American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  Jim passed the Special Forces selection—which as many as 50 percent of candidates fail—the first time through in 1988. In the Darwinian training that followed, he was one of the youngest in his group and was repeatedly injured, but he held on to earn his Green Beret. He served as a communications sergeant in the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War and received training as an intelligence analyst. In 1996 he was commissioned as an Army infantry second lieutenant. He received superlative evaluations from officers above him and in 2001 returned to Special Forces as a captain.

  Then came the long wars—deployments to Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, and Iraq in 2006 and 2007—and with them multiple awards for valor:

  17 June 2003. Army Commendation Medal for valor. Captain James K. Gant, United States Army, displayed exceptional courage under fire while serving as the Detachment Commander for Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 316 during a double ambush in the Pech valley, Konar Province, Afghanistan.

  Konar . . .

  Jim grew up in New Mexico, but he believed he wasn’t born until he landed in Konar. He and the six other men on his Special Forces team came of age in 2003 battling insurgent ambushes and conducting raids in the harrowing mountain passes of the Afghan province bordering Pakistan.

  They used to swim naked in the Konar River, which was fed by melting glaciers in the Hindu Kush and coursed through a narrow valley bordered by sparse wheat fields. Huddled around fires under star-strewn skies brushed by the Milky Way, they listened to ethnic Pashtun tribesmen talk of the local ways of warfare and raiding and the honor they bestowed.

  Jim learned to speak basic Pashto, the ancient Indo-Iranian language of some forty million Pashtuns, and developed a deep respect for their tribal code of ethics, Pashtunwali. He abided by the code to forge allies and shame opponents. To empower his allies he gave them guns and access to firepower, the ultimate status symbol for Pashtuns. The Pashtun tribes—traditional communities united by cultural, economic, and blood ties—dominated Afghan society. Pashtuns are honor-bound to show hospitality, or melmastia, to whoever comes into their territory needing protection—not only to friends but also to sworn enemies. But the hospitality only went so far. Jim learned which tribe he could trust with his life, and which tribe would invite him and his men to a midday meal, only to ambush them on the road out. Among Jim’s most fearsome opponents were the tribesmen of Konar’s Korengal valley, where dozens of Americans would later perish fighting.

  Despite the duplicity, there was a mutual admiration between warriors that infused Jim’s relations with even his worst enemies in Konar. “May your life be long, and may big wolves prowl at your door,” went the Pashtun saying, meaning a man’s honor grows with the ferocity of his enemies.

  Afghans in the area referred to Jim’s team as “the bearded ones”—a meaningful name, as many Muslims consider wearing beards a religious obligation—and called him “Commander Jim.” Years later, after the Army transferred Jim to Iraq, the Afghans still remembered him.

  In the sterile Fort Bragg conference room, Jim recalled the night that one of his sergeants swept an infant out of harm’s way during an intense, thirty-second firefight inside a pitch-dark Afghan compound. He felt the exquisite burden and pride of having led men in combat, and wondered if he would ever lead again. And deep down, as he awaited his audience with the commander, he felt just a bit like an imposter. Because he knew his superiors had no idea who he really was. Because screaming in his mind was a demon that never left him: a desire to fight—not for his country, nor for a cause, nor even for his men, but for the pure sake of it. In Iraq, he’d been in combat so intense, so long, that he’d lost himself in it. Images flashed through his head of a Sunni fighter darting through a palm grove, and a military convoy on a deserted, sun-bathed road.

  11 December 2006. Silver Star. Major James K. Gant distinguished himself by exceptional gallantry in combat actions against a determined and aggressive enemy of the United States. . . . MAJ Gant’s masterful leadership and selfless courage under fire directly resulted in saving the lives of his men, a countless number of National Police QRF personnel and four Iraqi civilians, as well as 12 confirmed enemy kills and a much higher number of estimated enemy killed and wounded.

