The herders didn’t keep their secret. The result of that vote of conscience and rule was one of the largest losses of life in the Afghanistan campaign and in Special Operations Forces history. A lieutenant and three petty officers: this was the scope of their brigade. Estimates of the enemy contingent that arrived to take them down: around two hundred. All sixteen men on the quick reaction force copter died; rocket-propelled grenade. The one survivor on the ground was taken in by a Pashtun villager. The villager saved his life.
“I was here for the—one of the—memorial services,” the CO says. “I know you’ve seen your share.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very moving. Very intense.”
“Yes, sir.”
“This community went almost three decades without waves of memorials. Are we any better at processing loss now than we were then?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think about that a lot. Did I ever show you this?”
And explaining that one of the eulogists that day had told the story of King Leonidas of Sparta, and about how the king had selected his troops for their celebrated battle, he pulls a piece of paper from his desk and asks Jason to read it:
Leonidas, the Spartan King, hand-picked and led a force to go on what all knew to be a one-way mission. He selected three hundred men to stand against an invading Persian force of over two million. Most of us know this story. But most of us don’t know how Leonidas selected those three hundred men. Should he take the older, seasoned warriors who have lived a full life? Should he take the young lions that felt they were invincible? Should he take the battle-hardened, backbone-proven warrior elites in their prime? Or should he sacrifice his Olympic champions? The force he chose would reflect every demographic of the Spartan Warrior class. Why? Because he selected those who would go based on the strength of the women in their lives. After such great loss, he reasoned, if the women faltered in their commitment, Sparta would fall. The rest of Greece would think it useless to stand against the Persian invaders. The democratic flame that started there would be extinguished.
And as he places the piece of paper back down on the desk, Jason thinks, This is his version of an artful segue.
Was that piece of paper waiting for Jason’s arrival, and for this meeting? Maybe this had all been prepared as neatly as a mission briefing, because perhaps this was the talk with which the CO would remind Jason why he does what he does. He knows the young officer is at an inflection point in his Team tenure, and he knows he might lose him if he doesn’t make the sale for him to stay. The art of any sale is to make it look like your goods are precious. The art of the sale in the military is to reinforce the mythology of valor and justice and history.
From the CO’s perspective, he simply wants Jason to know he has a future in the Teams. He wants to know how the young officer is doing. And he wants to gauge his taste for change. Like a father gently grilling a daughter’s eligible date, he wants to learn as well as teach. It’s not a lecture. It’s not an ambush. And it’s not quite a confessional. It’s an exchange. Jason obliges.
“Are you happy?” his CO asks.
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you learning?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Happiness plus learning equals growth.” And he thinks about that for a minute before asking, “Is that the right math?”
“Well, what doesn’t kill us certainly makes us stronger.”
“This is true. I know you’ve been in some tough situations.”
“We’ve been busy.”
“Any plans to start a family?”
“One day.”
Jason stays confident (as he knows he should) but vague (as he knows he must), by the latter leaving open the option that his attitude will be interpreted as rational but flexible. He hasn’t mentioned the set of grad school applications he has stacked on his desk—or the girl asleep in his bed.
The CO talks for a while about when he was Jason’s age. He talks about the importance of a stable personal life and about the importance of choosing the right person to share a life with—any life, but “particularly this one.” He tells Jason how he made it through BUD/S, how it all came down to a vision of his future. He tells him about the moment he almost quit, during Rock Portage. RP is considered one of the tougher evolutions because it is one of the most frightening. It’s the essence of the S, for sea; it’s docking on rocks at night.
He tells Jason how he remembered that “right at that moment, right up on those rocks, with my life passing before my eyes, all I could think was, well, my father had five daughters, and my brother has five daughters, and one day I’ll marry and I’ll quite likely have daughters. And one day those daughters will bring home boys. And they can bring those boys home either to a father who was almost a Team guy or to a father who is a Team guy. And that was it. After that, quitting never crossed my mind.”
“Have they brought home any boys yet?” Jason asks. He knows the CO has daughters.
“They have.”
“And?”
“And exactly what you think ‘and.’ What was your moment, lieutenant?”
“My moment?”
“You ever think about quitting?”
“No. I guess I never had that moment.”
“Impressive.”
“I was probably too cold to think straight. Definitely too cold to think about …”
“Think about?”
“Think about … goals.”
Check.
The CO leans forward.
“And what are your goals?”
“Sir, my only goal is to make it to tomorrow.”
“In the Teams?”
Checkmate.
And Jason says, “As of today, yes.”
And the CO closes his eyes, opens them, and raises an eyebrow. “Is that a new tattoo?”
