The hardest call they had to make was to Alexandra, Mick’s wife, to tell her the story of what had happened and to offer their condolences.
Jordan was chosen to travel home with Mick. The two had become close friends during the deployment. Jordan didn’t have money, documents, or clothes—everything was still at Camp Antonik. He had to borrow clothes and obtain a new military ID card on the base to be able to travel, which he did without shaving his beard. A close friend on another team lent him his green beret, which was an emotional moment.
Hundreds of people lined up on the tarmac at Kandahar Airfield to watch as Mick’s teammates carried his casket draped with an American flag onto the waiting C-17 transport plane.
The company held a memorial for him afterward, in front of a battle cross made of a helmet, rifle, and boots. Andy and the chaplain said a few words. The team was bitter. It seemed to Andy that all the generals were congratulating themselves for getting the team out when their failure to provide air support had resulted in the soldiers dragging their friend’s body through waist-deep mud and water with a bullet in his head. Gen. Swindell didn’t even show up. He sent his sergeant major, who approached Andy with a pep talk after the speech.
“You need to get back out there and avenge McClintock,” he said.
Andy didn’t even try to be polite. “We’ll get back out there as soon as we have the battalion’s support,” he replied.
Jordan was drained by the time they landed at Bagram Airfield, the first stop on the long journey to Dover Air Force Base. The tour felt unfinished. He wanted revenge for Mick. He felt guilty for being alive and thought about how to explain his friend’s death to his wife and family. He replayed in his mind all the ways things could have turned out differently during the mission and how Mick could have still been alive.
Andy and Dan tried to counsel the team members to avoid making poor decisions after Mick’s death. Everyone believed it had been avoidable. There was a pervasive feeling that the army thought their lives were expendable. Some of them wanted to go on a rampage to get revenge. Some of them didn’t want to do anything else for the rest of the tour. Neither was a good state to be in during the middle of an operation.
When the battalion told Andy that his team had killed fifty insurgents in Marjah, it only made him angrier. He had signed up for Special Forces to help people, to make a difference. It seemed to him that the insurgents were little more than dirt-poor farmers who lacked education and were paid to pick up a gun. And it still seemed that the Green Berets’ only job there was to keep Helmand out of the news until the next election.
ALEXANDRA RECEIVED THE FIRST CALL while driving back from therapy with her father on the day Matthew McClintock was killed. Little Declan was asleep in his car seat in the back. Her handbag was on the floor somewhere, stuffed with forms showing that she had completed her course of therapy. She was feeling good and was ready for the trip to New Mexico to stay with Matthew’s family. The only sign that something was amiss was a text from a friend. It said they’d seen the news and were thinking of her husband. She rarely watched the news—she didn’t need more reasons to worry—and the message quickly slipped her mind.
“Hello, is this Charles?” the officer on the line asked. “This is Sgt. First Class Clarity with 19th Special Forces Group. Are you Alexandra McClintock’s father? Do you have her address?”
Thinking the call was about some military function for families, she told her father to say no. But then she remembered the text from earlier. Matthew had been fine when they’d spoken yesterday. Had something happened?
“It’s probably not a big deal,” her father said. “You sure you’re okay on your own? I can stay if you need me.”
“No, Dad, it’s fine, don’t worry. I’m fine,” she said. She dropped him off at his home, which was near hers.
Declan was still asleep. Alexandra had silently spiraled into a panic. Frantically, she started to call all the people on her notification list who would have been informed if anything had happened to Matthew. She called his best friend: no reply. She moved down the list until her friend Jessica picked up. Alexandra asked if she’d heard any news.
“Nah, man, I’m on the way to the airport to pick up my brother. Everything’s fine,” Jessica said.
Alexandra tried to stem her growing fear. “You’re right. It’s probably nothing,” she said.
A military van drove past the house as she pulled into the driveway. Everything is fine, she repeated to herself. She picked up Declan and her handbag and went inside. She began tidying up the living room. The dog started barking. Through the window, she saw figures appear at the door. One of them was wearing a green beret and the other a red beret with a chaplain’s cross. She opened the door. She remembered that Matthew had been complaining about a foot injury and wondered if that was the reason for the visit. She felt bad for not taking it more seriously.
“Are you Alexandra McClintock?” one of them asked. She let them into the house.
“The president and the secretary of defense send their deepest condolences and regret to inform you that Staff Sergeant Matthew McClintock was killed in action on January 5, 2016,” the officer said.
Alexandra stood there in shock for a few moments. She had spoken to Matthew yesterday. And Afghanistan was nearly a day ahead, because of the time difference.
“But that’s today! That’s not possible,” she said. “You’re wrong!”
She marched over to the neighbor’s house to apologize for the van in the driveway and stopped halfway there, lost. The officers helped her back to her home and stayed until friends and family arrived to take care of her.
Later that night, she spoke with her therapist by phone. “I don’t want to feel anything anymore,” Alexandra said.
Her therapist wrote her a prescription for that.
