Killing Time
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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment