The Taliban plan was to suppress the base with massive firepower, breach the wire, and drag off dead and wounded American soldiers. There was a small outpost a hundred yards outside the base, and that was particularly vulnerable to being overrun. The Taliban knew that once they were close in they couldn’t be hit by artillery, and that Apaches would take at least an hour to get there. That meant it would be a fair fight until then. With luck they could get inside the wire, kill groups of soldiers as their guns jammed, and possibly take over the entire base. It was exactly the nightmare scenario that the men at Restrepo went to sleep dreading; it was exactly the nightmare scenario that few Americans back home even understood could happen. The fact that it didn’t happen at Wanat was nothing short of a miracle.
The signal to attack was two long bursts from a heavy machine gun. That was immediately followed by waves of rocket-propelled grenades that took out or suppressed every heavy weapon at the base. There was so much fire coming in that the mortar tubes were sparkling with bullet strikes and no one could get near them. A grenade hit the missile truck almost immediately and set it on fire. The Americans were instantly outnumbered and outgunned and shooting so much that the barrels of their guns were melting. A sergeant named Hector Chaves, who had already been through Ranch House, saw a Taliban fighter climbing a tree outside the wire so he shot him. Another fighter started climbing the tree so Chavez shot him too. After Chavez shot his third man they finally abandoned the tree and tried something else.
An RPG hit near the mortar pit and tore up a mortarman named Sergio Abad with shrapnel. Abad had transferred out of Battle Company several months earlier, and the last time I’d seen him, he was relaxing at Camp Blessing, just waiting to go home. Now Abad found himself lying wounded in the mortar pit handing ammo to Chavez, who was busy firing over the tops of the sandbags. The 120 mm mortars, which have a killing radius of seventy yards, caught fire, and Chavez and another man grabbed Abad and started pulling him to safety. Halfway across the base they took a burst of machine-gun fire and Chavez went down, shot in both legs. He continued crawling toward cover, pulling Abad behind him, until several men at the command post ran out and rescued them.
Abad died quickly in the command post lying next to Chavez and several other wounded. Chavez was worried he’d been hit in the balls and so in the middle of the firefight he made Staff Sergeant Erich Phillips pull his pants down and make sure everything was okay. It was. The blazing missile truck finally exploded, engulfing an Afghan soldier in flames and sending antitank missiles tumbling across the base. One landed in the command post, and as it sat there the men could hear the motor spinning up and the weapon arming itself. Chavez just lay there, waiting. “I was in so much pain I couldn’t move,” he told me. “I just said ‘Fuck it, I’m done.’ Then Sergeant Phillips came over, picked the motherfucker up, walked it out somewhere, and tossed it.”
Meanwhile, a hundred yards outside the wire, the outpost was getting overrun. The first barrage of grenades had slammed into the position and wounded or incapacitated every man there. The grenades kept coming and blowing men out of their positions and the weapons out of their hands and even the helmets off their heads. A specialist named Matthew Phillips stood up to throw a hand grenade and was killed before he could pull the pin. Specialist Jason Bogar was ignoring the rounds that were sparking off the boulder in front of him and going cyclic on his SAW. It finally jammed when the barrel turned white-hot and started to melt.
Enemy fighters were swarming toward the position, and the only way to keep them back was to keep up a constant barrage of fire. The weapons couldn’t sustain it, though. If a machine gun could shoot forever, one man could hold off a whole battalion, but they jam. That’s how positions get overrun. After Bogar’s SAW went down the 240 ran out of ammo and the men were reduced to shooting with their rifles and throwing grenades. Almost every man was wounded by this point, some badly. There was so much gunfire that, psychologically, it was very hard for the men to expose their heads above the tops of the sandbags in order to shoot. Specialists Chris McKaig and Jonathan Ayers decided to pop up in unison, shoot a burst, and then duck down again. They did that several times until Ayers was hit in the face and fell over, dead.
