The enemy couldn’t hope to inflict real damage on the Americans as long as they were in their bases, and the Americans couldn’t hope to find the enemy and kill them unless they left their bases. As a result, a dangerous game started to evolve over the course of the summer in the Korengal Valley. Every few days the Americans would send out a patrol to talk to the locals and disrupt enemy activity, and they’d essentially walk until they got hit. Then they’d call in massive firepower and hope to kill as many of the enemy as possible. For a while during the summer of 2007 almost every major patrol in the Korengal Valley resulted in a firefight.
The trick for the Americans was to get behind cover before the enemy gunners ranged in their rounds, which usually took a burst or two. The trick for the enemy was to inflict casualties before the Apaches and the A-10s arrived, which often took half an hour or more. Apaches have a 30 mm chain gun slaved to the pilot’s helmet that points wherever he looks; if you shoot at an Apache, the pilot turns his head, spots you, and kills you. The A-10’s weapons are worse yet: Gatling guns that unload armor-piercing rounds at the rate of nearly 4,000 per minute. The detonations come so close together that a gun run just sounds like one long belch from the heavens.
Pretty much everyone who died in this valley died when they least expected it, usually shot in the head or throat, so it could make the men weird about the most mundane tasks. Only once did I know beforehand that we were going to get hit, otherwise I was: about to take a sip of coffee, talking to someone, walking about a hundred meters outside the wire, and taking a nap. The men just never knew, which meant that anything they did was potentially the last thing they’d ever do. That gave rise to strange forms of magical thinking. One morning after four days of continuous fighting I said that things seemed “quiet,” and I might as well have rolled a live hand grenade through the outpost; every man there yelled at me to shut the fuck up. And then there were Charms: small fruit-flavored candies that often came in the prepackaged meals called MREs. The superstition was that eating Charms would bring on a firefight, so if you found a pack in your MRE, you were supposed to throw it off the back side of the ridge or burn it in the burn pit. One day Cortez got so bored that he ate a pack on purpose, hoping to bring on a firefight, but nothing happened. He never told the others what he’d done.
When a man is hit the first thing that usually happens is someone yells for a medic. Every soldier is trained in combat medicine—which can pretty much be defined as slowing the bleeding enough to get the man onto a MEDEVAC—and whoever is nearest to the casualty tries to administer first aid until the medic arrives. If it’s a chest wound the lungs may have to be decompressed, which means shoving a fourteen-gauge angiocatheter into the chest cavity to let air escape. Otherwise, air can get sucked into the pleural cavity through the wound and collapse the lungs until the man suffocates. A man can survive a bullet to the abdomen but die in minutes from a leg or an arm wound if the round hits an artery. A man who is bleeding out will be pale and slow-speaking and awash in his own blood. A staggering amount of blood comes out of a human being.
A combat medic once told me what to do to save a man who’s bleeding out. (He then gave me a combat medical pack—mainly, I suspect, so I wouldn’t have to take one from another soldier if I ever got hit.) First you grind your knee into the limb, between the wound and the heart, to pinch off the artery and stop the blood flow. While you’re doing that you’re getting the tourniquet ready. You take pressure off the limb long enough to slide the tourniquet onto the limb and then you tighten it until the bleeding stops. If the medic still hasn’t gotten there—maybe he’s treating someone else or maybe he’s wounded or dead—you pack the wound cavity with something called Kerlix and then bandage it and stick an intravenous drip into the man’s arm. If you’re wounded and there’s no one else around, you have to do all this yourself. And you want to make sure you can do it all one-handed. When a soldier told me that, I unthinkingly asked him why. He didn’t even bother answering.
The combat medic’s first job is to get to the wounded as fast as possible, which often means running through gunfire while everyone else is taking cover. Medics are renowned for their bravery, but the ones I knew described it more as a terror of failing to save the lives of their friends. The only thing they’re thinking about when they run forward to treat a casualty is getting there before the man bleeds out or suffocates; incoming bullets barely register. Each platoon has a medic, and when Second Platoon arrived in the valley, their medic was Juan Restrepo—O’Byrne’s friend from their last trip to Rome. Restrepo was extremely well liked because he was brave under fire and absolutely committed to the men. If you got sick he would take your guard shift; if you were depressed he’d come to your hooch and play guitar. He took care of his men in every possible way.
On the afternoon of July 22 a foot patrol left Firebase Phoenix and moved south to the village of Aliabad under a light rain. Much of Second Platoon had already left for a month at Firebase Michigan, which saw so little combat that it practically qualified as summer camp, but there were still men left who had to conduct one last patrol. Restrepo was among them. On the way back they passed an open spot in the road just outside of the Aliabad cemetery and began to take fire. There were enemy gunners east of them above Donga and Marastanau and south of them on Honcho Hill and west of them at Table Rock. It was the first time the Americans had taken fire while inside a village—the enemy was usually too worried about civilian casualties—and the men took cover behind gravestones and holly trees and piles of timber stacked by the road.
Restrepo was the only man hit. He took two rounds to the face and fell to the ground, bleeding heavily. There was so much fire coming from so many different directions that at first no one even dared to run out to get him. When they finally pulled him to safety they didn’t know what to do with such a bad wound, and he struggled to tell them how to save his life. Within minutes three Humvees roared out of the KOP and a MEDEVAC flight lifted off from the air base in Asadabad, twenty miles away. A valley-wide firefight kicked off but they got Restrepo back to the KOP in less than twenty minutes. He was breathing but he was drifting in and out of consciousness, and they brought him to the aid station and ran an oxygen tube down his throat. Some of the oxygen went into his stomach, though, and made him throw up.
“It was the first time I’d seen one of ours like that,” Sergeant Mac told me. “Besides Padilla, it was the first time I’d seen one of ours jacked up. When I helped get him into the truck I could see the life was gone. To move a body around that’s just not moving was really odd. He was almost…foreign. That kind of thing gets put someplace deep, to be dealt with later.”
The MEDEVAC pilot had been circling the valley, unwilling to land while a firefight was still going on, but he finally put down at the KOP and Restrepo was loaded on.
The radio call came in three hours later. O’Byrne had already written in his journal that Restrepo was too good a man for God to let him die—wrote that despite the fact that he didn’t even believe in God—and he and Mac were in the Second Platoon tent cleaning the blood off Restrepo’s gear. They had to use baby wipes because the blood had combined with dirt to cement into the cracks of his M4. They also had to take all the bullets out of his magazines and wipe off the blood so that they could be distributed to the other men. They were almost done when a sergeant named Rentas stepped into the tent and grabbed O’Byrne by the shoulders. ‘He didn’t make it, man,’ Rentas said. O’Byrne almost punched him for lying.
“For a long time I hated God,” O’Byrne told me. “Second Platoon fought like animals after that.”