“This is Six, roger, your platoon was headed east.”
Fifty feet deep. Steep. Rocky. Well over a hundred pounds on our backs. I might as well have been talking to my M4. I called Sergeant Collins on the ICOM and told him that we’d essentially been fired. All I heard on the other end was a, “Pfff.” In my mind I could see his scrunching facial features, along with the shrug, and the headshake.
Stepping gingerly into the chasm I could feel loose gravel along with some larger, fist-sized rocks beneath my boots. It was a decline of about forty-five degrees, so at times I could balance myself by grabbing the ground above me. I had just stepped in, and I could already hear the muffled sounds of soldiers falling in front of me. I had almost reached the bottom when I heard someone go down above me. I turned around, straining to see through the green of the night vision monocle over my left eye. Several soldiers were trying to help another up.
I heard Sergeant Reid’s voice over the ICOM. He said that one of his SAW gunners had gone down.
“Who is it?” I asked.
It was a specialist named Boudreau and now I was being told that he couldn’t walk. For the love of God, not now, I thought.
“How bad is it,” I asked.
Sergeant Reid came back, “I don’t know yet. We’re trying to get him up. He says he’s twisted his knee and can’t walk, over.”
Then Sergeant Collins entered the conversation. “1-2, tell him to get the fuck up! There ain’t no truck behind us to pick up the fallouts. And we can’t carry his shit.” He paused. “Over.”
He was right. Unless there was bone sticking out of Boudreau’s leg, Boudreau was going to have to march and keep up. In the infantry, “march or die” is a common expression. This is where it comes from.
While Boudreau pondered why he had ever joined the infantry in the first place, I called Captain K. on the company net and told him we were stopped in the back. The company first sergeant, who was now alongside Captain K. trying to navigate out of the gorge, came on the net. “Tell him nobody’s going to pick his ass up! Tell him he has to march! He doesn’t have a choice!” He said it in a low, tactical voice over the radio, but the exclamation points were understood.
It was completely dark when we crested the top of the gorge. We had lost nearly fifteen minutes with Boudreau, in what became a thirty-minute negotiation of the draw by the company. From there we found more level terrain, between the valley on our right and a massive ridge on our left.
The joy of being able to carry my overloaded ruck on easier terrain was soon overshadowed by the fact that it was getting more difficult by the minute. When carrying an excessive load on your back, the first body parts to go are your trapezius muscles. Most people assume just by virtue of the fact that you’re walking, that the legs go first, but that’s not true. The weight is literally hanging off your traps and they begin to burn. First you try to shift the shoulder straps of the ruck closer to your neck. This feels better for a minute or two, and then it begins to hurt worse. Then you try to spread the straps further out over your shoulders. This method of carrying forces you to stand up straight as opposed to walking hunched over. It lasts a little longer, but in the end, it too becomes painful. At that point, you begin to conjure up all the reasons why the company might need to stop—map check, recon ahead, whatever. Anything that would allow you to take off your ruck for a few seconds. You begin hoping for any reason, really. In the end, you just keep shifting your straps across your shoulder blades, from neck to shoulder. And you keep walking.
The weight and awkwardness nearly made me forget I was at over nine thousand feet and couldn’t breathe normally. We marched for hours this way, listening to the rhythmic sound of falling bombs.
It wasn’t like the walk past the Apaches earlier in the day, earlier in my life. My adrenaline valve was jammed in the open position, blessing me with a pleasant, low-level euphoria. I coupled that with extreme terror and uncertainty and called it even. I became eerily calm. On account of the odd combination of external stimuli, all the fear I felt earlier had mysteriously dissipated. I was no longer concerned with my apprehension and only mildly aware of the physical discomfort. Everything felt totally natural. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The booms, thuds, and crashes were getting closer with every step but it didn’t seem to matter to me anymore. There was a strange sense of déjà vu—like I’d always been there.
