and Pakistani fighters from across the border in Bajaur Province and local militias run by a veteran of the Soviet jihad named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Video made by insurgents during one attack shows tiny figures—American soldiers—sprinting for cover and trying to shoot back from behind ragged sandbag walls. The KOP is surrounded by high ground, and to mount an attack local fighters only had to scramble up the back sides of the ridges and pour machine-gun fire down into the compound. This is called “plunging fire,” and it is hard to suppress or take cover from. The only way to fix the problem was to take over the high ground with small outposts, but those positions then also became vulnerable to attack. The battle plan for the valley became a game of tactical leapfrog that put the Americans into the village of Babiyal by the spring of 2007.
Babiyal was about half a mile south of the KOP and had ties to the insurgents, though it was not overtly hostile. American soldiers with 10th Mountain rented a residential compound from a local schoolteacher and fortified it with enormous cedar logs that locals had cut on the upper slopes of the valley. The position was named Phoenix, after the city in Arizona, and had its counterpart in Firebase Vegas across the valley. Unfortunately, all you had to do to figure out the tactical problems at Phoenix was to tilt your head upward at Table Rock. Insurgents could pound Phoenix from there and then just run down the back side of the ridge when the Americans started hitting back. One American was killed by an 88 mm recoilless round that shrieked through the narrow opening of his bunker and detonated; another was killed while running to one of the machine-gun positions during an attack. A soldier at the KOP was shot while standing at one of the piss tubes. An American contract worker was shot and wounded while taking a nap on his cot. Another soldier stumbled and drowned while wading across the Korengal River in his body armor.
At a brief ceremony at the KOP on June 5, Captain Jim McKnight of 10th Mountain took down his unit’s guidon, climbed into the back of a Chinook, and flew out of the valley forever. Battle Company’s guidon was immediately raised in its place. In attendance was a dark, handsome man of Samoan ancestry named Isaia Vimoto; he was the command sergeant major of the 173rd and the highest enlisted man in the brigade. Vimoto’s nineteen-year-old son, Timothy, was a private first class in Second Platoon, and after the ceremony Vimoto asked Battle Company’s First Sergeant LaMonta Caldwell where his son was. Caldwell walked Vimoto over to the wire and pointed down-valley.
‘He’s down there at Phoenix,’ he told him.
Vimoto had requested that his son serve in Battle Company because he and Caldwell were best friends. ‘You tell him I said hello,’ he told Caldwell before he left the KOP. ‘Tell him I came out here.’
There had been some contact earlier in the day, and Second Platoon spotted what they thought was an enemy position on top of Hill 1705. A twenty-five-man element, including two Afghan soldiers and an interpreter, left the wire at Phoenix in early evening and started walking south. They walked in plain view on the road and left during daylight hours, which were two things they’d never do again—at least not at the same time. They passed the villages of Aliabad and Loy Kalay and then crossed a bridge over a western tributary of the Korengal. They started up through the steep holly forests of 1705, crested the top, and then started down the other side.
The enemy was waiting for them. They opened fire from three hundred yards away with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. A private named Tad Donoho dropped prone and was low-crawling to cover when he saw a line of bullets stitching toward him in the dirt. He rolled to one side and wound up near PFC Vimoto. Both men began returning fire, bullets kicking up dirt all around them, and at one point Donoho saw Vimoto open his mouth as if he were about to yell something. No sound came out, though; instead, his head jerked back and then tipped forward. He didn’t move again.
Donoho started shouting for the platoon medic, but there was so much gunfire that no one could hear him. It didn’t matter anyway; the bullet had gone through Vimoto’s head and killed him instantly. One moment he was in the first firefight of his life, the next moment he was dead. Donoho shot through all twelve magazines he carried and then pulled more out of his dead friend’s ammo rack.
There was so much gunfire that the only way the men could move without getting hit was to low-crawl. They were on a steep ridge at night getting raked by machine-gun fire, and everyone knew the MEDEVAC helicopters would never dare attempt a landing in those conditions; they were going to have to get Vimoto and another man named Pecsek down to the road to get picked up. Pecsek had been shot through the shoulder but seemed able to walk. A staff sergeant named Kevin Rice hoisted Vimoto onto his back, and the men started down the steep, rocky slopes of 1705 in the darkness and the rain.
Captain Dan Kearney, the commander of Battle Company, drove down to Aliabad in a Humvee to help evacuate the casualties and remembers turning a corner in the road and hitting a wall of Taliban firepower. “I was blown away by the insurgents’ ability to continue fighting despite everything America had to throw at them,” Kearney told me later. “From that point on I knew it was—number one—a different enemy than I fought in Iraq and that—number two—the terrain offered some kind of advantage that I’d never seen or read or heard about in my entire life.”
When Battle Company first arrived in the Korengal, O’Byrne was a gunner in Second Platoon’s Weapons Squad. A squad is generally eight men plus a squad leader, and those eight men are divided into two fire teams designated “alpha” and “bravo.” In a Weapons Squad, each team would be responsible for an M240 heavy machine gun. O’Byrne spent two months in Weapons Squad and then switched to First Squad under Staff Sergeant Josh McDonough. The men called him “Sar’n Mac,” and under his tutelage First Squad became one of the hardest-hitting in the company, possibly the entire battalion. When his men didn’t perform well, Mac would tilt his head forward and bore through them with an unblinking stare that could go on for minutes; while he was doing that he was also yelling. “Mac was just a fucking mule,” O’Byrne said. “He was just so goddamn strong. His legs were the size of my head. His guys were his only concern. If one of us team leaders wasn’t doing our job he got furious—because he cared. He just had a very rough way of showing it.”
First Squad was line infantry, which meant they fought on foot and carried everything they needed on their backs. Theoretically, they could walk for days without resupply. O’Byrne was in charge of First Squad’s alpha team, which included a former high school wrestler from Wisconsin named Steiner, an eighteen-year-old from Georgia named Vaughn, and a wiry, furtive oddball named Monroe. Each man carried three or four hand grenades. Two out of the four carried standard M4 assault rifles and a chest rack of thirty-round magazines. Another man carried an M4 that also fired big fat rounds called 203s. The 203 rounds explode on impact and are used to lob onto enemy fighters who are behind cover and otherwise couldn’t be hit. The fourth man carried something called a Squad Automatic Weapon—usually referred to as a SAW. The SAW has an extremely high rate of fire and basically vomits rounds if you so much as touch the trigger. If you “go cyclic”—fire without stopping—you will go through 900 rounds in a minute. (You’ll also melt the barrel.) O’Byrne’s fire team probably had enough training and ammo to hold off an enemy force three or four times their size.
Every platoon also has a headquarters element composed of a medic, a forward observer, a radio operator, a platoon sergeant, and a lieutenant who had graduated from officer candidate school. Second Platoon went through two lieutenants during the first half of their deployment and then wound up with Steve Gillespie, a tall, lean marathon runner who reminded his men of a movie character named Napoleon Dynamite. They called him Napoleon behind his back and occasionally to his face but did it with affection and respect: Gillespie was such a dedicated commander that his radioman had to keep pulling him down behind cover during firefights.
Lieutenants have a lot of theoretical knowledge but not much experience, so they are paired with a platoon sergeant who has probably been in the Army for years. Second Platoon’s sergeant was a career soldier named Mark Patterson who, at age thirty, had twelve years on the youngest man in the unit. The men called him Pops. Patterson was both the platoon enforcer and the platoon representative, and his role allowed him to keep an eye not only on the grunts but on the lieutenants as well. His face got bright red when he was angry or when he was working very hard, and he could outwalk