At close range.

Byline: MATT COOPER The Register-Guard

1ST LT. MATT LOWEN flopped down and leaned back on his gear, his eyes following the foothills up into the majestic mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

It was March 4, about 5 p.m., and the 24-year-old platoon leader from Eugene was resting before the next day's push higher into the mountains. He and the 120 soldiers with him planned to block enemy troops as part of the U.S. military effort to destroy al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the area.

Lowen was eating a cracker when he heard it - the zing! of a round passing overhead. It came from behind, where his men were, and he assumed that someone had accidentally discharged a weapon.

Then the air was filled with them - red tracers, the telltale signs of flying bullets - ricocheting off rocks and zipping between soldiers, coming from a village below. Shocked at first, Lowen and his men leaped into action, returning fire.

Then the mortars started raining down on them. As each shell cut through the air, Lowen heard the sickening wail - like a heavy wind building to gale force - then saw the blast.

The first ones exploded about 50 yards short of them, the next ones just 30 or 40 yards beyond the soldiers. They had been targeted by some of Afghanistan's fiercest fighters - "true dead-enders," in the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - who were zeroing in.

"I said, `They know what they're doing,' ' Lowen said, recalling the action last week from his Eugene home. "I remember looking over at one of my (officers), and I kind of saw the fear in his eyes. I'm sure he saw the same look in my eyes."

From campus to combat

Matt Lowen - Churchill High School class of 1996, student body co-president, football player - joined the Army in June 2000 to defend his country's values, plain and simple.

"I definitely don't want to fight to kill," said Lowen, who favors tie-dyed shirts and has more than a passing interest in the Grateful Dead. "I don't take enjoyment out of that. But democracy needs to be protected, and it needs people who believe in it to protect it. And I'm one of those people."

Lowen received his officer's commission in May 2000 through the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Colorado State University. He looks like a soldier - square jaw, blond hair cut close - but is disarmingly polite in a homespun way, ending conversations with a "thank you kindly" or an "okey-dokey."

He recounted his six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan, which ended in late May, with earnestness and humility and recalled some aspects of war - blowing up enemy equipment, for example - with a trace of boyish thrill.

He was a platoon leader at Fort Campbell, Ky., last November when he got the call: As part of the mission to combat terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., he and the men under his command were sent to Afghanistan to participate in Operation Anaconda, which turned out to be the largest ground battle in a military campaign that began last October.

For 18 days in March, about 2,000 soldiers - U.S. as well as Afghan and coalition forces - scoured the landscape at elevations of 8,000 feet to 12,000 feet in a 60- to 70-square-mile area of Paktia province, near the city of Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. Their mission was to capture, kill and disrupt the operations of hundreds of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Lowen had suspected he'd see action - the rumor back in the states was that his battalion would be "first in the hopper to go," he said - yet the cold realization that he was actually going to war caused him a moment of sheer panic.

As the enormous C-17 roared down the runway carrying him to a distant, dangerous world, Lowen went hot and cold, his heart skipped a beat and he lost his breath.

"It just hit me all of a sudden," he said. "I thought, 'Suck it up.' I just kind of swallowed it and put it away and said I'll deal with it later.

"I never felt that panic again."

A beautiful, harsh land

Even in war, the beauty of Afghanistan has mesmerized American military forces, and Lowen was no exception.

Set against the bluest skies imaginable, the towering, snowcapped Hindu Kush mountains and its branches rise 25,000 feet along the eastern border with Pakistan. Lowen likened them to the Rockies, rugged and imposing, and said he misses them.

The climate was a different matter, subjecting soldiers to temperatures that ran the full range of a thermometer. In Pakistan, it rose to 127 degrees - "It felt like a blow-dryer in your face," Lowen said.

For much of Operation Anaconda, however, Lowen and his men were above 9,000 feet in the mountains, with snow on the ground and temperatures in the teens.

Army-issue boots were no match for the weather. Lowen's toes were numb for weeks after the mission and he watched fellow soldiers tumble over after sitting too long, then trying to stand. "Your feet felt like blocks of ice," he said.

His encounters with civilian Afghanis occurred in the north, where he was met only with curiosity, never hostility, he said. He assumed that was because people there generally opposed the Taliban rulers and wouldn't protest the United States toppling their government.

As the soldiers passed through villages, children bunched around them, begging for pens and paper. When the soldiers asked them, "Where's Osama? Where's Osama?" they smiled and pointed to the mountains.

At one point, Lowen was approached by a teen-age boy who spoke English and said he'd been beaten by Taliban officials for shaving off his beard. The teen reported that Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathizers at another village had tried to drum up support for an attack on the Americans.