Somehow I managed to stay focused on the guys in the platoon and how they were holding up, too. In fact, I can’t recall a time when I felt more focused on the things going on around me. And yet, I still felt completely at ease—as if the years of Army training had worked. It was like being pulled in opposite directions by two very different drugs—one a stimulant, one a downer. My senses were being expanded beyond the normal human range.
If you’re not careful under such exhausting physical stress, the emotions and chemicals drifting in and out of your brain can make a you numb; then the numbness becomes fatigue. In the infantry, we call it “droning.” Droning is where you’re technically still awake—you’re walking and maybe you can answer questions to a degree—but in reality, you’re brain has passed out. I can remember an all-night march during a training exercise—a “march to daylight” as we called it—where I started dreaming during the walk. I was sleeping, but my body was continuing on without me. It’s a peculiar state in which to work, but once you’ve done it a few times it becomes less disconcerting. After a couple of years, your body adjusts, and it rarely, if ever, happens any more. It’s usually younger, newer guys who drone.
This is what happened to Pfc. Peter O’Brien as we marched to the tune of two-thousand-pound bombs hitting mountains. O’Brien was from south Boston and had the Irish tattoos to match his name and the accent to match his hometown. He was twenty-two years old and married with two kids. O’Brien was also one of the few soldiers willing to speak up on behalf of all the lower enlisted guys. It seemed as though he could never be bothered with the whole “rank structure” thing, and he never allowed it to get in the way of telling those above him (from squad leader to company commander) when things were getting stupid. He was the platoon bellwether.
To that end, he had perfected the art of being a smartass complainer, but also of making his points convincing enough that he stayed out of trouble. Because his complaints were always valid, and because he always did a good job in handling his SAW, Sergeant Collins let it slide. And it wasn’t that he was just a smartass; it was that he was so deadpan about it. Most of the time in Pakistan people couldn’t tell if he was serious or not, me included. Like the time he held a PT formation for a squad of dead crickets.
We’d had a cricket infestation for a time in Jacobabad. One night, while walking the thin line between exhaustive boredom and actually losing it, O’Brien went about collecting a batch of the dead insects. By the time I was told about what was going on, Drill Sergeant O’Brien was well into his best Full Metal Jacket impression.
First I saw O’Brien’s real squad standing in a semicircle. They looked like they didn’t know whether to laugh or run for help. Then I saw what he was doing.
The dead crickets were arrayed in a crisp, disciplined formation on the floor. O’Brien, resting on one knee, hovered threateningly over them. With a blank expression on his face, he was yelling at them.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he bellowed at one lifeless insect. “Are you falling out of my formation!? Get the fuck back in my formation!”
Standing behind O’Brien, I looked up at his squad members. They looked back at me, still unsure as to whether or not this was funny. O’Brien continued ranting.
“Okay, that’s it! You’re all gonna pay now! The push-up position, ready, move!”
He started counting a cadence. “One, two, three . . . one, two, three . . . one, two, three! Hey, I said go all the way down, turd! Oh, you don’t like push-ups? We’ll do flutter-kicks! On your backs!”
I was going to stop him, but I just stood there, w
atching. At that point O’Brien took one finger and began flipping each dead cricket onto its back, one at a time. “The fluuuutter-kick! Ready, move! Keep kicking or you’ll all pull twelve hours of guard duty tonight!”
That was enough. I tapped him on the shoulder and he stopped midsentence. “Hey,” I said, looking down at him. “Come out here with me for a second.”
“But sir, we’re having a formation. They’ve been fucking up lately and now they’re paying for it, sir. Can it wait?” His voice was completely earnest when he said this to me, his eyes pleading.
“Okay, I understand, but I want you to come talk to me out here.”
I told him to get rid of the crickets and go to bed. I told him he might be disturbing to the newer guys. After a short but spirited resistance, he relented.
* * *
Time had ceased to exist in the traditional sense. There were hands on a clock. When they reached a certain point, we had to have a landing zone secured. The hands on my watch had made more than a few loops when Sergeant Dougherty called me on my ICOM. He informed me that O’Brien had gone down and that they were stopped, trying to get him up. I said okay and then told Sergeant Reid’s squad to slow to a shuffle. Dougherty called back after about forty-five seconds and reported that O’Brien was up and moving.
