The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (31 page)

Within forty-eight hours of the e-mail exchange, McChrystal descends on a small combat outpost called JFM. He goes on a four-
kilometer patrol in the most dangerous area of the country. It is an unprecedented risk for a four-star general to take. He forgets his cap behind at the base. An officer at the nearby forward operating base wonders if he should give it back. The officer ends up keeping it as a memento.

  APRIL 2010, NEWPORT, MICHIGAN; DOVER, DELAWARE; ZHARI; AND KANDAHAR

On April 13, 2010, Corporal Michael Ingram Jr. logs onto his Facebook account. Like his friend SSG Arroyo, he’s at combat outpost JFM in Zhari, near Kandahar. He writes this line on his wall:

“Come on fellas hold it together … Almost home.”

A few weeks earlier, he calls home to speak with his father, Michael Ingram Sr. He calls him Pops. Pops calls him Mikie. He has to pay for the long distance call. It annoys him—why should soldiers have to pay for long distance calls home? It’s what he ends up spending his combat pay on. He mostly communicates with his family on Facebook. He talks to his dad every few weeks or so. In the last couple of days he’s called him three or four times. He feels the fighting is heating up.

Mikie tells his dad that he can’t wait to get home. He has one month left. The tour started badly last summer. They lost two guys in an attack in August. Mikie carried one of the bodies, just a torso, onto the stretcher. Last month, he pulled a muscle working out in the gym. It’s a serious enough injury that they want to send him off the front lines for treatment. He refuses—he doesn’t want to leave his squad.

Mikie doesn’t mention this tonight. He talks life. He’s dating a girl, and it’s getting serious. He wants to start a family. He wants to get married. He’s ready to take life more seriously. He’s going to Las Vegas and Graceland when he gets home. But he swears he’s going to try to save his money, too. They talk for twenty minutes. He tells his father before hanging up, “It’s getting pretty bad over here.” His father says, “You’ll be home soon.” Mikie says, “I don’t know.”

Mikie posts another message on Facebook. “I love my family… lil bro… lil sis… can’t wait until I’m out of the army.”

On the evening of Saturday, April 17, Michael Ingram Sr., a self-employed painting contractor, and his wife, Julie, are hanging out with friends in Britton, Michigan. It’s about an hour from their home in Newport. They’ve got the barbecue going and are having fun riding four-wheelers. It’s been a nice afternoon.

Julie’s phone rings at six thirty
P.M
. It’s her son, Kyle, twenty-one years old. He’s screaming.

“The guys in green are here for Pops, the guys in green are here for Pops!”

She doesn’t believe it. No, you’re wrong. Her son says they won’t tell him anything. She tells her son to tell the men that they’ll be home around nine thirty. She hangs up.

Julie looks down at her Motorola phone. It’s new. She just got it that morning. She has no contacts saved in it. She has no numbers to text or call. She looks around the yard and sees her husband. She doesn’t say anything. She thinks: He has three hours of happiness left. She can’t tell him. She can’t believe it. She doesn’t say anything.

At around eight
P.M.
, they leave their friends’ place and drive back to their home on Pointe aux Peaux Road. It’s a three-bedroom, two-bathroom ranch with a porch out back. They get back at nine fifteen. Julie puts the grandbaby to bed. Julie follows her husband into the backyard. They want to make a bonfire.

Fifteen minutes left.

Julie goes up on the porch. It’s nine thirty.

Julie sees a turquoise Ford F-150 parked at the end of the street. Her son said they were driving that car. That was the color: turquoise. Her son isn’t home—he didn’t want to be there.

Two figures step out of the F-150. She sees them coming. Her husband hasn’t noticed them yet.

“Hello, hello,” a man calls out.

Julie and Michael walk out to the front of the house. The two figures walk onto the driveway.

The sensor light goes on. The light illuminates the driveway. Her husband sees one man and one woman wearing green.

“We’re here to speak with Mr. Michael Ingram Senior,” the man says.

Julie starts screaming. Michael Ingram Sr. tries to stay calm. The two officers try to keep them calm. The rest of the night: text messages to friends and family. Come over to the house. They don’t sleep, and when they do sleep it’s blackness—too tired for nightmares. It begins again in the morning when their eyes open.

On Monday, the front-page story of the local newspaper: N
EWPORT
M
AN
K
ILLED IN
A
FGHANISTAN
. The headline makes it more real—it’s in print, it’s now fact. The newspaper runs seven or eight more stories about Michael Ingram Jr. He wanted to become a police officer, he never gave his stepmom any trouble, he joined the Army in 2007. His friends remember him.

Mikie likes music—Elvis, Buddy Holly, Sinatra. His favorite song is “Suspicious Minds.” If you heard Elvis in the gym, you knew Mikie was working out.

