Eagle Down

by Jessica Donati

  The rest of the time was spent sitting in the shade under trees with rank-and-file Afghan soldiers while waiting for the generals to emerge from their afternoon meetings. The soldiers described the usual problems: maintaining Humvees and getting paychecks. No one had been paid the previous month. Hutch explained that there was a technical, countrywide issue with the new payroll system. Greg promised to send a team to help them sort through any other issues. The Afghans smoked all Greg’s cigarettes, asked about Paktika, and took pictures. Then we boarded the Chinooks and left.

  Back in Kabul, we found out that two more American soldiers had been killed that day in Uruzgan province: a 10th Group soldier on his sixth deployment, and an explosives expert whose wife was expecting their first child. A few days later, a second 10th Group soldier died in a noncombat incident in Helmand province. Their deaths brought the total to ten American soldiers killed in the first six months of 2019.1

  I had dinner with Hutch before leaving Kabul, at the same Thai restaurant on the base where he’d had his last meal with Col. Johnston after getting fired back in 2015. Not even the menu had changed. Hutch conceded that he needed many more staff to manage the advisory mission. He said, “I need fifty guys, instead of five, that are free to go to all thirty-four provinces. But that could mean, say, losing two guys. The army isn’t willing to expose itself to that risk. Thus they [the US Army] have to make do with the limitations and the probably limited outcome.”

  He talked about the two US soldiers killed in Uruzgan and pondered whether it would be worse to die at the end of a deployment, like they had, or near the start. He said, “I always start a deployment thinking I’m not going to come back. Toward the end, you’ve made all these concrete plans with your family. I think that would be worse.”

  “I’m not sure Tina would look at it that way,” I said.

  He smiled sheepishly. When something consumes you this much, it’s hard to imagine it won’t consume you altogether, he explained. “I didn’t realize how much at a loss I had been when they took all this away from me,” he said. “Until they gave it back.”

  Footnote

  1 The soldiers killed in Uruzgan province were Master Sergeant Micheal B. Riley of 2nd Battalion, 10th Group (A), and Sergeant James G. Johnston of the 79th Ordnance Battalion (Explosive Ordnance Disposal), 71st Ordnance Group, both of whom died in a firefight on June 25, 2019. The soldier who died in Helmand province was Sergeant First Class Elliott J. Robbins, a medical sergeant.

  CHAPTER 29

  Recovery

  CALEB

  AFTER I GOT BACK from Afghanistan in July 2019, I went to Arizona to spend a weekend with Caleb’s family in Tucson. We chatted at the kitchen table, Caleb leaning back in his wheelchair with his hands clasped around his left stump, which had part of a tattoo stretched over it. He spent most of his time in the chair because his prosthetic legs were causing him pain after he’d overexercised the previous week. No matter how long you spend with Caleb, it always comes as a surprise to think of him in a wheelchair or as disabled. It’s his spirit.

  “We haven’t found anything I can’t do yet,” he said, more than once.

  It’s true, sort of. I watched his old teammate, Chris, pick up Caleb’s four-year-old daughter, Emily, and toss her into the air, making her “fly” around the room. I wondered how that must feel for Caleb, his legs sore because of the bones growing at the end of his stumps that made it painful to wear his legs. When we went to watch the sunset over a nearby valley, Chris was the one to carry Emily to the top of the viewing point while Caleb stayed at the bottom with Ashley and nine-year-old Evelyn, who was afraid of heights.

  Emily was as fearless as Evelyn was cautious. I pondered how much the contrast had been caused by the amount of change the elder daughter had experienced in her short life. She had seen her father’s and her family’s before and after. The younger girl knew nothing different. Caleb ran a ten-mile race less than a year after losing his legs, and then a full-length marathon a year later. He never felt sorry for himself, at least not in public. He did everything with confidence and refused to show signs of frustration or helplessness.

  When he struggled to get back to the car after the sunset, he blamed it on the beer—not the lack of legs—and on the fact that it was dark, and thus more difficult to navigate the rocky path. He went into a detailed explanation about a problematic mechanism in the knee that caused it to swing freely and lock, making it harder to walk.

