Charlie Mike

by Joe Klein

  Mike would receive the daily U.S. casualty reports—two killed in action in Kandahar, three wounded in action in Helmand—but they were abstractions, and he didn’t think about them. He was far more obsessed with the bad guys. He had pictures of them, in most cases; he had compiled thick dossiers on them, their movements, their families, their residences. He felt he knew the Al Qaeda networks cold; he was so caught up in Mondo Mike and special ops that he lost track of which conventional U.S. units were where, with one exception. He knew that the 173rd Airborne was operating in Paktika, and one day there was a report of two killed in action, members of the 173rd Airborne . . . and he wondered. Mike had interrogated prisoners who were members of an IED cell operating in Paktika; they turned out to be part of the group that had laid the IED that killed the soldiers from the 173rd. Mike had known that the rest of the group was still out there. He had felt almost confident enough to put together a contingency operation for special ops troops to hit the members of the cell who were still at large. He had their homes, their schematics . . . but not quite enough.

  Then Georgia called. “You heard, right?” she asked.

  “Heard what?”

  “About Dante.”

  Fuck. No.

  “He was killed in an explosion”—an IED explosion, the IED explosion in Paktika. Mike had killed Dante. It was the only way he could think about it. He had absolutely been responsible for his best friend’s death.

  After that, every KIA had Dante’s face. Mike felt responsible for all of them. Each time someone was killed or wounded, Mike would go through the “if only I had” stations of the cross. He rarely left his work area, rarely ate, rarely slept—finding the bad guys was now a 24/7 operation. Later, he would realize that he had gone off the deep end and probably should have checked himself into sick bay and sought counseling. Instead, the excellent, if insane, quality of his work put him in line for the offer to go to Iraq with the private contractor who dare-not-be-named. He would have access to a lot more assets, and he could be a lot more effective than he’d been in Afghanistan and prevent a lot more American deaths, and he leaped for it.

  The fact that Mike met Eric Greitens in Balad helped a lot. Eric was an anchor; his sanity and friendship kept Mike from flying off too far. But Mike figured that he wasn’t going to have access to the LT for very long. Eric was like a lion in a shoebox, Mike thought, desperate to get downrange, see real action, test himself. Eric pushed himself physically far beyond anything Mike had seen before; he pushed so hard running a treadmill one day that he broke it. (Eric would win the Fallujah marathon that year—an event that took place within FOB Fallujah, in which the runners were given maps that included bomb shelters in case there was a rocket attack.)

  And so Mike wasn’t surprised when Eric went downrange to lead an Al Qaeda targeting cell in Fallujah. He was pretty much alone then. He had become a necessary piece of the machine, and he was respected, sort of. But he hadn’t trained with any of the guys in his secret intel unit—Mike believed you couldn’t really know a guy unless you’d trained with him—and they were pleasant and smart enough, but they weren’t brothers.

  He did have one friend, a prisoner. We’ll call him Hamid. He knew Mike as “Stanley,” which was Pereira’s nom d’intel. He was a lot like Mike, same age, a nerdy, introverted ectomorph. He was a jacked-up Al Qaeda communications expert. He’d built the laptop for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that was traced by American intel and led to Zarqawi’s death. Hamid was from Kuwait, the younger brother of a major Al Qaeda leader. He was working in an electronics store in Syria while doing his secret work, and his parents were on his case: Why couldn’t he be a fighter, a martyr for God, like his brother? The family had connections to Zarqawi, and Hamid eventually agreed to go to Iraq to be part of Zarqawi’s team. He was caught up almost immediately in the battle of Fallujah—which terrified him. “All I could do was cry,” he told Mike. “They wanted me to drive a suicide car. I drove it a little ways and then jumped out and ran to another village, where I knew some of my brother’s friends were.”

  Having demonstrated a distinct inability to be a martyr for God, Hamid was put in charge of the Al Qaeda websites and chat rooms, which were sometimes used to send instructions for terrorist missions. He was captured on the “Night of a Thousand Daggers,” when forty-eight different high-value targets were taken by American special forces, one of the most effective operations of the Iraq War. Mike was not the first person to interrogate Hamid, and he didn’t want to be the last: when a prisoner was deemed no longer useful, he was turned over to the Iraqi judicial system, which was usually a death sentence.

