American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  But the round-the-clock Baghdad raids and extreme hazards for his men only increased the pressure Jim felt to perform. He trained the team harder and worked out more. He spent three or four hours a day between missions poring over intelligence. To protect his men, he tracked and mapped by hand all IEDs, EFPs, sniper attacks, and complex ambushes reported by U.S. Army combat units on a laminated map of Baghdad with his own color-coding system. If the call came at two in the morning to conduct a raid in a neighborhood across Baghdad, Jim knew the best route to take. Every day he studied photographs and reports on all the IEDs found or exploded in Baghdad. Violating military rules, he refused to delay missions for hours to wait for military teams to clear the IEDs he spotted on the route. Instead, he disarmed them himself.

  Again and again he approached the IEDs, knowing the slightest mistake could blow him to pieces. Booby traps, multiple explosives and detonation devices, hidden land mines—the risks and calculations were endless. Whenever he yanked an IED out of the ground, it was as though he was counting off another one of his cat lives.

  The world beyond the war zone faded away as he felt himself losing touch with realities of life outside Iraq. The universe of the people he cared about shrank. He could no longer see the faces of his wife and children or remember what his house in Fayetteville, North Carolina, looked like. Time grew distorted, marked not by calendars and holidays but by missions and the little downtime he had in between. Maybe it was his mind’s way of distancing himself from who he was and what he was doing. He started drinking much more—sometimes as much as a fifth of hard liquor a day. The alcohol made it even harder for him to sleep. He rested fitfully for two or three hours at a time; night and day blurred into one. The onslaught of killing and death collapsed his moral walls. Once in a while between missions, he began frequenting Baghdad whorehouses or sleeping with female soldiers. The only loyalty he felt was to his men. He got into fistfights, rode on the hood of his Humvee, and a few times went on night raids after drinking. Underlying it all was the inescapable fact that he could die any day, that each sip of whiskey could be his last.

  “I sometimes feel like I do not want to wait for death,” he wrote to his father. “I want to go out and find it. I want to be able to look myself in the mirror. I want no voices in my head telling me that I didn’t go after the enemy every day. I have enough demons in my head without that. It is the battle I didn’t fight that still echoes in my mind.”

  Jim had started hearing, faintly at first, what seemed to be voices inside his head when he was fighting in Afghanistan a few years earlier. They were like a “sixth sense,” telling him what to do. Now those voices became louder, more incessant, and more vivid. They told him to work harder, to train more, to press his men every day. Over time, they began guiding him more actively.

  Slow down! . . . Slow down! The voice seemed to come out of nowhere one day as his patrol approached an Iraqi army checkpoint north of Baghdad. Jim ordered his driver to slow and radioed the vehicles behind him to hold. Seconds later, a white sedan laden with explosives blew up just ahead.

  Later on a raid, he heard it again: Go! Get them! Push! It sounded like his buddy Sgt. 1st Class Mark Read from ODA 316 in Afghanistan. Other old teammates spoke to him, too, as though they were watching over him.

  Sometimes the voices were strange and unfamiliar. As he engaged them in mental conversation, he began to give them the names of ancient warriors, both mythical and real.

  “Many, many centuries of warriors reside in my body,” he wrote to his father. “This is my life. It is where I live daily. I may be going crazy. Hecate is the goddess of war. Although she has roamed the periphery of my life for many years, it is only recently that I have heard her voice and seen her body. I still have not seen her face.”

  The voices came to him when he was exhausted and on the way back from missions, telling him suddenly to stop and look for roadside bombs. He learned to always listen to them. The more receptive he was, the more he accepted them, the more they dominated his actions outside the wire of Site One, in the streets of Baghdad. It was to him almost like prayer. He believed that God spoke to people who opened their hearts, and that is how it was for him with the internal voices. They became his true north.

