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The artillery base at Camp Blessing. Photographs by Tim Hetherington.

Return to the Valley of Death

With the Pentagon requesting $20 billion more for Afghanistan, and American casualties mounting there, the author rejoins the men of Battle Company at their Korengal Valley outpost. The war has changed them; have they changed the war?

by Sebastian Junger October 2008

On the night of July 12, 2008, a group of Taliban fighters crept into the town of Wanat, in northeastern Afghanistan, and began telling the locals to leave. According to one internal U.S. military report, they were led by a local commander named Maulawi Usman, who was under orders from higher-ups to destroy an outpost that American soldiers had just established. With the locals gone, the Taliban quickly filtered through the streets and set up fighting positions in the deserted houses. They also moved along a riverbed west of the base and set up machine-gun positions on the flank of a hill.

Many of these fighters had crossed the border from Pakistan and spent the previous couple of weeks preparing to overrun an American base. The assault force was composed of Arabs, Chechens, and Uzbeks who acted as a complement to local fighters probably organized by a warlord named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Some sources within the U.S. military believe that locals had “rented” the foreign fighters with money made from a recent wheat harvest; some also believe that a terrorist organization named Laishka-e-Taiba was part of the mix. let was created in the late 90s by a shadowy branch of Pakistani intelligence known as Directorate S, which is responsible for running insurgent operations in neighboring countries such as India and Kashmir.

The entire American strategy in northeastern Afghanistan depends on having small bases, like the one at Wanat, from which soldiers can interact with the local populace and win them over. To an extent, the strategy has worked: infrastructure projects and humanitarian aid in the areas surrounding these bases have brought substantive good to many poor communities. “We have to go to the population,” says Lieutenant Colonel William Ostlund, battalion commander for the area. “If we stay on large bases, we will not get into the villages and connect the population with the government, connect with and train the local police. We’ve accepted a lot of risk and suffered a lot of casualties to prevent our sons from having to come over and do what their dads should have done.”

When it works, that strategy can pay big dividends: locals tip the Americans off to insurgent activity in the area because they don’t want fighting to disrupt the aid projects, and those bases become less vu lnerable to attacks. The Taliban know this, of course, and are desperate to prevent it. One way is to kill anyone suspected of collaborating with the Americans; another is to overrun an American position.

This is not a war where soldiers are taken prisoner; if a position were to be overrun, virtually every American in it would be killed during the firefight. The wounded would probably be executed where they lay, or worse. The Taliban would take astronomic casualties, but they may have calculated that one or two such incidents would cause the American public to demand an end to the small-base strategy in Afghanistan. With roughly 30,000 troops in the country—there are more police in New York City—the U.S. command would never be able to reinforce those small bases. They would have to withdraw to larger ones instead, and swathes of territory between these bases would become open to infiltration by the Taliban.

In early July, American military intelligence learned that a force of 300 foreign and local fighters had massed around another remote base, named Bella, but the Americans completed a planned pullout before they could be attacked. Bella had been occupied by Chosen Company, part of the Second Battalion of the 503rd Infantry, and Chosen had just finished a 15-month deployment in one of the most rugged and dangerous parts of Afghanistan. Like the rest of their brigade, they were literally days from going home. Chosen had acquired a bit of a reputation in the battalion, however. The previous August they had nearly been overrun at a 22-man outpost named Ranch House; at one point the enemy was so close that Chosen asked the A-10 pilots to strafe their own position. And several months later, 14 men from Chosen—along with 14 Afghan soldiers—were ambushed along a mountain trail in the same valley. Within minutes, every single man on the patrol was dead or wounded. An American unit hasn’t suffered a casualty rate of 100 percent in a firefight since Vietnam.

Maulawi Usman helped lead both of those attacks. The assault on Wanat began just before dawn with a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine-gun fire. There were 45 American and 25 Afghan soldiers at Wanat—a relatively large force—but they had erected almost no fortifications around themselves. Instead, they were relying on concertina wire and a ring of armored Humvees to keep them safe. Judging by the sequence of targets in the first few minutes, the American military believes that the Taliban probably had a detailed plan of the base; it also believes that both local police and a district governor were complicit in the attack. First the insurgents hit the mortar pit, which deprived the Americans of their most potent weapon; then they took out a $400,000 long-range surveillance device called an lras; finally they destroyed a devastating weapon called a tow missile. The tow is mounted on a Humvee and fitted with multiple tracking systems that would have made it extremely effective in the pre-dawn darkness.

Once those targets had been destroyed, the attackers turned their attention on a small observation post 50 yards outside the wire. The post was manned by nine American soldiers, and within 30 minutes most of them were dead. The survivors crouched behind sandbags and fired blindly, unable to even stick their heads up to aim. They fired until their weapons jammed, and then some kept firing with the weapons of their dead friends. Branches fell on their heads from trees that were getting shot to pieces. At one point a soldier emptied his service pistol over the top of the sandbags because he heard someone on the other side.

Three times, teams of men from the main base ran through intense gunfire to resupply the post with ammunition and to drag back the wounded and the dead. They held the position, but barely: the attackers had breached the wire and were dodging among the sandbags, trying to grab American weapons and equipment. They were communicating with whistles instead of radios so that the Americans couldn’t listen in, and at one point they started throwing rocks. It is thought that they hoped the Americans would mistake the rocks for hand grenades and jump out of their positions.