Sergeant Ryan Pitts, the platoon forward observer, was pinned down and badly wounded in the northernmost position. He’d gotten a tourniquet onto his shattered leg and started throwing hand grenades over the top of the sandbags. Between explosions he got through to the command post by radio and told them that they were getting overrun. A three-man team led by First Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom left the base and ran through heavy fire carrying weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies. One of them got hit almost immediately. Brostrom and Specialist Jason Hovater made it to the outpost and began fighting with the help of another specialist named Pruitt Rainey. They grabbed the 240 from Pitts — he was too badly wounded to use it — and moved to an adjacent fighting position. At one point a specialist named Stafford heard one of the men scream, “They’re inside the wire!” followed by a long burst of gunfire. Then, “He’s right behind the fucking sandbag!” and another burst. After that came silence, and Brostrom, Rainey, and Hovater were dead.
By this time there were almost no functioning weapons at the outpost. Three wounded men, unaware that Pitts was lying wounded in the northern position, crawled through the outpost making sure everyone was dead and then started staggering toward the relative safety of the base. They made it amid a hail of gunfire and Pitts, who by now had run out of ammo, realized he was alone up there. Enemy fighters were so close that when he radioed for help he had to whisper. Another relief team was organized and four men left the wire at a run and headed for the outpost. One of them was a private first class named Jacob Sones: “No one wanted to go up there because the way they were shooting, whatever angle they had, it was perfect,” Sones told me. “They were laying that place down, they were blowing the shit out of it. We got up there and they were all dead except for Pitts, but at the time you’re just like, ‘We have to get this done or everybody’s going to die.’”
As soon as they got there they took another tremendous barrage of grenades. One hit Sergeant Israel Garcia dead on. He died within seconds, Pitts holding his hand and telling him they were going to get him home. The blast “hot-miked” his radio and jammed the platoon frequency. Within minutes everyone on the relief team was dead or wounded. They fought on, picking up jammed weapons and trying to shoot them and throwing them down and looking for more. Sones remembers seeing Specialist Phillips and another man lying dead, embracing each other. Ayers was slumped over a 240, and they had to pull him off to use the gun, which was jammed anyway. The Taliban were even throwing rocks at them, hoping the Americans would think they were grenades and jump out of their positions, where they could be shot.
Sones made his way to Pitts, who was blacking out from blood loss, and together they started trying to crawl back to the main base. Right around then — about an hour into the fight — the first Apaches arrived. They hunted men in the treeline and did gun runs that plowed up the earth thirty yards outside the sandbags. The Apaches finally managed to tilt the battle back in favor of the defenders. Nine Americans were killed and twenty-seven wounded — over half the American force at the base. It was the single costliest firefight of the war. It was the single costliest firefight since Mogadishu. At some point the enemy supposedly managed to drag two dead Americans down several agricultural terraces before abandoning them. They hadn’t overrun an American base, but they’d penetrated a position and put their hands on American soldiers. It wasn’t a good sign.
Back at the KOP, Battle Company was following the events over the battalion net as they unfolded, and Third Platoon was mobilized to fly in by helicopter and reinforce the position. After Third Platoon left, Kearney gathered the rest of his men around the command center at the KOP and told them what had happened. He stood in a brown T-shirt, twenty-seven years old, all the youth in his face gone, unshaved and grim and
angry.
“Proctor, why did you join the Army?” he said, pointing to one of the men.
“To fight for my country, sir.”
“Did you expect there was a chance you might get injured or that you might die?”
“Absolutely, sir.”
“Anybody join not knowing that might be an option?”
The men shook their heads.
“Okay, the country’s at war and you’re the ones stepping up and doing it,” Kearney went on. “It’s like one percent of the whole damn nation is out there doing it. What do you guys think would have happened if we had just stopped at Vimoto, didn’t go out there doing our aggressive patrolling, didn’t go out there and build OP Restrepo? You guys want to know what would happen? The same shit that happened today up at Chosen Company.”
The men are looking down and avoiding each other’s gazes. Many are smoking cigarettes and others look close to tears. Kearney repeats the information he has — nine dead, nine wounded — and then tells them that one of the dead is Abad.
