The Hill

I think I mentioned this base in a previous post, how it is situated at the foot of a mountain, and commands an impressive view of the valley below. When I was here last time, I took all of my smoke breaks on the roof of the administration building. During the day, you can see for miles into the valley, and at night you can watch the stars without being bothered by the flood lights or the generators on the ground. I’m not the only one that took a shine to the rooftop, the MK-19 and .50 cal gunners were also up there 24 hours a day with their sights on the road coming up from the valley, and on the saddles formed by the mountain and the small hills at its feet.

I have returned here with two Air Force guys, Jacobson and Triplett. Jacobson and I have come to train this unit and help them install a new radio system, while Triplett is here as mobile morale for the Air Force. His job is to travel around to Army FOBs and camps where airmen are stationed and just hang out. He talks with them, plays cards with them, smokes cigars with them and generally rolls all over theater being a nice guy. It’s a strange gig, but he loves it and he’s good at it.

We arrived here before lunch, in time to chat with a party that was forming to scale the mountain and resupply the Observation Post at the top. The mountain is like a long ridge, like an A-frame house, with the OP located at the end of the ridge line. From there, you can imagine that it can see all sides of the valley and into most of the battalion’s area of operation. The scouts are camped at the top, and they use scopes, binoculars and night vision to watch the villages and report suspicious activity. The OP is also a convenient place for a retrans station, giving radio coverage to the whole valley, and linking up elements on either side of the ridge. We were invited to join them on the climb.

Now, I have never attempted anything like this before in my life. Ask anyone, I’m a lazy hiker and as a youth I made a splash as a terrible Boy Scout. Truly, a terrible Boy Scout. I was in Troop 97—The Eagle’s Nest—for two years and didn’t advance once, I didn’t even make Tenderfoot (the lowest possible rank, for the uninitiated). I think there was some talk of making up an award for being such an accomplished slacker. Not even being a Tenderfoot, I think I was referred to as just a Scout. In the army they would have just called me a Shitbag.

On top of my lazy-outdoorsman nature, I’m also out of shape and afraid of heights. So when they generously offered me the opportunity to climb a mountain with them, I didn’t hesitate for a second. The essence of this trip has been getting out of my comfort zone, far from home and all things familiar, what better escape than to the top of a mountain? I had to take them up on it.

There were 6 of us going up—three Army, two Air Force and one hesitant civilian. We met in front of the COMMO shop for a short briefing in which we were assigned an order (I was safely wedged in the middle, between the Air Force guys, Army guys taking point and bringing up the rear) and they dispensed a few tips. I clung to the following ones:

a) Keep three points of contact at all times.
b) take small steps.

With that, we set off to the edge of the compound where there is a narrow break in the concertina wire. Everyone with a weapon loaded it and chambered a round before stepping over the line going officially, figuratively and literally outside of the wire.

The first part really was the hardest. It was a long slog up a rocky hillside which is covered in the barely-marked graves of the locals. I noticed it the last time I was on this FOB, little piles of rocks clustered together on the hill, all of them with makeshift headstones. I wondered if the families in the area know which graves belong to them and which are their neighbors’. Without markings, it has to be hard to tell.

My heart was beating out of my chest when we reached the top of the hill, my breathing heavy and loud. I was a little embarrassed about the heaving, labored breaths, so I called ahead to Jacobson “don’t mind the heavy breathing,” hoping to stave off embarrassment, to own my poor fitness. When I talked to him about that comment the next day, he thought I had heard him huffing and puffing and was trash-talking. Funny.

We took a moment for all of us to catch our breath before we walked up the little saddle to the actual mountain and started to work our way carefully up the steadily increasing grade. Every leg of our path was covered with loose rocks and gravel, which continued to shift and confound with each step up. Two of the Army guys were carrying ruck sacks filled with 60-80 pounds of gear for the team on the mountain, and they were starting to bend under the strain.

We took breaks every 20 or 30 minutes on the way up, all of them marked by our pictures. I would sit down on the rock, sling my camera out from under my arm and take a few shots of everyone else, the view, or the compound which shrank smaller and smaller with each step up. Jacobson and Triplett made repeated offers to take the rucks off the shoulders of the soldiers, and at last both soldiers relented and traded off, the two Airmen taking the load the other half of the way up. My own meager effort was to carry part of a whip antenna which had become too cumbersome to strap to anyone, so it just left me with only one free hand.

Continuing up the mountainside, we crept up narrow draws, pulled ourselves and each other over short, sheer cliff faces, always moving up along the side of the mountain until at long last we reached the top. We radioed ahead to the OP for them to come meet us and walk us around any booby traps on the approach to their camp. While they moved our way, we all took a seat and gazed out over the valley, spread as full and as far as I will ever see it.