The fight lasted four hours and didn’t end until aircraft showed up and started strafing the perimeter of the base. Nine Chosen Company soldiers were killed and 21 were wounded. Over half the Americans at the base had been hit. It was the single costliest firefight of the war.

Battle Tested

I had been following Chosen’s sister unit, Battle Company, which was stationed several miles away, in the Korengal Valley. (Several radio call signs used by the Taliban at Wanat had previously been heard in the Korengal.) That fall, Battle Company had seen some of the most intense fighting of the war, but when the snows finally melted in Kunar Province, the enemy seemed to have refocused farther north. Gone were the local militias, with their haphazard bravery; in their place came Pakistani and Chechen fighters who were nearly as well armed and well trained as the Americans. Videotape shot by Taliban cameramen during the Ranch House fight—and posted on the Internet—shows Arab-looking fighters with full racks of ammunition maneuvering under fire as calmly as if they were organizing a game of cricket.

The American military generally counts on a kill ratio of 10 to 1 when fighting lightly armed insurgents: for every dead American, there are probably 10 dead enemy. That means only an overwhelming force can threaten an American position. But at Wanat the Taliban attacked downhill with a force that—by some accounts within the U.S. military—was as small as 50 fighters. (Press reports commonly cited 100 to 200 fighters and massive casualties.) If that’s true, they pulled off a feat few Western armies would want to try.

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Sergeant Tanner Stichter, who has “Infidel” tattooed on his chest, collects fingerprints for a database.

News of the disaster immediately spread across the battalion communications net. Captain Daniel Kearney, commander of Battle Company, called his men together on a small gravel parade ground at the Korengal Outpost and gave them the bad news. “Listen up—I’m going to talk to you a little about Chosen Company,” he said. “I want you guys to mourn and then I want you guys to get on with your jobs. Hey, Proctor, why did you join the army?”

“To fight for my country, sir,” Private Kenneth Proctor answered.

“Did you expect there was a chance you might get injured or die?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Anybody not know this is an option?”

Silence.

“Our country’s at war,” Kearney went on. “And you guys are stepping up and doing it. There’s no one else doing it. It’s like less than 1 percent of the whole damn country doing it. The only way to bounce back from shit like this is to go out and make the individuals who did this pay. It’s not to sit back and hide because we’ve got three weeks left. We go out there and we find the fuckers who did this and we make them pay.”

The war in Afghanistan has developed two distinct fronts. In the Pakistani city of Quetta, Mullah Omar and other pre-9/11 Taliban leaders have established a rear base where they can recruit and train an army of young new fighters. Last June, 30 of these men rode motorcycles into the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, breached the city prison with suicide bombers, and liberated several hundred comrades. As impressive as it was, the prison attack was just a diversion: hours later, other units infiltrated the Arghandab Valley and took up positions among the orchards and mud-walled compounds that ring the city. It took a full Marine expeditionary force with nato and Afghan allies nearly one week to dislodge them.

The other front is in the northeastern part of the country, where the Hindu Kush Mountains provide ideal terrain for lightly armed Arab and Pakistani fighters. They cross the border in small groups and come together to attack isolated bases like Wanat. The mountains are so rugged they can establish themselves virtually within sight of the American forces without much fear of attack. In the Korengal Valley, for example, the towns of Yaka Chine and Kalaygal are swarming with insurgents, despite the fact that they are only three miles from the main American base. Captain Kearney’s men could be in Yaka Chine in a few minutes by helicopter, but what would happen next is anyone’s guess. The last time the Americans tried to move too quickly in the Korengal, in 2005, local fighters wiped out most of a four-man navy-seal team and shot down a Chinook helicopter with 16 men. Everyone on board died.

By the summer of 2008, almost every metric for measuring the war had gotten worse. In May, for the first time, total American casualties for a single month were higher in Afghanistan than in Iraq—despite the fact that Iraq has five times as many American troops. The same happened in June and July. Enemy infiltration from Pakistan was up 50 percent from the previous year, attacks on nato forces were up 40 percent, and President Hamid Karzai narrowly missed being assassinated while attending a military parade in Kabul.

The Korengal itself, however—last fall the most fought-over valley in northeastern Afghanistan—had slipped into a tense truce. The Americans controlled the northern half of the valley, the Taliban controlled the southern half, and neither side seemed particularly eager to upset that balance. I returned to the Korengal three times during the first half of 2008, each time braced for a Taliban offensive that never came. Unable to drive the Americans out of the valley in an open fight, the Taliban adopted tactics that have been perfected in Iraq: killing locals who work on the base, threatening village elders, and planting bombs in the road to blow up American convoys. One of these—a British anti-tank mine they’d somehow gotten their hands on—blew a turret gunner completely out of his Humvee and a hundred feet down a mountainside. He was loaded into the medevac helicopter while asking his squad sergeant whether he could still go to the sergeant’s upcoming wedding despite having just lost both his legs.

Anytime you drove the roads, you were running a risk, and my luck ran out in January. Bad weather had grounded the resupply helicopters, so I hitched a ride with a 20-truck convoy that took two days to make the drive from Jalalabad Airbase. I was in a lead Humvee when it hit a pressure cooker packed with TNT buried in the road about a mile short of the main base. It was detonated by a man who touched two strands of regular electrical wire to an AA battery from behind a rock a hundred yards away. I happened to have my video camera running at the time, and on tape the explosion looks like a sheet of flame and then an abrupt darkening. The darkening was from dirt that landed on the windshield and blocked the light. The gunner dropped out of his turret and sat next to me, unhurt but scrambled by the blast, and someone came up on the convoy radio yelling, “we just hit an i.e.d.e front of!”

