Into the Valley of Death [Archive] - Marine Corps

thedrifter

01-09-08, 07:46 AM

Underwood competes as a bodybuilder and is probably the strongest man in the platoon besides Carl Vandenberge, who stands six feet five and weighs 250. Specialist Vandenberge doesn’t say much but smiles a lot and is reputed to be a computer genius back home. In June, I saw him throw an injured man over his shoulder, ford a river, and then carry him up a hill. His hands are so big he can palm sandbags. He turned down a basketball scholarship to join the army. He says he has never lifted weights in his life.

“Vandenberge, you big bastard,” I overheard someone say to him once. It was out of the blue and utterly affectionate. Vandenberge didn’t look up.

“My bad,” he just said.
Battle-Tested

“get his waist! get his waist!”

Little gouts of dirt erupting from the ground. The workman-like hammering of a heavy machine gun. A soldier named Miguel Gutierrez is down.

“up on the ****in’ ridge!”

“how many rounds you got?”

“he’s in the draw!”

Everyone is yelling, but I hear only the parts between the bursts of gunfire. The .50-caliber is laboring away inside the bunker and Angel Toves is taking fire from the east and trying to unjam his machine gun and spent shells are vomiting in a golden arc out of another machine gun to my left. We’re getting hit from the east and the south and the west, and the guy to our west is putting rounds straight into the compound. I duck into the bunker, where Sergeant Mark Patterson is calling grid points into the radio and the platoon medic—the one who replaced Restrepo—is hunched over Gutierrez. Gutierrez was on top of a hesco when we got hit and he jumped off and no one knows if he took a bullet or just broke his leg. Three men dragged him into the bunker under fire while Teodoro Buno hit the ridge with a shoulder-fired rocket and now he’s lying on a cot, groaning, with his pant leg slit up to his knee.

“Guttie’s ****in’ hit, dude,” I hear Mark Solowski say to Jones, deeper in the bunker. There’s a momentary pause in the firing so Rice can figure out what’s going on, and the men are talking low enough that Guttie can’t hear. I ask Jones what happened.

“We just got ****in’ rocked,” Jones says.

The most immediate threat is a grenade attack from the draw, and someone has to make sure that whoever is down there is killed or pushed back before he gets any closer. That means leaving the cover of the outpost and shooting—completely exposed—from the lip of the draw. Rice moves to the gap in the hescos and steps into the open and unloads several long bursts of gunfire and then steps back and calls for 203s, which are grenades shot from an M16-attached launcher. Steve Kim sprints to the bunker and grabs a rack of 203s and a weapon and sprints back and hands them to Rice. Bravery comes in many forms, and in this case it’s a function of Rice’s concern for his men, who in turn act bravely out of concern for him and one another. It’s a self-sustaining loop that works so well that officers occasionally have to remind their men to take cover during firefights. The rounds snapping in over the sandbags can become an abstraction to men who have been too well drilled in the larger, violent choreography of a firefight.

Rice was once reprimanded for smoking during a firefight. He’s not smoking now, but he might as well be. He walks into the open like he’s in his bathrobe going out to get the morning paper and pumps several rounds into the draw and then steps back to cover. He’s aiming close, the detonation coming almost immediately after the shot, and, after he’s finished, retreats to the bunker to check on Guttie.

G
uttie wasn’t hit, as it turns out, but he broke his tibia and fibula jumping off the hesco. The medic has given him a morphine stick to suck on and Guttie’s stretched out on a cot listening to his iPod and staring up at the plywood ceiling of the bunker. “I find it odd that an airborne-qualified soldier jumps five feet and breaks his ankle,” a soldier named Tanner Stichter comments.

“And by the way, I ain’t wipin’ your ass,” adds Corporal Old, the medic.

Guttie asks Hijar for a cigarette and lies there smoking and sucking on the morphine. Brendan Olson is asleep against some sandbags and Kim is reading a Harry Potter book and, next to Guttie, Underwood is lying with his tattooed arms folded over his chest. The men get hit one more time that afternoon, another 20-minute blur of gunfire and shouting and rounds slapping into dirt. Everything seems backward in a firefight: the snap of the bullets going by is the first sound you hear, and then—many seconds later—the far-off staccato of the machine gun that fired them. Men who get hit from a great distance don’t hear the gunshots until they’re down, and some men never get to hear the gunshots at all.

The fighting is over by dusk, and the men gather again by the bunker in a weirdly lighthearted mood. O’Byrne once showed me footage shot by another soldier of him in a firefight. He’s in the bunker returning fire when a burst of rounds comes in that smacks the sandbags all around him and sends him to the floor. When he gets up, he’s laughing so hard he can barely work his weapon. Something like that is happening now, only it’s most of the platoon and it’s delayed by several hours. They’ve been hit hard today, a man’s broken his leg, and the enemy has figured out how to get within a hundred yards of us. In a situation like that, maybe finding something to laugh about is as crucial as food and sleep.

