I shoved him back toward his buddies, then pointed
at the girl. “Did you do this?” I was speaking in English,
CO MB AT O P S
23
but I was so pissed I hadn’t realized that. I shouted
again.
One guy threw up his hands and said in Pashto, “We
do not do that. I don’t think Zahed does that, either.
We don’t know about that.”
“Yeah, right,” snapped Ramirez.
Nolan got the girl to come around, and she began
crying. Ramirez went over and tried to calm her down;
he got her name, and we learned that she was, as we’d
already suspected, from Senjaray, the town on the other
side of the mountains from which we operated. We had
conventional radio, but even that had been fried, and
Hume suspected that some kind of pulse or radio wave
had been used to disrupt our electronics.
We hiked over the mountain, keeping close guard on
the prisoners and taking turns carrying the girl. We
eventually reached our HMMW V, which we’d hidden in
a canyon. The radio onboard the Hummer still worked,
so we called back to Forward Operating Base Eisen-
hower and had them send out another Hummer to
bridge the eleven-kilometer gap. We set up a perimeter
and waited.
“You know, this place makes China look good,” said
Jenkins, who lay on his stomach across from me, his nor-
mally hard and determined expression now long with
exhaustion. “Those were the good old days. That was a
straight-up mission. Pretty good intel. And good sup-
port from higher. That’s all I ask.”
“I don’t know, Bo, I think those days are gone,” I
said. “No matter how good we think our intel is, we can
24
GH OS T RE C O N
wind up like this. And I know it’s discouraging. But I’ll
do what I can to find out what happened.”
“Thanks.”
No matter how careful we’d been in leaving our FOB,
no matter how secretive we’d kept the mission, all it took
was one observer to radio ahead to Zahed that we were
coming. We’d taken all the precautions. Or at least we’d
thought we had.
And at that moment, I was beginning to wonder
about our “find, fix, and finish the enemy” mantra. I
still wasn’t buying into the whole COIN ideology (let’s
help the locals and turn them into spies) because I fig-
ured they’d always turn on us no matter how many
canals we built. But I wondered how we were supposed
to gather actionable intelligence without help from the
inside—without members of the Taliban itself turning
on each other . . . because in the end, everyone knew we
Americans weren’t staying forever, so all parties were
trying to exploit us before we left.
The second truck arrived, and we loaded everyone on
board and took off for the drive across the desert. My
hackles rose as I imagined the Taliban peering at us from
the mountains behind. My thoughts were already leap-
ing ahead to solve the security breach and tech issues.
Treehorn, who was at the wheel, began having a con-
versation with himself, offering congratulations for his
fine marksmanship. After a few minutes of that, I inter-
rupted him. “All right, good shooting. Is that what you
want to hear?”
“Hell, Captain, it’s something. I got the feeling this
CO MB AT O P S
25
whole op will go round and round, and we won’t get off
the roller coaster till higher tells us.”
I considered myself an optimist, the never-say-quit
guy. I’d been taught that from the beginning. Hell, I’d
been a team sergeant on an operation in the Philippines
and lost nearly my entire ODA unit. My best friend
flipped out. But even then, I never quit. Never allowed
myself to get discouraged because the setbacks weren’t
failures—they were battle scars that made me stronger. I
had such a scar on my chest, and it used to remind me
that there was a larger purpose to my life and that quit-
ting and becoming depressed was too selfish. I’d be let-
ting everyone down. I had to go on.
If you join the military for yourself, then you’re setting
yourself up for failure. Kennedy had it right: Ask what
you can do for your country. I’ve seen many guys join
“for college” or “to see the world” or “to learn a trade.”
Their hearts are not in it, and they never achieve what
they could. Perhaps I’m too biased, but in the beginning,
there was an ideal, an image of America that I kept in my
head, and it reminded me of why I was there.
Kristen Fitzgerald, standing among acres of lush
farmland, her strawberry-blond hair tugged by the wind.
She smiles at me, even says, “This is why.”
Pretty cliché, huh? Makes it sound like I do it all for a
girl. But she represented that ideal. A high school sweet-
heart who told me she’d always wait, that she was like
me, that we were not born to live ordinary lives.
My ideal was not some jingoistic military recruiting
commercial or some glamorous Hollywood version of
26
GH OS T RE C O N
war. I didn’t join because I wanted to “get some.” I
wanted to protect my country and help people. That
made me feel good, made me feel worth something.
And as the years went on, and I got promoted and was
told how good I was, I decided to share what I knew. I
loved teaching at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare
Center at Fort Bragg. I couldn’t think of a more reward-
ing part of my military career.
In fact, that was where I met Captain Simon Harruck,
who’d been a fellow trainer despite his youth and who was
now commander of Delta Company, 1st Battalion—120
soldiers charged with providing security for Senjaray and
conducting counterinsurgency operations.
I knew that when we got back, Harruck would try
to cheer me up. He was indeed ten years my junior,
and when I looked at him, oh, how I saw myself back in
those days.
But as we both knew, the ’Stan was unforgiving, with
its oppressive heat and sand that got into everything,
even your soul. I threw my head back on the seat and
trusted Treehorn to take us home, headlights out,
guided by his night-vision goggles.
By the time we arrived at the FOB, Harruck was
already standing outside the small Quonset hut that
housed the company’s offices, and the expression on his
face was sympathetic. “Well, we got three we can talk to,
right?”
I returned a sour look and marched past him, into
the hut.
THREE
The three prisoners were taken to a holding room. The
CIA was sending a chopper down to transfer them to
FOB Chapman in Khost, where some big shot from
Kabul would come in to interrogate them. FOB Chap-
man was the CIA outpost where seven agents were killed
years ago. I knew this time the bad guys would be strip-
searched, x-rayed, and then have their every orifice and
cavity probed.
Didn’t matter, though. I didn’t think they knew
much. Zahed wasn’t fool enough to allow underlings to
know his plans or whereabouts.