Lifeline - Off Duty, Military Health and Fitness - Navy Times

Lifeline

Brendan O’Byrne had been drunk for a week when he showed up on Sebastian Junger’s doorstep in Manhattan. Choking back tears, the best he could muster was simply, “Dude, I need help.”

Out of the Army less than a year and struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, O’Byrne was a 25-year-old combat veteran in the throes of another weeklong bender. He had passed out on a park bench the night before. Somewhere along the way, he’d lost his last two possessions, a video camera and his guitar.

Junger, a seasoned war correspondent, had met O’Byrne in Afghanistan while working on a book and a movie about the fighting there. Best known as the author of “The Perfect Storm,” Junger has covered everything from African bush wars to Balkan genocide. Indeed, Junger was making trips into Afghanistan long before most Americans could find it on a map, with his first foray in 1996 to cover rumors of terrorist training camps in the region.

For his latest project, Junger teamed with photographer Tim Hetherington to follow a platoon from the Italy-based 173rd Airborne Brigade through more than a year of combat in Afghanistan. Their movie — “Restrepo” — bears the name of a platoon medic, among the first of many casualties the unit would take. An unfiltered, grunt’s-eye view of war, the film garnered top honors at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, claiming the Jury Award for documentaries. It opens in limited release this summer.

His book — “War” — was released May 11.

While “The Perfect Storm” told the story of an ill-fated fishing crew he could never meet, Junger hoped total immersion in this project would lead him to the answer of a single question: What gives men the courage to fight and die for each other? He says he found what he was looking for in surprising and disturbing ways. Surprising in the depth of self-sacrifice he witnessed on the battlefield; disturbing in how those battles continued to rage long after the warriors were home.

And now, standing on his doorstep, one of his answers had found him.

“OK, let’s get you some help,” Junger told O’Byrne.

An imperfect storm

Junger had singled out Battle Company, part of the 173rd’s 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, during a 2005 assignment in Afghanistan for Vanity Fair magazine. Impressed with the company’s spirit and professionalism, he promised himself that if it ever went back, he’d follow the soldiers through their deployment.

Around the same time, a SEAL team was ambushed in an area called the Korengal Valley, not far from the Pakistan border. Three of the four commandos were killed, along with 16 troops shot down trying to rescue them.

As U.S. commanders have tried to dislodge the hive of Taliban activity there, the Korengal has been the scene of nearly continuous fighting since the U.S. first arrived there.

Last month, the U.S. announced it was pulling out of Korengal Valley. The six-mile stretch is home to a string of thickly wooded canyons and ancient stone villages where tribes cultivate stubborn, tightly terraced crops under towering dagger-edge ridgelines.

A contingent of Marines established the first real beachhead there, building what became known as the Korengal Outpost or, to most troops, simply “the Kop.”

When the men of Battle Company arrived two years later, the Taliban had given up little ground, peppering troops with nearly constant sniper fire and well-coordinated ambushes.

“Every day was pure hell,” O’Byrne says. A scrappy kid, he took his first bullet long before he joined the Army. Growing up in a hard-drinking family in a small Pennsylvania hill town, he was shot at in fights as a teenager.

By the time Junger arrived at the KOP, O’Byrne was a sergeant responsible for a three-man fire team of paratroopers who could not have been less impressed with the author-filmmaker in their midst.

“First few times he came out, I didn’t even know who he was,” O’Byrne says. “We were getting hit every single day, four or five times a day. Guys were dying; guys were getting hurt. He wasn’t even a little blip on our radar. You’ve got to do a lot to impress people who are being shot at every day.”

Like family

O’Byrne, however, already had impressed Junger.

“The high point of our day is killing someone else,” Junger quoted O’Byrne saying in the Vanity Fair piece he wrote after his first trip into the Korengal. “I mean, what’s that say about us? What’s it going to be like when we go home? I went out to take a piss one night, and I was like, ‘What am I doing in Afghanistan?’ I mean literally, ‘What am I doing here?’ I’m trying to kill people and they’re trying to kill me. It’s crazy.”

Despite the insanity — or, perhaps, because of it — the two became friends.

“When we read that first piece in Vanity Fair, we knew he was a legitimately good dude who really wanted to tell our story and not demonize us,” O’Byrne says. “The truth — that’s what was important to him. And so we opened up.” Battle Company commander Capt. Dan Kearney tells the camera just before a major offensive: “The guys, that’s the hardest thing. If something happens to me, there’s not much I can do about it. ... It takes a little bit out of you every time you see one of your boys get hurt or you lose one of them. It’s really like a big family.”

