He thinks about the videos Sam showed him that day at the beach, the last free day before they’d been called up to go out on what would prove to be a particularly bloody deployment, rich with upset and casualty. He and Sam shared an obsession over old Cold War–era government videos, especially ones instructing children
about necessary preparations in the event of a nuclear strike. The “duck and cover” joke of their generation was the notion that a school desk could protect you from anything, let alone radioactivity. Sam had pulled up clips of “daisy cutter” bombs exploding, the same bombs we would use in Tora Bora. In Southeast Asia they were used to clear jungles. They were effective not only for creating flat, wide spaces in the place of brush, for opening up landing zones, but also for psychological intimidation. They were the same bombs not so slyly referenced in President Johnson’s controversial “Peace, Little Girl” campaign ad, another obsession of Sam’s. In the ad, a pretty little girl counts the petals on a daisy until, at “nine,” a ground control operator’s voice overtakes hers. He is counting down to zero—
Nine! Eight! Seven! Six!
And as the countdown ends, the camera closes in on the child’s eye, and her iris fades into an image of a mushroom cloud. Johnson’s voice then announces, “We must either love each other, or we must die,” a line cribbed from a British poet. The little girl in the ad was only four years old. He thinks about carrying Sam on his back down the stairs in that house, how bloodied his hands were when he laid his friend down and how he waited until late that night to wash them clean.
*
He thinks about the Creed. It was written only recently, during his last year at the Academy. “Brave men have fought and died building the proud tradition and feared reputation that I am bound to uphold. In the worst of conditions, the legacy of my teammates steadies my resolve and silently guides my every deed. I will not fail.” This is his prayer, in fact. Its seriousness and simplicity tie it to a history of creeds and pledges, ritualistic totems that helped a
culture hold. Creeds kept the edges of a culture sharp. Of course, they were meaningless if the truth did not support the things they preached.
All ambiguous behavior is interpreted negatively
.
As he feels the bird turning and hears the guys click their belts free, he goes over in his mind the first things he will do when they land. There is no water here, only sand and rock and dry grass and trash. The level of trash accumulated by the house’s occupants had been one clue to their number. The volume of traffic in and out had been another. Knowing he won’t taste water for a while, he remembers to take some. If all goes well, this will be fast—one hour, or less. If.
And then someone else, almost inaudibly this time, says, “Hail Mary, full of grace.”
*
When his feet hit the ground he will think only of what is in front of him: his task, and the need to accomplish this mission with alacrity, care, and minimal collateral damage. His skills at close quarters combat will serve him well. When the helo stops outside the house, he will enter it, and it will seem eerily familiar, as if he has been there many times. Like pool to ocean, or dirt dive to sky: you train for the work, and he had been trained to within an inch of his capabilities for this.
Proper preparation prevents poor performance
. If this was his last mission, he thinks, it was a fitting culmination of everything he had learned. The guys will enter the target structure. And with the confidence of athletes—or gods?—they will maneuver its elements to ensure that any innocents are secured. Their jobs are “elimination” and “collection”: eliminate the threats; collect the evidence. Like Confederates pressing up against Union flank lines at Gettysburg, they act on
orders. “Pray,” Jason repeats to himself under his breath. And the prayer he chooses is simply “Get us all home.”
The total time of preparation for this moment—not the years of training but the split-second assessment following an actual accounting of the space, the threats, the presence of unknowns—was an instant: less than the time it takes to dress a child for school, or to make a round of pancakes, or to walk a bride down the aisle to her groom. This timeline would enter the annals of history and be debated and disputed, before being codified into accepted truths. The anonymous participants on both sides that night would take their places in the classic warfare texts, standing somewhere after poppies sprouting in English trenches and before the presence of relative peace in an era where unmanned birds rained missiles down from skies a world away from their pilots. Did this mission matter. Would it change the course of history. It would alter the politics. And it would shatter the economy of lives, in particular those left behind by men KIA. “Courage is not the absence of fear,” the cliché goes. Correct: courage is the ability to control fear. Courage kicks in instinctually when you throw a door.
