Maybe someday we will realize that the path we are currently on ends in a place that looks a lot like Kosovo, where I served from 2004-2006 with the United States Army’s 40th Infantry Division. The people there chose expedience and violence over the hard work of sustaining the rule of law. To paraphrase that knight in that Indiana Jones movie, they chose poorly.
But we don’t have to. We can still choose wisely. As I wrote in my Preface to People’s Republic, we still can choose not to throw away the greatest, freest nation in the history of mankind.
And I still pray we do.
Baghdad
August 2022
1.
Whenever Kelly Turnbull met someone, he always made a tentative plan to kill him.
Or her. Or xe, if that was xis pronoun of choice. It was August 2022. With Hillary Clinton finally president – the third time was the charm – the US Army, in the years leading up to the Split, might not have been too concerned with winning wars, but it was definitely big on diversity, including diversity of gender identity. And Captain Turnbull didn’t discriminate.
Everyone was a potential target, so everyone got a termination plan. Man. Woman. Unspecified.
This was a real timesaver in his line of work.
Some people earned more detailed plans than others; for most, the plan was his default move – shoot them in the face with the tricked-out Kimber Model 1911A1 .45 automatic he kept locked and loaded 24/7 with eight hollow point Federal Premium HST rounds in his extended mag. Plus, of course, one in the pipe. Totally illegal ammo – some of the REMFs called it a “war crime,” but never to his face.
Others’ killing plans got more in-depth attention. But after years of fighting, his planning process was now just a reflex.
Hi.
How are you?
I think I will use this pen to take you out by going for your left eyeball.
But in preparation for tonight, Kelly Turnbull had made a very detailed plan.
It was still hot in Baghdad at oh-dark thirty – no one ever called it “zero dark thirty.” His body armor and battle gear, worn over tan civilian tactical clothing designed to obscure the fact he was a soldier, only made it worse. The young captain paused to wipe the accumulated layer of sweat off of his forehead. Had Turnbull opted to wear the helmet he was supposed to have on, he’d have been even hotter. He wore a ball cap instead.
The whir of a gas-powered generator had covered their movement over the low wall and into the compound. Turnbull and his team paused behind a storage shed, checking out the two-story house, weapons up, covering the windows. Behind them lay a zip-tied and duct-taped sentry who one of his Iraqi commandos had silently taken down in textbook fashion. He probably didn’t know it, face down in the dust with a broken nose, but he was lucky.
Turnbull’s boys didn’t play, and the American advisor trusted his five man team of local fighters with his life. He’d worked with them, trained them, and the hell if he was going to let them go on a mission without him regardless of the standing orders sent down from the desk drivers back in Washington.
The last thing the politicians presiding over the accelerating collapse of the Union wanted the public to hear about was more dead Americans fighting in some distant, endless counterinsurgency. No, the politicians had much bigger problems at home. And so Kelly Turnbull’s faraway war was just an unwelcome footnote to a much bigger story.
But that didn’t mean he was going to fight his own personal war on the jihadists any less aggressively.
There were lights on upstairs. Khalid al-Afridi, known as the Accountant, would be up there. Khalid was all his now. Homeboy had a lot of dead commandos to account for. And dead commando families. Because in the bitter calculus of insurgency, an effective way to hurt a guy inside a well-defended forward operating base was to go butcher his family at their home and have one of your minions drop off a bag of heads and hands at the front gate.
That was the kind of thing Khalid the Accountant was responsible for funding. And tonight Kelly Turnbull was intent on him paying for his actions in a different kind of currency. One that was denominated in calibers.
There was a lot of noise and movement on the first floor. It was 3:00 a.m., Baghdad time, but these assholes were all wide awake, probably sampling some of the meth they were supposed to be arranging to truck out to the desert and into the wild lands of Syria for their Islamic State pals’ kid soldiers. After all, if the promise of an afterlife of eternal booty calling wasn’t enough motivation, some crank would seal the deal. They sure loved their drugs – being whacked out probably made it easier for them to do what they did.
But Turnbull didn’t need drugs to do hard things to bad people. That’s what made him so very good at his job.
Too good, according to some.
The bad guys were all exactly where they were supposed to be. It looked like the informer had actually been straight with Turnbull. The Shia militia Turnbull’s team uneasily worked with had fingered the informer, meaning the Iranians who pulled the strings were in on it too, so Turnbull’s trust meter was pegging zero when they talked. The informer was initially reluctant to assist. It helped when Turnbull had explained that if he wasn’t straight, Turnbull would shoot him in the face. One look in Turnbull’s eyes and he knew this American was not like other ones he had dealt with.
So he chatted freely and without restraint.
The Iraqi police commando lieutenant to Turnbull’s right fingered his M4, breathing shallowly. He spoke English, the only one of the Iraqis who did. But after working together so long, the team’s tactical conversations were conducted with hand and arm signals. They were a machine. Still, it didn’t hurt to make sure the plan was clear one more time.
“Remember, I’m going in first and clearing the upstairs,” Turnbull whispered. “You guys just deal with the shitheads on the bottom floor and everything will be fine.” Turnbull made the appropriate gestures to illustrate the plan as he talked.
“Okay,” the lieutenant replied, and then he repeated the instructions to his men in Arabic. Turnbull could understand bits and pieces of the speech, but had no trouble feeling his counterpart’s underlying fear – the lieutenant cared for the family he was always talking about, and that emotion made him vulnerable. But he was still braver than most. He would not let his American advisor down.
“Are you going to take this guy alive, Kelly?” the lieutenant asked. “I mean, for once.” The other guys who made up the team just watched, looking as if they understood the question even though none spoke a word of English beyond “dollar,” “whiskey” and “fuck.” They’d seen this happen before dozens of raids all through Baghdad over the last year.
Turnbull smiled, then peeked around the corner of the shed at the main house. It was a pretty nice-sized two-story job that some local Baathist flunky had owned and that had been turned over to the gentlemen they would be visiting this evening. The owner had kindly chosen to donate it when the Islamic State goons showed up at the front door and gave the owner four hours to clear out or be disemboweled in the street along with his whole family. Even though the government of Iraq, such as it was, was at war with the Sunni insurgents, through bribes and fear, these guys operated out of this house with impunity.