“It is,” Jason says. Even he concedes it’s extreme, and he’s not quite sure why he got it, but now it’s part of who he is—the quite literally indelible inkings of war. He knows the older guys don’t understand. They think his generation is too competitive, too ambitious, too needy for immediate success. The ink’s emblematic of that. The ink’s a proxy for emotion, maybe. Or a proxy for stars on one’s shoulders. It says, I was there. I was in it. He’d thought about Kipling when he got it; he’d thought about getting it on his back but had opted for his forearm instead, a decision he’s deeply regretting in this moment.
“Also impressive,” says the CO.
Jason rolls down his sleeve, a rare moment of self-consciousness. “A bit silly, I guess.”
“Sign of the times. Things change.”
“When you—”
“When I came through, there were two billets to BUD/S, Jason. Two. No Mini-BUD/S, no pretraining courses. Guys worth their weight wanted to be pilots, not frogmen. What they told us about special warfare was that the guys had to take daily breaks for sun tanning. They had to take breaks to tan so they wouldn’t burn in the middle of a mission. Sailors sunning themselves on the Strand: that was the rumor about life in the Teams. No one had a clue what this community was capable of.”
“Now they have one,” Jason says quietly.
“They do,” the CO says loudly, and laughs, spinning his chair to consider a map on his wall. The map had tiny pins placed in areas of interest. “We’re at the crest of a wave here. You know what the crest of a wave feels like?”
“I can imagine.”
“You surf?” And he moves his hand—as Jason had seen Sam do countless times—to fold his fingers in the shape of a wave—the perfect wave. At the end of the fold, his fingers close into a fist.
“I’d like to learn.”
“The crest is when you’re riding on the top. Obviously. The crest is when you’re coming near the peak but with the knowledge that after the peak there comes the challenge of how to ride down the other side. And we’ve been on the other side. There was a time when Special Operations Forces weren’t considered central.”
/>
“Sir.”
“It was an army world. We were—we were a bit like the relief pitchers. Or some might say, we were a bit like the magic show.”
“Magic show?”
“You can’t afford a magic show when economics are tight; magic shows are the first things to go. You give your kids cake and ice cream at the party, and not one of them will ask, ‘Hey, where’s the magician?’ Only one day you realize, hey, cake makes me fat. I can learn from a magician. He can do some neat things. Maybe I reallocate my strategic interests to ensure we always have a magician on hand.”
The choice of metaphor makes Jason smile. The CO keeps talking.
“When I came in, op tempo was low. It was the end of the Cold War. The Greatest Generation saved the world, and then the Vietnam generation almost threw it wide open again. We trusted that Greatest Generation. And they trusted us. Then nobody trusted anybody. Lindsay said that there would be ‘a more violent peace.’ General Lindsay.”
“A more violent peace.”
“A more violent peace. Sometimes I think we’re preaching a more peaceful violence.”
“What makes a peace violent?” Jason asks after a while.
“Ah: now there’s a ‘known unknown.’ ”
“We’re not at peace.”
“Well, there’s no Terrorism Treaty of Versailles happening anytime or anywhere as far as I can see.”
Jason’s mind began to wander. His mother had a book on Versailles; she’d been there. The CO kept talking.
“In 1966 the CO of the UDTs was a lieutenant commander. Our CO now is a four-star admiral. We have ten admirals now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We need guys like you, Jason.”
“That’s kind of you to say.”
“I know you lost your dad when you were little. And I know you have no siblings.”
“That’s—”
“And I know your guys love you.”
“Thank you.”
The CO closes the computer and stands up, so Jason stands up. The CO folds the piece of paper with the eulogy and hands it to him. “Some guy came in here the other day and asked me to bet him on a match-up between one of our platoons and a platoon in Vietnam,” he says.
“Not sure I would take that bet.” Jason puts the paper in his pocket.
“ ‘There is no bet.’ That’s what he said. And then he said, ‘Your guys would eliminate them before they even got out of the boat. It’s not because you’re smarter than they were. Or faster. They were smart and fast and tough, and they grew up a lot less coddled than you. That war was as brutal as these. But you’d still kill every one of them before they got out of their boat for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with character or strength: you’d kill them before they got out of the boat because you carry better guns.’ ”
“Technology.”
“Progress. Progress is the word he used.”
“Was he a vet?”
“Progress is the game changer. And politics creates an environment that’s either receptive to or destructive of technological change. And geopolitics defines the need for those new technologies. Technology. Politics. Geopolitics. The Global Want Monster.”
“Did he say all that?”
“I’m saying it. There is no more room for rogues in the Teams, Jason. We need leaders. You can be a warrior for only so long, and then you’ll need weapons fit to serve you well on other fields. Weapons like diplomatic instinct. Political acumen.” He taps a finger to his temple.
“Does that mean I have to get a Ph.D.?” Jason asks. They laugh.
“It means you have to make choices to show you understand the challenges. ‘Irregular warfare is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.’ ”
“T. E. Lawrence.”
