INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ASSISTANCE FORCE (ISAF)

AFGHANISTAN
May–October 2009

 

Bagram Airfield, Kabul

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Commander, ISAF
Gen. David McKiernan, Commander, ISAF

FOB Fenty, Jalalabad Airfield, Nangarhar Province

Col. Randy George, Commander, 4th Brigade Combat Team

FOB Bostick, Kunar Province

Lt. Col. Robert Brown, Squadron Commander, 3-61 Cavalry

COP Keating, Nuristan Province

Cpt. Melvin Porter, Commander (outgoing), Black Knight Troop
Cpt. Stoney Portis, Commander (incoming), Black Knight Troop
Lt. Robert Hull, Executive Officer, Black Knight Troop

INTRODUCTION

It Doesn’t Get Better

5:45 a.m., Red Platoon barracks
Combat Outpost Keating
Nuristan Province, Afghanistan

ZACH KOPPES LAY in his bunk, half-awake with an ear tuned to the radio in the next hooch, a few feet down the hallway. In the predawn darkness, he was anticipating “the call,” the deeply unwelcome summons that usually arrived just a few minutes before he was slated to pull early-morning guard duty.

Sure enough, like clockwork, there it was:

“Hey, uh … could somebody tell my relief to get on out here?” came the static-charged voice over the combat network. “I really need to take a shit.”

Koppes sighed.

Every morning, it was the same deal. Josh Hardt, one of Red Platoon’s four team leaders—and therefore a man who outranked Koppes by a full grade and nearly five years of service—could never quite make it to the end of his early-morning shift without needing to ease the volcanic surge in his bowels. Hence the request, which was really more of an order, for whoever was relieving him to get up early and hoof it out to the armored Humvee known as LRAS1 on the eastern side of the outpost so that Hardt could make a dash for the latrines, which lay a hundred yards to the west.

Somehow, it seemed to Koppes, it was invariably him and never anyone else who was on the receiving end of that call. But as he reminded himself while he levered out of his bunk and threw on his kit, this day was different for a number of important reasons, one of which was lying right there on the bed beside him.

When he finished with his gear, he reached over and grabbed the newly arrived magazine that he was planning to read from the turret of the Humvee, rolled it up as tightly as possible, and prepared to shove the thing into a place where nobody would spot it.

Needless to say, a dude couldn’t just cruise out to the guard post swinging a magazine in his fist. That was the kind of infraction that would win you a full-on ass-chewing from our first sergeant, Ron Burton, who was a raging stickler when it came to even the smallest rules. But Koppes had a little hidey-hole, which he called his “go-to zone,” in his body armor, the ceramic plates we wore to protect our necks and torsos.

We hated those plates for their weight and for how hot they were, even though they had a couple of advantages—the chief one being their ability to prevent an AK-47 bullet from turning the contents of your chest into wet dog food. But in addition to that, right there in the front of the armor was a small pocket of dead space into which, Koppes had discovered, you could stuff a magazine to see you through to the end of your guard-duty shift.

This system had worked well enough that during our five months in-country, Koppes had taken to semiregularly bringing old Playboys with him when he went out to the Humvee. His buddy Chris Jones had a respectable stash that his older brother had been sending him in care packages. They featured women like Carmen Electra and Bo Derek and Madonna, which Jones and some of the other lowerranking enlisted guys, after much discussion, had agreed offered up some compelling evidence that centerfold chicks from the unimaginably distant era of the 1980s were actually kind of hot.

On the morning of October 3, though, Koppes had something even better than vintage softcore porn riding under his armor. The previous afternoon one of the Chinooks had made a supply drop-off, and by some miracle, we’d actually gotten our mail. Included was an almost-current issue of SportsPro with Peyton Manning on the cover, which offered a comprehensive rundown of the top one hundred NFL players for the 2009 fall season.

True, we were nearly seven thousand miles from the nearest sports bar. And yes, we’d be stuck here long past the end of the play-offs and the Super Bowl. But Koppes knew, like the rest of us did, that when he was finally allowed to go home he might be making that trip inside a metal coffin draped with an American flag. So the prospect of paging through the player stats and the team rankings, and thereby permitting his mind to travel far beyond the black walls of the Hindu Kush, which framed our world and restricted our movements and offered a perfect vantage for our enemies to smoke us—the mere idea of making an imaginary trip like that, no matter how brief—was enough to put him in an exceptionally positive frame of mind. Which is why, as he jammed the magazine inside his vest and trundled out to the Humvee—a journey of no more than fifty steps—Koppes muttered a phrase that we all liked to invoke in such moments. A mantra whose succinctness and sagacity summed up the many double-bladed paradoxes that dominated the thoughts of every American soldier who found himself stuck inside the most remote, precarious, and tactically screwed combat outpost in all of Afghanistan.

