Adams: all right. Let's go have a party.
-All right. -Hey, let's go.
Hey, sir.
Somebody was shootin' at somethin' up here.
Trahan: I don't think there's anybody in our platoon
That probably hasn't killed somebody.
I don't think there's any infantrymen on cop michigan
That hadn't killed somebody.
-You want to push up to that? -Yeah.
Trahan: we were in gunfights every day.
We shot back at the enemy every single day.
All right, sarge.
Mccool: I'm a completely different person than I was
Before I joined the army,
Bunch of good ways and whole lot of bad ways.
Adams: there was a couple suspicious areas
Close to cop michigan.
And the purpose of our mission
Is to move up the mountain about 200 meters,
Check out these, uh, possible caves.
Mccool: the original plan is to check out the first few.
But as missions are, uh, you don't always do
What's originally anticipated.
Adams: people start to get cocky and feel that little sense of,
Uh, you know, "I'm invincible."
Adams: hey, come here. Let me get a saw.
Hurry up. I'm in a very vulnerable spot.
We're almost in a tiny, little fish bowl.
Do not like this.
They could be sittin' up on these ridgelines
And fire right down into us.
Hey, why don't you set up right there
Over watchin' that way, all right?
Come on. Let's go.
Worst case scenario running through my mind,
I may not have that chance to go home
And have a child with my wife.
Go! Go!
In may 2010,
A small unit from the legendary 101st airborne
Is among those deployed
In an attempt to defeat the taliban.
obama: it is our vital national interest
to send an additional 30,000 u.s. Troops to afghanistan.
Pick it up! Go! Go! Go!
woman: the korangal valley is frequently described
as the valley of death.
Hurry up! Hurry up! Get up there.
Oh [bleep] oh!
Mccool: we knew that it was gonna be the deployment
That people would write books about.
I figured I wanted to be able to document that.
Adams: what is that? Is that a camera or something?
their base, cop michigan,
At the juncture of the korangal valley
And the pech river,
Is in the heart of taliban territory.
The troops here are about to become
An even bigger target
As afghan elections approach.
Among them, squad leader sergeant chris adams
And privates kyle boucher and jj mccool.
Mccool: as the election cycle neared...
Oh [bleep]
Activity increased significantly.
and their brothers in arms,
Bravo company... -Stay low, bro.
stationed for the elections
On the observation post overlooking cop michigan.
-Oh! Move, move, move. -Back shoulder. I'm bleeding.
We knew durin' elections
That the taliban were gonna be out in mass numbers.
Hey, I got wire or somethin' right up ahead.
Rpg!
Trahan: you have to grow up in a very short amount
Of time over there.
There's a saying, like, uh, you leave the valley,
But the -- the valley never leaves you.
-Want to push up to that? -Yeah.
Adams: the purpose of our mission
Is to move up the mountain about 200 meters,
Check out these, uh, possible caves.
We got ambushed.
We are under direct fire
From the insurgents up on the ridgeline
With no cover whatsoever.
Yeah. I see it.
Mccool: sergeant adams and his crew
Were just about 25 meters below me.
I just know that sergeant adams is like,
"[Bleep] mccool shouldn't be up there."
How do we get out of here now?
I noticed this rock behind us. -Hey, sir!
If we could push right on the other side of that rock,
We can head down a lot further south with cover.
If we can push to that rock to your west,
We can head down south with cover.
Yeah, roger.
Hey, sergeant adams.
All right. Got it.
Adams: in my mind, I don't want to do this.
But I don't have a choice.
Either take the risk of standing up in the open
And getting hit or staying there
And waitin' to get boxed in.
You're sitting there. You're getting ready.
You almost kinda pause for a second.
It's, like, okay.
Adams: go. Let's go.
Haroni!
Haroni, get behind that!
Go! Go!
Come on, harerra.
Adams: okay. Now, I have actual cover.
Hey, lay down fire. Let's go.