The bomb had detonated under the engine block and completely destroyed the front of the Humvee. The cabin immediately started filling with smoke. I adjusted the filter on my camera to compensate for the new darkness and braced for more impacts—rocket-propelled grenades, probably, or heavy machine gun. We were sitting ducks. Behind us, another Humvee opened fire on the ridgeline with a grenade machine gun: blap-kachunk, blap-kachunk. The turret gunner finally stood up and started firing his .50-caliber into the draw to our right. Big, hot shells clattered next to me into the cabin.

When the smoke became overwhelming, the captain gave the order to bail out, and we stumbled out into the fresh, cold air. There was a lot of gunfire, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, so I just sprinted for cover behind another Humvee and waited for it to be over. Even when we were in the burning vehicle I’d been oddly unafraid, as if everything were happening a long way away and had nothing to do with me. The fear came later: I tried to watch the footage that night, but when I got to the part where we were about to get hit, my heart rate shot through the roof. It was a delayed reaction that I recognized from talking to soldiers who had been in attacks.

Down in the Valley

I was following Battle Company’s Second Platoon, which was primarily responsible for a hilltop outpost called Restrepo. The position had changed the fight in the valley because it dominated most of the high ground outside their main base, but it was exposed to attack from almost every direction. No one knew what would happen if Restrepo were to be attacked by, say, 200 men coming up the draw in waves. A lot of the attackers would die, for sure, but there were men in Second Platoon who wondered whether they could hold the position. They slept with their bootlaces tied and their guns loaded and their hand grenades within easy reach in their bunks. The one time we were attacked early in the morning, it took me five minutes just to get my clothes on. By then the attack was over—it was just one man with an AK—but it gave me a taste of what the experience would be like. Five minutes into the attack at Wanat, half a dozen Americans were dead.

Restrepo was built in the heat of the summer, when the men could just stretch out on the ground and go to sleep at night, but the winters were far too cold for that. The men built makeshift hooches from plywood slung in by helicopter and kept themselves warm around crude gasoline heaters and rigged up a small generator for a few hours of electricity. There was still no way to bathe, but it didn’t matter, because it was too cold to take their clothes off anyway; they ate and slept and fought in the same clothes for two weeks at a time, and then they walked down to the main base for a shower and a call home.

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Downtime at Restrepo.

Even though the fighting had dropped off dramatically, just about everyone had a close call: Private Sterling Jones missed a bullet to the head by inches, Private Steve Kim got pinned down 50 feet outside the wire with no cover—“We all thought for sure he was dead,” one man said—and Sergeant Brendan O’Byrne almost took a sniper round as be bent to help an Afghan soldier who’d just been hit. (The man died.) A few of the men had bullet holes in their uniforms from near misses, and a specialist named Kyle Steiner had a bullet hole in his helmet. The round hit him during a firefight in the Aliabad cemetery and knocked him down. He lay there unable to see and unable to move but dimly aware that there was a fight going on around him. He could hear his friends yelling for a medic and saying that he was dead.

After a while he regained his senses and sat up. The other men looked at him in puzzlement and kept on shooting: they were still taking heavy fire and had nothing to hide behind except gravestones. Normally helmets don’t stop high-velocity bullets, but this one had hit at an angle and gone tumbling off in another direction, looking for someone else to kill. Later I asked Steiner’s team leader, Sergeant O’Byrne, how soldiers keep fighting after something like that. “Bullets are freaky. They do strange things,” he said. “You can’t let yourself think about how close this shit is—it’s inches. Everything is that close. Steiner was saying to me, ‘What if the bullet—,’ and I stopped him right there. I didn’t even let him finish. I just said, ‘But it didn’t. It didn’t.’ ”

To some military planners, the Korengal Valley is a test case for how to fight an insurgency. The valley is six miles long, two miles wide, and forms part of a latticework of ridges and mountain valleys that insurgents can use to avoid nato checkpoints in the lowlands. The locals are tough, clannish people who have thrived on a now banned timber trade and see some common cause with Taliban and al-Qaeda cells in the area. If the American forces can’t even bring this small valley under tactical control, one can imagine that they don’t stand a chance with Afghanistan as a whole.

But the results have been tentatively encouraging. After losing seven men in the first five months—and sustaining many more wounded—Battle Company has not lost a soldier since last October. They have gone from enduring several firefights a day to week-long stretches of absolute quiet. The terrifying cliff-edge road that snakes through the valley is now scheduled to get graded and paved. Not only will this allow economic development to seep into the valley, but it will reduce the number of roadside bombs. A school and community center have opened in the exact spot where I was pinned down by machine-gun fire with Second Platoon last year. There is even talk of putting up a cell-phone tower. The northern half of the valley, at least, was a much safer and easier place to be an American soldier than six months earlier.

