War

The videotape I shot during the ambush in Aliabad shows every man dropping into a crouch at the distant popping sound. They don’t do this in response to a loud sound—which presumably is what evolution has taught us—but in response to the quieter snap of the bullets going past. The amygdala requires only a single negative experience to decide that something is a threat, and after one firefight every man in the platoon would have learned to react to the snap of bullets and to ignore the much louder sound of men near them returning fire. In Aliabad the men crouched for a second or two and then straightened up and began shouting and taking cover. In those moments their higher brain functions decided that the threat required action rather than immobility and ramped everything up: pulse and blood pressure to heart-attack levels, epinephrine and norepinephrine levels through the roof, blood draining out of the organs and flooding the heart, brain, and major muscle groups.

“There’s nothing like it, nothing in the world,” Steiner told me about combat. “If it’s negative twenty degrees outside, you’re sweating. If it’s a hundred and twenty, you’re cold as shit. Ice cold. It’s an adrenaline rush like you can’t imagine.”

The problem is that it’s hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well. Complex motor skills start to diminish at 145 beats per minute, which wouldn’t matter much in a swordfight but could definitely ruin your aim with a rifle. At 170 beats per minute you start to experience tunnel vision, loss of depth perception, and restricted hearing. And at 180 beats per minute you enter a netherworld where rational thought decays, bowel and bladder control are lost, and you start to exhibit the crudest sorts of survival behaviors: freezing, fleeing, and submission.

To function effectively, the soldier must allow his vital signs to get fully ramped up without ruining his concentration and control. A study conducted by the Navy during the Vietnam War found that F-4 Phantom fighter pilots landing on aircraft carriers pegged higher heart rates than soldiers in combat and yet virtually never made mistakes (which tended to be fatal). To give an idea of the delicacy of the task, at one mile out the aircraft carrier is the size of a pencil eraser held at arm’s length. The plane covers that distance in thirty-six seconds and must land on a section of flight deck measuring seven yards wide and forty-five yards long. The Navy study compared stress levels of the pilots to that of their radar intercept officers, who sat immediately behind them but had no control over the twoman aircraft. The experiment involved taking blood and urine samples of both men on no-mission days as well as immediately after carrier landings. The blood and urine were tested for a hormone called cortisol, which is secreted by the adrenal gland during times of stress to sharpen the mind and increase concentration. Radar intercept officers lived day-to-day with higher levels of stress—possibly due to the fact that their fate was in someone else’s hands—but on mission days the pilots’ stress levels were far higher. The huge responsibility borne by the pilots gave them an ease of mind on their days off that they paid for when actually landing the plane.

The study was duplicated in 1966 with a twelve-man Special Forces team in an isolated camp near the Cambodian border in South Vietnam. The camp was deep in enemy territory and situated to disrupt the flow of arms along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. An Army researcher took daily blood and urine samples from the men while they braced for an expected attack by an overwhelming force of Vietcong. There was a serious possibility that the base would be overrun, in which case it was generally accepted that it would be “every man for himself.”

The two officers saw their cortisol levels climb steadily until the day of the expected attack and then diminish as it failed to materialize. Among the enlisted men, however, the stress levels were exactly the opposite: their cortisol levels dropped as the attack drew near, and then started to rise when it became clear that they weren’t going to get hit. The only explanation the researchers could come up with was that the soldiers had such strong psychological defenses that the attack created a sense of “euphoric expectancy” among them. “The members of this Special Forces team demonstrated an overwhelming emphasis on self-reliance, often to the point of omnipotence,” they wrote. “These subjects were action-oriented individuals who characteristically spent little time in introspection. Their response to any environmental threat was to engage in a furor of activity which rapidly dissipated the developing tension.”

Specifically, the men strung C-wire and laid additional mines around the perimeter of the base. It was something they knew how to do and were good at, and the very act of doing it calmed their nerves. In a way that few civilians could understand, they were more at ease facing a known threat than languishing in the tropical heat facing an unknown one.

3

THE KOP DOMINATED THE CENTER OF THE VALLEY, BUT halfway up the slopes of the Abas Ghar was a small firebase named Vegas. Its purpose was to control access to the Korengal from the east. Vegas was a five-hour walk from the KOP and almost never got into contact, so journalists only went out there if they could catch a resupply from the KOP. Vegas was manned by First Platoon and had a small HLZ—helicopter landing zone—but for a while lacked phone or Internet, and the men were stuck there for weeks at a time. “I guarantee you, half of First Platoon is going to be divorced by the time this is over,” Kearney told me early on in the tour. The cook started talking to a finger puppet as a way of coping, but that unnerved the other men so much that one of them finally destroyed it.