  Baghdad at the time was a sea of carnage, with horrific suicide bombings killing scores of Iraqis every week. One day in November 2006, when Jim was in Baghdad between resupply runs to Balad, a huge explosion went off just outside Jim’s base in central Baghdad. Body parts flew over the wall of Site One. Jim grabbed his medical bag and ran to the scene, armed only with his 9 mm pistol. As soon as he went out the front gate of Site One, he saw the mangled bodies of the dead and injured. A suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt had blown himself up next to scores of men waiting outside a recruitment center at the National Police headquarters. As the recruits scattered down a side street, another suicide bomber chased them and detonated himself. Jim decided to make his way down the side street, where there were fewer rescuers, looking for people who were still alive. He spotted a heavy man of about fifty whose leg had been blown off near the hip. The man was screaming. Jim wadded up his jacket, stuffed it in the leg cavity, and tied it up with a bandage. He moved farther down the street and saw another man walking in a daze, his face severely burned and his arm severed above the elbow. All Jim could do was try to stop the bleeding; he put on a tourniquet and kept going. Then, as he was bent over treating another man, he looked up. A crowd of Iraqi civilians had gathered and was starting to chant, irate. National Police on the scene shot a few rounds in the air. A shouting match started between the two groups, with Jim in the middle, the only American. He drew his pistol and looked around. None of his commandos was there. People were grabbing at him to get his help. As the crowd turned menacing, he ran back to the U.S. base, covered in blood.

  Back on the base, a sergeant major looked at him disapprovingly.

  “Sir, you are out of uniform. And you need to clean up,” he said.

  Jim walked numbly to a shower. He turned on the faucet, but no water came out. He went back to his room, opened a package of baby wipes, and tried to clean his hands. It seemed the blood would never come off. He slumped down against the wall.

  This is pure evil, he thought.

  IN MAY 2007, JIM was awarded his Silver Star. At his request, the ceremony was held at the ramshackle police compound at Site One. The U.S. team and the commandos stood in formation, while American and Iraqi generals and other dignitaries looked on. In the audience was then Brig. Gen. John Campbell, Jim’s old battalion commander who had once chewed him out for challenging Army tactics as a young lieutenant. Campbell was spearheading efforts to integrate into the Shiite-led government thousands of Sunnis in Baghdad who had stood up to the insurgents and volunteered to defend their neighborhoods. Also there to shake Jim’s hand was Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the three-star general in charge of day-to-day military operations in Iraq. Odierno had offered to pin on Jim’s medal. But Jim asked his boss and friend Col. Lewis to do it instead. After the honors, Jim walked to a microphone and spoke of the December 11 battle.

  “On that day, there were no Americans. There were no Iraqis, no whites, and no blacks. There were no Sunnis, Shias, or Christians. There was just a group of warriors working and fighting together. I would gladly and without hesitation lay my life down for all of them,” he said.

  For Jim personally, the award for valor held many meanings beyond showcasing the close bond between his American team and the Iraqi police. It relieved his frustration and guilt at not being able to return to Afghanistan to fight with ODA 316. It symbolized an achievement worthy, at last, of winning his father’s approval.

  “I wanted to make you proud of me,” Jim wrote to his father on the day his Silver Star was pinned on. “I believe I have attained that. It was not easy. Your shadow was big.”

  It is hard to say whether Jim lost himself or found himself in his quest for greatness in combat. But there is no question that by th
e end of his time in Iraq he was possessed by war, captive to its horrors and addicted to the arena and roaring crowd.

  In July 2007, after thirteen months in Iraq, Jim prepared to return to the United States. Fearless in the streets of Baghdad, he was terrified of going home. He had sacrificed everything at the altar of war. War was, by then, all he really knew. He could not imagine a world where the people he had loved most had become strangers, and where—unlike in Iraq—his enemies were not trying to kill him, making them much harder to find and impossible to destroy.

  “I can no longer remember the person I once was,” he wrote to his father.

  My perception of the world has taken an 180-degree turn. Everything I have always been taught, everything I believed in, has been turned upside down. . . . I have seen such evil that I don’t think I can ever be free of the demons that will haunt me for the rest of my life. The smell of burned bodies. The smell of blood and death. So many innocent people killed.