“You can boil it all down to an economic fight,” Lieutenant Colonel Ostlund explained to me last April as I was waiting for a helicopter ride into the valley. It was still not known whether warm weather would bring a massive Taliban attack, but I was going in to find out. “There are Wahhabists in the valley, of course, but they’re a very small minority. Dan [Captain Kearney] is putting together a ‘taxi’ service in the valley—jingle trucks with benches, or a bus. It’s subsidized by the Afghan government. There are some people who have never been out of the valley We’ll take them to Asadabad, buy them lunch, let them see what progress can bring.”

The soldiers themselves had various theories for why things had quieted down. First and foremost, Captain Kearney had brought an immense amount of firepower into the valley, and, simply put, he had killed an awful lot of men. The impact of those deaths would be fleeting, however, without subtler changes. Projects such as the road have brought a lot of money into the area and have ensnared at least a few elders in a web of tangential benefits that they are reluctant to give up. And then there was the price of ammunition: by late spring, AK-47 rounds were in such short supply for the insurgents that they were supposedly selling for a dollar apiece—triple the normal price. That meant the firefights were both less frequent and less intense.

The American military attributed the shortage to maneuverable little Kiowa helicopters that had begun patrolling smuggling routes along the Pakistani border, but the real reason may have been more ominous: that spring, the Pakistani military had started trying to impose government control in the tribal territories, and the Taliban were openly waging war against it—and winning. Some people thought that they were too busy humiliating the national army to tackle the Americans across the border. That would come later.

“There is really an offensive going on in Pakistan,” says Ahmed Rashid, an internationally recognized authority on militant Islam in Central Asia. “The Taliban are trying to take as much territory as possible. They have seen a strategic window here, with the American elections coming and the fact that there will be no U.S. policy in place for the next nine months.”

Finally, the men of Battle Company had really learned to fight. By the spring of 2008 they had been in the valley almost a year and come into contact literally hundreds of times. In a narrow valley, gunfire can be hard to pinpoint; the sound bounces off cliffs and seems to come from several directions at once. The Taliban also take care to fire from between trees so the muzzle flash is harder to spot, and to soak the ground around them with water. That way, the weapons don’t kick up dust and give away their position. But slowly, ambush by ambush, the Americans figured it out. They learned where the Taliban shot from, where they would try to escape to, and when they would probably strike again. The Americans got so good at this game of fighting that they could call mortars down onto escape routes that the Taliban were headed for but hadn’t even reached yet.

Killing Time

The spring passed without a major enemy offensive, but when I arrived in late May there was a lot of chatter on the Taliban radio frequencies about moving men and weapons around the valley. The Taliban use a kind of clumsy code when they communicate (“The sick people are outside—where is the doctor? Bring the medicine”), and the Americans don’t have much trouble deciphering it. By late May the Americans knew there was a group of new fighters in the valley, and that they were planning to attack every American position simultaneously.

It finally came one slow-moving afternoon while I was in the middle of a conversation with the lieutenant. The temperature was well over a hundred, and the men were strewn around Restrepo like dogs sleeping in the shade. The attack started with a long burst of machine-gun fire and everyone just looking at one another—Are you kidding?—and then a series of explosions outside our wire: 82s hitting the north side and rocket-propelled grenades hitting the south side and machine-gun fire passing overhead with its awful, steely whisper. Private Misha Pemble-Belkin took five rounds through the observation post that barely missed him and Private Matthew Moreno got pinned down by the ammo bunker and the Afghan soldiers all froze in their position by the burn pit. It was their first firefight. Sergeant Daniel Richardson was brushing his teeth when it started, and he got on a machine gun so fast that he had to wait until he was between bursts to spit.

The men came tumbling out of their hooches in gym shorts and flip-flops, some of them even barefoot in the powdery Afghan dirt. They took turns shooting and getting dressed, and some of them didn’t realize until later that they’d been badly burned by the hot brass tumbling out of the machine guns. Their legs looked like they’d been tortured with lit cigarettes. Pemble-Belkin was so furious about almost getting killed that he unloaded a whole can of grenade ammo into the far ridge. I’ve never heard of a soldier getting scared in those moments, only angry: a hot, ancient rage over the fact that someone they’d never met was actually trying to kill them and their friends. Patriotism on its own couldn’t take a hilltop from a troop of Boy Scouts, but that rage will win battles, change wars. (“I just get really, really pissed,” one soldier told me about being under fire. This particular soldier was known for having rescued a wounded buddy who was getting dragged off by three Taliban during an attack.)

The fight was over in 20 minutes except for a slow pulse of American mortars that were methodically hitting the known Taliban escape routes. After half an hour even that had stopped, and the Taliban’s “spring offensive” was over. “That was it?” one soldier asked with a shake of his head. A few days later it happened again, a group of fighters spotted moving with weapons across the valley and every American position opening up on them. Restrepo poured out fire for an hour and never took a round. At one point the scouts called in over the net that a wounded Taliban soldier was crawling around on the hillside without a leg. They watched him struggle until he died, and when they called that in, everyone cheered. It didn’t seem like a fair fight, and it wasn’t, but wars are won by men who figure out how to fight on the most unequal terms possible. Anything else costs the lives of them and their friends.