I never went out to Vegas, but once in a while I’d get to know First Platoon guys who were rotating through the KOP for a hot shower and a call home. One was a sergeant named Hunter, who managed to be both very cynical about the Army and also a very good soldier. I was under fire with him once, he was leaning back against some sandbags saying things that made everyone laugh while sniper rounds went schlaaack over our heads. “We call him Single-Shot Freddy,” his sniper rap went. “We believe he is a blind Afghan man between the ages of sixty-five and seventy…”

Hunter was known throughout the company for his pantomime of Single-Shot Freddy. He’d pretend to pull himself up a hillside along an imaginary guide rope, all the while muttering, “Allahu Akhbar,” and then unlimber the rifle from his shoulder and feel along the stock for the bolt. Sightless eyes turned heavenward, he’d jack the bolt back, chamber an imaginary round, and fire. Allahu Akhbar! He’d work the bolt and then fire again. I asked Hunter why he thought the sniper was blind. “Because he hasn’t hit anyone yet,” he replied.

A couple of months into the deployment Hunter came up with the phrase “Damn the Valley,” which quickly became a kind of unofficial slogan for the company. It seemed to be shorthand not for the men’s feelings about the war—those were way too complicated to sum up in three words—but for their understanding of what it was doing to them: killing their friends and making them jolt awake in the middle of the night in panic and taking away their girlfriends and wiping out a year—no, fifteen months—of their lives. Their third decade on the planet and a good chunk of it was going to be spent in a valley six miles long and six miles wide that they might not leave alive. Damn the Valley: you’d see it written on hooch walls and in latrines as far away as the air base at Jalalabad and tattooed onto men’s arms, usually as “DTV.”

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 redhaired 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.

The U.S. military tends to divide problems into conceptual slices and then tackle each slice separately. Wars are fought on physical terrain—deserts, mountains, etc.—as well as on what they call “human terrain.” Human terrain is essentially the social aspect of war, in all its messy and contradictory forms. The ability to navigate human terrain gives you better intelligence, better bomb-targeting data, and access to what is essentially a public relations campaign for the allegiance of the populace. The Taliban burned down a school in the Korengal, for example, and by accident also burned a box full of Korans. The villagers were outraged, and the Taliban lost a minor battle in the human terrain of the valley.

You can occupy a “hilltop” in human terrain much like you can in real terrain—hiring locals to work for you, for example—and that hilltop position may protect you from certain kinds of attack while exposing you to others. Human terrain and physical terrain interact in such complex ways that commanders have a hard time calculating the effect of their actions more than a few moves out. You can dominate the physical terrain by putting an outpost in a village, but if the presence of foreign men means that local women can’t walk down certain paths to get to their fields in the morning, you have lost a small battle in the human terrain. Sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes it isn’t. Accidentally killing civilians is a sure way of losing the human terrain—this applies to both sides—and if you do that too many times, the locals will drive you out no matter how many hilltops you occupy. It has been suggested that one Taliban strategy is to lure NATO forces into accidentally killing so many civilians that they lose the fight for the human terrain. The physical terrain would inevitably follow.

The U.S. military depicts the human terrain with genealogical data and flowcharts of economic activity and maps of tribal or clan affiliation. That information is overlaid onto extremely detailed maps of the physical terrain, and a plan is developed to dominate both. Maps of the physical terrain are rendered from satellite data and show vegetation, population centers, and elevation contours. Superimposed on the maps is a one-kilometer grid, and the military measures progress on the physical terrain by what gridline they’ve gotten to. The Korengal Valley is ten kilometers long and ten kilometers wide—about half the size of Staten Island—and military control ends at Kilometer Sixty-two. The six-two gridline, as it is known, bisects the valley at Aliabad; north of there you’re more or less safe, south of there you’re almost guaranteed to get shot at. It’s as if the enemy thought that the Americans would go for a de facto division of the valley, and that if they stayed out of the northern half, maybe the Americans would stay out of the south. They didn’t.