-Mccool... -Okay, on me, on me!
-Move in. -Go.
Hey, hey, hey. We're good. We're good.
-We're good. -Open fire, open fire.
Mccool: there wasn't anyone hurt or injured.
And we made it.
It was, I mean, we... Luck was in our favor.
Adams: I'm enraged at this point.
When I see people laughing and joking,
It's, like, what is wrong with you?
You need to pull your head out of your fourth point of contact
And get into the game. -Keep pushin'.
Keep pushin' to that next set of rocks.
I'll provide you cover. Go.
Come on. Get up.
The reason I'm being so serious
Is 'cause my life was on the line.
And my men's lives were on the line.
Let's go. Let's move.
Trahan: sergeant adams, his job,
Um, was a lot more stressful than ours.
You know, he was responsible for us.
We didn't know if we were gonna make it home or not.
None of us knew.
And people dealt with it differently.
Um, but when you have the pressure of being
A leader on top of that,
You know, it -- it can't be easy.
Adams: as a squad leader, you know, it's always a worry
Because every time you go outside that wire,
Your men are lookin' to you to make the right decision
Because ultimately, it's your responsi--
Responsibility to bring 'em home.
When we got back from that deployment,
Most of us were still in battle mode.
And tryin' to come down
From that was extremely difficult for some of us.
And I know myself, it was particularly hard for me.
That sense of, you know, wantin' to protect my guys,
Wantin' to bring 'em home,
You know, follows you back to the states.
It made it -- it sometimes difficult dealing
With all these emotions and feelings.
My marriage, uh, started getting rocky
Because of, you know, the way I was acting.
You know, I wasn't acting like a husband.
When that happened, I had to stop and think about,
You know, I -- I need to address these issues
Because if I don't and I keep acting the way I'm acting,
I'm gonna lose my wife.
woman: saturday's vote in afghanistan
is for 249 parliamentary seats.
we have 10 candidates for every...
Adams: we learned afghan elections were comin' up.
woman: the security situation has only been worsening.
and the decision that the afghan government made
is it's sort of now or never.
Mccool: so the elections were kinda paramount in us
Making some progress in the region.
The idea, after all, was empowering the afghans
To eventually, uh,
Take control of their communities,
Their villages and overall, their country.
woman: no one's saying there won't be violence.
and there won't be fraud.
everyone's just hoping that it isn't so much
to completely invalidate the vote.
Trahan: up there, in the pech, you know, they didn't have a --
A -- a democracy or any sort of government.
To us, I mean, that was, like, you know, our --
Our -- our job, um, you know,
To promote a government for afghanistan.
Adams: everybody had a job in this.
We had to push out away from the cop
And, you know, secure the poll sites.
Then we had a platoon that was on op pride rock.
man: you got to fire me some...
Adams: their sole responsibility
Was to stop enemy movement within the korangal.
observation post, or op pride rock,
Is on a ridgeline with commanding views
Down both the pech river
And the korangal valley.
A squad from bravo company
Will be stationed there for the elections.
Mccool: bravo company's task was trying to draw fire
From the korangal
And provide an overwatch for us.
The closer and closer it got to election day,
We started hearin' stuff about how taliban were
Threatenin' people and sayin' if anybody --
They saw anybody go that was there to vote,
They were gonna shoot 'em.
I joined the army when I was a little bit older
Than most people do.
I was 23.
Before I joined, I was at a dead-end job.
I knew I wanted to do infantry.
They were the ones who did the fighting.
And I knew that's what I wanted to do.
-You were gettin' what? -The expo route.
I heard you make lifelong friends.
But you don't really understand the bond
Till you've been through it.
Dude, you hit in the [bleep] valley on the other side...
Trahan: one day, it was me, sandoval and sergeant musgrave.
It was just -- just one of those days
Where you're just dying of boredom, you know.
And you sit there. And you listen to music.
Gettin' our army arts and crafts goin' on.
Tac. Tac -- uh, tactical arts and crafts.