Jason directs the assault train, the others guys in line behind him. As they spread throughout the house, they’ll maintain lines of sight to the extent that they can; buddy systems become burdensome when things get busy. On entering, they need to make sure that anyone unarmed is not wounded. And they need to neutralize threats. In the first room, a room larger than its counterpart in the mockup, Jason finds several elderly men, three women, two young boys, a very young girl. There are also eight military-age males in the center of the room. One of those men raises his hand. He’s holding a weapon. That gesture sets things in motion.
When Jason opens fire, he can almost count the rounds, as
if a guardian angel is sitting on his shoulder and whispering the numbers in his ear as they pop. An operator will shoot hundreds of thousands of rounds over the course of a career; you quickly get used to the feeling of recoil. There are thirty rounds in his primary weapon, only a little over a third of which he’ll use to dispatch the eight MAMs before performing a tac reload, a reload performed while moving. It’s easier said than done. But it’s easier done, in certain cases, than switching from one gun to another; you don’t want to have to change your primary for your secondary when it’s raining bullets. Within what feels like more but is less than a minute, they’ve cleared the first room, one guy staying behind with the women and children. Later, they’ll be moved to a marshaling area and interrogated. The original room in which they were found will be noted.
Everything is going as planned. Now with only one guy right behind him, Jason moves through three more rooms, all empty. Then at the end of the long, wide central hall, a door opens. Three men emerge, and one of them is the man they have come for, the High Value Individual. They’ve studied his face, the way he walks. He is standing in the center—almost, it seems, physically supported by the ones on either side of him. It’s clear that all three are armed. Jason fires, not caring to spare rounds this time. The hall gets crowded. “Take a picture,” someone says. And then they hear shots coming from another room.
Turning to address the noise, one of the guys makes a mistake. He fails to seat the magazine of his gun. If you fail to seat your mag during a reload, the weapon jams, and that eight pounds of trigger pressure suddenly becomes stuck. In what would in any other circumstance be an insignificant delay, things change. Rather than switch to his secondary, after the last bullet remaining in his chamber fires, the operator elects to reseat his mag, and
this action results in a distraction. Mapped onto that distraction is another, larger one: something rolls into the hall, from one of the rooms. It’s a stun grenade—a nine-banger grenade that will set off a series of small explosions designed to disorient rather than harm.
After the noise, when he opens his eyes, Jason hears a baby crying. There is no more shooting now. He makes it clear to the other guys that he will check it out so, stepping into the room, a room they’ve already cleared, he goes toward the sound; it’s coming from a closet. He remembers another baby in another room, and this time he knows what to do.
Yet when the guys go back to find him, no one is there. Everyone else was accounted for, dead and alive. (Intelligence hadn’t tracked the fact that a child had been born in the last few weeks.) The mission was accomplished. The order came down to exfiltrate immediately, and though there was argument, orders trump arguments. The guys were told they had to get the helo out before the light changed.
And for those next nearly nine days, we have no idea where Jason was. What’s clear is that someone fed him and cleaned him and clothed him. Someone kept him alive until his teammates could return, which they did. And when they did, as the papers faithfully reported, “there were no prisoners taken” during the recovery mission. The guys wouldn’t stop this time for interrogations or checking closets. Once stabilized, they laid Jason in the chopper.
Someone had beaten him, badly, but whether for torture or simply for show was unclear. At some point someone had threatened him, their version of a threat being to carve a knife-line down one side of his face. A spinal cord snapped high enough ensured that he’d never have walked again, that snap’s coup de grâce the resulting
damage to his brain—and so to his will. When he arrived at the hospital he was breathing, but he was entirely without affect. He couldn’t say his name. The neurologists at Bagram had done their best. When David called the godfather on the jet by a secure line in Jeddah, he simply said, “He’s almost gone. I will tell her. Let me tell her. Let me decide when to tell her.”
