The Valley Read Online Free PDF Page A

sir.”
    Gayley nodded once and picked up a folded map. It was covered with topographic markings and military grid lines. Black saw a lot of green.
    Gayley flipped it like a Frisbee. It spun across his desk and straight into Black’s lap, startling him.
    â€œYou’re going up the Valley.”
    â€”
    There were many valleys in the mountains of Nuristan, and many were hard places where people died hard deaths. But there was only one Valley. Black didn’t even know its proper name. But he knew about the Valley. Everyone at FOB Omaha did.
    It was the farthest, and the hardest, and the worst. It lay deeper and higher in the mountains than any other place Americans ventured in Nuristan, beyond the front range you could see from Radio Hill, and beyond the peaks that lay beyond those. You had to travel through a network of interlinked valleys, past all the other remote American outposts, just to get to its mouth.
    From there the Valley wound upward, snaking this way and that through the steep mountainsides and apparently, as Black had heard from tales whispered and retold, terminating at its highest point in a narrow pass that crossed over the ridges and into Pakistan. No one could say, because no American had been that far.
    Black knew that there were outposts in the Valley, though he didn’t know how many or how far in. Stories circulated back to Omaha periodically, tales of land claimed and fought for, or lost and overrun, new attempts made or turned back, outposts abandoned and retaken.
    They were impossible to verify. Everything with the Valley was myth and rumor. No one on the FOB seemed to have met anyone who had been there.
    Black would hear the young soldiers in the S-1 shop talking once in a while.
Did you see the Valley guys in the chow hall last night?
    Then skepticism from another soldier, followed by protestations to the contrary, joined by another soldier whose buddy said he talked to them and yes, they
were
Valley guys.
    Black concluded that the place was far enough away that any soldiers who went there mostly stayed there—spent most of their tour in the mountains and rarely returned to the FOB. When or if they did, they probably just kept to themselves or slept.
    He didn’t blame them. The only hard information he had seen were the casualty reports, which came down from Brigade headquarters weekly. 3/44 Infantry regularly had the highest counts. Now, 15-6 paperwork in hand, Black understood why. They had been cursed with the Valley.
    Whatever the rest of the truth of the place was, he had only been certain that he would never know.
    â€œIt’s six hours by ground convoy,” Gayley was saying, “and a hell of a lot shorter by air.”
    Black considered the mess of paperwork now splayed across his lap. Combat Outpost—COP—Vega seemed small. Tiny, really.
    A “cop,” as the joes said it, typically didn’t comprise more than several hasty structures with incomplete barriers around them. COPs were meant to be compact and highly defensible, to the extent a tiny base in the middle of enemy territory could be defended.
    Vega looked typical in this regard. It had been built right on the slope of the mountainside, well above the river that ran along the bottom of the valley. It had limited views and was surrounded by high ground on all sides. A nice fat target.
    â€œI don’t know how Three-Four-Four’s gonna get you there yet,” Gayley went on. “Their commander’s gonna let me know.”
    He pointed across the desk at the map draped over Black’s knee.
    â€œBut I would hope for ground, because helicopters don’t stay airborne very long up in that place. Those fuckers get shot down all the time when they fly down below the mountaintops.”
    Black brought the map up to his face. The outpost was accessible by a road, or a track, or what passed for it. But from the reports in his hands it sounded as though at some points there