Musgrave: hey, use the machine gun!
Adams: hey, I got a wire or something.
Yeah. Right up ahead.
Ortega: cop michigan right there. It's our home, baby.
We miss that [bleep] you know what I mean?
Hey, lasinge! Hey!
How you doin'?
Trahan: the weeks leading up to election day,
We started hearin' stuff about how the taliban
Was gonna do everything they could to stop it.
You got closest with the people in your squad
'Cause those are the guys you're with all the time.
Friendship just builds from there.
Ah!
Trahan: I would mess with ortega, burn his leg hairs.
-He would get pissed. -I'll [bleep] on someone.
Just -- just little stuff we would do
Just to irritate each other
To try to entertain ourselves a little bit.
Can't tell me nothin'.
One day, it was me, sandoval and sergeant musgrave.
All right. Fine.
Trahan: if those sandbags would've given out,
You know, we might not have gotten up in time.
Musgrave: hey, use the machine gun!
Use a 240! Hurry up!
Open that lid.
There was a part of me that, uh, it's like,
It's not gonna happen to me, you know.
But then, whenever they're actually
Hitting, like, right next to you...
Ten four, attack.
Trahan: I mean, you could feel the wind from the bullet.
Like, "okay. Well, it might be my day."
You know, you never know.
Musgrave: keep engaging where that rpg came from.
Trahan: taliban liked to take out your --
Your big weapons.
They would always shoot for the mark 19.
That's what does the most of the damage.
Well [bleep] it. Just hit.
Trahan: and I started thinkin' about it.
Ortega, I think he's up there by himself.
And nobody's givin' him ammo.
It's probably comin' from high up.
Yeah.
Stay low, bro.
Trahan: I knew 100 percent that I would take a bullet
For any of them in a heartbeat without even thinkin' about it.
I would jump on a grenade for any of those guys.
On that weapon, havin' somebody open your ammo for you is huge.
oh [bleep]
Trahan: we're takin' a lot more contact at this point.
Ortega: oh [bleep]
Yeah? Yeah.
Good job!
Yeah.
Hey, good job, fellas.
Trahan: I took one of the guys out that was shootin' at 'em.
I was smiling. It feels good at the time
Just because it was either you or them
Or one of your buddies.
But, I mean, something like that sticks with you.
Holy [bleep]
That's when it clicked in my head
There was gonna be issues going back home.
Something changed about everybody
In some way after that deployment.
Since coming back, I have a really bad social anxiety.
I struggle every day.
I didn't want to be around anybody else.
You know, we fought that war over there.
But that... We're fighting another one here,
You know, in your head.
There's not a day I don't think about deployment or my friends.
You know, it's just every day
There's something that I think about from that.
stay low, bro.
woman: the taliban have really in the past few days
stepped up their threats.
they've been saying since, um, the beginning
that they don't accept this election,
that they don't want people to go vote.
but they've repeated that they plan to attack
polling stations, voters and election workers.
Adams: in the lead-up to the election,
It was important that we kept searching for any ieds.
If any routes would have been disabled during that time,
It would have stopped us from having the ability
To secure the area effectively.
We had to step up the search for ieds.
Mccool: there's a series of different ways
Ieds can be set off.
There's command-det
Which would be, like, a line ran to it.
And there's a trigger man.
There's also, uh, different kind of radio ones
Where they could call it with a cell phone
And set it off.
The taliban, they were known to set ieds
In the same location.
They didn't like diggin' holes.
And in order to put an ied in the ground,
You got to dig a hole.
Yup, just, uh, dip a little.
Basically park here by the poll.
The easiest and fastest way
These guys could do it is put it in a hole
That was already formed by an ied.
-Roger. -Roger.
Trahan: so part of our sops were to, um,
Before we went over
These historical ied sites, get out.
And you go and clear 'em.
Adams: all right. You ready, bobby?
Boucher: let's do it.
