Welcome to Firebase Vegas

We moved with haste. Soldiers from the 173rd Airborne escorted Third Platoon inside the wire following touchdown on the landing zone. We entered the gates of Firebase Vegas for the first time, our brows slick with sweat. One man shouted instructions that were muffled by the sound of the rotor wash, I could only hear one thing: Welcome to Firebase Vegas! The paratroopers belonged to a platoon of soldiers that occupied the beleaguered base for the previous fifteen months, and were scheduled to ship out as we arrived. The short timers appeared relaxed, and ready to go home, but their demeanors changed when they saw the new arrivals. Smiling lips did an about face. Tribal politics took its course. We may have been wearing the same uniform, but we were not on the same team - It was Us and Them.

We were introduced to a quiet Staff Sergeant named Sal Guinta. I recognized him immediately, thanks to an article written in Stars and Stripes about him being nominated for the Medal of Honor. It wasn’t long before one of the other Sergeants mentioned it. “That boy got put in for the big one,” he said, spitting out his chewing tobacco. The Sergeant spoke like an elected official. He talked too much; and was all hand gestures, eye contact, and drama, titillating us with tone and tempo - proof the oral tradition was still alive and well. He described the nightmare scenario at Honcho Hill, when the platoon, part of a battalion size combat mission called Operation Rock Avalanche, walked into a perfect L shaped ambush. The Taliban tried to take one of his men alive, dragging the American, blood soaked and hogtied, into the deep, dark forest. Guinta made chase, heroically, and succeeded, only to embrace a dying friend and watch his skin turn grey.

(SSGT Salvatore Guinta, the first living Medal of Honour Recepient since Vietnam)

The Korengal Valley is large-boned, mountainous, and wooded. But Firebase Vegas was claustrophobic, and filthy; mud caked walls resembled the trenches of World War One. I felt suffocated by the many dirt filled barriers snaking their way around stone huts and plywood shacks, their shape - a boa constrictor slowly crushing its prey. A deserted no man's land lay just beyond the sandy structures. The paratroopers had lost a platoon sergeant in no man's land prior to our arrival when enemy fire rained down from a nearby ridgeline. The open space inside the wire became off-limits to all but the local Afghans hired to work for us.

The outpost was a stark naked lady. She was exposed to the surrounding hillsides, and scantily so, as confirmed on my first patrol to the summit. I peered through a rifle scope at the tiny base below, and saw the mortar pit and guard towers, on perfect display. I could also see black smoke rising from the burn pit. The fetid and toxic smell emanating from the inferno sits fresh in my memory. A sinister concoction of molten brass, batteries, plastic and JP-8 fuel, it’s flame, bright and flickering green, shouted cancer at the top of its lungs.

The door to my sleeping quarters, a piece of scrap plywood with a rope handle, mimicked the sound of a closing casket as it swung shut behind me. Hesitantly, I entered the dimly lit livestock shed, managing only once to strike my forehead on a low hanging wooden beam. I crouched under five foot ceilings and tip-toed between bunks and military gear scattered about. The paratroopers had slept there for fifteen months and it was obvious they spent far more time filling sandbags than tidying up. I tossed my gear on an Army issue cot and went back to the command post. Vegas had little infrastructure: a mortar pit, two guard positions, and a plywood barracks we referred to as the B-hut, home to second squad and the stench of stale body odor and ammonia.

I spent much of my time at an observation post called OP Rock. Each night I listened to the dark in acute curiosity; to the harmonic sound of twigs, trees, wildlife and humans — fear’s seducing song. The observation post was isolated, unplugged; equipped to kill — Ted Kaczynski’s dream home. It sat alone. Out of sight, out of mind. It offered few strategic advantages. Terrain rendered radios useless. There were no barrier walls or razor wire. Few took the responsibility of pulling guard seriously. Soldiers smoked hashish. We slept. Hard. I remained sober during the first months of the tour, but had reached my breaking point. I wanted to disappear.

Marijuana grew, untamed, on patrol routes and guard towers, and seemed to flourish in all the places soldiers suffered most. Hashish was a Godsend, and also everywhere; easily acquired through Afghan soldiers, workers and villagers at a pharmaceutical pawn shop in the sky. I traded cameras and boots and knives and hard drives for golf ball size bits of brown gold. I inhaled it’s thick smoke through a shotgun barrel and paid homage to the hero’s of Hollywood — life imitating art. We slept through the night trading safety for sleep, drifting off together, hoping, but not knowing, if either of us would wake. A soldier's imagination is a powerful and dangerous thing. I had deathly dreams and visions of slaughter, hallucinations worse than anything the war could throw at me — I slept anyway.

The elevated position offered a birds eye view of the Korengal River. Square cutouts in plywood walls looked west, general issue cots sat beneath them. Rats nested in a resting mattress — the platoon’s back massager. All four walls were covered in back issue Playboy centerfolds. My head swiveled around the room, confirming we had ample supplies, putting hands on what history had taught us we needed to win the war: water, bullets, bombs and food. In that order.

Smith had a radio mic in his hand, and was about to wish the LT a happy birthday when rockets soared past the bunker: One. Two. Three. Four. The room gleamed red and green with each luminous flash; bright lights mocked me: fight or flight. Suddenly, the physical self was self sufficient, I relied on a triggered autonomic nervous system. My adrenal response classified my surroundings, and I determined our weapons were not a threat, so they fell silent. The soldier screamed into his radio mic, but he wasn’t a threat, so he, too, fell silent. Then, a peculiar noise enthralled me, and I hyper focused. The universe became the sound of sliding steel, but not our steel. The enemy was close. I could hear the internal organs of AK’s. Bolts slammed forward in the toxic marriage of brass, gun powder and graphite, together always, until death do they part.

My soul left me crouching on the floor as it soared above the outpost. I explored the hillside like a heavenly surgeon hungry for dead tissue. I could see the men attacking the OP, and guided machine gun fire onto the target. A soldier was wounded, and crawled toward us. An hour prior, he had argued the ethics of war, and killing. But circumstances had changed, he had been shot in the shoulder, and the bullet burned, deeply. The soldier panicked; and his voice cracked. He shouted into the handset, “Fucking kill every one of these people, right now!” The dying deal in absolutes. Suddenly, I understood. I had just uncovered the great, and terrible truth. It was, in that moment, abundantly clear, there are no moral men. I returned fire, blew claymores, threw hand grenades. And then, the strangest thing happened. Specialist Sanchez looked up at the sky and laughed hysterically. He seemed excited to die, excited to kill. For the first time in his life he understood his destiny with absolute conviction, manifestly knowing the choice to act would spare his friends. He catapulted over a rock wall, effortlessly; he walked on water, guided to his fate by some mysterious force. Bullets kicked up dirt at his feet. He took cover behind a small rock and laid waste to the enemy fighting position.

We consolidated the team inside the dark OP. I freed the flashlight secured to my belt, and raised it, high. Faint rays of light revealed bloody bandages, an outpost bestrewn with needles and plastic and plasma. The wounded soldier was seated, but maintained perfect posture. The others anxiously paced, back and forth, behind us, full of ire; there simply to bear witness to an execution, nothing more. Then, I heard the faint flick of a switch and Flemate’s brain began convulsing, violently rattling its cages, desperate to escape, until the medic put another needle in his arm, and he relaxed.

We came home from war and stood at attention in mid-century gyms. We watched lovers embrace. Dreams were real, but only for the chosen few. The rest of us shrugged identity’s coat from bent shoulders and dispersed. I was alone; at the crossroads of where war stories usually end, but perhaps, should begin.