That night I couldn’t sleep, and I crept out onto the ammo bunker and sat down and looked out over the valley. I kept thinking about that cheer. On the one hand—on a purely human level—it was breathtakingly callous: the man died alone on a mountainside looking for his leg, and the fact that he was an enemy didn’t change the fact that his last moments must have been absolutely horrific. On the other hand, I realized, no one who hasn’t been through a year at Restrepo could even begin to judge that reaction. Getting shot at feels intensely personal, as if the enemy has somehow singled you out for special punishment. (Sergeant Tanner Stichter was pinned down so badly in Aliabad once that he finally just started screaming, “stop shooting at me!” Afterward he found holes in his clothing from bullets that almost hit him.) The fact that an unknown person 300 yards away so desperately wants you dead—and that you’re helpless to do anything about it—pretty much eliminates any pity you may feel for him later.

“The high point of our day is killing someone else,” O’Byrne told me one night. We were talking about the psychological strains of being stuck in so remote a place that combat was practically the only diversion. O’Byrne had an Irish flag tattooed on the back of his neck and had come to the army via a tough childhood that culminated in juvenile detention. He was now in command of a four-man combat team. “I mean, what’s that say about us? What’s it going to be like when we go home? I went out to take a piss one night and I was like, ‘What am I doing in Afghanistan?’ I mean literally, ‘What am I doing here?’ I’m trying to kill people and they’re trying to kill me. It’s crazy.”

The main thing that worried O’Byrne about civilian life was that he’d get bored, and that in his boredom he’d start acting in self-destructive ways. Combat is a rush, and once it has blown out your levels, it’s hard to appreciate the more mundane pleasures of life. “People think we drink because of the bad stuff,” O’Byrne went on, “but we drink because we miss the good stuff. I talk to my ex-girlfriend on the phone and my reality is just so different from hers, it’s hard to know what to say.”

That conversation happened during a lull in the fighting when the men were getting increasingly restless. However bad combat can be, it doesn’t grind soldiers down quite like boredom. In mid-June there were intelligence reports that 50 Chechen fighters were preparing to attack one of the outposts in the valley, but one week went by, then another, without a single gunshot. “Come on, let’s get into a fight,” one of the soldiers muttered to no one in particular one broiling afternoon. The men were sitting around Restrepo in a kind of stunned torpor, unmoving as lizards. They had a month left before they went home, and the only thing that would make the time pass more quickly—combat—was also the thing they dreaded most. No one wants to get killed three weeks out; no one even wants to leave the wire.

Their minds worked so slowly in the clobbering heat that it could take 10 minutes for them to respond to a comment. Someone would always answer, but it just might take a while. “God, I wish something would happen,” O’Byrne finally agreed. He was getting out of the army in November, so if there was going to be any more combat in his life, it had better happen fast. “I like firefights,” he admitted, scratching a design in the dirt with his boot heel. He must have realized how that sounded.

“I know,” he said with a shake of his head, “the saddest thing in the world.”

Home After Dark

Second Battalion of the 173rd Airborne Brigade—Battle is one of its four companies—lost 26 men during the year-plus that they were stationed in northeastern Afghanistan. The majority of those came out of Chosen Company. A soldier starting his deployment with Chosen in the spring of 2007 had roughly a one-in-two chance of getting killed or wounded before the end of his tour. Most of the wounded in the battalion were patched up and sent back into combat, where some of them were wounded again. A few were killed. If you were wounded three times in combat, you had the right to be posted at a rear base, but that doesn’t always happen. Men who have been wounded three times are often so worried about their friends who are still fighting that they insist on returning to their unit.

The last major operation conducted by Battle Company was an air assault on a mountain named Divpat in late June. The mountain sat between the twin insurgent strongholds of Kalaygal and Yaka Chine, at the southern end of the valley, and would be crucial in any future attempts to go into those towns in force. Battle Company was supposed to clear those towns out as well—an operation that almost certainly would have ended in an epic firefight—but the plans were scrapped after pilots for the incoming aviation unit crashed three helicopters in their first month. The landing zones that had been picked out for a major assault were marginal at best, so Battle Company’s task was to land on Divpat and use chain saws to clear a landing zone big enough for a twin-rotor Chinook. It would be up to the incoming unit, Viper Company of the First Infantry Division, to end the stalemate in the Korengal later that year.

Blackhawk helicopters made five runs at Divpat and dropped 30-odd men onto the brush-covered slopes in the dying light of a summer evening. I was on the next-to-last drop. Several days earlier I had overheard an intelligence brief over the battalion net that local insurgents had spent $20,000 to buy four SA-18 heat-seeking missiles for use in the area. Heat-seeking missiles were primarily responsible for driving the Russians out of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the impact on the U.S. military of even one or two shootdowns would be disastrous. “It would put every nato country on the front lines because even countries that are not fighting use a lot of helicopters,” Ahmed Rashid told me later. “The casualties would terrify the domestic populations and lead not just to a military crisis in Afghanistan but to a global international crisis within the nato alliance.”

It was a threat that had everyone uneasy; whatever waited for us on the ground seemed manageable compared to getting blown out of the sky. The pilot settled his aircraft into waist-high brush at the top of Divpat, and we tumbled out of the bay doors in pairs. The Taliban spotted us immediately. “The Americans are on Divpat,” one commander was overheard saying on the radio. “Let’s give them a nice welcoming present.”

The soldiers got into their fighting positions and didn’t move the entire night, taking turns on guard. They slept in their body armor and helmets and kept their hands wrapped around their guns. As soon as it got light, Captain Kearney got on the radio with the main base and asked about Taliban movements in the valley. Sure enough, by midmorning they had 30 men massed to our east and more fighters to our south and west, and they were moving a Dishka machine gun and a mortar to our north. “We’re in position and ready to go to work,” one Taliban commander said over the radio. Another called in, “I will go unless you are coming, in which case I will stay.”

