cell in the area and was responsible for a number of attacks on American convoys. He was reported to have close ties with Al Qaeda leadership across the border in Pakistan and with the radical Islamic commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Shah executed the three men and waited for the Americans to arrive. It didn’t take long: days later a four-man Navy SEAL team was dropped by helicopter onto the Abas Ghar. Their mission was to track the activity of Shah’s men so that other American forces could keep them from disrupting upcoming elections. SEALs are the most highly trained commandos in the U.S. military, but nevertheless they were compromised eighteen hours later when a goatherd and two teenage boys walked past their position. The Americans agonized over whether to kill them or not and in the end decided to let them go. Marcus Luttrell, the only survivor of his team, later explained that it was his concern over the liberal American press that kept him from executing the three Afghans.
That wouldn’t have saved them, however. The Taliban are well known to use shepherds as scouts, and on a mountain that big it was almost inconceivable that the shepherds stumbled onto the SEALs by accident. The Taliban knew exactly where the SEAL team was, in other words. And there were other, more serious problems. The radio barely worked but the SEALs did not use their satellite phone to abort the mission or call in reinforcements. No quick-reaction force had been put on standby at nearby American bases in Asadabad or Jalalabad, and insufficient intelligence had been gathered from inside the valley. No one knew that for the past eighteen hours an enemy force of several hundred fighters had been converging on four SEALs who had no working radio, no body armor, and just enough water and ammo for a couple of hours of combat. It was not a fair fight, and some in the U.S. military questioned why the SEALs were even up there.
Luttrell and his men soon found themselves surrounded and catastrophically outnumbered by Shah’s fighters. The battle went on all afternoon, spilling down off the upper ridges toward the Shuryak Valley east of the Korengal. The SEALs finally used their satellite phone to inform headquarters that they were in contact, and a Chinook helicopter with eight more SEALs and eight other commandos scrambled from Bagram Airfield and thundered off toward Kunar. Chinooks must always be escorted by Apache gunships that can provide covering fire if necessary, but for some reason this one came in on its own. It was immediately hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed onto the upper ridges of the Abas Ghar. Everyone on board probably died on impact, but Shah’s fighters allegedly put two bullets in the head of every American soldier just to make sure. They then picked through the wreckage and walked away with several “suppressed M4s”—that is, M4s with silencers—night vision goggles, helmets, GPS devices, hand grenades, and a military laptop. It would make the fight in the Korengal that much more difficult for those who were to follow.
Luttrell, meanwhile, had shot his way off the mountain and made it to the village of Sabray, where he was taken in by the locals. Everyone else on his team was dead; one man was found with twenty-one bullets in him. The people of Sabray were obligated to protect Luttrell under an honor code called lokhay warkawal, which holds that anyone who comes to your doorstep begging for help must be cared for no matter what the cost to the community. Taliban forces surrounded the village and threatened to kill everyone in it, but the villagers held out long enough for American forces to arrive.
The American response to the debacle on the Abas Ghar was swift and furious. B-52 bombers dropped two guided bombs on a residential compound in the village of Chichal, high above the Korengal Valley. They apparently missed Ahmad Shah by minutes but killed seventeen civilians in the compound, including women and children. Over the next twelve months American firebases were pushed deeper into the Pech River Valley and three miles into the Korengal itself. The Korengal was a safe haven from which insurgents could attack the Pech River corridor, and the Pech was the main access route to Nuristan, so a base in the Korengal made sense, but there was something else going on. The valley had enormous symbolic meaning because of the loss of nineteen American commandos there, and some soldiers suspected that their presence in the valley was the U.S. military’s way of punishing locals for what had happened on the Abas Ghar. For both sides, the battle for the Korengal developed a logic of its own that sucked in more and more resources and lives until neither side could afford to walk away.
SUMMER GRINDS ON: A HUNDRED DEGREES EVERY DAY and tarantulas invading the living quarters to get out of the heat. Some of the men are terrified of them and can only sleep in mesh pup tents, and others pick them up with pliers and light them on fire. The timber bunkers at Phoenix are infested with fleas, and the men wear flea collars around their ankles but still scratch all day long. First Squad goes thirty-eight days without taking a shower or changing their clothes, and by the end their uniforms are so impregnated with salt that they can stand up by themselves. The men’s sweat reeks of ammonia because they’ve long since burned off all their fat and are now breaking down muscle. There are wolves up in the high peaks that howl at night and mountain lions that creep through the KOP looking for food and troops of monkeys that set to screeching from the crags around the base. One species of bird sounds exactly like incoming rocket-propelled grenades; the men call them “RPG birds” and can’t keep themselves from flinching whenever they hear them.
One day I’m in the mess tent drinking coffee when three or four soldiers from Third Platoon walk in. It’s early morning and they look like they’ve been up all night and are getting some breakfast before going to bed. “I jerked off at least every day for an entire CONOP,” one guy says. A CONOP is a mission dedicated to a specific task. I sit there waiting to see where this is headed.
“That’s nothing—I jerked off while pulling guard duty above Donga,” another man answers.
Donga is an enemy town on the other side of the valley. “Illume is key,” a squad leader weighs in, referring to the lunar cycle. “You know, you get that fifteen to twenty percent illume and it’s so dark you can’t see five feet in front of you. I did it in the tent with all the guys around, and afterward I thought, ‘That’s kind of fucked up.’ But I asked the guys if they saw me and they said no, so I thought, ‘That’s cool.’”
Someone raises the question of whether it’s physiologically possible to masturbate during a firefight. That is, admittedly, the Mount Everest of masturbation, but the consensus is that it can’t be done. Another man mentions a well-known bunker on the KOP and mimes a blur of hand movement while his head swivels back and forth, scanning for intruders. Someone finally notices me in the corner.
“Sorry, sir,” he says. “We’re like monkeys, only worse.”
The attacks continue almost every day, everything from single shots that whistle over the men’s heads to valley-wide firefights that start on the Abas Ghar and work their way around clockwise. In July, Sergeant Padilla is cooking Philly cheesesteaks for the men at Firebase Phoenix and has just yelled, “Come and get it before I get killed,” when an RPG sails into the compound and takes off his arm. Pemble helps load him into a Humvee, and for weeks afterward he has dreams of Padilla standing in front of him with his arm missing. Battle Company is taking the most contact of the battalion, and the battalion is taking the most contact—by far—of any in the U.S. military. Nearly a fifth of the combat experienced by the 70,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan is being fought by the 150 men of Battle Company. Seventy percent of the bombs dropped in Afghanistan are dropped in and around the Korengal Valley. American soldiers in Iraq who have never been in a firefight start talking about trying to get to Afghanistan so that they can get their combat infantry badges.
In July, before switching over to First Squad, O’Byrne gets pinned down with the rest of his 240 team on the road above Loy Kalay. They’re providing overwatch for a foot patrol that has gone down-valley when rounds suddenly start smacking in all around them. Reporters often think that taking cover from small-arms fire is the same as getting pinned down, but it’s not. Getting pinned down means you literally can’t move without getting killed. Once the enemy has you pinned down, they drop mortars or grenades on you. There’s no way to hide from mortars or grenades; they come shrieking down out of the sky and after a couple of correction rounds you’re dead.
“We