Adams: it was very nerve-wracking,
Having to get out of the truck and go up on these ied sites,
Checkin' to see, uh, if any dirt's been moved,
If there's any wires.
Just look for anything that doesn't look right.
What? All right.
Did I tell you yet that this [bleep]
Yeah.
If there is one there, and it explodes,
You don't have the cover of the truck.
You can tell the other guys have walked through here.
There's fresh prints.
You know, it plays, uh, with your emotions
A lot as you're getting closer and just hopin' and hopin'
And hopin' that it's not an ied.
-Hey, I got a wire or something. -You do?
Yeah. Right up ahead.
Yup. Yup, we do.
Adams: yeah. We're comin' up on the ied site.
Adams: whenever big events were comin' up,
Uh, for example, the elections,
The -- the enemy likes to change their tactics.
We had to step up the search for ieds
Because they -- they try to catch you
When you're not paying attention.
roger, two ten.
-Hey, I got a wire or somethin'. -You do?
Yeah. Right up ahead.
Boucher: yup. Yup, we do.
Two seven two two, I believe I may have found a wire.
I'm still a little bit of a distance away from it.
But it's goin' across the field, across the ditch,
Lookin' like it's heading up to the road, over.
If it's a small one, you know, I might be okay if it goes off.
Uh, but if it's a big one, you know,
There's a good chance it's gonna take me out.
Nah, I'm gonna move up a little bit closer, bud.
Roger. Oh.
What is that?
Oh.
Two seven, this is 2-2.
Um, what I found was the guts of a cassette tape.
Um, it looks like it's comin'
From the road down into the ditch.
But, uh, that's all it is.
Uh... I'm gonna get them to move up.
try to, uh, buy some time to get our guys on the ground.
Two two delta, 2-2, go ahead now and move up.
I'll tell you when to stop.
There is a sense of relief that it's not an ied.
But there's still one more potential ied site.
All right, 2-2 delta, you can go ahead and hold up.
All right.
And make sure you're watching where you're steppin', dude.
I'm su -- I wouldn't be surprised
If they booby-trapped this ditch.
Stay down in the ditch.
I'm gonna get up and check out the site.
I tell boucher to stay back.
If something happens and one person gets hit,
You know, that -- that's horrible.
But it'd be better one person than two people.
Trahan: with any sergeant in our platoon,
Um, there was a lot of stress on them.
Actually, ied site's right here. I'm gonna go.
-All right, uh... -With sergeant adams,
You could definitely see, you know,
The stress on his face.
Boucher: a twig, if placed just right, could look like a wire.
All right, guys, on the ied site.
And it looks clear.
Two seven, 2-2, second ied site is clear.
It's, like, thank god.
Two two delta, 2-2,
Go ahead and push up to my position, over.
You finally get away from the area.
And then you can feel, you know, how --
How bad it was affecting you.
All right. Whenever we start movin',
Just keep an eye on that area.
-If we got somethin', stop us. -All right.
Two seven, 2-2, do you want us to hold up here
And just find a place to get off the road?
Adams: the feeling that you have when you come back,
You're super aware.
Goin' down the road, you see something
That you think doesn't belong.
And you react to it.
The anxiety is so overwhelming.
With me, it got really bad.
Being on a deployment put a --
A lot of stress on a marriage.
And a lot of times during a deployment is
When people get divorced.
Izzy changed while I was gone.
I changed while I was gone.
woman: and everybody is looking to see
if the afghan government can now
hold a really fair election,
especially in a war zone. security...
Adams: leading up to the elections,
Things definitely got more tense.
Everybody was called into action,
Which included bravo company. -Hey, mike.
-Yeah? -Don't open the gate.
Trahan: we knew that we were gonna be at the op on election day.
Taliban knew that we have to go through the bazaar
To get to the op.
So they set an ied right there.
And, uh, nobody was hurt,
Uh, just, uh, made a huge hole in the road.
the blast had disabled the only land supply route
Between cop michigan and op pride rock
Where bravo company is stationed for the elections.