It doesn’t get better.

UP IN THE rafters of our platoon’s plywood barracks just three cubicles down from Koppes’s bunk, there was a plank on which one of the previous tenants, a soldier who was part of the unit that had been deployed here before we arrived, had scrawled a little message to himself, a reminder about how life worked in Afghanistan.

Me and the rest of the guys in Red liked what was written on that board so much that by the end of our first week on station, we had adopted the thing as our informal motto. It epitomized precisely how we felt about having been shoved up the wrong end of a country so absurdly remote, so rabidly inhospitable to our presence, that some of the generals and politicians who were responsible for having stuck us there were referring to the place as the dark side of the moon.

Those words were so cogent that whenever something went off the rails—whenever we learned, say, that we were heading into yet another week without any hot chow because the generator had taken another RPG hit, or that last month’s stateside mail still hadn’t been delivered because the Chinook pilots were refusing to risk the enemy’s guns for anything but the most critical supplies—whenever news arrived of the latest thing to go wrong, we’d give one another a little half-joking smile, cock an eyebrow, and repeat:

“It doesn’t get better.”

To us, that phrase nailed one of the essential truths, maybe even the essential truth, about being stuck at an outpost whose strategic and tactical vulnerabilities were so glaringly obvious to every soldier who had ever set foot in that place that the name itself—Keating—had become a kind of backhanded joke. A byword for the army’s peculiar flair for stacking the odds against itself in a way that was almost guaranteed to blow up in some spectacular fashion, and then refusing to walk away from the table.

We took Keating’s flaws in stride, of course, because as soldiers we had no business asking questions so far above our pay grade—much less harboring opinions about the bigger picture: why we were there, and what we were supposed to be accomplishing. Our main job had a stark and binary simplicity to it: keep one another other alive, and keep the enemy on the other side of the wire. But every now and then, one of my guys would find himself unable to resist the urge to ponder the larger mission and to ask what in God’s name the point was of holding down a firebase that so flagrantly violated the most basic and timeless principles of warfare.

Typically enough, the sharpest and most defiant response to those queries would come from Josh Kirk, one of the other sergeants and probably the biggest badass in the entire platoon. Kirk had grown up on a remote homestead in rural Idaho not far from Ruby Ridge, and he never backed down from any kind of confrontation, no matter how big or how small it might be.

“You wanna know why we’re here?” he’d asked us one evening as he was peeling back the plastic wrapping on his chow ration—a veggie omelet MRE, which was everyone’s least favorite item on the menu, because it looked like a brick fashioned from compressed vomit.

“Our mission at Keating,” he declared, “is to turn these MREs into shit.”

The real beauty of It doesn’t get better, however, was that it had a two-sided quality that enabled it to work like a coin. On its face, the phrase not only expressed but somehow managed to celebrate what Kirk was getting at, which was that Keating’s awfulness was both magnified and underscored by its pointlessness and futility—and that to a man who was prepared to adopt the necessary frame of mind, being stuck in such a place could instill a perverse but ferocious kind of pride.

On the other hand, if you took that phrase and flipped it around in your mind, you’d see that it could mean something completely different, and that this new meaning hinged on the fierce sense of purpose that young men sometimes embrace—especially young men who are permitted to carry extremely heavy weaponry—when they find themselves drop-kicked into a situation that is totally and incurably fucked up.

The main reason why life wouldn’t get any better at Keating, of course, was that it was so irremediably impossible to begin with. But in one of those odd little twists—the kind of irony that only a group of guys who pull time in a frontline infantry unit can truly appreciate—we were convinced that we would all look back on our tour there, assuming we managed to survive the damn thing, as one of the most memorable times of our lives.

It stood as a point of considerable irritation among my guys that in Red Platoon, First Sergeant Burton, the highest-ranking enlisted man in our troop at Keating, wasn’t willing to try to wrap his head around any of this. Burton, who was a big admirer of formal military protocols that tend to work in a stateside garrison but make absolutely no sense in a free-fire zone, decided that our little slogan was an expression of “poor morale.” So whenever he heard one of us repeating those words, he’d make a point of going up to that guy and telling him to shut the hell up.