  “There’s been a lot of time throughout the past three years where the realization of not having legs will catch up to you. You can easily feel sorry for yourself. I think if I had to put it in the ratio, good to bad days, the good days far outweigh the bad days because of my family, my friends, good support network. It’s not all rainbows and unicorns, and sometimes it just sucks. I want to go, without doing any prior planning, just go running somewhere. You know what I mean?” he said. “I can go run, but there’s a lot of deliberation, putting things together, switching out parts, making sure I’m not in pain. There’s days where it definitely sucks, and sometimes I get angry. And now I’ve realized it’s easier to calm down, and filling my life with good things has helped outweigh the bad things.”

  Caleb found new meaning after getting training certifications through CrossFit and nonprofits supporting adaptive sports in mid-2017. He started training wounded vets and other people with disabilities, which was a turning point. Being required to focus on others made all the anger, selfishness, and self-pity disappear.

  “It just turns it completely around,” he said. “I found my calling: my passion is helping people in the gym. I’ve seen direct results of what can happen for people with disabilities or not, anybody—their mental, physical, emotional—and it changed me. I feel good, felt a sense of purpose, felt good about helping people.”

  One client was a sixty-five-year-old amputee who had lost a leg to diabetes. He started training with Caleb in October 2018 and by the following spring went to his doctor and found out that he wasn’t diabetic anymore. Teaching him and other elderly folks how to get up off the ground without assistance, and seeing them cry and hug him, was an amazing feeling for Caleb.

  “Really it could be worse. I’m interacting with other folks that don’t have the same support networks that I do through the VA [Veterans Affairs]. Seeing them struggle to find the right prosthetic care, the right-fitting socket, insurance won’t pay for whatever.… I can show them tips and how to adjust things, and what to look for and stuff. It helps me realize I’m really fortunate in that aspect,” he said. “I haven’t found anything I can’t do yet.”

  Caleb’s next plan was to go to physical therapy school in Texas. “Right now I don’t have to work. I could literally sit in this chair, drink beer all day long, get on Facebook, bitch about the VA, how my life sucks, [how it was] back in war. All these snowflakes nowadays,” he said. “When I say snowflakes, I mean, like, all the skinny-jean-wearing hipster people, people from Seattle.”

  “I’ve never heard that term,” said Ashley.

  “You guys never heard the term? Where everybody’s told you’re an individual, special,” Caleb said.

  “I got Urban Dictionary going,” said Ashley, reading from her phone. “Where someone thinks they’re unique and special but they’re really not. Gained popularity from Fight Club. Funny.”

  Caleb had just returned from a scuba-diving trip to Saipan in which he’d helped search for the remains of missing-in-action US service members from World War II. The group he was with, Task Force Dagger Foundation, performed underwater archeology on planes that had crashed in the harbor and hadn’t been recovered. In class before the dive, Caleb had heard that unexploded bombs might still exist on the harbor floor. He started to feel panicky. The anxiety developed into sweats. His heart pounded, his mind shut down. He couldn’t listen to any more of the lecture; he was thinking about the bomb in Sangin, flashing back to the explosion over and over.

  “I could be digging in the
sand, this bomb could have been here for seventy-five years, I could just go boom! And it would explode. So these things are running through my mind,” he said. “I have this fear, which was crazy, but at the same time part of my mind was like, you know it’s not going to happen, all explosives are degraded, it’s not going to happen.”

  Caleb also had visions of an American WWII pilot being shot down, plummeting toward the sea. It would have been like his stepping on the bomb in Sangin. He felt a strange connection to the man whose body they were potentially going to recover. He was freaking out. In group settings, he’d stop talking and just replay the scene in his mind.

  “He’s up in the air, couple of thousand feet, gets shot down, plane’s on fire. Just hurtling down to the water at hundreds of miles an hour, a sense of hopelessness. Fear. I’m going to die and there’s nothing I can do to control that,” he said, imagining the episode. “That’s a lot of the feelings I felt after the explosion, like, oh my god, what’s going to happen? I felt this weird connection to this guy. To the circumstance. It was just weird. Just processing it through my mind… thinking about why we’re there, potentially to recover somebody.”

  Caleb found that focusing on the task allowed him to control his own fear and face the difficult emotions he still carried with him after stepping on the bomb in Sangin.

  “It helped me to develop, to overcome these feelings, to where I was able to be digging around in the sand, knowing there could be bombs. It was the weirdest self-progression I’ve had in a long time,” he said. “My mind is wired. You can plan anything perfectly, [but] bad things can still happen. Logical and illogical as it sounds at the same time.”

  He continued, “Someone told us the canisters were napalm. Then we learned they were rocket boost assistors for the seaplanes. The booster helps the plane get up, and then nothing, they’re inert. I went through all this emotional turmoil over all this stuff, and it turned out to be nothing.”