  Just as sectarian bloodletting between Sunni and Shiite Muslims was pushing Iraq to the brink of civil war in the summer of 2006, Jim took over a nine-man U.S. military team advising an Iraqi National Police Quick Reaction Force (QRF) battalion. Attacks on U.S. forces by both Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias were escalating, and American casualties in Iraq were at an all-time high. In late November 2006, the vehicle Jim was riding in was hit by a massive improvised explosive device (IED) and caught on fire, trapping Jim inside. His Iraqi comrades pulled him out. Days later, after a brief hospital stay, Jim returned to the scene of the roadside attack. Using a loudspeaker, he taunted the local Sunni insurgents in an effort to draw them out. They took the bait. Soon afterward, on December 11, they struck again with full force.

  Jim and his U.S. team plus 190 Iraqi police commandos in twenty-three vehicles were headed south from the town of Balad toward Baghdad through an area where insurgents had complete freedom of maneuver. What unfolded was a running gun battle stretched over five miles that required Jim and the patrol to push through three separate kill zones, all the while evacuating severely wounded commandos.

  After the battle, the Iraqi police slaughtered a goat—swiftly slitting its throat in accordance with Islamic law—and covered Jim and his team with bloody crimson handprints to celebrate victory.

  It was almost as good as Konar.

  NOW SITTING IN FORT Bragg, Jim remembered that the Silver Star battle had been three years earlier . . . a lifetime. He knew why he’d been summoned. His career hung in the balance.

  Only days earlier, on October 26, 2009, Jim had rocked the U.S. military establishment by publishing a treatise on why it was destined to lose the war in Afghanistan. In the online paper “One Tribe at a Time,” posted on a website popular in military circles, Jim exposed a gaping hole in U.S. strategy: the failure to systematically engage Afghanistan’s powerful Pashtun tribes. The Pashtuns make up 40 percent of the population—including the majority of the Taliban insurgents—and occupy the volatile east and south. Jim argued that as the tribes go, so goes the rest of the nation. With the Pashtuns behind you, Afghanistan was won.

  By the time Adm. Olson called Jim in, the paper had gone viral at the Pentagon, in the White House, and on Capitol Hill. Then it landed in the New York Times.

  “The United States has killed tens of thousands of ‘insurgents’ in Afghanistan, but we are no closer to victory today than we were in 2002,” Jim wrote.

  Would the military establishment tolerate the criticism? Jim didn’t care anymore. He had watched too many men die; he couldn’t continue to keep quiet. Laying out his on-the-ground experience in black and white was the only honorable thing to do.

  SIX HUNDRED MILES AWAY, Adm. Olson strode into a secure conference room at his MacDill Air Force Base headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Olson wore a crisply pressed uniform but chose not to flaunt the medals he’d earned as the highest-ranking Navy SEAL in U.S. history. Olson was the first SEAL to pin on four stars, and the first to head U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). A meticulous man of few words, Olson studied the disheveled Army major on the screen in front of him. Jim chose to sit in a relaxed posture, seemingly unconcerned that Olson stratospherically outranked him.

  As the debate over Afghan war strategy raged in Washington during the first year of the Obama administration, Olson had quietly staked out a position that was at odds with much of the top military brass commanding the war. The think-tankers lobbied for sending in as many as eighty thousand more conventional ground troops to wage a full-blown campaign of counterinsurgency (COIN) and nation building. In contrast, Olson’s thinking was more closely aligned with that of advocates in the White House—led by Vice President Joseph Biden—who argued for a minimalist counterterrorism (CT) appr
oach. It was a strategy with a lighter footprint that relied more heavily on the small teams of Special Operations Forces under Olson’s command. Ironically, the COIN/CT debate was the perfect storm for Jim. Both sides could embrace his plan as buttressing their opposing strategies. But Jim didn’t care about the debate. He just wanted to give Afghanistan back to the tribes, without shock and awe, corrupt governments, or boots kicking in doors in the middle of the night.