What Burton never understood, however, was that it was categorically impossible to lay down a decree like that in a place like Keating. By the end of our first week on station, the outpost had already implanted It doesn’t get better deep within us, down in the dark, fertile layers of the mind where words take root and then sprout into conviction and belief. Weeding it out of us would have been like trying to weed the Taliban from the slopes and ridgelines that ringed every side of the outpost. And that would have been like trying to yank up every thornbush and poisonous little flower that had anchored itself to the flanks of the Hindu Kush.

As far as we were concerned, Keating not only wouldn’t get better, it couldn’t get better, because we were already doing our damnedest to make it, by sheer force of will, into the best thing going.

That was something we all grooved on, and a good example of how it worked was exactly what Koppes was doing as he strolled out to the gun truck with his magazine to relieve Hardt.

THE ARMORED HUMVEE where Koppes was headed was one of five such vehicles positioned along the perimeter of the outpost that served as part of our primary defense. It featured a steel turret mounted directly above the cab that was armed with a Mark 19, which is basically a machine gun that shoots 40-mm grenades instead of bullets. When fully engaged, the gun is capable of pumping out almost three hundred rounds per minute, an astonishing level of firepower. In less than three minutes, a Mark 19 is supposed to be capable of reducing a two-story building to a pile of rubble.

Koppes had never actually witnessed such a thing with his own eyes. But that little factoid afforded a certain measure comfort each time he clambered into the Humvee and was forced to ponder the truck’s many glaring vulnerabilities, starting with the fact that when he hunkered down behind the Mark 19, his legs, arms, and torso were shielded, but his head and shoulders were totally exposed. Equally disconcerting, the turret rotated along an arc of only 110 degrees, which made it impossible for him to return fire at anyone who was trying to shoot him in the back.

Like almost everything else at Keating, this was decidedly not ideal, which was why we’d been planning to replace the gun truck with a properly reinforced guard tower. But those plans had recently been put on hold when we’d been told to prepare to dismantle the outpost, pack it up, and get the hell out of this part of Nuristan. That operation was actually scheduled to start within seventy-two hours, although most of the lower enlisted guys at Koppes’s level hadn’t been told about this yet.

By the time Koppes reached the side of the truck, Hardt had already climbed down from the turret with the aim of getting over to the latrines as quickly as possible. He paused just long enough to update Koppes on the latest intel.

According to the small network of Afghan informants who were supposed to keep Keating’s officers abreast of any developments in the surrounding area, a group of Taliban had been mustering in the village of Urmul, a tiny hamlet that lay less than a hundred yards to the west of the outpost on the far side of the Darreh-ye Kushtāz River.

This hardly qualified as news. Since our arrival four months earlier, it seemed as if we’d received a warning along these lines every three or four days. Each time, the pattern was the same. The report would state that fifty or seventy-five enemy fighters were massing for a major attack. But when the attack finally arrived, it would turn out to involve four or five insurgents—or even more frequently, just one or two gunmen. Eventually, we’d started taking these warnings with a grain of salt.

Which is not to say that we didn’t expect to get nailed. Throughout the summer and into the fall, we’d been getting hit, on average, at least four times a week. But for the men on guard duty, word of a massive impending assault was no longer capable of setting off alarm bells. And so when Hardt passed along the report, Koppes simply nodded and settled himself into the turret while concentrating on more immediate matters.

For a soldier of Koppes’s rank and stature, the pleasures afforded by life at Keating were few and far between, so it was vital to savor any diversion, regardless of how small it might be. The new issue of SportsPro certainly qualified as one of those. Indeed, the magazine all by itself would have been more than enough to make Koppes’s entire morning. But there was an added bonus, because today was Saturday, which meant that every one of the fifty American soldiers at Keating was scheduled to get not one but two hot meals, an event whose importance was almost impossible to overstate.

Ever since we first arrived at the outpost, we’d been receiving about one hot meal a week, and surviving for the rest of the time on MREs, liberally supplemented by Pop-Tarts and chocolate pudding that was so long past its expiration date it made you wonder if maybe the army wasn’t trying to give the Taliban an assist.

Under these circumstances, two hot meals in the same day was almost beyond Koppes’s ability to imagine, especially considering that breakfast was supposed to be eggs and grits. What’s more, if Thomas, our cook, was in a generous mood, maybe there would be some bacon too. But even that wasn’t the whole story.

The best thing about all of this, in Koppes’s mind, was that if you were on guard duty when Thomas started slinging breakfast at the chow hall, the guy you had just relieved was required to go up there and get your food, then bring it out to the truck and actually serve the stuff to you.

