War

The platoon hides all night on a hill above Karingal. As dawn breaks, the village stirs, and Taliban guards move about, but no one has yet spotted the Americans, who lie still all day while making notes about the comings and goings below them. After dark, they move out and head back to Restrepo.

It’s April, time for “fighting season,” but nothing has happened in weeks. The men feel restless and get into silly arguments. The platoon acquires a puppy from some Afghan soldiers; they name him Airborne; he chews on everything, wanders off, finds his way back.

Now and then, the men argue religion. Junger realizes that, for them, trust in each other is their faith; dying while fighting is less important than making sure you’re there for the other guys in a firefight. To Second Platoon, doing something outsiders would consider heroic is simply the minimum required.

Platoon members often offer Junger a weapon, but he always turns them down: If he shoots, he’s no longer a journalist, and his reports won’t ring true anymore. He realizes, though, that the platoon’s ethos has affected him, and if things got really bad, he, too, would pick up a gun to protect them. Just in case, the men show him and videographer Hetherington how to shoot each of the various machine guns—the M4, the 240, the .50.

The platoon protects the two men during battle; they wish they could somehow return the favor, despite their role as dispassionate journalists. At one point in a firefight, Hetherington passes ammo to a couple of the soldiers; that’s as close as either he or Junger get to actual participation in combat.

The soldiers yearn for battle just to exercise that supreme commitment to each other. After they end their tour, Junger asks one platoon member if he misses Restrepo. He answers, “I’d take a helicopter there tomorrow […] Most of us would” (215).

One day at noon after a morning patrol, Taliban fighters light up several American outposts with gun and mortar fire; the army responds, along with “Bone”—a B-One bomber that drops ordnance on a few enemy positions. Things quiet down, and then Prophet overhears an order for the enemy to start up again. One platoon member quips, “Apparently we didn’t do enough damage to them and they want some more” (219). It’s the first day of real fighting in weeks, and the men are enjoying it.

Apparently, the Taliban enjoy it as well. Today they’re hosting visiting fighters and showing them a good time. Later, they’ll take orders from the visitors for more weapons, which improves the Taliban’s cash situation.

Each Monday, the men take mefloquine pills to prevent malaria; the pills give them strange nightmares that Junger calls “mefloquine dreams.” Side effects of the pills include “severe depression, paranoia, aggression, nightmares, and insomnia. Those happen to be the side effects of combat as well” (221).

A poor spring harvest limits funds for insurgent ammunition and attacks slow to once every several days. Summer heat moves in, and boredom becomes severe. One man, Bobby, is a large, powerful, southern “redneck” whose best friend is Jones, the only Black man in the platoon. Bobby spouts ridiculous racist tripe as if mocking it, and, as the months wear on, he taunts the others with his theory that real men are never abstinent and, if needed, don’t care with whom or what they have sex. The men begin to walk around in pairs in case Bobby and Jones act on Bobby’s theory.

Throughout eastern Afghanistan, US forces put more pressure on the Taliban, but its members continue to fight hard. In Korengal, a general meeting of elders, attended by the provincial governor and a Pashto-speaking woman from USAID, takes place while a firefight breaks out nearby. The speakers urge the elders to accept Afghan government authority and receive more development projects. One local young man argues that Americans have killed civilians; the governor replies that that won’t happen if the locals push out the Taliban.

One day, Prophet learns of an attack scheduled for 12:30, and the men get ready. Nothing happens—the attack is late—and the men begin to relax; then enemy mortars and grenades pour down on the outposts and KOP. Second Platoon soldiers whoop and grab their weapons. They give back as much as they get until A-10s appear overhead and fire beer-can-sized explosive rounds at enemy hillside positions, and the battle ends.

O’Byrne is near the end of his enlistment; he must decide whether to reenlist or face what is to him the truly scary prospect of trying to find a job in the civilian world. He also fears that, back in the US, he’ll miss the emotional rush of combat so much that he’ll start drinking and getting into trouble. O’Byrne and others like him “come home to find themselves desperately missing what should have been the worst experience of their lives” (233).

Something within men drives them toward danger: It’s six times riskier simply to be a young man in America than a firefighter or police officer, and, except at rare outposts like Restrepo, it’s safer to be in the army. Military researchers have studied men in combat and learned a great deal about what makes some men courageous. The chief predictor is their devotion to each other, their “solidarity with the group”—in short, they learned “that courage was love” (239-40).

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990s reckoned that, due to human brain size, the maximum number of people in a social group is about 150. That’s as many people as an average individual can comfortably keep track of. Other researchers discovered that pre-contact hunter-gatherers tend to live in groups of about 150 and that groups from ancient Roman military units and ancient Mesopotamian villages to present-day Hutterite religious communities in South Dakota have tended to split off when the size reaches about 150.

A second common clumping number is 30, the size of the largest sub-groups of a 150-member tribe or other social organization. In the military, a platoon is very roughly 30 men; a handful of platoons makes a company of up to 150 soldiers. In hunter-gatherer societies, bands of 30 group together into tribes, and loyalty extends to the tribal level. All the men in Second Platoon interviewed by Junger state emphatically that they’d risk themselves for anyone in their company.

After World War II, researchers found that German soldiers often fought and died together, not for nationalism or Nazi beliefs but because they were protecting their fellows. Most units fought, died, or surrendered together; the few who broke away or surrendered alone were disgruntled or had a history of troubled relationships.

