WAR by Junger Sebastian

Author:Junger, Sebastian [Junger, Sebastian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: BIO008000
Publisher: Twelve
Published: 2010-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

We drive into the KOP late that afternoon, our destroyed Humvee chained to the one ahead of us and getting dragged through the mud like some kind of stubborn farm animal. The place has changed since I was last here, the men are cleaner and less wild-eyed and don’t have to wear body armor all the time. It’s strange to see them walking around as if this were just any old place in the world and the hills weren’t crawling with enemy fighters who wanted them all to die. There’s a new brick-and-mortar for the command center and there are shower curtains on the shitter doors and there are seven or eight new laptops with a high-speed satellite Internet connection. I’m told to sleep in one of the new buildings, so I carry my gear up and drop it on an empty cot. There’s only one other man in the room, a Third Platoon soldier named Loza who’s been in Italy for three months recovering from a shoulder wound. He sits quietly on a cot listening to music on his laptop and rigging out his gear. He ties his night vision scope to his helmet with green “550 cord” and attaches a nylon sling to his rifle and tries on his new boots and then puts them, heels together, against the cement wall.

Loza was shot up at Restrepo on the second day and his return to the KOP was mildly controversial because he still can’t lift his arm higher than his shoulder. He wanted to come back to be with his friends and someone behind a desk basically did him a favor. He pulls an X-ray out of his pack and shows it to me and at first I don’t even understand what I’m looking at. It looks like a black-and-white photo of a suspension bridge in the fog, until I realize that the spans and cables are actually pieces of metal screwed into his bone. I ask him if it hurt to get shot.

“No,” he said. “I just thought I’d been slapped.”

I’ve been on some kind of high-amplitude ride all day since the bomb went off, peaks where I can’t sit still and valleys that make me want to catch the next resupply out of here. Not because I’m scared but because I’m used to war being exciting and suddenly it’s not. Suddenly it seems weak and sad, a collective moral failure that has tricked me — tricked us all — into falling for the sheer drama of it. Young men in their terrible new roles with their terrible new machinery arrayed against equally strong young men on the other side of the valley, all dedicated to a kind of canceling out of each other until replacements arrive. Then it starts all over again. There’s so much human energy involved — so much courage, so much honor, so much blood — you could easily go a year here without questioning whether any of this needs to be happening in the first place.

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