To Koppes—whose name, fittingly, was pronounced just like the word “copacetic”—the confluence of these events was like the greatest thing on earth. He not only had his top-100-football-players magazine, but a hot breakfast was about to be hand-delivered as if he’d pulled the Humvee into a Sonic drive-in.

It was true, of course, that this grub would be forked over by a guy who had just taken his morning dump. But did that matter? To a man like Koppes—a man who, thanks in part to the motto we all had adopted, was able to embrace the brighter side of pretty much anything, no matter how shitty it might be—the answer was an emphatic no, this did not matter one bit.

You know what, Hardt? he told himself as he got behind the Mark 19 and his sergeant dashed off toward the latrines. You head on up to the shitter and do your thing.

Everything here is absolutely cool.

AS KOPPES WAS settling into position on the guard truck, another soldier, a private by the name of Stephan Mace, was counting down the final minutes of his own four-hour guard shift in one of our other gun trucks, which was positioned on the opposite end of camp, about 120 yards to the west. Known as LRAS2, that Humvee was the most remote and exposed guard position on the entire outpost. It sat just forty yards from the Darreh-ye Kushtāz River and faced directly toward the cluster of some three dozen mud-walled buildings that comprised the village of Urmul.

Mace, who was Koppes’s best friend, was waiting to be relieved by a sergeant named Brad Larson, who happened to be my best friend. And just like Koppes and Hardt, Mace and Larson had a little ritual that they enacted on most mornings when they were trading off guard duty.

Although Mace was one of the lowest-ranking soldiers at Keating, he was also one of the most entertaining characters inside the wire. Armed with razor-sharp wits and a wickedly inappropriate sense of humor, he generated a continuous stream of off-the-cuff jokes and smarta-leck remarks that could always take your mind off the surrounding miseries, even if it was just for a second or two. In short, Mace was the kind of guy who everybody enjoyed having around, and a measure of that enjoyment was that even Larson—a laconic and self-contained Nebraskan who rarely had more than two words to share with anyone, including me—would voluntarily get up a few minutes early and trundle out to the guard position just so that he could sit in the front seat of the Humvee and listen to Mace’s bullshit.

What those two guys talked about spanned a wide spectrum. It could run the gamut, from heated debates about which animal you’d most want to shoot during a big-game hunting safari in Africa to minutely detailed descriptions of hot teachers they’d had back in grade school. But the substance of their conversations probably mattered less than the fact that they liked each other’s company enough that sometimes they’d simply sit in the cab of the gun truck, staring out the windshield in silence while Mace pulled on one of his Marlboro Lights and Larson took a dip from his can of chewing tobacco.

On this particular morning, however, they’d skipped over their usual routine because Larson had some business to take care of first. Instead of climbing directly into the Humvee, he strode past the driver’s door toward the front of the truck, set his helmet and his gun on the hood, then spread his legs, unzipped his fly, and stood there, bareheaded and facing west, taking a long and much-needed wake-up piss.

Technically speaking, Larson should have taken care of this back at the piss tubes, the row of four-inch-diameter pipes made of PVC that were sunk more than three feet into the ground just outside our shower trailer. The path out to the gun truck had taken him right by them, and normally he would have stopped there. But the tubes reeked worse than almost anything else in camp, and for whatever reason he’d decided that the odor of stale urine wasn’t something he was keen to inhale just then.

Meanwhile, when Mace saw what Larson was up to, he climbed down from the gun truck and headed east across the outpost toward the barracks building, where the rest of our platoon was still fast asleep in our bunks.

It was 5:50 a.m. and dawn had just broken as Larson went about his business while staring up at the scene before him. The first rays of the morning sun were painting the mud walls of Urmul with a golden pinkish light, and his gaze was pulled toward the tallest structure in the village, which was its mosque.

Unlike the masjids that graced the larger and more prosperous towns and cities of Afghanistan, Urmul’s mosque boasted neither a delicately tapered spire nor an onion-shaped dome. It was a square-sided tower, coarse and humble, that reflected not only the harshness and the austerity but also the humbleness of this impossibly distant and cut-off corner of Afghanistan.

Closer at hand, Larson could see the river, frothy and bright as it churned beneath the single-span concrete bridge leading out to the small island that doubled as a landing zone for the massive, anvil-shaped Chinooks that served as Keating’s lifeline to the outside world, ferrying in everything from diesel fuel and ammunition to crates of Dr Pepper and plastic bottles filled with drinking water.