The signal was very strong, which meant the man was close by—probably a spotter who was going to try to get a look at the American positions. Kearney had a decision to make: he could kill the spotter with air strikes and pre-empt the attack, or he could wait and hope a full attack would allow him to kill many more of them. It didn’t take Kearney long to make up his mind.

“Yeah, maybe it would’ve been better to let them mass for an attack, but this late in the game it’s just not worth it,” he told me later. The A-10s had finished their business and we were sitting on the side of the hill looking eastward across the valley. It was almost peaceful. “Mortars and a Dishka? I don’t need that shit and neither do the boys. For that matter,” he added, looking over at me, “neither do you.”

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Above, Specialist Kyle Steiner shows where his helmet took a bullet during a firefight. View more of Hetherington’s portraits and front-line images from Afghanistan. Plus: Read Sebastian Junger’s report, featuring more of Hethington’s photos, from our January issue.

On July 26, Captain Kearney and the last few dozen men from Battle Company boarded a Chinook helicopter and flew out of the valley. Minutes beforehand, mortars had come shrieking into the base and forced everyone to dive for cover—a fitting send-off. It wasn’t their problem anymore, but the question remained: had Battle Company truly changed the Korengal, or would it quickly slide back into the free-fire zone it had been?

The past few months had been bizarrely quiet, but the arrival of the new unit seemed to have brought a cascade of problems: one or two firefights a day, an advanced “daisy chain” of bombs dug into the main road, and a suspension of the paving project. None of this was irreversible, but it didn’t look good. Perhaps the worst sign was Viper Company’s agonizingly slow response time to attacks. When mortars started hitting the base, Battle Company soldiers looked on in alarm while Viper’s own mortar team took 10 or 15 minutes to fire back. They’ll get faster, but it wasn’t a good start.

Normally the Chinooks fly north out of the valley because it’s safer, but this time the pilot took a different route. He climbed fast out of the L.Z. with two Apache gunship escorts circling above him and headed south. He flew past Restrepo and Hill 1705—where Battle took their first casualty only days into their deployment—then over Divpat and the insurgent-held towns of Kalaygal and Yaka Chine. Forty-five minutes later, the pilot put down at Jalalabad Airbase, the rear door was lowered, and the men stepped out of the helicopter and, finally, back into the world.

Sebastian Junger is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

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Event information about the Inaugural 9/11 Memorial Benefit being held at the Tavern at Great Falls to support the brave men of the 173rd 2/503 Infantry Airborne Brigade. Funds will be used to reunite 2-503 Chosen Co. wounded members at WRAMC with their unit in Italy for the Homecoming celebration on 9/23/08.  

Hosted by:

The Owners & Management of The Tavern at Great Falls; Land Design Consultants; Sherry and Doug Charles; Judi &Michael Hershman; Jill and Jeff Lubore; Lauren & Jack Mencia; Kelly and Gary Nakamoto; Annie & Paul Norman; Paula & Bennie Potter; Lesley & Michael Vandergrift; Dianne & Peter Van Volkenburg and their families with the support of Pamela’s Punch 

In partnership with:

The Veterans of Foreign Wars Post# 8241-Mclean, VA;

American Legion Post #1976 Annandale, VA & Delegate Margi Vanderhye

Live music by: Western Electric Band

Your 100% Tax Deductible Donation (*) May Be Made In Advance By:
Check: 173rd Sky Angels Fund
c/o Terry and Cheryl Blaskowski
P.O. Box 164
Cheboygan, MI 49721
Paypal: www.paypal.com by using the email address:

airborne173rdskyangelsfund@yahoo.com

ALL PROCEEDS TO BENEFIT THE SOLDIERS

(*) The “173rd Sky Angel Fund” is one of the Military Missions of the Black River Full Gospel Church, Cheboygan, MI (www.blackriverfullgospel.com) a registered 501(c)3 organization. Tax ID# 71-0951486. Tax receipts for your donation will be provided by the church.

* You can help us “fill the Jump Boots” with your greatly appreciated donation of any size at The Tavern at Great Falls on 9/11/08.

* There will also be a $10/ticket “50/50” Raffle at the door whereby 50% of the proceeds go to the winner of the raffle and 50% go towards the “173rd Sky Angels Fund”.

Ontario (Oregon) — Bradley McGowan calls himself "a caring person that likes to help others."

"I'll do whatever I can to help somebody out," he said.

Janice Gates describes her late son, Sgt. Joshua Brennan, in similar terms. (Read more about Josh here and here)

"Josh was the kinda guy who was always thinking about everyone else and what he could do for them," she said.

That caring attitude is why a committee from Ontario High School selected McGowan, 18, Ontario, as the first recipient of the Sgt. Joshua Charles Brennan scholarship, OHS principal Bret Uptmor, who helped picked McGowan, said. "His packet modeled the characteristics we saw in Josh as well as he met all the academic qualifications," Uptmor said Wednesday in a phone interview.

Brennan's family founded the annual $5,000 scholarship after Brennan, a 2003 OHS graduate, was killed in action Oct. 26, 2007, serving with the 173rd Airborne Infantry Brigade Combat Team in Afghanistan. Gates, Ontario, said they "wanted to create a scholarship based on civility and kindness towards others regardless of their station in life" and have it go to an OHS student.