  Afghanistan has long resisted having large numbers of foreign troops on its soil, from Alexander the Great’s Macedonian army to the U.S.S.R., Olson observed. Testifying before a House subcommittee in June 2009, Olson even used a term many U.S. commanders shunned as the “o-word,” noting that the Afghans perceived the U.S. presence as an occupation. Olson was also convinced that the U.S. military’s understanding of Afghan culture—particularly the valley-by-valley, village-by-village distinctions that define Afghanistan’s highly decentralized society—was woefully inadequate. “It’s simply their culture to resist outsiders. . . . Afghanistan will require as small a footprint as we can get away with,” he contended.

  “We have to get beyond generalizations in Afghanistan into true, deep knowledge of tribal relationships, family histories, the nuances of the terrain and the weather and how that affects how business is done,” Olson told the House panel. Only through such a robust understanding, he asserted, could the United States hope, over a long period of time, to convince the Afghans to side with us.

  Olson dubbed this initiative to foster cultural knowledge within the U.S. military “Project Lawrence,” a reference to the World War I British archeologist and military intelligence officer Maj. T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence “went native” and helped lead the 1916–18 Arab revolt against the declining Ottoman Empire, which had been weakened by a revolutionary movement of Young Turks and lost much of its territory in Europe and North Africa. The United States needs “Lawrence of Pakistan, Lawrence of Afghanistan, Lawrence of Colombia, Lawrence of . . . wherever it is,” he said.

  Olson naturally sought to nurture these advanced cultural skills inside the organization where they were already most concentrated, his Special Operations Command, and in particular within the Green Beret community, the segment of the Army that specializes in working with indigenous peoples. So when Jim’s forty-five-page “One Tribe at a Time” landed on Olson’s Tampa desk, laying out a strategy for sending small, handpicked teams of Green Berets to empower and leverage Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes, Olson was intrigued.

  The man who first brought Jim’s paper to Olson’s attention was the admiral’s senior enlisted advisor, Command Sgt. Maj. Thomas Smith, a thirty-one-year veteran of Special Forces. Smith had found the paper fascinating and true to the Green Beret mission he’d long believed in. “Sir, this is exactly what we need to be doing,” Smith told Olson. “We need this going on everywhere in Afghanistan, from tribe to tribe.”

  In the hours prior to the November 2 teleconference, Olson pored over Jim’s military record while tasking Smith to call around and check out his bona fides. Olson had tasted his share of combat. In 1993, before he was named head of SEAL Team Six, the team that would be tasked with killing Osama bin Laden, Olson was assigned to the headquarters of a task force in Mogadishu, Somalia. There, on the video screens of an operations center, Olson watched as a mission that was supposed to last an hour turned into a bloody street fight after two U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopters were shot down. Olson volunteered to be a leader of the rescue force. He put on his body armor, grabbed his M4 carbine, borrowed some night vision goggles, and joined what turned out to be an all-night mission into the zone of the city where the Black Hawk helicopters were surrounded by Somali militia fighters. After the rescue force loaded the dead and wounded onto vehicles and daylight broke, Olson helped lead the battered patrol back through a daunting gauntlet of heavy fire known as the Mogadishu Mile. He was awarded the Silver Star. Because of his experiences there and in other places, Olson wanted to hear from men who had fought with Jim.

  Olson then spoke with his next-door neighbor in Tampa, Gen. David Petraeus, who was in charge of all U.S. military forces in the Middle East and Central Asia as the head of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). Petraeus would later lead all U.S. and other foreign troops in Afghanistan, and afterward direct the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Petraeus, too, had read “One Tribe at a Time” and was so impressed that he forwarded the paper to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the NATO commander in Afghanistan, telling him that it should be required reading for all his subordinates. Petraeus remembered Jim from when they both had served in Iraq in 2007. Petraeus had singled Jim out there for his bravery in combat with the Iraqi police he advised. Although Petraeus’s perspective differed from Olson’s—Petraeus crafted the counterinsurgency doctrine and was its biggest evangelist—he agreed that the ability of officers such as Jim to mobilize indigenous forces was going to be critical to any winning strategy in Afghanistan.

  Smith made a preliminary introduction via teleconference. The admiral remained silent.