On the far side of that river, a dense green wall of vegetation concealed the monkeys, the birds, and the other wild creatures that populated the sides of the impossibly narrow valley in which Keating was nestled. And soaring above all of that, Larson could see the features that dominated and defined our lives in that place, which were the mountains.

Their cliffs rose up out of the river valley, straight-sided and steep, and high above those cliffs and far in the distance, he could see the snow-covered peaks that were now glittering with the orange tint of dawn against the backdrop of a sky that had taken on the deep and impenetrable color of cobalt.

In another place, at another time, a view like the one laid out before Larson would have been nothing short of glorious. But here you could never allow a thing like glory to seduce you into forgetting that we were at war and that the men we’d been sent here to fight, the soldiers whose deepest desire was to kill as many of us as possible, lay concealed within that beauty.

LOOKING BACK ON that moment now, I’ve tried to imagine the scene from the perspective of the three hundred Taliban fighters who had moved into position overnight, forced the civilians in the area to leave their homes, set up firing positions in the buildings and across the hillsides along all four cardinal points of the compass, and who were now counting down the final seconds to launching a coordinated attack on us from all sides with RPGs, mortars, machine guns, small arms, and recoilless rifle fire.

The force they’d assembled outnumbered us by six to one, and the onslaught they were about to unleash would qualify as the largest, fiercest, and most sophisticated assault ever seen in the portion of Afghanistan that US high command referred to as Sector East.

As impressive as all of that may sound, however, what is perhaps even more remarkable is the depth of our collective ignorance in that instant.

Brad Larson had no clue, as he stood there with his dingus on display, absentmindedly registering the sound of splashing in the dirt just beyond the toes of his boots, that his head was framed in the crosshairs of at least ten snipers, each armed with a Russian Dragunov rifle and intent on putting a 7.62 cartridge through the front of his face.

Zach Koppes had no idea that there would be no delivery of a hot breakfast, that his magazine would never be opened, and that within seconds he would be cut off inside his Humvee and squaring up against dozens of insurgents while more than three dozen Afghan Army soldiers who were supposed to be our allies and partners abandoned their positions and fled, allowing Keating’s eastern defensive perimeter to completely collapse.

Josh Hardt didn’t have the faintest notion that within the hour, those insurgents would breach our wire, seize our ammunition depot, set fire to most of our buildings, and eventually be pointing an RPG at him with the aim of blowing his brains through the back of his head.

As for me, as those final seconds ticked down before the Taliban’s hellfire was unleashed, I was racked out in my bunk, fast asleep and oblivious to the fact that within thirty minutes everyone inside our besieged outpost who was still alive would be falling back into what would later be called “the Alamo position” and preparing to make a final stand in the only two buildings that weren’t on fire, while ten of our comrades were stranded outside the line.

Which brings me back to our little motto, the phrase that sustained us:

It doesn’t get better.

There were fifty Americans inside the wire at Keating that morning, including the men who were part of Red Platoon. Partly thanks to those words, we not only understood but also accepted, with total clarity, just how bad things were: how untenable our lines were, how impossible it would be to effectively defend our perimeter, how far we were from the nearest help. But in reality, not a single one of us had the faintest inkling of the sheer fury that was about to rain down on our heads.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS not the story of one man, but of an entire platoon. It is a story that has the hair and the dirt still clinging to it: a saga whose characters, in ways both large and small, are less heroic than one might wish and yet far more human than the citations to the medals that this battle yielded might suggest.

The men of Red Platoon were no pack of choirboys. Nor were we the sort of iron-willed, steely-eyed superheroes who seem to populate so many of the narratives that have emerged during the last decade of war. We were quite unlike the squadron of special forces hard men who had ridden across the plains of northern Afghanistan on horseback to capture the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in the weeks following 9/11. And we had almost nothing in common with the four-man team of American spec-ops assassins whose ordeal in the summer of 2005, just a few miles south of Keating, would later be chronicled in the book and the movie called Lone Survivor.

If we qualified as heroes, then the heroism we displayed that day in the autumn of 2009 was cut from a more ragged grade of cloth—a fabric whose folds conceal the shortcomings and the failings of exceptionally ordinary men who were put to an extraordinary test. Men who were plagued by fears and doubts. Men who had bickered endlessly and indulged in all manner of pettiness. Men who had succumbed to—and in some cases, were still running from—a litany of weaknesses that included depression and addiction, apathy and aimlessness, dishonesty and rage.

