1-503 gets to honor heroics in Afghanistan European edition, Saturday, November 1, 2008 by Kent Harris, Stars and Stripes     VICENZA, Italy — The 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry Battalion has known for almost a year that one of its own earned the Silver Star for gallantry in Afghanistan. But it wasn’t until Thursday that Spc. Dillon Bergstad received the honor. The medal erroneously was sent to the 82nd Airborne Division — which First Rock fell under in Afghanistan — while 1-503 was still in country. The soldiers returned to Vicenza in June. The medal didn’t arrive until recently. Not that Bergstad was complaining. He said Thursday he can’t even recall when he first heard the news. "The whole 15 months is just a blur now," he said with a crooked smile. He and the other soldiers involved in the firefight won’t forget at least some details of the events of Aug. 27, 2007, though. A mounted patrol consisting of seven vehicles from Headquarters and Headquarters Company and Company D was heading from Zerok Combat Outpost to the battalion’s headquarters at Orgun-E when it ran into an ambush. About two dozen fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and armor-piercing bullets had the high ground and put the patrol under a heavy barrage of fire. Pfc. Thomas Wilson, who was in the turret of 1st Sgt. Mason Bryant’s vehicle, was killed. The patrol’s other heavy weapons were soon out of the action. That left Bergstad firing away from his .50-caliber machine gun. And fighting for his life. The four Humvees trapped in the ambush constantly stayed in motion to try to avoid making themselves easy targets. Still, Bergstad was knocked out of his position by two RPG rounds and a armor-piercing round that went through his right bicep. He continued to fire away, though, until the ambushers broke off the engagement after the rest of the patrol entered the battle. "Without him on the .50-caliber, we probably would have been a lot worse off," Bryant said. Brig. Gen. William Garrett III, the commander of the Southern European Task Force, pinned the medal on Bergstad and praised his efforts and those of his fellow soldiers. "As you are all aware, any given day we have this kind of action in Afghanistan," he said. Still, Bergstad’s courage stands out.   SIlverStarceremony "He displayed it in spades that day," Garrett said. "And that’s why we’re here recognizing him." Bergstad has a two-year commitment left in the Army and is set to leave Vicenza in December. The native of North Bend, Ore., said he’s honored to receive the award. But he’s not planning to rest on his laurels. "It’ll go on the shelf somewhere, then it’s back to work," he said.

© 2008 Stars and Stripes. All Rights Reserved.

© 2008 Stars and Stripes. All Rights Reserved.

www.army.mil

Soldier earns Distinguished Service Cross for actions in Afghanistan

By Kent Harris, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Tuesday, September 16, 2008

VICENZA, Italy — Aug. 22, 2007, didn’t start off well for members of 1st Platoon, Company C. And it only got worse.

"I was asleep in my bunk," said Staff Sgt. Erich Phillips, the company’s mortar section sergeant. "I woke up to [rocket-propelled grenades] slamming into the side of my building. Then two soldiers ran in and said: ‘Sergeant, we’re under attack.’ "

Phillips, on his fourth deployment to Southwest Asia, had already figured that out.

It was about 5 a.m. and enemy forces were trying to overrun the platoon-size element stationed at the Ranch House, a rudimentary outpost built on a mountain side 7,000 feet above sea level in Nuristan province, Afghanistan.

"That was exactly their intention," Phillips said Monday. "We didn’t allow them. We fought hard."

Phillips not only fought hard, he was instrumental in keeping one of the perimeter posts from falling into enemy hands, stopping the enemy advance. His actions that day earned him the Distinguished Service Cross, pinned on Monday by Gen. Carter Ham, commander of U.S. Army Europe.

Two dozen U.S. soldiers from 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment fought off a force estimated at about three times their strength that day. Half of the U.S. soldiers were wounded and parts of the compound were breached. But, with the help of A-10 Warthogs, they held out long enough for more air support to arrive and force the enemy to abandon their attack.

Phillips said Monday that all the U.S. soldiers involved in the battle deserved recognition. That’s something his company commander, Capt. Matthew Myer, would expect him to say.

"He’s one of those guys that people rely on," Myer said. "Very humble. But an absolute go-getter in his job."

That job changed several times during the attack. Phillips initially directed fire from the mortar pit, then led its defense — holding off more than a dozen insurgents who had breached the perimeter with a combination of small-arms fire and grenades. Then he and Sgt. Kyle Dirkinitis, a medic, rushed out to defend an isolated guard post. Phillips halted another enemy advance with more grenades and fire. Dirkinitis — who would eventually receive the Bronze Star with "V" device — was then wounded in the chest. Phillips dragged him to safety and directed another soldier to treat his injury while rejoining the fight. Strafing runs by the A-10 and machine-gun and mortar fire by the Chosen Company soldiers forced the enemy to abandon their positions. Phillips then led a team that retook part of the perimeter. He then dragged another wounded soldier from a destroyed guard tower and directed the evacuation of wounded personnel.

Phillips would go on to fight in two more battles that involved elements from his company — an ambush near Aranus on Nov. 9 that killed five soldiers and a July 13 attack in Wanat that resulted in nine more U.S. deaths.

The 24-year-old from Eastpoint, Fla., said he’ll soon be leaving the brigade to head back to the States and join the Rangers, where he’ll be an instructor.

Paratroopers play in pilot program

Warrior Adventure Quest, an Army pilot program of high-octane outdoor activities for soldiers recently returned from the war zone, was conducted Sept. 8-10 in northern Italy for paratroopers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team.