He made the ultimate sacrifice and he would make the ultimate sacrifice again, his father says.

The town erects a billboard with his picture on it: H
EAVEN
N
EEDED A
H
ERO
, it reads.

The obituary reads: “Sgt. Michael Keith Ingram, Jr. ‘Pookie’ born March 6, 1987–April 17, 2010. He died fighting for his country on April 17, 2010, in Afghanistan. Michael is survived by his mother, Patricia
Kitts (Ronald C. Kitts); father, Michael Ingram ( Julie Ingram); brothers Jason R. Ingram and Kyle Ingram and sister, Chelsea A. Ingram; grandmother, Annie Ingram of Newport, MI; numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins. He was preceded in death by his grandfather, James Ingram.”

Michael Ingram Sr. is looking through the couch for some reason. He finds a memory card for a computer. He gives it to Julie. Julie pops it in—it’s pictures and videos of Mikie in Afghanistan. The card must have fallen out of his pocket when he was home last. She watches and she can hear his voice again and that makes her cry.

His father opens the safe in the house and takes out Mikie’s last letter. He wrote it before he deployed. He detailed what should happen when he dies. He wants lots of flowers at his funeral. He wants a nice tombstone. At home on leave for Christmas, Mikie opened the safe and revised it. He revised what should be written on his tombstone. He wants it to say
Limitless
. It’s the saying he has up in his room at JFM. His stepmom doesn’t really understand what it means, but she is going to put it on his headstone because that’s what he wanted. The headstone costs $16,000 and the funeral costs $40,000. We don’t care about the fucking money, says Julie, we want our boy back.

It takes seven days for his body to arrive in Dover, Delaware. The flight is held up because of an ash cloud from a volcanic explosion in Iceland.

From Dover, his casket is flown to Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan. The casket is unloaded on April 24. It’s a cold and rainy day. An honor guard of sixty Vietnam veterans on motorcycles and the Michigan State Police escort a white hearse down I-75 South, a left onto M-125, a right onto Santure Road, pulling up to Merkle Funeral Service. Visiting hours twelve to eight
P.M
.

He’s buried on April 30, 2010. It’s a beautiful day this time. His casket is placed in a black horse-drawn carriage. His sister sits next to the carriage driver. The procession from the church to St. Joseph Cemetery goes off without a hitch. The train tracks and a street are shut down for the
procession. His father and stepmom sit side by side as the casket is lowered into the ground. His father is holding an American flag, folded up into a triangle. His father keeps clutching it to his chest, moving it around in his hands, his fingers digging into the flag.

Back in Afghanistan, Sergeant Israel Arroyo logs into his e-mail account. He sends a message to McChrystal.

 APRIL 28, 2010, KABUL, KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, AND FORWARD OPERATING BASE WILSON

My Afghan security guard dropped me off about three blocks away from the entrance to the International Security Assistance Force headquarters. I walked down the street parallel to the compound’s garden wall, then took a right on the main street to get to the gate. It was a different path from the one I’d taken on earlier visits. I could still see the effects of the suicide bombing that had hit the base a year and a half earlier. Chunks of concrete missing from the sidewalks with newer and bigger concrete blast walls providing shade for the street. The road in front of the gate had been closed to almost all nonmilitary traffic. Trash filled up cracked and mud-covered gutters—potato chip bags, soda cans, empty cigarette packs. The entrance was infused with the feeling of run-down wariness that often marks the site of bombings with the potential for a repeat performance—an intuition that it would be a waste to spend too much time beautifying a target.

Four Afghan army soldiers sat around a pillbox guard hut, leaning against a traffic gate. I showed my media identification, and they waved
me up to a metal door. It was an unenviable job, and perhaps explained their laissez-faire attitude—if there was another bombing, these Afghans would boost the death toll by at least four. A Macedonian guard opened the metal door, didn’t bother looking at my ID too closely, and waved me down a path with chain-link fences, tarps, and plywood. It was like a cattle lane to a slaughterhouse, ending in another guardhouse with a full body scanner. Another Macedonian stood behind a dirty plastic window and slipped a visitor badge under the screen. Macedonia was a member of the NATO coalition, sending seventy-nine troops to take turns guarding a door.

Duncan came out to meet me. He wore a suit and red tie, unperturbed by the change in scene. Kabul, Paris, Berlin—Duncan was Duncan, a smooth operator.

We walked through the body scanner. Duncan flashed his badge at a security camera, and we were buzzed through.

“I hope there’s not too much radiation in these things,” he joked. “I go through them a few times a day.”

We walked onto the grounds of the ISAF HQ. Duncan did seem slightly more caffeinated, speed-walking ahead of me, a reflection of the higher operational tempo they kept in Afghanistan.