“I guarantee you that if he hadn’t been doing his job when he died, there’d probably be more soldiers out there dead right now,” Kearney says. “So take honor in the fact that you guys trained up one hell of a fucking soldier.”
Kearney holds a moment of silence for the dead and then dismisses the men. “Carry me,” Jones says to Stichter quietly as he walks past.
6
BATTLE COMPANY’S LAST BIG MISSION GOES OFF AT dusk, lines of men moving down the slope to the landing zone and piling into Black Hawks. The 101st refused to fly into Grant and Cubs so the mission got scaled back to Third Platoon flying onto Divpat along with some Scouts and a unit of Pathfinders. The job of the Pathfinders is to clear the top of Divpat so that the next unit can land Chinooks up there. That way Viper Company could pick up where Battle Company left off. Battle will not be sweeping Yaka Chine; Battle will not go out of the valley with one last monster firefight. Most of the men seem relieved. A few are clearly disappointed. Someone who was probably going to get shot will now be going home alive and whole.
We’re there in minutes, the slopes of Divpat rising up fast and then suddenly becoming hard ground right beneath us. Men tumble out of the bird, hitting heavily with their full rucks and immediately going prone in the heavy brush, rifles aimed outward in case we take contact and uniforms rattling in the rotor wash. Then the bird rises up and pounds off to the west, dropping fast off the ridge and then carving back northward for the KOP. It’s almost dark by the time everyone is there, and the men wallow through the chest-high brush to set up fighting positions in the cardinal directions. I stay with Kearney, who finds a central place for himself near the 60 mm mortar. The enemy chatter starts almost immediately:
“It’s very important to talk to Mullah Nasrullah for permission to go to work tomorrow,” one commander says over the radio. “Let’s give them a good welcome on Divpat.”
Prophet is picking up information that the enemy has a Dishka and a mortar tube and that there are thirty fighters ready to assault up the slopes in the morning. Kearney kneels in the brush studying a laminated map and talking to Ostlund on the radio. His mission is to clear the landing zone for later use, but he and Ostlund have come up with a plan to lure the fighters onto the hill to kill them. The birds are going to come back for what’s known as a “false extraction” — they land and take off again, as if picking up men — but the Americans remain in place. When the fighters come up the slopes to check out what the Americans were up to they’ll walk straight into the Claymores and the guns.
The illume is a 100 percent and the fighters will be moving into position all night long. The radio chatter stops after a while and Prophet informs us that they’ve got their detection equipment on “scan” and will now be listening to the ball game. (The White Sox are playing the Cubs and there’s probably a certain amount of money at stake.) The moon comes up over the Abas Ghar and we lie in the brush listening to the wind sweeping over the top of Divpat. A surveillance drone buzzes protectively overhead. Everyone sleeps in their clothes and body armor and some men even keep their helmets on. If it starts it’ll start fast.
Dawn comes crawling up out of the east with the moon still hung over the valley like a dinner plate and the men wrapped in their ponchos and curled up shivering. More radio chatter but no contact and as soon as the sun has spilled over the top of the Abas Ghar the men disperse to their fighting positions. Kearney strings up camo netting over the brush to create some shade and we sit there waiting. The false extraction is blown already because the Pathfinders bound up their chainsaws cutting through the brush and had trouble rehanging the chains. The medic grew up on a farm and shows them how to cut brush without ruining the saws, and now in broad daylight they go to work finishing their job and blowing the biggest trees off the position with C-4. Over the battalion net it comes in that Destined is in contact to the east.
“Two ANA killed, we’ve only lost five so far,” Ostlund says over the radio. Five American dead would be a major event, but the Afghan soldiers are different, and undoubtedly they feel the same way about us.
Around midmorning Prophet suddenly picks up radio traffic from all over the southern part of the valley. “We are in position and ready to go to work,” one fighter says. Another answers, “I will go alone unless you are coming, in which case I’ll stay. I will tell you what I see.”