"The main purpose of the scholarship was that we wanted Josh's memory to live on and we wanted to give back, and we know that's what Josh would have wanted, to give back to his community," she said. The scholarship recognizes "community stewardship," Uptmor said, noting OHS offers about five locally-sponsored scholarships.

McGowan said he heard about the scholarship about a week before the May 10 deadline and Gates asked him to apply. For the application process, McGowan said he asked his family what characteristics they noticed in him.

"Then (I) talked to my neighbor because I had done stuff for her while her husband was in Iraq," he said. "Just kinda listened to everybody and picked out some good examples of what type of person I thought I was." On his application, McGowan said he wrote about his neighbor, caring for his sisters during childhood illnesses and volunteering for Project Dove. Uptmor said he noticed the common characteristics between McGowan and Brennan.

The description, especially the reserved part, is a "pretty accurate" one of himself too, McGowan said.

"I think that's really the type of person I'd like to be ... it's just a real honor that people think of me that way," he said. According to McGowan, who had met Brennan a few times "just from being over there and being family friends," Gates saw him the same way.

"I've known her for a long time and she just told me that when she was designing the scholarship that I was one of the first people she thought of," he said. "That really meant a lot to me. I just thought it was cool that she thought of me when she was doing that." This first scholarship was funded with "our own monies," Gates said, but future winners will receive monies from sales of her AKC golden retrievers.

Kandigal Village Celebrates Girls’ School

The first girls’ school in Kandigal Village celebrated an opening ceremony with elders from all over the river valley June 14, in Konar Province, Afghanistan.

The new $200,000, 400-seat Kandigal Girls School was funded by the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, also known as Task Force Rock.

Gov. Hajji Sayed Wahidi, Konar, and a number of other Konar provincial government officials were joined by Lt. Col. William Ostlund, Task Force Rock commander, and Navy Cmdr. Daniel W. Dwyer, Konar Provincial Reconstruction Team commander.

“Girls schools are the first priority for the government because unfortunately when Afghanistan was in the hands of the Taliban, the women were kept in the dark, and not allowed to come out of their homes for learning,” said Wahidi. “The women are in a very bad situation; therefore we believe now we need to do more for women, we should have some positive discrimination to increase activities for women.”

The Kandigal Girls School is a community success story, said Dwyer. The school was only possible through the cooperation of the Ministry of Education, the district and provincial government, the elders, and the Coalition forces working together.

“The community recognized and stated its number one priority for Kandigal Village was a girls school,” said Dwyer. “The government is addressing the needs of the people.”

Five schools are currently under construction in Konar province, and in the next several months the provincial government plans to build 15 more, according to Wahidi.

“We always try to make more facilities for girls in Konar province, we have 140,000 students going to school, and fortunately 40,000 are girls,” said Wahidi. “The number is still not bad, but I think if you provide the facilities, the number of girls and boys will be [50 percent of each].”

The Konar PRT, in conjunction with the ministry of education, will continue to fund the construction of new schools throughout the province, according to Dwyer.

“Konar province has 315 schools with only 115 buildings,” said Dwyer. “The Konar PRT will fund schools only along roads with already existing locations, whether it is a tarp, tent, or open air school.”

“A year ago Kandigal District had only two schools,” said Army Capt. Louis B. Frketic, with Headquarters and Headquarters Company. “The schools consisted of two teachers, and a collection of children sitting under trees in the village center.”

“Afghan’s believe when you send a child to school, the education process ‘“the tailm”’ is a cleansing process,” said Frketic. “Where you wash away all the bad things from the children’s minds, you wipe away the 30 years of fighting from their minds.”

According to Frketic, building schools is only part of a grander scheme. The coalition forces are also building roads, power stations, health clinics, pipe schemes, bridges, and wells, in support of the Afghan government.

U.S. Dept. of State representative Alison Blosser, spoke on behalf of the Konar PRT, and in their native language, Pashtu. She addressed the elders during the celebration ceremony about the importance of women’s education. It is a good step for the Afghans to be educating Konar’s future women doctors and provincial council members, she said.

“The Kandigal Girls School celebration was actually a fantastic event,” said Blosser. “The bulk of the time was the Afghanistan government officials speaking about the importance of community participation in government, and they really stole the show.”

According to Blosser, Kandigal Village is a strategic village because it sits between two decisive valleys, the Korengal Valley and the Pech Valley. Now that coalition forces have built strong relations with the elders by giving them something to develop their children, and develop their future.

“The significance of Kandigal Village is that it sits at the mouth of the Korengal Valley, and the Korengal Valley is the place in Konar province where probably our toughest fight has been for the last five years,” said Blosser. “One important thing about the Kandigal Girls School is over the past two years we’ve been trying to gain the trust and confidence of the Korengalis, and what we have been trying to do in Kandigal Village is demonstrate all the benefits development can bring.”

DVIDS
By Spc. Gregory J. Argentieri
173rd Airborne Brigade Public Affairs

 CPT DANIEL KEARNEY'S LAST POST AT ANYSOLDIER.COM! THE TIME IS SHORT.........

