Word: mountaineerful
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...thing.THC: Were you both the “bookworm kid?” What else did you do growing up that brought you to the point you are at today? LD: I had a completely different childhood than David, because his was in Maine, and mine was in the mountains in the Philippines where I was born just before the war, and I spent the war in a Japanese internment camp. So it was a strange place, where although everyone spoke English—it had been in American possession for some decades—still, I was the only...
...however, it's a lot more complicated, especially in the Korengal Valley, where a toxic combination of local grievances, Taliban sympathizers, al-Qaeda operatives and professional warlords has taken 39 American lives since 2006. For a few days I based myself at Restrepo, an American firebase perched on a mountain ridge overlooking three of the valley's most important villages. One, called Loi Kolay, had been particularly problematic. Last November the Taliban pulled the village elder out of the mosque and shot him, accusing him of working with the Americans. Then they beheaded his corpse in the village square. Things...
Finally it was dark, and we started the arduous trek up through the village to the main road, where we would take a breather before continuing the climb up the mountain to the firebase. As soon as we got to the road we started the usual two-men-at-a-time sprint through exposed terrain to the humvee that was supposed to be waiting just around the corner, a kind of mobile hesco. Just as I turned the corner the night was ripped open with muzzle flashes. We had been ambushed...
...myself at the pile of soldiers huddled between the humvee and the mountainside. Mortars coming from the Korengal outpost lit up the sky in flashes. I could see a tangle of limbs and chests heaving to suck in oxygen. The smell of sweat intermingled with the scent of the mountain sage bushes we were crushing under our cumulative weight. My head rang with the sound of returning fire coming from the guy on my left as he aimed at the darkness below. Adam Ferguson, TIME's photographer, actually stood up to take pictures. It felt like we were taking fire...
From the outpost we hiked up the mountain face back to Restrepo. The surge of adrenaline and endorphins meant that I didn't even notice a journey that on previous attempts had left me panting at every turn in the switchback trail. I had sweated through my Kevlar. It felt like I had sweated through my plates. It had taken little more than an hour to move from Loi Kolay back to Restrepo, but it felt like days. Within an hour, though, we were back on the move. One of the soldiers, Private first class Matthew Fowler, 24, had ripped...