Prophet says the signal on the last one is very strong, which means the man is close. Kearney tells me he’s probably a spotter whose job will be to call corrections in to the mortarman and the Dishka gunner. Once those have us pinned down the other men will come up the hill to kill us. Kearney has a decision to make: he can take out the spotter with A-10 gun runs and ruin their plan, or he can let it unfold and hope to kill more of them when they come over the top. It doesn’t take him long to decide.
“Maybe it would have been better to let them mass for an attack, but this late in the game it’s just not worth it,” he tells me. The A-10s have finished their business and we’re sitting on the side of the hill looking eastward across the valley. It’s almost peaceful. “Mortars and a Dishka? I don’t need that shit and neither do the boys. For that matter,” he says, looking over at me, “neither do you.”
VICENZA, ITALY
Three Months Later
Day after day of rain and early, sullen dusks. Second Platoon is about to disperse and will never exist again, as such, but the men are too busy — or messed up — to get overly sentimental about it. Bobby is running a fever of 103, coughing like a diesel engine and drinking all day long. Money marries a woman he met on leave a few months earlier. A soldier from Chosen Company gets taken to the hospital in an ambulance after collapsing in his room shrieking that people are trying to kill him. The toughest guys in the platoon find themselves crying every day, and the more vulnerable guys skirt the edge of sanity. “It’s even bothering me,” Bobby confides to me over dinner. “And nothing bothers me. Can you imagine what it’s doing to some of the other guys?”
The petty tyrannies of garrison life have returned, and the men do not react well to getting reprimanded by other men who have never been to war. O’Byrne gets yelled at for not sitting in an armchair properly, meaning that he looks too comfortable. Solowski goes home on leave and finds out that his mother is days or weeks away from dying of liver disease. He uses up eight days of emergency leave and then has to go AWOL in order to stay by her side until the end. She is saved by an emergency transplant, thank God, but when Solowski returns to Vicenza, he gets busted down a rank and is made to work extra duty. Cunningham creeps out of bed at dawn and stands outside Battle Company barracks shouting “ALLAHU AKHBAR!” into a bullhorn. Men stagger out of bed thinking they’re still in the Korengal.
O’Byrne doesn’t fare well. He decides to get out of the Army rather than renew his contract, but he can’t begin to tackle the paperwork in his state of mind. His sister flies in for a visit, and when they go walking around town, O’
Byrne becomes convinced someone is following them and takes defensive action. He was less scared in the Korengal, where people were actually shooting at him, than in Italy, where it’s mostly in his head. Eventually his paranoia starts to fulfill itself. He gets attacked in Venice; a guy breaks a bottle over his head and O’Byrne has to jump into a canal to escape. Soon afterward he falls down a flight of concrete stairs and cracks a front tooth and splits open an eyebrow. His explanation, when asked, is that he was attacked by a wolverine.
When I get to Vicenza, O’Byrne has gone AWOL. That’s a problem, because his military ID is about to expire, and when it does he’ll be in some weird limbo where he won’t be allowed on base but he won’t be allowed to go home either. One night Second Platoon is having a barbecue and the guys are standing around talking to some Romanian strippers, and O’Byrne finally calls Hoyt’s cell phone. Hoyt talks to him for a minute and then hands the phone to me with a “See what I mean?” kind of look. O’Byrne is so upset he can barely talk. He’s drunk at a bar in Florence and his wallet is missing and his cell phone has died. He’s talking on a cell he borrowed from some guy in the bar. “The Army’s trying to kill me,” he says. “I don’t dare come back. They’re trying to kill me.”
He finally shows up the next day and Nevala drives him around the base trying to take care of his paperwork. I tag along to see what happens. O’Byrne refers to the base as “Coward’s Land,” because it’s a place where guys who have never done anything but fill out paperwork can boss around guys who have actually fought for their country. A whole new set of rules apply that seem almost deliberately punitive of the traits that make for a good combat soldier. We park in front of something called the Transition Office, and O’Byrne says, “Come in and watch, this is gonna be good.”