A joint endeavor of the Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation Command, and Office of the Surgeon General, the pilot is designed to support soldiers during their unit’s reset period following a combat deployment.

The 173rd ABCT recently returned to their home station at Caserma Ederle, following a 15-month combat tour in Afghanistan.

Warrior Adventure Quest, which involves such activities as whitewater rafting, kayaking, canoeing, skydiving, paintball, rock climbing, rappelling, mountain biking, skiing and snowboarding, works hand-in-hand with another Army program, Battlemind.

Designed as a psychological resiliency building program, Battlemind reinforces leadership talents and shared experiences to enhance unit cohesion by opening communication between ranks.

Warrior Adventure Quest is scheduled to expand to 24 other garrisons and some 80,000 soldiers over the next year at a cost of $7 million.

The long-term goal is to have every brigade combat team participate in the program within 90 days after redeployment from a combat zone.

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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.”

Poar04_afghanistan0810

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.

Published: Sunday, August 31, 2008

Fundraiser to reunite soldiers

A fundraiser is under way to reunite a group of wounded U.S. soldiers with their unit in Italy in mid-September.

Sgt. Ryan Pitts of Mont Vernon, a 2003 graduate of Souhegan High School and member of the 173rd, 2-503 Infantry Airborne, was seriously injured in Wanat, Afghanistan, on July 13 along with 15 other soldiers. Pitts is receiving medical care in the United States at Walter Reed Medical Center.

A series of welcome-home events for the 173rd, 2-503 Infantry Airborne is scheduled for the middle of September in Italy. The events include a memorial service (about 25 soldiers from the unit lost their lives), a Family Appreciation Day and a Fourth of July-style party.

Ten of the soldiers who were wounded in the battle with Pitts want to be reunited with their comrades to mourn those lost, reconnect with their buddies and heal. Because they were injured with only days left in their deployment, funds aren't available to get them back to Italy and provide them with lodging and any necessary medical care. About $20,000 must be raised in just a few weeks.

America's Wounded Heroes, a nonprofit organization, is helping the soldiers reunite with their unit by collecting donations to get the soldiers to Italy.

To donate to the fund, make checks out to "America's Wounded Heroes" and mail them to Jo-Ellen Redmond, 86 Mack Hill Road, Amherst, NH, 03031. Redmond will forward the checks to the Pitts family.

For more information, e-mail jo red55@hotmail.com.

Pitts' mother, Kelly, has been at Walter Reed Medical Center with him since he came back to the United States. To track Pitts' progress, visit www.caringbridge.org/visit/ryanpitts.

Highway motorcade will honor 'sky soldiers'

66-mile road to be dedicated Saturday to honor Army 173rd Airborne Brigade

Army Pfc. Jacob Lowell of New Lenox was 22 years old, a gunner on a Humvee, when his unit was ambushed in Afghanistan in June 2007. Lowell was the first member of the U.S. Army, 173rd Airborne Brigade, killed in Afghanistan, according to Bob Getz.

Getz, of Elgin, was just a few years older than Lowell when he was deployed overseas with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. That was almost 40 years ago in Vietnam, and Getz was then an Army captain.

But the two "sky soldiers" may as well have fought alongside each other in the same war.

Getz said Lowell's death inspired the Elite Forces, Chapter VI of the international 173rd Airborne Brigade Association, to begin efforts to have Illinois 173 designated in honor of the brave men and women who have fought with the brigade.

On Saturday, they will travel the newly designated 173rd Airborne Brigade Highway in a motorcade from Zion to Loves Park to thank communities along the 66-mile stretch for their help to make that happen.

"This is not a memorial highway," said Getz, secretary of the Elite Forces. "It's a living highway for those who live and those who have died -- everyone who has served with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. This is for the guys and gals yesterday, today and tomorrow."

Getz said he expects some of those "guys and gals" to ride in more than 150 vehicles along the 173rd Airborne Brigade Highway, which runs east and west across northern Illinois near the Wisconsin border. The motorcade will include several motorcycle groups, two Chinook helicopters, local emergency vehicles and veteran organizations. It will stop in Antioch, Hebron, Harvard and Loves Park, beginning at 8 a.m. at Illinois 173 and Sheridan Road in Zion.

The Elite Forces first visited those communities last fall to ask them to pass resolutions in support of renaming the route. With the support of their resolutions, the Elite Forces managed to get a joint resolution passed through the Illinois General Assembly May 28.

"That was pretty exciting," Getz said. "It was neat that our state legislators, in a time when there's been a little bit of divisiveness, were able to work together and pass this joint resolution unanimously."

It wasn't hard, according to state Rep. Ruth Munson, R-Elgin. Munson, one of the resolution's 30 co-sponsors, said many state legislators were "moved by the sentiment."

"When Bob Getz brought this to me and told me the history of the 173rd Airborne Brigade ... I thought this was a great way to honor those who had served on our behalf, and I was happy to support the initiative," she said. "I think we owe them a great debt of gratitude, and this is a small honor we can give them."

Red, white and blue signs along marking the route as the 173rd Airborne Brigade Highway were completed last weekend, just as members of the brigade are currently rotating out of a second deployment to Afghanistan.

When not stationed along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the 173rd Airborne Brigade is based out of Italy and Germany. Originally formed in 1917 during World War I, Getz said, it continues to be "one of America's most effective parachute infantry units."

"I don't know how many (members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade) will be in the area, but we said if you are anywhere between Chicago and Rockford, Madison and Milwaukee, come and join us," he said.