  Jim did what came naturally to an aggressive officer—one known to always carry triple the required ammunition for missions—and seized the initiative.

  “Hey, sir, I appreciate you taking time to talk with me. The bottom line is: I will go anyplace and do anything you ask me to.”

  Olson had his Lawrence.

  “Assemble your team. Send me the names of the men you want. Send me your training plan. The time you need to prepare is not important.” Olson paused. There’s an old Taliban saying: you’ve got the watches, but we’ve got the time. “What is important is that when you get on the ground, you do not fail.”

  CHAPTER 3

  ON NOVEMBER 29, 2009, three weeks after Jim got his “Lawrence of Afghanistan” mission, President Barack Obama summoned his top advisors to the Oval Office to give them their marching orders on the war. The meeting came after a protracted debate within the administration over Afghanistan strategy that summer and fall, as advisors grappled with how to fulfill the president’s difficult-to-deliver campaign promises on what pundits had labeled “Obama’s War.”

  Leading up to the Oval Office meeting, Obama and his advisors couldn’t help but be mindful of historical parallels to another conflict: Vietnam.

  Forty years earlier, in March 1969, President Richard Nixon had escalated the Vietnam War by authorizing B-52 Stratofortress sorties armed with thousands of tons of ordnance to carpet-bomb Cambodia. The secret bombing campaign later revealed as Operation Menu, which included missions lightheartedly code-named Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner, was part of Nixon’s covert war in “neutral” Cambodia. It targeted North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong guerrilla bases and sanctuaries in Cambodia and aimed to make good Nixon’s 1968 campaign pledge to “have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.”

  Like Obama, Nixon had inherited a war from a previous administration. The outgoing president, Lyndon Johnson, had not sought nor would have accepted the nomination for another four-year term, primarily because he and the best and the brightest of his advisors could not envision a way to deliver an honorable peace in Vietnam. To attain peace in 1969 would have required U.S. capitulation to communist North Vietnam and its Ho Chi Minh–inspired Viet Cong insurgency in the South. Whichever way you looked at it, Vietnam would be a definite mark in the loss column for the United States’ war record. At the same time, an occupying superpower propping up the repressive government of South Vietnam was the furthest thing from honorable. Concealing disgrace by wrapping it in the ancient warrior code was good rhetoric, but in 1969 the only conceivable honor would come from turning the war around and doing what two previous presidents couldn’t do: beat the insurgency.

  The Nixon administration initially planned to accelerate a program that secretary of defense Melvin Laird called “Vietnamization.” During preparations for Nixon’s promised withdrawal, American soldiers would arm and train the South Vietnamese with the goal of eventually turning over the war
effort to them. The security of South Vietnam would become the responsibility of loyalists of the U.S.-backed president Nguyen Van Thieu, a former general of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). If it could extract itself before the country fell, the United States would be spared “defeat.”

  But with increasing aggression from the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army, the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), just after Nixon’s inauguration, the president felt compelled to respond. He had two unappealing choices. On February 9, 1969, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, Gen. Creighton W. Abrams, submitted a proposal to the White House. Why not bomb Viet Cong and PAVN outposts based across the border in neighboring Cambodia and signal to the enemy that the new guy was just not going to roll over and retreat? Less than two months into his term, Nixon had to decide whether to back his general and intensify bombing in Cambodia, thus expanding the battlespace for a war he’d vowed to quit, or stay the course and prepare for withdrawal while pursuing a truce. For a man who had once lost his composure after being beaten in an election and let loose with “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” the choice he made was perfectly in character.

  Nixon secretly escalated the war and signed off on Operation Menu. The epic domestic and international debacle scarred the nation and cost thousands of Cambodian and Vietnamese lives in the process. By 1975, the United States had not only left Vietnam in dishonor but so destabilized Southeast Asia with its opening of the second front that Cambodia eventually fell to genocidal repressions of a communist North Vietnam offshoot, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. A war fought in the name of halting the domino theory, which holds that if one nation falls to communism, its neighbors will soon follow, ended up causing the very thing it was meant to deter—the expansion of communism.