Bravo, led by sergeant tom musgrave,
Must repair the road before election day.
Musgrave definitely had some tough luck.
But he cared about his guys, you know.
You could -- you could tell he did.
Musgrave: my first deployment was in afghanistan
And then went to iraq.
A lot of people have different reasons
For joining the military.
My biggest reason was I just always wanted to be a warrior
And thought I'd be good at it.
The taliban must have told all the villagers to,
You know, stay out that area.
And the fact that the bazaar
Was pretty much empty, uh, I --
I mean, I was pretty sure we were gonna get attacked.
Trahan: I go to pull security.
You can kinda get
A good look over the korangal valley.
Try to find enemy fighting positions.
Now I'm nervous as hell.
You know it's coming.
You just don't know when.
You got no cover right there.
One attack comes from that way,
You're goin' up there and get down.
I just knew it was gonna happen.
And a sniper was gonna try to take shots at us.
Woo!
Rpg!
Trahan: there were a bunch of these railroad-tie-type logs.
We might be able to use those to make the road passable.
Let's go. We were watchin' kids
Jump on this log and tryin' to patch this hole.
These kids are 5, 6 years old.
We've been there their entire life.
And that's all they know is war.
It's almost like they're immune to it.
They're numb to it like we got numb to it.
Woo!
Castro!
Hey, up here!
ranger rock, the taliban fighting position,
Is just under a mile south of the bazaar.
Its elevated position is allowing
The enemy to rain fire down onto the u.s.
And afghan troops in the valley below.
Trahan: I was firing the m4, took a couple pop shots.
I switched to the 203 grenade launcher.
Thought there were some guys comin' through the fields.
Not so close to the houses, guy.
The possibility of somebody else
Gettin' hurt was always heavier on my mind
Than it was for me getting hit.
And I think everybody felt that.
You know, that's what the brotherhood is.
Adams: our main tactic is to fix their position
With suppressive fire.
Hey, cease fire!
Musgrave: once we had suppressed the enemy,
They -- they kinda stopped shooting at our position.
The enemy fire stopped.
We continued to work on the road.
That should be straight.
We got it so we could get some vehicles across.
I think it's gonna be good, done.
Test.
Yeah.
It wasn't permanent by any means.
But prior to the election, it worked for the time being.
Trahan: you still get that adrenaline rush.
Maybe the happiness was gone.
Weird to say that there was ever happiness in a firefight.
But, I mean, there was. Maybe it just,
Like... The crash was worse at that point.
You know, comin' down off of it was worse than before.
Doing it is the easy part.
It's afterwards that it'll get to you.
I don't think they can train you to deal with stuff like that.
Everybody has different ways of dealin' with stuff.
I found out what worked for me. There is jiu-jitsu.
A buddy of mine that was in the army before me,
He talked me into coming to a class.
He understood that I had my anxiety issues.
I didn't want to be around anybody else.
And he thought maybe, you know, maybe it would help.
When I'm in here, it's kinda like an escape.
It's a physical outlet, not just sit down talkin' to somebody.
You get to go in there and beat people or get beat up
And then shake hands afterwards. Nothing else matters.
I don't have any other problems, no anxiety, no panic.
Even though all the problems might come back as soon
As I walk out that door,
Like, just that short amount of time
That I don't have to worry about anything else is worth it.
woman: afghan voters are facing down threats of violence.
and they've turned out today to cast ballots
in the country's fourth national election anyway.
man: the election faces serious threats.
on friday, afghan officials say taliban fighters
kidnapped 18 campaign and election workers...
Mccool: we got to the election day.
Basically, our entire area
Of operation on that day was on general security.
So we knew that they were collecting ballots
From a lot of the villages.
It was important for us because we were the people
That were bringing those ballots into fob blessing,
Into where, you know, they were gonna be counted.
All right. We're up. We're good. One more.
