with their beards dyed orange and eyes like small black holes and young men who don’t smile or talk and are clearly here to see, up close, the men they’re trying to kill from a distance, and young boys who dart around the edges, seemingly unmindful of the seriousness of things. Kearney is unshaven and shadowed with dirt from two nights on Divpat. The Americans are by far the dirtiest men there.

The locals sit with their backs against a stone wall and Kearney crouches in front of them to speak but soon stands back up. “I’m here to tell you guys why I did what I did. I’m Captain Kearney, the U.S. commander for the Korengal,” he says, and waits for the translator to finish. “When I come into villages and I find RPGs and weapons that are shot at myself and at the ANA, that indicates that there’s bad people in here. Good people don’t carry these weapons.”

Every few sentences Kearney stops to let the translator catch up, and spends the time pacing back and forth, getting more and more heated. “I can walk into Aliabad and not get shot at and not find any weapons…and I come into your village and I find RPGs.” He picks one up and waves it at the elders. “I bet I could give this RPG to any one of these younger kids and they’d know how to fire it—and they probably don’t even know how to read.”

He points to a young man seated in front of him. “You know how to shoot this thing?”

The kid shakes his head.

“Yeah, right.”

Kearney looks around. “You guys have insurgents here that are against myself and against the ANA and against the government. And they’re going to cause you guys to be hurt if you don’t help me out. I was able to pinpoint fifty insurgents that were in and around your village. The first building I engaged, the next morning when I get there I find five RPGs in it. So I know there’s not only good people in the building, there’s also bad people.”

Hajji Zalwar Khan, the wealthy and dignified leader of the valley, sits cross-legged on the ground directly in front of Kearney. He’s got a white beard and a handsome face and a narrow, aquiline nose that would easily pass for French at a Paris café. Kearney finishes by asking him point-blank for help: he wants Zalwar Khan to bring representatives from Yaka Chine to the weekly shura at the KOP. The old man says that Kearney will have to supply the fuel for the trip, and Kearney is about to agree but catches himself.

“I already told you: one Dishka and I’ll pay for your fuel,” he says. “When you tell me where a Dishka is, I’ll give you fuel for every single Friday for as long as I’m here.”

Zalwar Khan laughs. Kearney pinches the bridge of his nose and shakes his head.

“Hajji, I trust you,” he says. “I trust you.”

Ostlund is up next. He stands there bareheaded and clean-shaven, looking more like a handsome actor in a war movie than a real commander in the worst valley in Afghanistan. His style is respectful and earnest and he appeals to the men before him as husbands and fathers rather than as potential enemies.

“We came here with a charter from the U.S. government with direction from the Afghan government and the Afghan national security forces,” he says. The translator delivers the sentence in Pashto and then stops and looks over. “And we were asked to bring progress to every corner of Afghanistan. Somehow miscreants have convinced some of your population that we want to come here and challenge Islam and desecrate mosques and oppress Afghan people. All of those are lies. Our country supports all religions.”

The translator catches up. None of the expressions change.

“All of my officers are trained and educated enough that they could teach at a university,” Ostlund goes on. “I challenge you elders to put them to work; put them to work building your country, fixing your valley. That’s what they’re supposed to do—that’s what I want them to do—but they can’t until you help us with security.”

The translator is good; he delivers Ostlund’s points with nuance and feeling and looks around at the old men like he’s delivering a sermon. They stare back unmoved. They’ve seen the Soviets and they’ve seen the Taliban, and no one has made it in Yaka Chine more than a day or two. The name means “cool waterfall,” and it’s a truly lovely place where you’re never far from the gurgle of water or the quiet shade of the oak trees, but it’s no place for empires.

“You can be poisoned by miscreants and they can tell you that America is bad, that the government’s bad, but I ask you this: what have the people who run around with this stuff”—Ostlund waves a hand at the weapons—“done for your families? Have they provided you an education? Have they provided you a hospital? I don’t think so. I would say, shame on you, if you follow foreign leaders that leave their beautiful homes in Pakistan and come here and talk you into fighting against your own country, and they do nothing for you.”