From the Soldier:

12 Jun 2008:

So I guess it has been a while since the last time I updated this file. Well things are going great--at least great in respect to this time last year.   The men are doing awesome, and continue to take the fight to the enemy.   They are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and that leads me to my next thing.   Please do not send anything to Battle Company after July 1st as we will no longer be receiving mail here by the time they would likely arrive.   That is good news and all should be happy to hear.

As for the closing of the Battle Company time in [Afghanistan]another chapter begins for the men of Battle as they begin to go their separate ways in endeavours that will in the end take them and those around them to new heights.   Whether it is another tour in service of their nation, the calling of higher education, or simply the time they will now get to spend with family and friends at home the Battle Hard Family will always be remembered and will never forget those that gave their all so that a nation might see freedom's eternal shining light.   

I ask that you all continue to support our troops and take pride in being Americans.   

God Bless you, America, and BATTLE HARD!

Battle Hard!

Daniel P. Kearney
CPT, IN
Commanding

The peace deals between the Pakistani government and militants in the tribal areas have been exposed for what they were, a delaying tactic for the Taliban to send fresh fighters into Afghanistan. The new government in Islamabad, provided it staves off a political crisis, and its United States ally now have to make the hard decision whether to fight fire with fire or risk losing the battle against militancy. - Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - With the Taliban believed to have launched all of their fighters into Afghanistan and with tribal militants led by Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud faced off against the Pakistani armed forces, the issue becomes just how far Washington and its allies will be prepared to expand the war theater.

In a significant move, the Pakistani security forces last week blocked the main artery into the South Waziristan tribal area on the border with Afghanistan. This followed fighters loyal to Mehsud, an al-Qaeda ally who leads Taliban militants in Pakistan, setting up checkposts along the road to exert control over the region.

The Taliban need unhindered movement in this area so they can
keep supply lines to Afghanistan open, as well as move men across the border. It is expected that longer-serving Taliban will be replaced by fresh blood in the first week of July and from August onwards there will only be sporadic inflows of new men ahead of the winter lull in fighting.

The militants' aim has been to keep Pakistan and its Western allies fully engaged, and in doing so they have forced them to abandon their original plan. This centered on efforts to make inroads through local political parties into the Taliban's rank and file, in the process isolating hardline elements such as foreigners belonging to al-Qaeda, Uzbeks and local militants like Mehsud.

These isolated elements were then to be "chopped off" through special operations by US-trained Pakistani units and regional jirgas (councils) would then be convened for moderate elements to attempt to find a political solution to the Afghan conflict.

The jirgas were first scheduled for last November, but due to the military operations in Swat Valley in North-West Frontier Province and their cascading effects in the tribal areas, they were postponed to January, then February, before being shelved indefinitely.

Much of the unrest was fueled by al-Qaeda's "chaos strategy", which went into full swing after the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) operation last July when security forces stormed the hardline pro-Taliban mosque in Islamabad. By some reports, since then, Pakistan has had more suicide attacks than any other country in the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

This year, the al-Qaeda attacks reached the eastern city of Lahore, which until now has been largely left alone since conflict began in the region after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The poor security situation and uncertainty leading up to the parliamentary elections in February have caused a capital flight from Pakistan, and its rupee currency has fallen 13% against the US dollar since January.

"The capital flight ... continues from Pakistan as investors have parked $500 to $600 million in the UAE [United Arab Emirates] and other Middle East countries through exchange companies during last few months," Pakistan's The News International reported.

The trend is expected to continue, and last week the governor of the central bank warned exchange companies of stern action if they are caught transferring large amounts of money out of the country.

This situation is exacerbated by an impending political crisis. The two main parties in the ruling coalition, the Pakistan People's Party and the Pakistan Muslim League of Nawaz Sharif (PML-N) have failed to reach an agreement on the reinstatement of judges sacked last year by President Pervez Musharraf. The PML-N was due to decide on Monday whether or not to order its nine cabinet members to resign.

Against this backdrop, Islamabad has to consider how far it can go against people such as Mehsud in the context of the "war on terror".

Operations against militants have faced many snags since the start of the year. The first two months were spent in preparation for the general elections, for which a peaceful atmosphere was required. The formation of the new government took another few months, and then the militants played a smart card by offering ceasefire agreements with the new administration.

The government jumped at the opportunity, seeing it as a chance to promote moderates and isolate hardliners. However, the move simply boiled down to a chance for both sides to gain time. As soon as the militants had completed the launch of troops into Afghanistan, they broke the deals. And Mehsud's latest move to put his men in forward positions is a bid to deepen Pakistan's overall political and economic dilemma and break its will for any military operations in the tribal areas.

Sitting in Kabul, the international coalition believes that without the backup of the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan's tribal areas, the Taliban insurgency would be nothing more than a tribal rebellion which could easily be quelled through "give-and-take" deals.

It is crucial therefore that the Taliban's and al-Qaeda's grip in the Pakistani tribal areas is broken. All efforts to date have failed. The US and its allies might now have to expand the war to make this happen.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com

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Pakistan fury at Nato border raid

Pakistan's foreign ministry has said it has lodged a "strong protest" with Nato and the Afghan military after a border skirmish left a Pakistani soldier dead.

At least eight Taleban militants were also killed during the clashes which began when an Afghan border post was attacked before dawn on Wednesday.

During the battle, Nato forces fired shells and carried out an incursion into the Bajaur tribal region, it said.

Nato has not been granted permission to pursue militants over the frontier.