“This is my sixth tour between Iraq and Afghanistan since September 11, 2001,” Staff Sergeant Larry Rougle, or Wildcat, told us. Rougle was one of my favorites. He had dark brown hair that grew into a bowl around his big brown eyes the longer he stayed at the remote Camp Vegas. His chest ballooned to form his beefy frame, and his arms were tattooed from wrist to shoulder. He was thoughtful and articulate and spoke with an ominous wistfulness, as if he feared his sixth tour might be tempting fate too much. He had once been part of a gang in South Jersey. When he shot someone and ended up in juvenile detention, he spent his time learning Russian and reading. When he got out, he joined the army. He had a girlfriend he wanted to marry. He always spoke about his mother.
Some of the guys played games and wrote e-mails on their laptops. Many read old magazines and recycled books. It wasn’t long before I finished the reading material I had lugged along, and in those pre-Kindle days I ended up reading a miniature copy of the New Testament I found lying around on the base.
And every morning, day after day, in the early-light dawn we went on the patrols. We first all gathered around for a briefing from the platoon leader, the soft-spoken and painfully shy Lieutenant Brad Winn. Then we loaded our day packs with water, protein bars, MRE snacks, and our headlamps, and I checked my camera gear to make sure I had spare batteries and as many flash cards as I owned, just in case we got locked into hostile activity overnight.
We would walk single file along a goat path through the tall cedar trees, making our way from hostile village to hostile village. The platoon leader generally put Elizabeth and me together between two soldiers, and I pestered Elizabeth constantly about whether she was drinking enough water as we trudged dutifully along the narrow paths. Our directive was to stay roughly twenty feet behind the person in front of us—allowing space between soldiers would lower the number of casualties in an ambush or land mine explosion. If attacked, we were to do whatever the soldier “assigned” to us told us to do. This was usually “Get down!” or “Run!” A part of me always quietly hoped for a brief gun battle; there were only so many pictures I could take of troops standing guard with their guns and talking with villagers. But when the bullets started flying, I prayed only for the battle to end.
During the weeks we spent hiking through the valleys, laden with flak jackets, helmets, water, and food, Elizabeth and I grew strong and determined. Our gear totaled forty pounds—mine even more with camera equipment—but we kept up with the six-hour patrols on the demanding mountains of the Korengal Valley. We grew accustomed to the incoming whistle and crash of mortar rounds directed at the base, which often landed off-target in the middle of nowhere. We scrambled for cover in a cinder-block shelter or behind massive sand-filled Hesco barriers without fanfare. Incoming rounds from Kalashnikovs or Russian-made machine guns, called Dushkas, became routine. The racing heart that at first accompanied the sound of bullets subsided into something as regular as the sound of roosters at dawn anywhere in the world.
Elizabeth’s belly grew as the month passed, but in tandem with the temperature dropping; her layers of clothing increased with the size of her belly, hiding any trace of the baby. With what seemed like every cramp or headache, I got out my Thuraya satellite phone and called my sister Lisa in Los Angeles, careful that none of the soldiers could hear us.
“Lee, what does it mean when Elizabeth has cramps?” I asked. “Is it OK if she walks for hours a day? Will the weight of a flak jacket be a problem for the baby?”
My sister, accustomed to years of her little sister on the front line, and somewhat resigned to not imposing her judgment on me and my colleagues, didn’t respond with a lecture about the dangers of being pregnant in a war zone or on a military embed. She was an ever pragmatic mother of two and assured us repeatedly of babies’ resilience.
“Just tell her to drink a lot of water,” she said. “The worst thing you can do is allow yourself to get dehydrated.”
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THAT AUTUMN in the Korengal, Battle Company had been gearing up for Operation Rock Avalanche, another battalion-wide mission to root out senior Taliban fighters. By mid-October the preparation was in full swing. We knew Rock Avalanche was going to be dangerous. The soldiers were hoping to lure the Taliban out of hiding to fight.