Almost immediately after that he called me again. “Tell ’em to hold up. He’s gone down again.”
Out of curiosity, I decided to walk back and see what the problem was. By the time I got to O’Brien, he was on his feet and we had started advancing again. While Sergeant Dougherty led the rest of the squad, I figured I would trail O’Brien for a while to see what was up. I hadn’t been following him for a minute when he took a sharp right turn and cut directly in front of me, nearly knocking me over. I grabbed him before he made it off the road.
“Hey man,” I said, “where’re you going?”
“I’m . . . I’m following the road,” he slurred.
“No you’re not. You just turned right and headed straight for the high ground,” I said.
He came back: “I’m following the road.”
He was done. His brain had paid the check, left a tip, and headed north. I had seen this before. It had happened to me at an army school. I kept losing my place in a march one night. Frantically, I had tried to find my squad. One of the other soldiers had put me back where I was supposed to be. Immediately I noticed that the formation wasn’t moving. After a few seconds I got lost again and set off to find my squad. This time the same soldier placed me back where I was supposed to be. Again, I noticed that the formation was stopped. It wasn’t until the next day that I learned that the entire company had never moved in the time I kept “getting lost.” I had only imagined that they’d moved on without me, and I’d been the only one walking around in a panic.
This is where O’Brien was. “Hey man,” I said. “Look at me. Do you know where you are?” Dougherty suddenly appeared out of the green to examine his patient.
“I’m walkin’.”
Dougherty put both hands on him, pointed him in the right direction, and said, “That way. Go that way.”
O’Brien complied with the order. Sergeant Dougherty went back to guide the rest of the squad, but I remained with O’Brien. Five minutes later he went down again. His legs had just given out. He lay there in a heap of arms and legs and equipment. He wasn’t moving. I couldn’t tell, but he looked to be unconscious. I looked in the direction of the nearest soldier. In a tactical, whisper voice, I yelled, “Hey, I need some help getting him up!” No response. The soldier kept walking. I looked at the next soldier and said the same thing. Again, no response. He too walked right past me. Then I realized what was going on. The idea of having to stop your momentum, bend down, and lift up something heavy was just too much. The thought was heartbreaking. The guys that walked past me knew that if I didn’t use their names, they could feign ignorance of the situation. The next person I saw was Sergeant Divona, my forward observer.
“Sergeant Divona, stop. I need some help pickin’ this guy up.”
“I . . .” he said. “I . . .” And then he gave in. He knew he was caught.
The next soldier in line was a grenadier in O’Brien’s squad. I called out his name. Nothing. He kept walking. “Hey, goddammit, c’mere! We need some help!” I whisper-yelled. That time the grenadier responded.
Fatigue was setting in. We had been walking for hours. Guys were hauling their rucks with sheer will power alone. My neck was killing me. My NODs and Kevlar helmet were weighing my head down and I couldn’t stretch it. If I tried to crane my head back, my helmet hit my ruck and the back plate in my vest. And now the cold was beginning to exact a toll. I could feel my hands going numb. I was only wearing a thin set of cotton gloves, and now I was having trouble moving my fingers. I could see my breath through the night vision. Fortunately, my torso was kept warm by my body armor. It was a strange sensation, in that while my exposed fingers slowly froze, I could feel sweat running down my chest beneath my plates.
To make matters worse, the smooth ground disappeared and we started up an incline. I had been walking for a few minutes, one foot, then the next foot, when I felt a crunch underneath my boot. It wasn’t an “oh shit I broke something” crunch. It was another kind of crunch that I recognized—only it took a second for it to register. I looked down and focused my NODs on the ground.
The snow line.
For a brief moment I had a flash of sanity and thought to myself, What the fuck is a Nintendo-playing suburban kid doing in the Hindu Kush at nine thousand feet, marching in the snow toward the sound of guns? I seemed to have forgotten that once in my life I had pined jealously for this opportunity.