The bravo company was up on,
Um, op pride rock
While we were in trucks the whole day.
Yeah. Yeah.
-I did say desktop when they... -On election day,
I'm, uh, I'm at the op.
I'm rotating on guard shifts.
Wasn't long after the sun
Came up we started gettin' into a couple small firefights.
Roger.
I heard the rpg being fired.
That right there was from ranger rock, over.
We had a guy named, uh, castellano.
And his nickname was castro, kinda quirky, good guy, though.
-Yeah. -That's where he's...
Did you see rounds come up from there or somethin'?
Yeah. Just...
I mean, it was obvious, you know,
That we're shootin' at him.
Hey, rpg over there.
-Yeah, rpg, I got it. -Oh!
-Oh! Oh!
-Oh! -Move, move, move.
Oh!
Yo.
Musgrave: when we stopped shooting,
The little group of kids,
They all want to get the expended ammunition.
They melt that brass down.
They use that to make jewelry or other things.
Now to them, brass is money.
They see a bunch of dollar bills on the ground
When they see expended ammunition.
Trahan: kids here wouldn't act like that.
But over there, uh, pretty much everything
Is worth money over there.
It's such a poor country.
Hey, rpg over there.
Yeah, rpg, I got it.
Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
Move, move, move. Oh.
Casualty, castro's hit in his shoulder.
Let me see it. Hey, need doc.
Shed, need doc.
Hey, tell him he's got a entry exit wound,
Right shoulder, out his back.
We're going to take [bleep] castro to the building.
At that point in time, we were takin' pretty heavy fire.
-One, two, three. -I told them to move castro
To the ccp so the medic
Didn't have to over to him.
-Okay. -We only had one medic.
If the medic gets shot,
You know, who's treatin' him?
-and all I hear is bullets
Just whiz by.
You fire a weapon.
It's 1000 meters away, you know.
How -- how much does he have to move his weapon
Where he is to make it miss by an inch where you are?
Yeah. I'm ready.
That whole deployment was a game of inches.
That's what's -- that's crazy
When you think about it like that.
Entry exit, right shoulder, out the back.
Major bleeding?
Musgrave: I think you can tell more
About somebody's wound by
Looking at their face than you can by all the blood.
As long as they're calm, they're not freakin' out,
I think that's a good indicator
That they're probably gonna be all right.
Whenever you see your friends get hurt, I mean, that's --
That's the ultimate low of a deployment.
I get really angry, kinda flipped a switch.
I looked at all the taliban equally.
I wanted to kill every single one of 'em.
At that point, I wasn't really there for my country.
I wasn't there, you know, to fight with this flag
On my shoulder.
I was there for the guy on my left and my right.
This guy and this guy, that's what I'm fightin' for.
When somebody gets hit, it just turns your world upside down.
You start carin' for 'em, you know, like, they're your --
Your blood brother.
And, uh, all you want is
For everybody to be able to come home.
There's a strike, man. Sit down.
That brought everybody even closer together.
Woo!
Knowing that they would take a bullet
For you just as fast as you'd take one for them,
It's different than any other friendship.
Once your ball hit you, it blew.
You have friends, civilian friends.
But you'll never go through afghanistan with those people.
I'm a completely different person
Than I was before I joined the army,
Bunch of good ways and a whole lot of bad ways.
But I'd much rather deal with my demons
I have now than not have the friends that I have now.
woman: the votes in afghanistan are in.
poll organizers hope to finally wrap up
an election marred
by widespread fraud and pave the way...
Our mission that day was to --
To get those ballots to fob blessing.
And so that's what we did.
Adams: I really felt that there was a good sense of achievement
Because, you know, we did our job.
We didn't allow the enemy to, you know, harass the locals
That were goin' to the polls.
Fortunately, we didn't suffer any casualties.
And it was a success.
But we thought would benefit them
And kind of calm the region,
Uh, did the exact opposite.
Significant activities and firefights,
Uh, increased.