And by all appearances, Junger was admitted into that family.

With the devious glee of a younger brother, O’Byrne tells of a practical joke that took advantage of a dread of spiders Junger had made the mistake of confessing.

“I’m sorry, but there are certain things you never do in a combat zone - admit that you’re a virgin or tell anyone what you’re afraid of,” O’Byrne says.

Junger paid the price without ever seeing the foam-and-pipe-cleaner creepy-crawly by his bed.

“He heard us giggling like little schoolgirls and figured we were up to something. He told us later he put on his shoes and stayed up all night with his back up against the corner,” O’Byrne says.

Emotionally embedded

Junger’s film opens with O’Byrne, platoon medic Pfc. Juan Restrepo and two other paratroopers on a train in Italy, headed out for one last weekend of partying before deployment. It’s eerie, because the viewer knows Restrepo is going to die.

He would be among the first of 26 men in the battalion killed during the deployment, along with hundreds more wounded. A remote mountaintop observation post built under fire would bear his name as fighting intensified.

But for now, Restrepo and O’Byrne are just a couple of GIs out with their buddies.

Within moments, the viewer is transported into the Korengal Valley, and the killing and dying begin. It’s what co-director and photographer Hetherington calls “complex emotional territory.”

The pair shot 150 hours of raw footage and edited it into 94 minutes of pure deployment.

There are no generals explaining strategy, no pundits explaining the generals, and no reporters explaining the pundits.

“We didn’t want a movie about the big picture or the right and wrong of the war, but a movie that was completely experiential,” Junger says.

The action is interspersed with interviews shot a few months after the unit returned to Italy. In some ways, the commentary is as jarring as the combat footage.

“PTSD was in full bloom,” Junger says. It seemed as if everyone in the unit was struggling.

“After 15 months of pushing everything down, it was all starting to come up,” O’Byrne says.

War story

O’Byrne left the Army shortly after returning from Afghanistan. His contract had already been extended for more than a year, and he’d had enough.

Back home in Pennsylvania, booze replaced combat as the constant in his life, numbing the pain and fogging the memories.

“When I got home, I was knee-deep in PTSD, probably closer to neck deep,” O’Byrne says. “I didn’t have any friends who were out of the Army who I could call. Sebastian was the only one who’d been there that I could talk to. So, I talked to him.”

He and Junger met a few times. They went hiking and visited wounded troops at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Junger says he could tell his friend was struggling. “The drinking was dramatic like combat is dramatic,” Junger says. “It was like, all you could do is watch and wonder, ‘Oh my god, who is going to win this fight?’ There was nothing I could do to help.”

But he could help. And he did. In Afghanistan, as a journalist, he couldn’t pick up a weapon and fight. But the rules were different now.

Living at home didn’t seem to be helping O’Byrne. Junger urged him to come to New York. Hetherington was going to be out of town; O’Byrne could stay at his apartment if he promised not to drink.

O’Byrne agreed and started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. But it was too much. Without booze, the memories were too painful.

Before long he asked to borrow some money so he could go to Pennsylvania to regroup. Junger loaned him the cash, but instead of getting on a bus, O’Byrne drank the money during a binge that lasted for days.

Penniless, hopeless and drunk, O’Byrne found himself knocking on the door of the midtown apartment owned by Junger and his wife.

“When [O’Byrne] showed up on my doorstep, I didn’t do anything out of a sense of duty. It was a sense of friendship,” Junger says.

He took O’Byrne in and cleaned him up, and they figured out what to do next.

In the months since, O’Byrne has made it through rehab, and with the clarity of sobriety has poured himself into understanding PTSD and helping others wrestling through the fog after war. He and his on-again, off-again girlfriend have married. A Marine, she’s deployed to Africa now.

And Junger has been teaching O’Byrne how to work as an arborist, the high-climbing, tree-trimming trade that financed Junger’s early years in journalism.

O’Byrne lives in a Cape Cod, Mass., cottage owned by some of Junger’s friends.

O’Byrne also has been inside Junger’s small circle of confidants reading - and fact-checking - the drafts of his book. Junger believes he’s answered his question about courage.

“Courage is love. It’s a result of your affection for another person,” he says with the conviction of someone who knows the truth from having experienced it. “It allows men to overcome their fear and inherent revulsion to kill another person.”

And, as it turns out, love is also what compels people to fight for each other, even when that revulsion turns inward. It doesn’t take a war to put lives on the line, but both men say they have learned there’s nothing like having family by your side to face down the enemy wherever it shows up.