Plodding up the slope, I looked back. The moon had risen, giving us very good visibility. Behind me I viewed the latter half of my platoon, stretched out over a hundred yards. The formation had begun to curve around to the right, so I could look over my shoulder and easily see the trailing soldiers. I couldn’t make out facial features, but I could identify each soldier’s silhouette simply by his height, weight, or gait. I could make out Sergeant Bryce Beville’s second gun team. Pfc. Terrence Kamauf was the most recognizable, carrying the M240 machine gun. It was slung over his shoulders and it hung horizontally at his waist. Kamauf was the tallest guy in the platoon and, carrying the longest weapon, he looked like a moving plus sign. Walking beside him was Private Kyle Johnson, the smallest soldier in the platoon. Johnson’s ruck weighed more than he did. Kamauf’s ammunition bearer, Pfc. John Smerbeck, rounded out the team and walked beside the other two stoically.
Looking forward again, I watched Taylor pacing beside me in silence. All I could hear was labored breathing. Suddenly I heard what had become the unmistakable sound of someone falling. I looked over my shoulder in time to see Johnson flailing on the ground. I saw that two mortar rounds had fallen out of his ruck and were now rolling down the hillside. The eighteen-inch cardboard casings in which the mortars were packed rolled without hesitation to the bottom of the hill. They bounced over loose rocks and snow before disappearing into the darkness. It was as if they had waited patiently for this moment, and were now making their escape from the interminable march.
My first thought upon losing the rounds was horror. A second later, it turned to, “Ahhh, fuck it.” All anyone could muster was a wistful glance into the darkness of the low ground.
Gasping, I continued walking up the craggy, snow-covered slope. I was thinking about how fortunate I had been to have not yet fallen, when my foot, weighted down and fatigued, failed to clear a rock jutting up from the ground. I pitched forward, the weight of my equipment forcing me face first into the snow. My M4 was flung from my hands, landing several feet away from me. As I fell forward, my rucksack hit my helmet, knocking it off my head. As my face met the snow, my ruck came to rest on the back of my head and shoulder blades—all one hundred and some-odd pounds of it. In that precarious position, I couldn’t move. My arms were pinned and I couldn’t eve
n push myself up. I managed a muffled, “Help, I can’t move.” The two guys nearest me lifted the ruck from off my head, and I crawled to all fours.
After walking for nearly eleven straight hours, we crested a rise in the frozen earth and found ourselves on a field of battle. We were exhausted, filthy, and out of breath. War had come barging into our houses on September the 11. And now, in the early hours of a March morning in 2002, for us at least, it had come full circle.
Before us stood the twelve-thousand-foot peak, Takhur Gar. Now known as Objective Ginger, it had become the site of the fiercest fighting of the battle. It was no longer on TV or in a scale model. It was real. I simply had two initial thoughts on seeing this mountain that was less than a thousand yards away from where I stood. My first thought was: That’s a big fucking mountain. My second was: It’s on fire. There were trees with branches burning all along the north face of Takhur Gar. I’m not sure if Captain K. consciously decided to stop, was ordered to stop, or just did it instinctively, but we did. I took a knee with Taylor at my side. Just then a bomb hit the side of the mountain, lighting up the entire sky.
I had never before seen anything like that. I had never witnessed a shot fired in anger, much less, a bomb fall on people. When the bomb hit, the sound was deafening. It made the air vibrate. For the split second in which the mountainside was alight from the explosion, I could see trees swaying from the shockwave. I could see embers blowing off branches and into the snow. Kneeling, I watched as two more bombs struck the mountain in quick succession, causing the same set of effects. It was then that I noticed Sergeant Collins had moved forward from the back of the column. He was kneeling next to me. When he saw me looking at him through my night vision, he pointed to the mountain. Then he whispered, measuring out each word carefully, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” I assumed he was talking about the terrorists. With each impact I ducked my head reflexively.
After a minute or two of watching this lightshow, Taylor handed me the radio. Captain K. was calling me to the front of the formation.
The War I Always Wanted Page 5