  Killing another person, even in war, changes a person. Being in combat changes a person. Being isolated from the ones you love changes a person. When your life is in the hands of others it changes your life forever. . . .

  This is the most gruesome, violent environment you can imagine, even in your dreams. Yet, God forgive me, I love it.

  Jim boarded a plane at the Baghdad International Airport that was packed with jubilant soldiers. A crew member noticed he was a major and moved him to first class. The plane hurtled down the uneven runway. The second its wheels lifted off, the cabin erupted in cheers.

  Jim put his head in his hands and cried.

  CHAPTER 6

  JIM LEFT HIS NOVEMBER 2009 video conference with Adm. Olson and burst out the main door of the towering tan U.S. Army Special Operations Command headquarters building at Fort Bragg into a chilly but clear afternoon.

  “Ai yi yi yi yi!” he said, pulling off his beret and giving out his Iraqi war cry. He’d been waiting more than two and a half years since Iraq for another combat mission. Now he’d gotten new orders—for Afghanistan.

  He strode past the manicured parade ground and through a stand of pine trees to his truck, jumped in, and gunned it down the drive. Pulling out the base main gate, he drove by the pawnshops, tattoo parlors, and honky-tonks on Yadkin Drive. But all he could see was a mud-brick village backed by snow-capped mountains. All he could think about was Olson’s last instruction: Assemble your team.

  Jim knew immediately four of the men he wanted for his tribal engagement team. Two he’d fought alongside—Capt. Dan McKone and Master Sgt. Tony Siriwardene. Two others he’d trained—Capt. Matt Golsteyn and Sgt. 1st Class Frank Benson. Jim knew each of them not only as soldiers but also as close friends. They were loyal to a fault. They were all warriors, and between them they had six awards for valor.

  Dan McKone was a talented medic as well as the best gunner Jim had ever had. He would be the team medic and handle weapons. A former Peace Corps volunteer who had lived on four continents, Dan was worldly, mature, and coolheaded. He never bullshitted Jim about anything. With a master’s degree in environmental systems, Dan was also in training to become a Civil Affairs officer and would oversee development projects. Dan was a proven fighter, a former Special Forces noncommissioned officer (NCO) with three awards for valor and five combat deployments under his belt, four of them in Afghanistan. He was culturally savvy, spoke Pashto, and had worked training Afghan soldiers. And from his time on Jim’s team ODA 316, Dan knew Konar Province and the village of Mangwel—the people there remembered him.

  Tony Siriwardene would be his team sergeant, responsible for the daily operation of the team. Tall and athletic, Tony was a native of Sri Lanka who had moved to Arlington, Virginia, at the age of eight. He graduated from Washington-Lee High School and enlisted in the Army as an engineer. In 2003, Tony was the second man assigned to ODA 316, and deployed with Jim twice to Afghanistan. There he proved himself the epitome of a soldier—always doing what was needed before he was asked. Tony was at Jim’s side on every single mission. Tony was the only team member besides himself whom Jim allowed to disarm bombs. Once he ventured with Jim into the Korengal valley even though he was so sick he had an IV in his arm when he drove out the gate. “I will always have something for contact,” he told Jim—and later that day earned his first award for valor in an enemy ambush.

  Matt Golsteyn would be his second-in-command, focused on the team’s strategy and operations. A 2002 West Point graduate and star baseball player from Winter Park, Florida, Matt was one of those rare officers who shone with both intellect and moral fortitude. He’d served with the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq and then tried out for Special Forces, landing in 2008 in a group trained by Jim in a guerrilla warfare scenario in the backwoods of North Carolina. Matt turned out to be the best captain Jim had encountered among dozens of aspiring Special Forces team leaders, and the gutsiest. Better yet, he’d just returned from months of fighting with an Afghan commando battalion in some of the country’s worst trouble spots. Matt knew how to navigate the clashing values of Western democracy and ancient Afghan precepts of justice—and make tough calls to save lives.