Sacrificing one’s life for others doesn’t at first seem to make sense from an evolutionary standpoint: People who do so remove their DNA from the human gene pool. Humans are the only primate to do this; perhaps it’s because, for example, a chimpanzee can’t communicate stories of courage or cowardice, while humans can. For a platoon member, being thought a coward instead of risking oneself for one’s group is unbearably shameful.

As many as 15% of ancient human populations died in warfare; war has hugely affected people’s makeup and attitudes. Groups that lacked the self-sacrificing attitude likely died off, while groups that possessed that attitude survived.

Cortez says he’d fall on a grenade for the others: “I actually love my brothers […] Any of them would do it for me” (246).

So many Pakistani soldiers come and go across the border that it begins to seem as if “Pakistan was effectively waging war against America” (249). When Colonel Ostlund finally orders a strike on the Pakistani side during an extended firefight, Second Platoon members hear about it and mutter, “Finally.” Hating Pakistan is the closest to politics that the men get.

A new armored unit arrives; the old unit drives them around and points out little tactical things they’ll need to know. These are called  “right-seat left-seat” patrols (249), in which newcomers first observe and then take the lead. Nevertheless, most casualties happen during the early months of deployment, no matter how much information the new soldiers receive.

Yaka Chine is crawling with enemy soldiers who walk openly in camouflage uniforms, with guns slung over shoulders. Kearney decides on an operation, including major air support, to engage them. The battle will be hard-fought. Junger tags along; he knows doing so could get him killed. He struggles with ways to reconcile himself: Maybe things are in God’s hands, but it’s he who chooses to ride along.

Simultaneously, members of Chosen Company, 10 miles to the north, will abandon an old outpost and build a new one—named Kahler in honor of a fallen platoon sergeant—in the town of Wanat. Taliban troops mass on the hills, preparing to resist the new construction in a major offensive of their own. The attack is well timed and deadly. A nearby guard outpost is quickly overwhelmed by barrages of gunfire; defensive positions elsewhere are fired on and shelled so that US troops can’t initially fire back. When finally they do, the men retaliate so ferociously that some of their big machine guns overheat, and the barrels begin to melt.

Apache gunships finally arrive and drive back the enemy, but insurgents manage to get their hands on a couple of dead American soldiers, dragging them some distance before giving up. Half the outpost’s servicemen are killed or wounded, the costliest engagement of the war.

The operation at Yaka Chine gets canceled. Instead, Second Platoon will assist in securing a landing area, Divpat, on a ridge where replacement troops and equipment can be offloaded. Radio chatter has the Taliban planning a welcoming barrage. Kearney and Ostlund devise a ruse that makes it appear as if the soldiers have departed by helicopter; when the enemy climbs up the ridge to investigate, they’ll be killed in an ambush.

At dawn, technical problems cause the ambush to be canceled. Radio chatter hints that the Taliban are planning to attack Divpat; Kearney can wait and let them arrive and try to kill them, or he can simply call in an A-10 strafing run and take out the main enemy element. He decides on the A-10; he doesn’t want a bunch of his men killed days before they ship out.

The men ship out to a US Army base in Vicenza, Italy. As they wait for their service to end, they get drunk and are pestered by officers who dress them down for petty offenses like not sitting properly in their chairs; many of the toughest of them spend time crying. What makes them great on the front lines gets them punished or tormented at rear bases.

O’Byrne decides not to reenlist; he struggles with paranoia, gets into a fight with a local, and finally goes AWOL, thinking the army is trying to kill him. Junger and others finally talk him down, and he gets things sorted out and retires to civilian life. Months later, though, he contacts Junger, saying he’s having trouble adjusting and wants to rejoin the army. Junger doesn’t have an answer, but he thinks: “Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in” (268).

Viper Company replaces Battle Company in the Korengal. There are a lot of setbacks that year, and Viper has eight killed and 30 wounded. Viper transitions out, replaced by a company that oversees the complete withdrawal of US men and matériel. Community elders get the Taliban to agree not to fire on the retreating forces; in exchange, the US leaves them the concrete buildings and generators.

The problem was that decision-makers vastly underestimated the manpower needed to pacify places like the Korengal: “A battalion of American soldiers probably could have done whatever they wanted in the Korengal, but they didn’t have a battalion—they barely had a company” (271). Still, the soldiers did throttle the smuggling of insurgents, giving the US breathing room to pave roads, build schools, and bring in electric power for local residents.

US policy changes in 2009 with the pullout of troops from remote valleys and a buildup in major urban areas. This deeply bothers Second Platoon veterans, who wonder what their hard work and risk were for. Battle Company remains in the border area to interdict Pakistani insurgents, and some of Second Platoon’s veterans return. Their outpost, Camp Monty, is much better provisioned than KOP and its outposts: Monty boasts “Internet, showers, hot chow, the works…” (273).

Most Second Platoon men get married or divorced or have kids. O’Byrne struggles with alcohol, runs into trouble with the law, finally gets sober, marries his long-time girlfriend, Liz—who then does a tour as a helicopter mechanic overseas—gets a job with a tree-trimming company, toys with writing a book about his platoon experiences, and continues to struggle with missing life in the Korengal.

Sal Giunta, who saves the wounded Sergeant Brennan from Taliban kidnappers, receives the Medal of Honor, the first living soldier to do so since Vietnam. The ceremony takes place at the White House, attended by First Platoon members and other veterans of Battle Company. Giunta wants the award given to the entire platoon, but he receives it alone from President Obama. The mother of slain medic Hugo Mendoza is there; she speaks briefly to the president, then breaks down into sobs. The whole room is in tears. The president hugs Mrs Mendoza; he holds her for a long time.