  Hamid had two wives and a kid. He spoke excellent English and had a sense of humor. Mike loved the guy but didn’t trust him entirely. He was, after all, Al Qaeda.

  Mike’s world began to crater in late March 2007, when he heard that Eric had been blown up in the chlorine bomb in Fallujah. It was a huge bomb, and Mike assumed the worst. He was shattered—everyone he’d really cared about seemed to die. When the casualty reports came in, Mike exhaled—Eric wasn’t seriously wounded—but the anxiety lingered, even after he actually saw Greitens one last time, on the flight line at Balad. Eric was on his way home, and he was humble about the bomb; he just said that it had been tough and that a close friend had been badly hurt, but he was fine. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “And keep in touch. Let me know when you get back home.”

  When you get back home . . .

  Okay, it was time to think about that. Georgia certainly thought it was well past time. But . . . home—nothing good had ever happened for him back home. And yet: He was a private contractor. He had about $100,000 in savings. All he had to do was walk into the office, sign a few papers, and he’d be out of there.

  Three days after he said good-bye to Eric, the special operators asked him to come on a field operation with Hamid. They were going to Ramadi, where Hamid was supposed to identify a target. When they got there, Hamid couldn’t, or wouldn’t, identify the guy—and the special ops guys took him away and beat the crap out of him, breaking his nose and jaw. They put him in the back of a flatbed truck with a bag over his head. He was sobbing quietly. “Stanley,” he whispered. “Stanley, are you here?”

  “Yes, right here.”

  “Will you hold my hand?” Fuck it, Mike thought. He held Hamid’s hand.

  They were piled onto a dual-rotor Chinook, the primary troop- and load-carrying military helicopter. They were dragging a sling-load of supplies to the town of al-Assad. But the load was too heavy for the chopper, which strained to get off the ground and then began to falter and groan when it was aloft. Mike could hear the Chinook’s crazy wheezing, and then he could see the engine on the other side of the bird was on fire. And they were going down.

  People were screaming. He could smell them pissing and shitting their pants. He was pushed up against the bulkhead. He was going to be crushed to death. “Please, God,” he prayed. “Please, God, let me live to see another morning.”

  Somehow, everyone lived. The pilots crash-landed the Chinook, and people were wounded, but everybody lived. Mike rolled out onto flat land and just stared at the stars. He had prayed to God, and he’d been allowed to see another morning—but how weird was that? How weird was praying? Was it really God who had spared him or the brilliant helicopter pilots? He had lived with God for a long time and never questioned Him. But now—and Mike realized that this was so him, so perverse—a prayer had been answered, and Mike had lost faith.

  And then there was Hamid. He’d been fooling himself about that, too. Sooner or later, Hamid was going to have to be remanded into the Iraqi judicial system. He would undoubtedly be hanged. There was no way around that. And there was no way around the fact that Hamid’s fate was Mike’s responsibility. He was the interrogator who knew him best—but, when it came right down to it, how well did he really know Hamid? And could he put his affection for the computer geek ahead of the safety of American troops like Dante Cannelli?
/>   He signed Hamid over to the Iraqis, and then he went to the contractors’ office and signed himself out. “I’m done,” he told them.

  He was very much done. Everything had died in the chopper. God was dead. His friends kept dying. He had signed Hamid’s death warrant. His life was over.

  He tried school at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham. It was said to be a good school, a feeder for the University of Washington, but Mike lasted only a few weeks. He took a political science class, and they were discussing Iraq. A girl said, “I don’t know what we’re doing there, aside from raping women and killing babies.” Mike held his fire, but then they showed a film about the war that had a scene of burning bodies and . . . Mike was back in the Intensive Care Unit at Bagram, interrogating severely burned detainees. The greasy smell of cooked flesh was in his nose, and he simply got up and walked out of the class.