WASHINGTON-BASED REPORTERS were summoned to the Pentagon briefing room for an update on the situation in Helmand as soon as Staff Sgt. Matthew McClintock’s relatives had been notified of his death. Fox News had reported that a team of Green Berets had gotten trapped in the village, and a Black Hawk sent to evacuate wounded soldiers had been shot down or had crashed. The White House was under pressure to explain why US soldiers were once again at the center of a pitched battle when combat operations were supposed to have ended a year ago. The new Resolute Support mission, as the Pentagon kept repeating, was only to provide training and assistance to local forces.
Peter Cook, the Pentagon’s press secretary, took to the podium at two p.m., wearing a crisp dark gray suit with a pink tie. The Pentagon’s logo was displayed on the blue curtains hanging behind him. The roomful of reporters waited to hear the White House’s explanation for the botched operation. The United States had withdrawn from Helmand with fanfare a year prior, and all US forces were assumed to have left the province. Their very presence in Helmand raised questions about a cover-up and what the military was really doing in Afghanistan.
The first question went to Robert Burns, a national security reporter with the Associated Press. “Could you explain the context of what’s going on in Marjah that required a US combat presence, given that the combat mission is over?” Burns asked.
“Bob, I cannot tell you with specificity at this point exactly what they were doing there at this particular time, other than this was an operation that was consistent with that train, advise, and assist mission,” Cook said.
Pure White House spin. It was inconceivable that a battalion would drop a team of Green Berets in the middle of Taliban-controlled Helmand to look for an insurgent commander and not expect them to get into a combat situation.
“We are confident that the Afghan national security and defense forces are continuing to develop the capabilities and capacity to secure the country,” Cook continued.
Jim Miklaszewski, a Pentagon reporter with NBC, pointed out that less than a month earlier, one of the Pentagon’s own reports had warned of a significant and ongoing decline in security in Afghanis
tan since the withdrawal of US troops in 2014.
“How can the US have confidence in the Afghan security forces?” he asked, citing the findings in the report. “Or was it a mistake to remove Americans from the combat battlefield?”
“They’re not at a point yet, Mik, where they are able to operate entirely on their own,” Cook said, “which is why US forces [and] other—NATO forces are there, assisting and providing this kind of training and assistance.”
Reporters continued to challenge the claim that US combat operations in Afghanistan were over and tried to force Cook to admit the White House’s failure to deliver on a pledge to end the war. Cook stuck to the talking points, insisting that the mission the Green Berets had undertaken in Marjah fell into the scope of the Afghan “training mission.”
“Peter, we have one dead special operator. How can you not say the combat mission endures in Afghanistan today?” Lucas Tomlinson of Fox News asked.
“These people are in harm’s way, Lucas. There’s no bones about that. We’re not—we’re not dismissing the risk to US forces that are there in Afghanistan. But the mission has not changed for the US troops on the ground, to provide training and assistance to those Afghan forces,” Cook said, repeating the talking point.
Reporters continued to press him about the ground that Afghan forces had lost over the year, but Cook insisted the strategy was working and the Afghan government would soon be able to take control of the country. He seemed relieved when the discussion moved on to Syria.
CHAPTER 19
This Isn’t Afghanistan Anymore
CALEB
CALEB remained unconscious for days as a vicious fever, caused by a bacterial infection from the soil that had blown into his open wounds, wracked his battered body. His eyes were glassy; his skin was gray and glistened with sweat. The doctors tried to keep his fever under control with medication, but the fiery heat kept coming back. Ashley held his good hand or hovered anxiously as he drifted in and out. She watched teams of doctors come and go and hung on their every word.
The doctors conducted evaluations, debated among themselves, and then floated away, leaving behind few clues about her husband’s deteriorating condition. She had never seen so many doctors work on a case at once. There were urologists for his failing kidneys, pain-management doctors, infection specialists, orthopedic surgeons, a trauma team, a specialized surgeon for his hand, and so on. Sometimes a representative came from the medical team; sometimes the whole team showed up. She began to realize that things were much worse than she had been told.
Caleb had five pulmonary embolisms that were preventing his body from absorbing the oxygen he needed to fight the infection. As a result, his fever continued to spike dangerously high as the powerful antibiotics being pumped into his bloodstream failed to bring the infection under control. The infection specialists started appearing in his hospital room more and more often.
Okay, Ashley thought, this is really, really not good. She had assumed that the main challenge would be for Caleb to recover from the loss of both legs. She hadn’t considered that he could actually die. She feared the worst every time the doctors changed his medication.
Caleb’s world had shrunk to the size of his hospital bed, the ebb and flow of pain, the drugs administered at regular intervals, tubes snaking in and out of his body, doctors coming and going. Sometimes his room was empty and sometimes full. The ketamine was a powerful sedative, but it often caused him to wake from terrible nightmares in which he was back in Afghanistan and getting captured by the Taliban.
It took a week for the doctors to get the infection under control. After that, Ashley felt certain that Caleb could make it through anything.
The doctors mapped out a plan for his care, which involved transferring him to Texas before Christmas, where he could be closer to his family and be treated at the military’s premier rehabilitation center. He remained semiconscious, his awareness suppressed by a cocktail of drugs that regulated his pain. Still, nothing helped ease the agony he suffered when the nurses moved him to change the dressings.