“I thought you’d like that one.”
Jason had ordered Seven Pillars of Wisdom off of Amazon months ago, after the CO had recommended it. He learned from Lawrence that knowledge of a people and place are not irrelevant. But he knew that already. Wasn’t that why the younger guys were now adding Arabic to their training? But hearts and minds weren’t within the classic wheelhouse of Naval Special Warfare. “Learning Arabic is opening a door into an empty room,” his troop commander told him, out on his first op. “That’s for Special Forces. You won’t be needing to talk quite as much as they do.” He considered the T. E. Lawrence story quaint, in its way. There is no Arabia now, full stop. Lawrence wrote his Jesus College thesis on Syrian Crusader castles. He approached battle like a philosopher. He approached it like a humanitarian.
As he leaves his CO’s office, Jason stops at the door. “Sir?”
And without looking up from his desk, the CO says, “Yes, you might be eligible for screening.” Dam Neck. “Was that the question?”
“The question is, if a mission isn’t worth risking lives, what’s the worth of the mission?”
And the meaning of the conversation is understood by both men. As Jason heads into the hall, the CO calls out after him.
“Yes, he was a vet.”
And Jason turns, raises the untattooed arm, and gives the other officer a gentle salute.
*
Four deployments, and how many missions? The number of missions depended on a constellation of factors beyond the control of even the savviest four-star. It was weather, for example. In winter, there’s less fighting in Afghanistan. It was length of deployment. It was area of operations. It was period of conflict (start versus surge). It was battle space owner. One deployment could include thirty missions or one hundred. And the size and scope of each depended. But all the guys who had been out over these past years had seen enough to lose the view that the world could be converted to good—or to peace—permanently. The world could be policed, perhaps, but the taste for bloodshed was alive and well in places most Americans will never go. Some of the things he has seen he has willfully forgotten. Some of the things he has seen he can never forget.
In Afghanistan, his platoon’s sniper lost an ear. Jason was standing about three feet away from him when it happened, and for months that moment would play over and over and over in his mind. They were working an overwatch for a group of Marines. Things had quieted down significantly in this particular part of this town; that could change at any minute but the mood—for the moment—was verging on boredom. Their job was to watch the street.
The guy was younger than Jason, married with three sons. He was quickly becoming one of the finest shooters in the Teams. That had been his dream, apparently, since he was a boy, even though he grew up in a place nowhere near a gun range, in a family that had no guns. The practice fit his temperament. He was precise. He was patient. Jason was certain his veins ran half blood, half ice water because nothing ever shook him. He was capable of waiting for hours or days in order to get the perfect shot, sometimes losing as much as eight or nine pounds simply from the pressure of the watch. Stillness, it turns out, is an athletic experience.
On that day, the two of them had been sent into a house in a city that was much in the news back home, a city Jason hoped his mother never noticed in the papers in connection with the phrase “Special Operations Forces.” The job was very basic: the Marines cleared the streets; NSW was there in case of a problem. And they worked well with those guys; they’d come to know them at the base, and there was mutual respect. But the Marines had become careless. Ironically, they’d become careless because of their increased confidence in the sniper’s skills and, more broadly, because of their confidence in the fact that they were being covered by guys they knew would never let them down. It was the “pool fence” problem, one with which any mother is familiar: confidence in visible protection elevates the probability of defeat. When two of the soldiers walked into—rather than ran through—the square below where Jason and his sniper sat, shots rang out. By the time the shooter located the origin of the bullets, the originator of those bullets had located him, and Jason felt something graze his plate at almost the exact same secon
d something flew (or at least looked as though it flew) right under the shooter’s helmet. The young father lowered his weapon slowly and said, “I think I’ve been hit.” And when he turned to look at Jason, his face was covered in blood.
Jason went to see him in the base hospital afterward. Both his eyes were bandaged. The doctors had told him he would regain full vision in one, but that the other would be chronically compromised and near-blind; it had been compromised due to the wound and the necessary attendant operations. It was the end of his career as a sniper.
“Hey,” said Jason.
“Shine a light,” said the sniper weakly. It was a reference to a song they both liked. Jason looked at him and felt a wave of nausea. And guilt. The doctors had said it might be wise to walk his friend around the floor, for circulation.
“Up for a walk?”
“Nah, too slow. Let’s hike up the Hindu Kush, take a picnic. I think my future holds a lot of fucking picnics.”
“What’s wrong with fucking picnics?”
The doctors said it was a miracle. They said the shot certainly could have killed him or—a better but still close-to-worst case—left him brain-dead. But the shot had taken out the operator’s prized possession, his talent; the silver lining that he would see again was one he would only be willing to accept, over time, as God’s grace.
“Do you think …” the sniper started, turning his head away.
“Do I think what.”
Eleven Days Page 13