He stops so that the translator will get every word, then goes on:

“The ACM that comes in and gives you five dollars to carry this stuff around the mountains and tells you you’re doing a jihad, is doin’ nothing for you except making you a slave for five dollars. These foreigners won’t fight my soldiers; they hide on a mountain in a cave under a rock and talk on the radio and pay your sons a small amount of money to go ahead and shoot at my soldiers. And my soldiers end up killing your sons.”

ACM means “Anti-Coalition Militia”—essentially, the Taliban. It’s a good speech and delivered with the force of conviction. That night a dozen or so fighters are spotted moving toward Kearney’s position on Divpat, and an unmanned drone fires a Hellfire missile at them. They scatter, but the Apaches won’t finish them off because they can’t determine with certainty that the men are carrying weapons. The Americans fly out of Yaka Chine, and valley elders meet among themselves to decide what to do. Five people are dead in Yaka Chine, along with ten wounded, and the elders declare jihad against every American in the valley.

2

DAWN ON THE ABAS GHAR, SOLDIERS CURLED ON THE ground wrapped in poncho liners or zipped into sleeping bags. The platoon has made a cold camp in a forest of small spruce after walking most of the night chasing heat signatures on the upper ridges. The signatures turned out to be embers that were still burning from artillery strikes days earlier. When the men kick out of their bags the sun is already over the eastern ridge and the Afghans have started a twig fire in a patch of bare open ground to warm their hands. There are stumps of huge trees cut down years earlier and hillsides of chest-high brush now blaze-yellow in the late season and dirt trails packed so hard they’ll barely take a footprint. The men change their socks and lace up their boots and smoke the day’s first cigarette and line up with their rifles balanced sideways on their ammo racks. Then they move out.

The men walk slowly and deliberately under their heavy loads, stopping when the line accordions and then starting up again without a word. Walking point is a four-man team from Mac’s First Squad, and their job is to clear the terrain ahead of the main group and trip any ambushes. First Squad is the lead element for the platoon, which is spearheading the effort for the entire company, which represents the main thrust of the battalion. It’s a significant honor and a huge responsibility. The men are sweating now and moving uphill toward the rising sun through burned-over logging slash and quiet dense stands of spruce and fir. Off to the south the mountains are still smoking from the airstrikes above Yaka Chine. Around midmorning Piosa calls a halt because Prophet has picked up enemy fighters discussing American troop movements, and then a possible bunker is spotted on a ridge to the southwest. Rougle’s sniper puts three rounds into it but nothing happens, so Piosa sends First Squad to clear the structure and get a grid coordinate, and then they move on.

It’s as if they’re alone on the mountain, but they’re almost certainly not. Prophet picks up radio chatter that insurgents have caught an Afghan soldier and are going to cut his head off. The Americans conduct a furious personnel count and determine that it’s just a bit of psychological warfare to throw them off their game. Kearney finally calls mortars down on a ridgeline to the south—a suspected enemy position—but even that fails to stir anything up. At one point, a shepherd wanders through the position with a herd of goats; later, Prophet picks up radio traffic of men whispering. The insurgents have never whispered on their radios before and no one gives it any thought until much later, when the reasons are all too clear.

The second night is spent again in thick spruce forests high up on a spur of the Abas Ghar called the Sawtalo Sar. Second Platoon orients themselves toward the north, with the ANA to the south, headquarters to the west, and Rougle and his Wildcat element to the east. Rice and his gun team—Jackson, Solowski, and Vandenberge—are up there with Wildcat as well, on a hill that has been designated 2435, for its altitude in meters. From their positions some of the men can see the remains of the Chinook that was shot down in 2005. That night the shadow people arrive, weird hallucinations that occur after too many nights without sleep. The men have slept a total of eight or ten hours i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Map
• AUTHOR’S NOTE
• BOOK ONE FEAR
• BOOK TWO KILLING
• BOOK THREE LOVE
• VICENZA, ITALY Three Months Later
• SELECTED SOURCES AND REFERENCES
• Acknowledgments
• Other Books By
• Copyright
• About the Publisher