Lowen couldn't confirm the account but he took note of the conclusion: When the enemy sympathizers called for followers, the teen told Lowen, "none of the younger kids wanted to go."

Going `up the stairs'

For 10 days in April, Lowen and his men hiked grueling miles up and down mountainous ridges, searching out and destroying enemy caves.

There were close to 100 in the area, and the soldiers had to pick and choose which to scour. Some caves were merely crawl spaces; others were elaborately constructed with tall ceilings, running water, jail cells and prayer areas.

The soldiers feared that the caves might be booby-trapped. To find the gossamer-thin trip wires, they used pressurized cans of Silly String, a children's party favor, shooting the lightweight material down corridors and around corners, hoping it might drape over a wire without tripping it.

Hundreds of enemy soldiers were killed during Operation Anaconda, but it was also the single deadliest military action for U.S. forces serving in and around Afghanistan, accounting for eight of the 37 who have been killed since fighting began, according to the Department of Defense.

And while there were combat-related injuries in Lowen's division - the 101st Airborne, consisting of about 3,700 soldiers - no one died, a fact Lowen attributes to the quality of their training.

As the mortar shells exploded around him during the March 4 attack, Lowen recalled the last words he'd been told before being sent off to war.

A lieutenant colonel noted that in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, "those firefighters were going up the stairs, not down the stairs, when that building came down. Just remember that when you feel afraid."

The soldiers used their radios to report their situation and dug in. A sergeant major strode boldly up from another position, blatantly disregarding the shells exploding behind him. His cockiness was an inspiration, Lowen said, a real-life version of Robert Duvall's character in "Apocalypse Now."

Minutes later, Lowen saw their salvation: a B-52 bomber, so far away at first that it was just a vapor trail, broke its flight pattern over a distant area and started heading their way.

The ground shook as the Air Force dropped 500-pound bombs on the village and along a ridge from where the mortars had been set up.

"After the first bombs in the village," Lowen said, "they basically ceased firing."

A warm welcome home

Lowen returned to a warm welcome in a hometown known for having diverse opinions on controversial issues, such as war.

On the October day the bombing began in Afghanistan, for example, peace advocates responded by rallying outside the University of Oregon.

But Lowen, who lives with his wife, Emily, in Clarksville, Tenn., was greeted only with relief and appreciation by members of the local community during his visit last week to see family members.

His service abroad was followed closely at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, which his family attends. When Lowen was introduced a week ago today during a morning service, it electrified the typically reserved parishioners.

"The whole congregation just burst into applause," the Rev. Nancy Muhlheim said. "There had been a lot of breath-holding and much prayer that he would be returned safely. It was a collective celebration of joy and relief, and it was also a statement of patriotism. It was a 'Thank God that you did what you needed to do, and you're back safely.' '

Similarly, no one in Lowen's family - father Rick, mother Marla and younger brother Adam - has encountered any anti-war sentiment in Eugene, which Rick attributed to the circumstances of the conflict.

"Had it not been an actual attack on American soil," Rick said, "you definitely would have had a much different reaction."

Adam, 22, said in the family's circle of friends, "Everybody's proud a little bit, to say they knew a soldier."

War seems scarcely to have affected that soldier.

Lowen returns to Fort Campbell this week, where he will serve as executive officer in his battalion through the end of his tour of duty in 2004.

He talks fondly of the simple, bucolic way of life he saw in Afghanistan, and said he hopes to return there one day as a State Department ambassador.

He doesn't dwell on the loss of life he saw there. He has unsettling photographs of slain enemies, but he never saw one die by his hand, and he draws resolve from his faith and from the oath that he took to defend his country.

He dreams, sometimes, of airplanes dropping bombs but said it's not traumatic. And he would go back to war today if it were asked of him.

"When I first came to the Army, I said, 'Violence is wrong,' ' Lowen said. "Well, violence is wrong. But sometimes you've got to act on the part of the greater good.

"If we hadn't taken away the al-Qaeda infrastructure, they would still be the same functioning terrorist organization. If we hadn't done what we'd done, many more people would have been killed or injured."

CAPTION(S):

Soldiers in Matt Lowen's platoon are silhouetted against the opening to a cave used by al-Qaeda forces near Khost, Afghanistan. Knight-Ridder Tribune News "When I first came to the Army, I said, 'Violence is wrong.' Well, violence is wrong. But sometimes you've got to act on the part of the greater good.' 1ST LT. MATT LOWEN platoon leader