If we were a band of brothers bound together by combat, then it’s important to note that our brethren included a private who had once tried to commit suicide by drinking carpet cleaner, a soldier who was caught smoking hashish in a free-fire zone while standing guard duty, and me: a man so keen to go to war that he never even bothered to consult his wife before volunteering to be deployed to Iraq—and then later lied to her, declaring that he’d had no choice in the matter.

But if all of that is true, what is also true is that we were soldiers who loved one another with a fierceness and a purity that has no analog in the civilian world.

To fully understand how that worked, you need to know a bit about how my platoon came together, and the path that drew us to Afghanistan.

PART I

The Road to Nuristan

CHAPTER ONE

Loss

I COME FROM an old Nevada ranching family with military traditions that date back to my grandfather Aury Smith, who took his brother’s place in the draft during the summer of 1943 and eventually wound up getting sent into Normandy as a combat engineer just a couple of days after D-day. Six months later, Aury got himself stuck inside the besieged perimeter of Bastogne with the 101st Airborne Division during the Battle of the Bulge. Somehow he made it through, then finished out his time in Europe helping to put on USO shows as a bareback rodeo rider.

Almost thirty years later, my dad was sent to Vietnam. And although he never said a single word about either of the two tours that he pulled up near the Cambodian border with the 4th Infantry Division, which was known to have taken some horrendous casualties during that time, his silence carried enough weight that all three of his sons enlisted in the military.

My oldest brother, Travis, enlisted in the army right after high school, participated in the invasion of Haiti, then later transferred to the air force. Next in line was Preston, who hitched up with the marines. By the time I was a senior in Lake City, California, a town so tiny that our high school graduating class numbered only fifteen, my brothers assumed that I would join up too, despite my father’s hopes that I might break the mold and follow the path he’d laid out by enrolling me in the Mormon seminary I had been attending since ninth grade.

My brothers were right. I joined the army in September of 1999, and was assigned to Black Knight Troop, a mechanized armor unit whose sixty-five men were spread across three platoons: Red, White, and Blue.

In military jargon, Black Knight belonged to the four-thousand-man 4th Brigade Combat Team, which itself was part of the twenty-thousand-man 4th Infantry Division. In laymen’s terms, what that boiled down to was that I was a tiny cog nestled deep inside the world’s largest and most sophisticated war machine. It also meant that I was part of the very same infantry division in which my dad had served.

My first deployment was to Kosovo, where we performed peacekeeping duties and saw very little action. But following the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, I volunteered to go to Iraq. After a fifteen-month detour through Korea, I found myself commanding an M1A1 armored tank in Habbaniyah, an area about fifty miles west of Baghdad that sits directly between Ramadi and Fallujah. There we spent the better part of 2004 battling hard-core Al Qaeda fighters who specialized in improvised explosives. We took an average of roughly one IED strike per day.

At the end of that first Iraq deployment, we were sent back to Colorado and the entire unit was reclassified from heavy armor to light reconnaissance so that we could start preparing for the type of fighting we’d eventually be facing in Afghanistan. As part of that transition, I was shipped off to school to learn how to be a cavalry scout. Eleven months later, in June of 2006, we were back in Iraq, this time in a place called Salman Pak, about twenty miles south of Baghdad along a broad bend of the Tigris River and not far from a notorious military installation rumored to serve as a keystone of Saddam Hussein’s biological and chemical weapons program. It was also a hotbed of extremist militia, and they did their best to make our lives as miserable as possible.

This was where my new training really began to kick in.

A cavalry scout is generally thought to function as the eyes and ears of a commander during battle. But in fact, a scout’s role extends quite a bit further. We refer to ourselves as “jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none,” and we are trained to have a working familiarity with—quite literally—every job in the army. We are experts in reconnaissance, countersurveillance, and navigation, but we’re also extremely comfortable with all aspects of radio and satellite communications. We know how to assemble and deploy three-man hunter/killer teams. We’re pretty good at blowing things up using mines and high explosives. We can function as medics, vehicle mechanics, and combat engineers. And we have a thorough understanding of every single weapons system, from a 9-mm handgun to a 120-mm howitzer.

Many soldiers find it challenging to master such an eclectic skill set. So it was odd that it all came so easily to me. Prior to the military, I found school to be quite difficult, especially when it came to abstract ideas. But these new disciplines came to me so instinctively that it was almost disturbing. Regardless of whether it was small-unit tactics or maneuvering an entire company’s worth of armor, the logic seemed inherently obvious. What’s more, I loved every aspect of being a scout—although I had a particular knack for something called “react-to-contact” drills, which involved coming up with a combat plan on the spur of the moment as the shit was hitting the fan.