The other major division is lengthwise, with the enemy more or less controlling the eastern side of the valley and the Americans controlling the west. The Americans, in other words, control about one-quarter of the Korengal. The six-two crosses the valley and climbs eastward right up the Abas Ghar, but if you follow it there with anything less than two platoons and dedicated air assets you risk getting shot to pieces. What the military calls “ratlines”—foot trails used by the enemy to bring in men and supplies—run eastward from the Abas Ghar through the Shuryak Valley to the Kunar, and then across the border to Pakistan. More ratlines run south into the Chowkay and north across the Pech. In the Korengal there is a high degree of correspondence between American control of the human terrain and control of the physical terrain. It’s hard to control one without controlling the other. When the Americans gain access to a community and start delivering development projects, the locals tend to gravitate toward them and away from the insurgents. Entering a village requires a large military presence, however, and that offers a perfect target to insurgent gunners in the hills. Locals invariably blame the ensuing firefight on the Americans, regardless of who shot first.

Around the time Vimoto was killed, Third Platoon soldiers in the northern end of the valley shot into a truck full of young men who had refused to stop at a checkpoint, killing several. The soldiers said they thought they were about to be attacked; the survivors said they had been confused about what to do. Faced with the prospect of losing the tenuous support that American forces had earned in the northern half of the valley, the battalion commander arranged to address community leaders in person after the incident. Standing in the shade of some trees by the banks of the fast, violent Pech, Lieutenant Colonel William Ostlund explained that the deaths were the result of a tragic mistake and that he would do everything in his power to make it right. That included financial compensation for the grieving families. After several indignant speeches by various elders, one very old man stood up and spoke to the villagers around him.

“The Koran offers us two choices, revenge and forgiveness,” he said. “But the Koran says that forgiveness is better, so we will forgive. We understand that it was a mistake, so we will forgive. The Americans are building schools and roads, and because of this, we will forgive.”

The American rules of engagement generally forbid soldiers to target a house unless someone is shooting from it, and discourage them from targeting anything if civilians are nearby. They can shoot people who are shooting at them and they can shoot people who are carrying a weapon or a handheld radio. The Taliban know this and leave everything they need hidden in the hills; when they want to launch an attack they just walk out to their firing positions emptyhanded and pick up their guns. They also make children stand near them when they use their radios. The Americans don’t dare shoot because, other than the obvious moral issues involved, killing civilians simply makes the war harder. The Soviet military, which invaded Afghanistan in 1979, most emphatically did not understand this. They came in with a massive, heavily armored force, moved about in huge convoys, and bombed everything that moved. It was a textbook demonstration of exactly how not to fight an insurgency, and 7 percent of the prewar population was killed. A truly popular uprising eventually drove the Soviets out.

The Korengalis are originally from Nuristan, an enclave of mostly Persian- and Pashai-speaking tribesmen who practiced shamanism and believed that the rocks and trees and rivers around them had souls. The Nuristanis didn’t convert to Islam until the armies of King Abdur Rahman Khan marched in and forced them to around 1896. The people who are now known as the Korengalis settled in their present location around the time of the great conversion, bringing with them both their newfound Islamic faith and their wild, clannish ways. They terraced the steep slopes of the valley into wheat fields and built stone houses that could withstand earthquakes (and, it turned out, 500-pound bombs) and set about cutting down the cedar forests of the upper ridges. The men dye their beards red and use kohl around their eyes, and the women go unveiled and wear colorful dresses that make them look like tropical birds in the fields. Most Korengalis have never left their village and have almost no understanding of the world beyond the mouth of the valley. That makes it a perfect place in which to base an insurgency dedicated to fighting outsiders. One old man in the valley thought the American soldiers were actually Russians who had simply stayed after the Soviet army pulled out in 1989.

The people aren’t the only problem, however; the war also diverged from the textbooks because it was fought in such axle-breaking, helicopter-crashing, spirit-killing, mind-bending terrain that few military plans survive intact for even an hour. The mountains are sedimentary rock that was compressed into schist hundreds of millions of years ago and then thrust upward. Intrusions of hard white granite run though the schist like the ribs on an animal carcass. Even the trees are hard: knotted holly oaks with spiny leaves and branches that snag your clothing and won’t let go. Holly forests extend up to around eight thousand feet and then give over to cedar trees that are so enormous, the mind compensates for their size by imagining them to be much closer than they are. A hilltop that looks a few hundred yards away can be a mile or more.