  He had rented—this was really weird, when he thought about it—his old house from his parents, who had gotten back together and moved to a newer place. It was a small three-bedroom set on three acres, with a red barn that his dad had used as a mechanic’s shed and a yard that was still filled with wrecked cars. He settled in very deeply with his memories. He played Rainbow Six nonstop on Xbox with a couple of Albanians in New York. He pushed Georgia away. She didn’t want to leave, but he told her that she had to—and she went back to Italy. That was August 2007.

  Trash and pizza boxes and empty bottles piled up around the house. He felt a near physical craving for the order of military life, for his guys, for the way things had been in Germany. He would haunt the local Army recruiting station, not to re-up, just to talk; the soldiers there began to think he was nuts. He put an ad on craigslist, seeking other veterans to talk to. No one responded.

  One night, alone in his mess, Mike pulled out his 9mm Smith & Wesson pistol. He put a bullet in the chamber and put the barrel in his mouth. He figured his life had more value as a statistic. The pain of living every day like this was excruciating. He put his finger on the trigger—and . . . he began to think: Dad had a really fucked-up life, but he made it through somehow—was he really that much more fucked up than Doc Pereira? And if he took the gun out of his mouth right now, he might be of service to others—you didn’t have to commit suicide, no matter how fierce the pain. And then he thought about Eric Greitens: he had believed in Mike. And what if Eric was right, that Mike could be not just a person of value, but a leader? Leadership seemed implausible—he couldn’t even lead himself at that point—but becoming a person of value was within range, even if he wasn’t quite sure how to get there. He took the gun out of his mouth. He kept the bullet.

  Before she left for Italy, Georgia had sent out an all-points bulletin that Mike was really in a lot of trouble. She went to the authorities at Whatcom Community College and told them; she went to the Student Veterans Club. And about a month after Mike took the gun out of his mouth, there was a knock on the door—Tim Nelson, the president of the Veterans Club at Whatcom. Tim was a Marine, a force of nature, the perfect opposite of lugubrious, and lugubrious was where Mike still was. They started to talk. Tim had done three tours in Iraq. They talked about the military; they were both proud to have served, but their pride didn’t match with the mortal suck of the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, the friends they’d lost—and for what? Tim didn’t mention the utter squalor of Mike’s place until near the end. “So, Mike, you’re so proud of being an NCO [a noncommissioned officer, a Sergeant],” he said. “How come you’re living like a Private?”

  Mike cleaned up the house. Then he went back to school, and it was sort of like being in the military again. He didn’t go back to school just for himself; he did it for Tim. And for the first time, he took it seriously: he aced every class. Every day, he could feel it—moving away from the squalor and depression, moving toward peace. He went to counseling at the VA. He moved out of his parents’ house into an apartment. Georgia came back in the spring of 2008. She wanted to go to school at Whatcom and become an accountant. “I’ll let you stay here for ten days, and then you’ve got to leave,” he told her. Ten days later, he desperately didn’t want her to leave, and they were back together.

  Mike became active in the Veterans Club with Tim Nelson, and over time, it turned out that Tim needed Mike as much as Mike had needed Tim. He would show up at Mike and Georgia’s house in the middle of the night, crying, unable to sleep. Mike would take him to Denny’s for an early breakfast and let him talk it out. There were a thousand signs that Tim was in deep trouble, but Mike couldn’t process that: Tim was his superior officer, his Eric. Tim had been trained in suicide prevention; he had taught Mike how to keep the gun out of his mouth.

  Tim took a shotgun and blew his face off in July 2008. Mike had to hold up Tim’s father at the funeral; the old man kept collapsing. Mike was collapsing inside, too—another Sky Soldier down—but this time, Mike was holding it together, in part because the other Whatcom veterans were looking to him for leadership. Tim’s wife had taken their daughter to her home in Spokane, and so it fell to Mike and his fellow veterans to clean up the mess, wash the walls, and pack up all of Tim’s things. Mike wasn’t sure he was ready for leadership; he wasn’t sure he was going to hold it together; he was back to dark as the reality of Tim’s death settled in.