There were two things, however, that didn’t come easily at all.

The first had to do with the position in which we found ourselves in Iraq, where we were consigned to a reactive role, and where we found ourselves bound by strict rules of engagement, or ROEs, that prevented us from shooting first—which meant that we were usually able to return fire only when attacked.

I found this intolerable not only from a tactical standpoint but also at a psychological level. And to compensate, I developed an unorthodox style of leadership that hinged on provoking a reaction from the enemy. When I was leading an armored convoy, for example, I would often order my tank driver to abruptly switch lanes, taking the entire column down a city street directly against the flow of traffic, forcing oncoming vehicles to get out of the way or risk head-on collision. At the extreme end of things, I would even use myself as a decoy. To ferret out snipers, for example, I would climb onto the sponson box, a big rectangular storage compartment on the turret of our lead tank, pretend it was a surfboard, and balance myself out there as we clattered through the streets of Habbaniyah, daring any Iraqi marksmen to take a shot at me and expose their positions.

Often these tactics worked well, although they never fully relieved my frustration with the rules of engagement. But as impossible as I found the ROEs, this challenge was dwarfed by a second problem, one that arose as an inevitable consequence of serving in a leadership position in a war zone.

What I found harder than anything else, by far, was witnessing one of my guys get killed. The first time this happened to me was just outside of Sadr City, and it involved one of the finest soldiers I’ve ever known.

THE SUMMER AND fall of 2007 was a bad time for all three frontline platoons in Black Knight Troop. By this point we were several months into a new strategy in which the administration of George W. Bush attempted to stabilize Iraq by sending in five additional brigades while extending the tour of almost every soldier who was already on deployment. While the surge did lead to a drop in overall violence, for reasons that remained mysterious (and which may simply have resulted from bad luck), our troop started getting hit harder and more often. In September, one of White Platoon’s team leaders got shot in the back, and although he survived, the bullet severed his spine and paralyzed him from the chest down. Not long after that, White lost two other men to a roadside bomb. And then, in September, Snell got hit.

Eric Snell was a thirty-four-year-old scout when I first met him in Iraq, but even as a newly enlisted private he’d managed to stand out as something extraordinary. He had been drafted as an outfielder for the Cleveland Indians straight out of high school in Trenton, New Jersey, but he had decided to forgo a career in the major leagues and instead focus on academics. He got a degree in political science, then moved to South Africa to work as a project manager for AT&T. He could speak French and he’d lived in Italy. He was also good-looking enough that he’d been recruited as a male model, appearing in magazines like Mademoiselle, Modern Bride, and Vibe.

Snell had the entire package, and he brought all of it to the task of being the type of soldier that did everything perfectly. You never had to give him an order or an instruction twice. He learned fast and he learned well. He showed initiative and he demonstrated leadership. In fact, that only thing that seemed even remotely off about the guy was the confusion he provoked among the rest of us over why he had signed on as an ordinary soldier in the first place.

“For Chrissake, Snell, you got all this education and all these credentials,” we’d say to him. “Why the fuck did you come into the army as enlisted?”

“Well, yeah, I’m gonna go and be an officer one day,” was his response. “But first I want to know what it’s like to be a soldier.”

That impressed us too.

He was promoted to sergeant two years after he enlisted, far ahead of his peers. Just over two weeks later, on September 18, 2007, me and him and two other guys were ordered to perform overwatch just outside of Sadr City on a group of Iraqi soldiers who were setting up concrete barriers to block suicide bombers. White Platoon had been on duty for most of that morning and our captain had ordered Red to relieve them—an idea that me and my platoon sergeant deemed unwise, because if there were any snipers in the area, they now knew our pattern of movement.

Our objections were overruled, so me and Snell started setting up our perimeter security. I was leaning inside the Humvee, coordinating on the radio with another platoon on the other side of the battle space, and Snell was standing right beside me in back of the vehicle with just his head exposed, when a sniper from across the way got him. The bullet came in just beneath the lip of his helmet, went through his right eye, and blew out the back of his head. As soon as I looked down and saw him lying on the ground, I knew he was dead.

It was the first time I’d seen one of my own guys get killed.

Up to that point, I’d been convinced that there was some sort of connection between how good you were and what happened to you in the theater of battle. But after watching Snell get assassinated like that, I realized that one of the fundamental truths about war is that horrible things can—and often will—happen to anybody, even to a soldier who has everything dialed to perfection.