  Frank Benson would serve as a medic and the team intelligence expert. Jim had known Frank for more than a decade, since Frank was seventeen years old and a newly minted infantry private. “Which of you sorry motherfuckers thinks you can whup my platoon sergeant’s ass?” Jim, then an infantry lieutenant, had demanded of a cluster of about twenty privates who’d just arrived at his Army base at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. Frank was the only one who raised his hand. “Get your shit! Come with us,” Jim said, grinning and pulling Frank out of the formation. Now an experienced Special Forces NCO, Frank had advanced intelligence training that would be vital to the tribal mission.

  Three days later, all his men were on board.

  As Jim pulled his dream team together on orders from the top, his phone began ringing with calls from subordinate levels of his Special Operations Forces chain of command. After all, Adm. Olson, who headed that chain of command, had paid Jim the ultimate tribute. “You are the first true ‘Lawrence of Afghanistan’ (as the ADM likes to put it) that we have found,” Olson’s top enlisted advisor, Command Sgt. Maj. Smith, wrote to Jim in an email hours after the November 2 video teleconference. Olson was working on a plan based on Jim’s ideas to place tribal engagement teams in Afghanistan, and he intended for Jim to spearhead the mission and set an example for others. Jim was the bright, shiny object. The generals and colonels began swooping toward him like crows.

  Brig. Gen. Michael Repass, the commander of the United States Army Special Forces Command (USASFC), who was in charge of all Green Berets, summoned Jim on November 6. Jim walked into Repass’s large office suite wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. He had several days’ stubble growing on his face—the beginnings of a beard for Afghanistan—and so by regulation could not wear his uniform.

  Repass came around from behind his desk and invited Jim to sit down next to him at a table. The general took out a pen and pad.

  “Major Gant, I’ve been tasked with supporting you any way that I can. What do you need?” Repass asked.

  Jim pulled out the list of names for his team and a training plan. He began briefing Repass, who listened attentively and took notes. Jim had never experienced such deference from so many general officers. He was slightly amused. They don’t know me, he thought. If they are calling me, they must be desperate.

  At the end of their meeting, Repass turned to him.

  “Jim, I want a T-shirt when you have them made up,” the general said.

  Jim smiled at the backhanded compliment. In the world of Special Forces, team T-shirts, hats, and logos meant a lot. Repass wanted to be part of his mission.

  “Roger that, sir,” Jim said, and walked out.

  Soon afterward, Jim was engaged by a general one step higher in his chain of command. The three-star general in charge of United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC), Lt. Gen.
John Mulholland, offered his full support for Jim and his team. Mulholland directed Col. David S. Maxwell, head of the command Strategic Initiatives Group, to work on getting Jim what he needed. Maxwell wrote to Jim with dramatic flourish about his mission. “To put things in historical terms . . . you are going to be the Lawrence and we have to find your Allenby in Afghanistan to provide you that top cover,” Maxwell told Jim in an email on November 10. He was referring to the British general Edmund Allenby, who in 1917 backed the bright, eager intelligence officer, Maj. T. E. Lawrence, in working with the Arab tribes to oppose Turkish forces of the Ottoman Empire. Jim was thrilled. He had long been inspired by Lawrence’s life story and his classic work, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which he first read during the 1990 Gulf War and again while deployed in Iraq. He had grown to understand Lawrence’s connection to the Arabs both emotionally and intellectually.

  “You are getting your TET [tribal engagement team],” Maxwell wrote to Jim the next day. “You basically will be able to write your own ticket. ADM Olson wants you and your team to do some focused training to prepare you, but the longer-term goal is for you and your team to become the future Lawrences of Afghanistan. Bottom line is you are going to be on the cutting edge.”

  But as quickly as Jim had gotten his dream mission, forces within his Army chain of command tried to take it away. Jim was fully aware that he, a lowly major, had unleashed a rash of professional jealousy by winning such high-level praise. What he didn’t realize was that two military hierarchies were about to battle over his fate—one in the United States and the other in Afghanistan.