Korengal

Where I grew up, like, in Oregon,

I was always up in mount hood, snowboarding and skiing.

And when I was in Afghanistan,

whenever I looked out at the mountains,

I didn't think, like, "Afghanistan.

Oh, there's Taliban roaming up there,

like, going into their little caves,

and they're about to shoot at me."

Whenever I looked up there, for the most part,

tried to think of back home, something peaceful, you know,

something... something nice.

For the last four and a half years,

the Korengal has been known as Afghanistan's valley of death.

We're taking heavy fire from...

The valley was just too remote, too difficult to resupply,

and too dangerous

like the isolated outpost called Restrepo.

Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!

And from the bottom of a Mountain,

we watched Restrepo burn.

Is there anything that you miss about Restrepo,

about the Korengal valley?

Oh, yeah, I...

I'd rather be there than here.

I'd... I'd go back right now, if I could.

I'd want to... I'd go back the Korengal right now.

Get in the fucking window.

Korengal valley...

I always wondered why I was in the Korengal.

But...

When you get told that the bigger mission is that,

hey, you're not in the Korengal to go and hunt the bad guys.

You're in the Korengal so the bad guys come to you,

and you kill them.

It was just a valley.

It's a valley that is... if you look from high above,

it looks like a quiet valley.

You look to your north, your South, east and west,

it's just mountains, it's rocks, you know,

and it was wooded.

Everybody thinks, "you're over there?

Then you're in the desert." No.

If you went a little north of us, it looked just like...

Like Colorado Springs, like, Denver.

It was gorgeous.

But the minute I got there,

the minute I got off the helicopter I got shot at.

I saw it from a distance, it was beautiful.

Bullets came in, "fuck this place.

I want to go... I want to go home."

That day, when we took over,

our Command Sergeant Major Vimoto, he was at the kop.

And he asked, "hey, where's my son at?"

He said, "you don't have to... just show me where he's at,"

and you know, and I go up on this ledge and stuff,

and I point down.

"You tell him I said hello. I came out here.

I know he's out there on patrols and doing his thing,

and stuff like that, but you tell him your dad said hello."

As soon as it came across the net

and said we had a K.I.A. I looked at First Sergeant,

I was like, "it's Vimoto."

I just lost the Sergeant Major's son,

the Brigade Sergeant Major's son in my company,

the very first day that I go out there

and the very first thing I told them to go do,

where I'm the only one in charge,

and I get his son killed, I was, like... at a loss.

I mean, what do I do from here?

You lose somebody that quickly in a deployment,

it kind of hits home, like, whoa.

When's my turn then?

If he got killed this quick,

how many people are we going to lose by the end of this?

As bad as it may be, we have to continue, you know?

We can't sit there, you know, and just cry.

And the thing... we'll do that, you know.

If you're gonna cry, you do it. You know what I'm saying?

If you're going to go in a corner

and do what you have to do, you go do it, you know?

But when I need you back to be part of the team...

Because the bad guys are still there.

Tomorrow we going to go on a different patrol,

and someone else is going to try to take another shot at you.

The Korengal was a major highway

for all sorts of Taliban and enemy activity.

It's been that way for years.

It was in a deep part of the mountains

where they were using that area to traffic weapons

a lot, you know, weapons and supplies.

And it was just finding those trails and those guys,

you know, I think was, you know, what we were supposed to do.

But honestly, like, I don't know,

we just knew that they were there

and that's where we're going, and, you know,

it was a shithole and, you know, we were there to deal with it.

Think about putting into context...

Somebody moves in and decides to take your house over.

You're going to fight for it,

and that's exactly what they did.

Hey, what you got? Do you got it PIDed?

No, just from the southwest.

"TIC," it stands for "troops in contact."

And what it is is basically anytime that we are engaged

being the U.S. forces are engaged by anybody

or we engage somebody else.

We were getting, you know, anywhere from one

to ten to fourteen sometimes a day.

Moreno, get the fuck outta there!

An ungodly amount of TICs, I think 220...

225 TICs that Restrepo was involved in

in some way, shape, or form.

We just fucking got fucking rocked.

I mean, that's basically 365 days

that they could have shot at them.

They shot at them nine months straight.

We're getting fire from, from one of these draws.

They think they're getting fire from down there.

We're in the middle of this valley

in sandbag huts that we built,

no running water. No life.

Chinooks would come in, helicopters would come in,

deliver our supplies of food, water.

You know, think about being alone for days on end,

you know, in an isolated area.

Even though you're with people out there...

We had nothing.

That was as ghetto as it comes.

The hardest thing was you just never knew

if you were going to start getting shot at.

It's like, I'd be laying there on my cot,

and all of a sudden you'd just hear the cracks flying by

and RPGs going by, blowing up, right on the HESCOs,

on the other side of where you're sleeping, you know?

You have to accept that fact,

that you could die at any second.

This is the place to be.

There's a little secret about second platoon...

Everyone can play the guitar almost.

You know what I'm learning, dude?

Pass that up, man.

Came in here with no... no cover, nothing.

And then we built this place up into a resort,

and, you know.

Oh, yeah. This is a real resort.

Yeah, resort. This is resort Restrepo.

I mean, in summertime, we put a pool up here.

But in the winter, we'll make it a ski lodge.

Base people right out of here.

Sergeant Simon was joking he was going to get some skis

and, ski down, you know, get the whole...

The army feeling into it, you know?

We'll have some bullet holes in some walls and stuff.

Maybe, you know, a few rounds come in once in a while.

I'm telling you, you look out the door,

this place could be sports heaven if they just...

If they just stop shooting at us, you know.

This is nine-November, Roger, copy. Fire... He's in the draw.

Shot two two zero six bullets.

The first thing you hear when you get ambushed

or you get in a firefight, or whatever it is,

the first thing you hear is just a loud crack.

The bullets passing by your head, the snaps.

You hear that snap and your first...

Exactly how were trained, the snap is...

The first instinct is to, you know, get behind something.

That's exactly what you do, you know, you get cover.

Then you find out, by sound and distance,

you know, where is this coming from?

Someone give me a direction! That way.

Seventeen-o-five, seventeen-o-five.

One of the things we're all would learn about

is that you may not see it, but you can hear it.

And that's our tactical awareness.

We're able to pick up the different sounds.

We got a general vicinity of where he's at.

You had to name

your terrain features you have around you.

You just can't say, "that green hill over there."

Is it coming from honcho hill? Is it coming from 1705?

Is it coming off the spartan spur?

On nipple rock! Hey, I got eyes on him! I got eyes on honcho hill.

Everybody'd just started shooting at that direction.

As a team leader, my second instinct

is to find out where everyone else is.

I return fire

and then immediately start checking my guys.

Hey, is everyone alright? Yeah, yeah.

Do they have enough water? Are they running low on bullets?

Are they shooting in the right direction?

Everybody good? I probably scan my guys 100 times

during a 3-minute firefight, that's what I do.

We're taking contact from the east side of the valley...

I was the RTO, so as soon as I heard a crack,

I'd just hop on the radio and be calling, like,

"troops in contact, we're taking fire from the east.

There's probably about five of them out there."

Then you got the squad leaders bouncing around

from each position where their soldiers are firing from

trying to give me a situation report,