In the days that followed, I found myself wrestling with the implications of this. While you could strive to be your best, and while you could demand that everyone under you adhered to those standards, the reality was that in the end, none of this might make a rat’s ass of difference—even for an ace like Snell.

When you lose a man like that, it can fuel a sense of resignation that can be totally debilitating. If there is no causal link between merit and destiny—if everything on the battlefield boils down to nothing more than a lottery—what’s the point of bothering to hone your skills or cultivate excellence?

The loss can create a practical problem too. When a soldier as good as Snell gets drilled through the brain, even if you want to try to replace him, how could you ever find someone to fill his shoes?

As it turned out, however, the rotten luck of losing Snell wound up having a silver lining to it because it triggered the arrival of a soldier who was destined to become my right-hand man in Afghanistan. A man who would provide the foundation of what Red Platoon was to become, and what it would later accomplish during its trial by fire in Afghanistan.

ABOUT A MONTH after Snell died, a batch of new replacements arrived in Iraq from Fort Carson, just outside of Colorado Springs, to fill the ranks of our dead.

Whenever a surge of soldiers arrived, the sergeants from all three platoons would size up the new guys and then haggle over how to divvy them up. These assessment-and-bargaining sessions were often intense because the outcome would have a big impact on the quality of each platoon. And the criteria on which everything hinged basically boiled down to our greatest pastime: platoon-on-platoon football.

Ray Didinger, a sportswriter who covered the NFL for more than twenty-five years, once said that football is the “truest” team game because nothing happens if all the players aren’t performing their roles to perfection. “Everyone has to contribute on every single play,” he argued. “You could have the guys up front all do everything exactly the way they’re supposed to; but if one guy breaks down—if he doesn’t get the play right or goes in the wrong direction—then the whole play falls apart.”

That’s not a bad summary of small-unit military tactics either—especially when you consider that football is all about assaulting another team’s territory, then holding that ground against a series of counterassaults. Plus, and this is Didinger again, “football is also a violent game and the guys who play it have to accept that fact.” Maybe that’s why we bonded so deeply with the game—especially in Red Platoon, where we took it with such hyperseriousness that we literally went for years without losing a single platoon-on-platoon matchup.

Brad Larson was a recruit from Chambers, Nebraska, a town whose population (288) was almost as tiny as the miniscule spot where I’d come from. He had jug-handle ears that kicked out from the sides of his head, cartoonishly thick eyebrows, and almost nothing to suggest that he possessed the sort of athletic prowess we were looking for in Red Platoon. So when we wound up getting stuck with him, I initially made a point of ignoring the guy and saying as little to him as possible, despite the fact that he was serving as the driver of my Humvee. Aside from “go left” and “turn right,” I don’t think I directed a single word to him for more than two weeks.

As it turned out, Larson had played free safety at the junior college he’d attended in Nebraska before joining the army. But as we discovered after finally condescending to allow him on the field during one of our platoon-on-platoon games, he could play just about anywhere because he was so astonishingly fast. Even more impressive was his uncanny sense of vision. Whenever the quarterback drew back his arm to throw, Larson knew exactly where the ball was heading. Except for one guy who had a weird sidearm throw that was almost impossible to read, Larson could figure out where the ball was headed just by looking at the quarterback’s eyes and the angle of his forearm. And then, thanks to his ferocious speed, he was able to make a beeline for that spot and destroy whoever was the target.

That made me sit up and take notice of him. It also served as the basis of the relationship that swiftly developed between us, because it didn’t take long for me to realize that when we were practicing combat maneuvers, Larson was taking the skills he exhibited on the football field and applying them to me.

He was also unbelievably quick to adapt—so quick that I almost never had to sit down and explain anything to him. Instead, he would simply look at me as I was doing something and, just by the fact that he was concentrating so hard and that he was so fricking on it, he would absorb the lesson.

As soon as I realized what was up, I started integrating him into the role that Snell had previously filled as my team leader. Like Snell, Larson did everything with ferocious precision and attention to detail. But what I valued even more was the way we connected.

Within a few months, the two of us had built the kind of rapport where if we were out doing a platoon exercise—assaulting an objective, say, or trying to find a weapons cache—I would give my team the commander’s brief, sketch out the mission, and announce, “Larson, you’re on point.” Then we’d start walking on patrol: Larson in front, me in the rear, with two or three guys between us.

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