  That was when Mike googled Eric Greitens, looking for advice. He was impressed by The Mission Continues website. There were video links to speeches Eric had given. Mike had never thought about the notion of community service as a means to reenter civilian life before. He really wanted to talk to Eric about it—he really wanted to become a Mission Continues fellow—but he couldn’t just cold-call him. He had to do something that would impress Eric first.

  Mike looked for a local program that encouraged veterans to serve in their community, but he couldn’t find any. There was one program that was targeted for convicts. “If they take convicts,” he told the guys in the Veterans Club, “maybe they’ll take veterans.”

  He met with Allie Hoover, the woman who ran the program for convicts. “We’d love to have you guys,” she said. “What do you want to do?”

  “Anything,” Mike said. “Give us the things no one else wants to do.”

  “You’ve GOT it,” Allie said.

  And they were in business, scrubbing mold in basements, cleaning roofs, helping the elderly and the disabled and those who were dying of cancer. Mike’s group grew from three veterans to thirty during the course of the year. They focused on helping the disabled and those who were ill. By the spring of 2009, they were helping six hundred people—doing chores, cleaning and shopping for them, taking them to doctor’s appointments, keeping them company.

  Finally, he was ready to send a letter—a nine-page, single-spaced letter—to Eric Greitens, asking to become a Mission Continues fellow. “Sir, you may not remember me,” he began. Eric laughed when he read that: How could you not remember Mike Pereira? “You’ve really got something here,” Mike wrote. “I’ve seen how service changes lives. It saved my life.”

  Eric invited Mike and Georgia to come to St. Louis for dinner. He was impressed, once again, by Mike’s acuity, but even more by his story: he had created his own Mission Continues fellowship and lived it without the stipend. Eric continued to think about Mike after he and Georgia returned to Bellingham. The Mission Continues was now almost two years old, and it was beginning to grow exponentially. There were now thirty-two Mission Continues fellows, past and present. But there was no one to keep up with the fellows, really keep up with them, to help them through the rough spots and challenge them if they weren’t meeting their service obligations. He was interviewing people to become Fellowship Director, and he realized the best interview he’d had was dinner with Mike.

  He called Mike and said, “Hey, Mike, I’ve been thinking about something. You’ve already done the equivalent of a Mission Continues fellowship. In fact, you’ve done more than that. You’ve organized veterans, and led them, and helped them through th
e tough times. I need someone to do that here. Would you be willing to come to St. Louis with Georgia and become my Fellowship Director?”

  “Are you kidding?” Mike asked. Eric said he wasn’t, and the job would pay $30,000 a year.

  “Of course I’ll come,” Mike said.

  “One other condition,” Eric added. “You’ve got to promise me that you’re going to go back to school and graduate from a four-year college. I don’t think the job I’m offering you scratches the surface of your potential.”

  For the second time in his life, Mike Pereira felt he’d been recruited into heaven.

  Chapter 4

  LIVING THE HERBALIFE

  Clay Hunt smiled, and that was it for Robin Becker. They were in a bar in Huntington Beach. Clay was there with friends; Robin was there with friends. They were in a group, sitting around a table. The club was well beyond noisy, full house in full plumage. The guys were ripped; the women, paragons of breezy tan. Later, they’d go out and play beach volleyball. You’ve seen this in beer ads.

  And it all seemed the primal usual: joking, teasing, pheromones, grenade bursts of too-loud laughter. Everyone entirely aware of everyone else’s performance art. But Clay’s smile seemed to exist on a different level of reality—or rather, in reality, rather than preen and display. He was actually looking at her, saying a hundred knowing things about where they were, without saying a word.

  The next day, they walked the beach and talked about war and friends and family. He was sensitive without seeming gooey, a safe kind of sensitive. He wouldn’t hurt her. They talked about doing stuff together—surfing, hiking, biking, just hanging out. They both enjoyed outdoor stuff. He was stationed out at 29 Palms, and soon he would be deploying to Iraq for the first time. He put his hand on the small of her back, guiding her up through the dunes.