Eleven Days (17 page)

“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 second 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.”

“Nothing.”

“Do I think what?” Jason noticed the guy’s hands were shaking.

“Forget it.”

“What.”

And Jason saw something wet spread across the lower edge of the bandage on the side of the good eye.

In Iraq, Jason was involved in clearing a house where a woman was found holding a baby. The woman was seriously injured—not by their guys, but by whom was unclear. Had they not arrived in time, and had she died, what would have happened to that baby? Jason couldn’t shake that question from his mind either. When his teammate lifted the baby from the mother’s arms, he handed the child to Jason. He could feel his heart rate accelerate; this was not a procedure they’d covered in SERE. He had never held something this small. Was she hungry? Was she well? Would she grow up to remember this? How far back did memory go, and what were the relevant and necessary defense mechanisms countering the horrors? “Don’t drop that baby,” his platoon OIC said, putting a hand on his shoulder. And when Jason looked up, he saw that the other officer was smiling. “She’s the same age as my littlest one,” he said. “She’s all right. She’s all right now.” And Jason was relieved that someone else had some experience with this. There was no room in his vest for the infant, so he wrapped
her—she was in only the thinnest of robes—in a VS-17 panel. It was bright pink. “Cover her head,” said the OIC. “She has to stay warm.” And so Jason jerry-rigged a tiny do-rag using a torn piece of tourniquet.

In Africa, sent in to rescue an American held in a house apparently occupied by AQAP cell members, they’d found the hostage barely breathing and lying alongside a group of partially buried bodies in the basement. It was unclear whether the bodies were those of military men or aid workers. It was even unclear whether the bodies were men or women. And it was unclear how they had been killed, and so, time being of the essence, the guys lacked the chance for forensic speculation. It might have been a mini-mass suicide. They were all blindfolded; that is what he would remember. Each body had cloth wrapped around where their eyes would have been; their eyes had been cut out or at least damaged. The cloths were red and hid the blood. Somehow that cloth humanized them. Somehow that cloth said,
These were once my eyes
. But what was the cloth preventing them from seeing?

None of these stories would appear in print, nor would Jason share details of them with anyone. Some of the guys, he knew, talked to their priests about things that they did and saw, but most talked only among themselves. This was not a profession that gave rise to many memoirs. The slim literature—necessarily crippled by the periodic publication of wildly inaccurate analyses—helped perpetuate the myths and the conspiracies, but the central humanness of the community kept the men in line. Back at the beaches, they were real people, with real responsibilities.

These experiences, among others, reinforced for Jason what had become a central trope: nothing is what it seems. What was most amazing about the day they found those bodies was that no one had discussed it. It was a quick op, the pressure was high, they
were there to try and find one thing, and once they had found it, it was time to go. They weren’t archaeologists. They weren’t war correspondents. They were warriors.

They had exfiltrated by MH-6 Little Bird, and when they boarded, the pilot, a Nightstalker, called out, seeing they had the hostage, “Did you guys get me my slice, too?” And no one had said anything. It wasn’t until days later that, sitting at a meal, staring into his soup, another guy who had been there said to Jason, “Those bodies were—.” And Jason said, “Yes.” They were both thinking the same thing, which was that they couldn’t stop thinking about them. But they would. Nightmares, for most men, could be willed away with discipline just as well as they could be with therapy. Of course, the outer edge of this ability to forget was numbness, anomie, despair.

Did these contemporary war stories lack the grandeur and arc of their predecessors? Sadr City was not the Somme. That was like comparing
Mad Max
to
Madame Bovary
. But they were alike in this simple fact: men were killing other men across a small space to save the lives of millions of others half a world away. Historians would eventually take their pick of the facts and look at the larger questions, but the first wave of understanding would come from the guys who were there, the guys who could say,
I saw the bodies. I carried the baby. I swallowed the dust
. The first phase of history was simply recollections from the survivors, the ones able to describe the details, like
In the early days of OIF we smashed the windows of the helos out so we could see better
and
The maximum effective range of an M4 with a fourteen-inch barrel is five hundred yards
and
The breacher prepared the slap charge, but we were lucky he brought the sledgehammer as backup when things got complicated
. These were not sentences formed anywhere else in the history of warfare. It was a new language, but they embraced it with characteristic grace.