The scouts escorted us the rest of the way, pointing out a near-invisible trip wire in the process. When we reached the OP, we happily dropped our loads and shed our IBA. It felt great to get out of that armor and let the sun dry some of the sweat off me. The actual camp consists of some small, two-man sandbag caves, with ponchos stretched across the top of them to block out the sun and the rain. And in between tiny hooches, stacks of supplies: water, diesel and MREs. The diesel seemed odd because I didn’t see or hear a generator, but we eventually walked over to the edge and carefully lowered ourselves to a narrow cliff where it was tucked away, humming along out of site. They told me they had paid two locals to bring it up for them, and these two had run it up like billy goats while the soldiers lagged behind, tired and out of breath.

The peak offers unobstructed views in every direction, not a horse cart or bicycle moves around in the little villages that dot the foot of the mountain without the scouts observing and reporting it. Their scopes are all set up at the point of the mountain, looking down into the farmland and the streets below. I was advising on the radio install when I noticed a crowd forming over by them. I walked over to find the scouts on the radio, reporting suspicious activity in one of the villages. They had spotted 4 or 5 “fighting age men” with a donkey cart, working underneath a footbridge. I looked through the scope myself and saw them, almost 1000 yards away. Several of them were taking sacks of material from under a bridge and putting them on a cart, while one of them appeared to be stringing wire around.

Because the men were partially obscured by a tree, the scouts called in some Kiowa observation/attack helicopters to get a closer look. The cameras in their ISR pods can capture clear images from much further away than the scouts’ binoculars and scopes, so they flew into the area, orbiting well away from the targets so as not to make their intent clear and to spook their quarry.

More information started to roll in with different angles meshing together to form an idea. It looked like they were planting an IED under the bridge. The guy in charge of the scouts called out, “get the 50,” and a scout jumped up and crawled into his little makeshift hooch, emerging moments later with a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle. I’ve seen these things on TV, but never in person, and never with malicious intent. It is a HUGE gun, the most accurate and deadly in the world. The rounds are 6 inches long and will destroy anything they hit. They can fire right through the armor of Russian T-72 tanks, through a quarter-inch steel plate at over 1000 yards, and one of them was about to be brought to bear on these 5 guys in the wadi far below us.



Between the possibility of these scouts exploding these men one at a time right in front of me, or the Kiowas returning to rain down hellfire from the sky, my heart was racing. Tensions were rising in everybody.

One of the books I’ve been reading lately is On Killing by Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman, a psychologist and retired Army Ranger. In it he presents a comprehensive study of the difficulty soldiers have historically demonstrated in killing their fellow men, and how modern training techniques have helped to desensitize soldiers to the shock of taking a human life. One of the factors that mitigate emotional and psychological damage of killing a person is distance, which he defines as either physical or mechanical distance. Physical distance is just that, distance from the target (victim), while mechanical distance means a separation between killer and victim by some mechanical means: artillery fired at an unseen enemy, the point-and-click of modern armed UAVs, or the cool soundless picture presented by a sniper’s scope. And here we are, sitting comfortably in a long-range kill situation. We’re looking at men through a scope who have no idea we are watching them, or that their lives are hanging on by the most tenuous of threads. The first guy would never hear the one that hit him, he would just cease to be.

I must confess: I wanted them to pull the trigger. I wanted to hear the crash echo off the rocks, and watch the chaos below as the remaining men scrambled for cover. I wanted the Kiowas to roar in and strafe them with rockets, to see shrapnel and smoke plumes. I think we all did. Waiting expectantly on the ridge, we were listening to the radio chatter all with our fingers crossed for the OK.

But it never came. The scouts called the Kiowas in close to harass and scare them out of whatever they were doing. The group broke up, a motorcycle going this way, a donkey cart going that way. The choppers stayed with the donkey cart as they rushed (as much as you can with a donkey) through the streets of the village and came to a stop at the end of an alley where he attempted to blend in and act normally. We watched as he struck up a conversation with someone on the street, trying to ignore the gunships swooping and diving above him

I can only assume they marked the footbridge for further inspection and continued to observe, because right about that time we had to begin our descent. The sun was going down and we only had an hour of daylight left us. On the way down we took fewer and less frequent breaks. We talked about the fate of the “fighting age men,” what their intent might have been, how cool it would have been to see an actual engagement. We ended up reaching the FOB just as the sun was setting, our legs shaking and our knees ready to collapse.

We took off our armor again and got some hot chow from the kitchen tent, finished up our day and went to sleep.

Even now, a day later, I’m still thinking of those guys and the foot bridge. Maybe they weren’t doing anything wrong. Maybe they were storing seed down there, or drugs, or fertilizer. Or maybe they were constructing a bomb, hoping to take out American and ANA forces. Whatever they were doing, they were an inch away from a gruesome death. And I would have been at least emotionally complicit in that act. The power of that moment was thrilling and frightening. I wanted the scouts to engage them, to punch gigantic .50 caliber holes into them from the mountaintop, or to see the Kiowas circle back around and blow them to Kingdom Come.

I’ve looked back at what I was thinking at the time, looking for signs of fear or hesitation, but there really was just a bloodlust not unlike what I feel watching violent movies or playing videogames. I wish there were fear, or compassion, but it’s not there. I wish for a lot of intangible things…

Surely I would feel differently if it were my finger on the trigger. Surely.

I hope I never have to find out.