War

Back home mundane details also have the power to destroy you, but the cause and effect are often spread so far apart that you don’t even make the connection; at Restrepo, that connection was impossible to ignore. It was tedious but it gave the stuff of one’s existence — the shoelaces and the water and the lost shirt — a riveting importance. Frankly, after you got used to living that way it was hard to go home.

When men say they miss combat, it’s not that they actually miss getting shot at — you’d have to be deranged — it’s that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted. They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life.

The fact that networks of highly mobile amateurs can confound — even defeat — a professional army is the only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the course of history. Whether that is a good thing or not depends on what amateurs you’re talking about — or what empires — but it does mean that you can’t predict the outcome of a war simply by looking at the numbers.

“Because I actually love my brothers,” he said. “I mean, it’s a brotherhood. Being able to save their life so they can live, I think is rewarding. Any of them would do it for me.”

No community can protect itself unless a certain portion of its youth decide they are willing to risk their lives in its defense. That sentiment can be horribly manipulated by leaders and politicians, of course, but the underlying sentiment remains the same.

These hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not most alive — that you can get skydiving — but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can’t.

It’s such a pure, clean standard that men can completely remake themselves in war. You could be anything back home — shy, ugly, rich, poor, unpopular — and it won’t matter because it’s of no consequence in a firefight, and therefore of no consequence, period. The only thing that matters is your level of dedication to the rest of the group, and that is almost impossible to fake.

I asked him how he was ever going to go back to civilian life. He shook his head. “I have no idea.”

As a civilian among soldiers I was aware that a failure of nerve by me could put other men at risk, and that idea was almost as mortifying as the very real dangers up there. The problem with fear, though, is that it isn’t any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy — anxiety, dread, panic, foreboding — and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another.