*
Later, the baby’s mother would identify herself and be reinterrogated. She would claim to have put her child in the closet to protect him. (She wouldn’t say if anyone else had been in the closet. Or if the closet was connected to an exit, one not on the maps the men had seen in training.) She would be keen to describe how carefully a “soldier” had wrapped the infant, covering his head. She was touched by that. She would say that her power to keep that soldier alive accrued from her husband; her husband had been killed in the house. In that little town the story, re-told ad infinitum, would always start with the fact that the American had been holding “guns and myrrh.”
CHADDS FORD, PENNSYLVANIA,
LATE MAY 2011
That letter still sits on the desk off the office upstairs at the little farmhouse. Sara will read it eventually, but only months after she’s back from Bagram, after Arlington, after the heat breaks. Before opening it, she will hold it in her hand sometimes, before placing it back in its drawer, unread. She is waiting for a moment that feels right, a moment when she feels strong. Something in her still cannot believe that this is all real.
David evaporated into the desert just as he had appeared, instantly, without remorse or emotion. Or explanation. He had always provided a task, a deadline, as explanation for his exits, and then he provided a lesson, a recap of what had been learned during their time together; this was his tic. Or his trick. He had walked down the jet’s stairs backward, slowly, glasses off, looking at her. He was saying something, but she didn’t listen too closely; she knew they both knew the point of this visit had been Jason, and that now there was no more point. There was no promise he would see her soon or ever. There was no promise to check in. When she said goodbye, in the doorway in Jeddah, she’d handed him the letters she’d printed.
“Soldier, scholar,” he’d said.
“Soldier, scholar, son,” she’d said.
As he turned around and walked across the tarmac to the waiting car, she realized he had drifted, at last, to that higher plane he’d long desired to live on, where nothing could hold him to gravity’s laws. He would float above feelings. He always had. But what was her task now? What was her lesson?
The godfather had returned to the Hill, to fight the good fight and, soon enough, to take his place in the cast of characters inevitably immortalized once that one night’s story—the mission, the mother, the loss, the legacy—emerged. The story inspired several books, several documentaries, and at least one film with movie stars. The story reinforced the ideas of some and challenged the ideas of others. The story was never discussed by its central participants, though, further underlining the irony of storytelling, at least when it comes to certain topics. The story as experienced by its protagonists, as English professors would call them, was not a “story” at all; it was their lives. Yet they were all changed by it—the godfather, in particular. He would work to end the wars sooner, and to elect a president who pledged to do so, even as the public seemed more anxious for peace than most of the politicians who gauged its viability.
Sam had returned to his life, too, but he called every day. Like clockwork, her phone would ring around seven p.m.—what she had come to consider her “witching hour,” the hour after which the phone almost never rang, the hour in which she would begin to prepare a meal for one, the hour in which the stretch of time between it and the hour of bedtime seemed a river she couldn’t bear to cross again. Every time the phone would ring. And every time she’d smile. Sam would always open with something like “What’s for supper?” And she would talk about what she was making, and he’d give gentle, critical tips (“Remember to use the wide pan with the high sides for shirred eggs”). He would become like
a son to Sara, and she would spend holidays with his family out west, in the mountains.
A steady stream of Team guys, wives and mothers, would reach out to her in those months, too, and she would have the very clear sense that she would never be alone in the world in quite the same way again, that some new chapter of her story was opening and that part of it would be, ironically, a deeper connection to the military than she had ever felt—or wanted. Her son had been her shot at legacy, but this was his: he had left her embedded in the community he had come to love, and that had loved him. She would make a place there for herself, and that place would insure her survival. And her sanity. One of the men who came to see her had been on the helicopter that night; his sister knew Jason well, too. He told her something she never forgot: that patients need less medication after surgery if the pain pills are placed at their bedside. If they know the pills are there, they don’t have the anxiety of not knowing when or if help will arrive. Having the pills there allows them to go longer without taking them. “Are you the pill?” she’d asked, half-laughing, half-crying. “Yes, ma’am,” he’d said. “I guess I am.”