The light mood ends abruptly when Sergeant Rice gets off the radio with the kop. The military eavesdropping operation, code-named Prophet, has been listening in on Taliban radio communications in the valley, and the news isn’t good. “Intel says they’ve just brought 20 hand grenades into the valley,” Rice says. “And 107-mm. rockets and three suicide vests. So get ready.”

Ranch House, everyone is thinking, but no one says it. Ranch House was an American firebase in Nuristan that nearly got overrun last spring. Before it was finished, the Americans were throwing hand grenades out the bunker door and calling for aircraft to strafe their own base. They survived, but barely: 11 out of the 20 defenders were wounded.

“You don’t get 20 hand grenades to throw from 300 meters,” Jones finally says to no one in particular. He’s smoking a cigarette and looking down at his feet. “They’re going to try to breach this mother****er.”

No one says much for a while, and eventually the men drift off toward their cots. As soon as it’s full dark the helicopters are going to come to lift Guttie out, and there’s not much to do until then. Jones is sitting on the cot next to me, smoking intently, and I ask what got him into the military in the first place. I’d heard he was a star athlete in high school and was supposed to go to the University of Colorado on an athletic scholarship. Now he’s on a hilltop in Afghanistan.

“I pretty much prepped my whole life to play basketball,” Jones says. “I could run the 40 in 4.36 and bench-press 385 pounds. But I was making money the illegal way, and I got into the army because I needed a change. I pretty much went into the army for my mother and my wife. My mom raised me on her own, and she didn’t raise me to be selling drugs and ****.”

T
hat night I sleep in my boots with my gear close to me and a vague plan of trying to make it off the backside of the ridge if the unimaginable happens. It’s not realistic, but it allows me to fall asleep. The next morning comes clear and quiet, with a sharp little feeling of autumn in the air, and the men fall to working as soon as the sun is up. They stop only when a squad of Scouts shows up to deliver a hex wrench that Rice needs to fix one of the heavy weapons. After 20 minutes the Scouts shoulder their packs and head back toward the kop, and I grab my gear to join them. It’s a two-hour walk, and we take our time on the steep slopes in the heat of the day. The squad leader is a 25-year-old sniper from Utah named Larry Rougle, who has done six combat tours since September 11. His marriage has fallen apart, but he has a three-year-old daughter.

“I usually vote Republican, but they’re all so divisive,” Rougle says on the way down. We are taking a rest break in the shade of some trees; Rougle is the only man who looks like he doesn’t need it. “Obama’s the only candidate on either side who’s actually talking about unity, not division. That’s what this country needs right now, so he’s got my vote.”

Ten minutes later we’re moving again, and just outside the kop we take two bursts of machine-gun fire that stitch the ground behind us and make leaves twitch over our heads. We take cover until the kop’s mortars start hitting back, and then we count to three and run the last stretch of ground into the base. A soldier is watching all this from the entrance to his tent. There’s something strange about him, though.

He’s laughing his ass off as we run by.

T
hree weeks after I left the Korengal Valley, Battle Company and other units from the Second of the 503rd conducted a coordinated air assault on the Abas Ghar. They were searching for foreign fighters thought to be hiding on the upper ridges, including Abu Ikhlas, the locally renowned Egyptian commander. Several days into the operation, Taliban fighters crept to within 10 feet of Sergeant Rougle, Sergeant Rice, and Specialist Vandenberge and attacked. Rougle was hit in the head and killed instantly. Rice was shot in the stomach and Vandenberge was shot in the arm, but both survived. Nearby, a Scout position was overrun and the Scouts fled and then counterattacked with help from Hijar, Underwood, Buno, and Matthew Moreno. They retook the position and then helped evacuate the wounded. Rice and Vandenberge walked several hours down the mountain to safety.

The following night, First Platoon walked into an ambush and lost two men, with four wounded. One of the dead, Specialist Hugo Mendoza, was killed trying to prevent Taliban fighters from dragging off a wounded sergeant named Josh Brennan. He succeeded, but Brennan died the following day at a U.S. military base in Asadabad. An estimated 40 or 50 Taliban were killed, most of them foreign fighters. Three Pakistani commanders were also killed, as well as a local commander named Mohammad Tali. Locals claim that five civilians also died when the U.S. military dropped a bomb on a house where two fighters were hiding.

The incident caused village elders to declare jihad against the American forces in the valley.

Sebastian Junger is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

To view video's and pix's

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/01/afghanistan200801?printable=true&currentPage=all

Ellie