As the world slowly came into focus, Caleb grasped that his goal was to get to Texas, and for that to happen his condition had to improve. It gave him something to focus on. A target. He knew that his legs were gone, but he felt strangely detached from that reality. It seemed a very distant problem when his immediate challenge was coping with the pain and the ketamine-induced nightmares.
He understood it would be hard to get stronger while being fed through a tube. He asked for a slice of pizza, but nearly choked on his feeding tube after taking a bite and being unable to swallow it. The nurse on duty was sympathetic.
“If it was me, I’d just rip it out,” the nurse said.
Good idea, he thought. He pulled the feeding tube out as though he were doing a magic trick. The doctors that came to check on him during the next shift were displeased, but he resisted having the tube put back in.
“Okay. But you’ll have to eat two thousand calories a day,” one of the doctors told him.
Challenge accepted. He started to eat everything in sight. It didn’t take long to realize that was a big mistake. His digestive system was slow to respond, and the drugs made him constipated.
Caleb woke up in the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston in Texas on Christmas Day. Ashley was on her way by car. She had flown back to Tucson, Arizona, where she’d packed up their baby and five-year-old daughter, Evelyn, as fast as possible. He hadn’t seen the children for more than six months.
Caleb’s mother had flown with him to Texas but had stepped out of the room. Sedated, he was drifting in and out of consciousness to the beep of monitors when an unfamiliar figure appeared at his bedside. It was the hospital commander, a colonel, with his deputy, doing their Christmas rounds. The colonel plopped a plate of cookies on the table as a gift and began talking about army regulations. Caleb didn’t hear him say “Merry Christmas.”
“Same army, same paycheck.…” The words floated through Caleb’s semiconsciousness. He grasped that the colonel wanted him to shave his beard and have a haircut. “This isn’t Afghanistan anymore; this is the United States, and at this hospital there are no exceptions to rules and regulations.”
Caleb realized that he still had the bushy beard that Special Forces were allowed to grow during deployment because their jobs required them to blend into the local population. But he was back to regular army life now. He blankly looked at the colonel, who was still talking.
“Need to maintain the same standards…”
Caleb sank deeper into his bed, surveying the lines feeding in and out of his body, the bandages over the stumps where his legs had been, and felt profoundly sorry for himself. As well as a deep, laser-focused hatred of the colonel. Who was this guy? He decided there and then not to shave his beard.
“You’re going to be fine,” the colonel concluded and walked out.
A fiery rage solidified in the drug-induced haze in Caleb’s brain. It was soon a familiar sentiment. Over the next week, the colonel sent various people to his room to harass him about the beard. He ignored them all. One of them left a pair of clippers behind as a present. He refused to be humiliated. A lieutenant colonel eventually dropped by with news that the sergeant major of the army was going to visit the hospital.
“You won’t be able to see him unless you shave,” the lieutenant colonel said.
“I guess I’m not seeing him then,” Caleb replied. The beard was all that was left of his old life. The sergeant major never visited the hospital; it had been a ruse to get him to shave.
Rocky, the dog that had failed to find the bomb outside the mud shack, was given a Purple Heart for his service and became an overnight media sensation. Journalists interviewed the dog’s handler, who was in the same hospital with shrapnel wounds. No one took any notice of Caleb. Instead, photos of the “heroic dog” appeared in the papers, which only made Caleb angrier. The dog had screwed up! It had missed the bomb. No one seemed to
remember the other victims, including Caleb, several Afghan commandos, and the interpreter who’d been blinded by shrapnel.
A friend from 19th Group who had come to visit wheeled Caleb into the hospital parking lot to get some fresh air. Ashley was with them. Caleb gratefully breathed in the crisp December air, feeling refreshed after weeks of existence in the stale hospital environment. Being in a wheelchair still didn’t seem real, but overall he felt pretty good. Then the nausea hit, and he threw up his iced tea. A long road still lay ahead.
Ashley was pleased with his progress but worried about their future. Caleb was incredibly strong-willed. But how would he live with what had happened to him? She thought of all the things he loved doing: fifty-mile mountain bike rides, rock-climbing, basketball. How would he cope? How would they all cope?
A couple of weeks later, in January, a buddy told Caleb what had happened to his friends back in Marjah. He tried to imagine the Black Hawk crashing down in the compound, his teammates surrounded by Taliban and counting their last bullets. In pain and a haze of drugs, he lay in bed, thinking of Mick. He remembered their conversations about transitioning to active duty and how excited Mick had been following the birth of his son. Guilt coiled through Caleb’s mind.
I planned that mission, he thought, remembering the intelligence on Marjah he’d shared with the team. It’s my fault.
He tried to remember the details of the intelligence he’d gathered during his first mission there, but it was like groping through mud in the dark. He couldn’t think clearly. If he had been present to help them plan the mission, he thought, perhaps Mick would still be alive. He had left the team more exposed.
Caleb blamed himself. He blamed the army. Everything they had been told about Afghanistan turned out to be wrong. He gave in and shaved his beard. He’d never felt so defeated in his life.
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