  Emily walked into the dining room. “Hi,” Caleb said to her, with a tender smile.

  CHAPTER 30

  Ending (and Trump Gets the Deal)

  AS COL. JOSH THIEL was leaving Afghanistan, President Trump appointed a successor to the post of top US envoy for Afghan talks, which had been vacant for over a year. Zalmay Khalilzad started in September 2018 with a new title but essentially the same role vacated by Laurel Miller. His orders were to get a deal with the Taliban within a year and negotiate the full withdrawal of troops that the president had wanted in the first place.

  Khalilzad was an Afghan-born diplomat who had been involved in the Afghan war from the very start. He served as President Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan in 2001 and then was appointed as US ambassador there in 2003. He was closely involved in the drafting of the country’s new constitution. He was a controversial figure, but arguably no one in the US government knew Afghanistan better than he did.

  Soon afterward, Pakistan released Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who had been a close confidant of Mullah Omar. He was often referred to as the cofounder of the Taliban and seen as an authoritative figure who could represent the group. In January 2019, Mullah Baradar was appointed as the Taliban’s political-office chief and tasked with leading the talks with Khalilzad. After more than a year of discussions, the United States and the Taliban signed a deal to withdraw all US troops and map out a path to reconciliation.

  Under the terms, the United States agreed to remove all troops within fourteen months in return for a Taliban pledge to ensure that Afghanistan would never again be used by terrorists as a safe haven from which to plan attacks. Clauses also called for a reduction in violence and a promise to launch talks among Afghans. Critics of the deal were swift to point out that the terms were vague. By how much was violence supposed to drop? And what if discussions among Afghans began but reached no conclusion? As an added obstacle, the Afghan government, which was not a signatory, was required to free up to five thousand Taliban prisoners for the talks to launch.

  Unsurprisingly, the Afghan government balked at the requirement, and preliminary discussions with the Taliban over the prisoner release broke off within weeks. It didn’t help that Afghanistan’s leaders were feuding over the outcome of a fraud-marred presidential election and more focused on claiming victory than agreeing on a team for negotiations with the Taliban, which was supposed to represent a range of Afghan powerbrokers and interest groups. Soon after the US deal with the Taliban was signed, President Ghani and his rival, Abdullah Abdullah, held competing presidential inaugurations. The United States responded with a $1 billion cut in aid to pressure the Afghan government to set rivalries aside. Ghani and Abdullah agreed to share power and completed the prisoner releases in September.

  At the time of this writing, talks between the Taliban, the government, and other parties had just launched in Doha. President Trump will end his term with some forty-five hundred troops still in Afghanistan—a few thousand less than he inherited from Obama. Violence is rising again, leaving US and Afghan special operations with the crucial task of keeping the Taliban at bay while talks last—likely years.

  ARMY STAFF SGT. MATTHEW “Mick” McClintock was posthumously awarded a Silver Star for his actions in Marjah. Alexandra wouldn’t let him be buried until the paperwork came through. She didn’t trust the army to deliver.

  She would spend years looking back, examining all the moments when it would have been possible to set history on a different path. The first was letting Matthew return to Afghanistan after Declan’s birth. But there were others. Like their first meeting at the dive bar in Seattle.

  “Nice T-shirt,” she had said, recognizing the logo of a military charity. He replied with a look that she interpreted as an insult.

  “Okay, I guess I’ll just go over there and fuck myself then!” she added.

  “Well, that will be an interesting sight!” one of his friends piped up, striking up a back-and-forth.

  Matthew had come to find her at the end of the night. “I’ll try to see you at a fundraiser sometime,” she said.

  “Do or don’t. There is no try,” he said.

  “Did you just quote Yoda at a metal concert?” she asked.

  “Did you just recognize Yoda?” he replied.

  What if she hadn’t said anything at all? For a long time, she felt that it would have been better if they’d never met and she had been spared the unspeakable pain of losing him. When the United States announced that it was going to negotiate a deal to withdraw from Afghanistan, Alexandra crawled back into bed and stayed there.

  “If we’re going to withdraw, then my husband died for literally nothing,” she said, thinking of all the other widows in her community. “I don’t know. I wish I knew the answers. I know that I can’t let Matt, James, Mike, and all these people I’ve gotten to know through their families, I can’t be okay with them dying for nothing. And I’ve met some amazing Afghan people, and I hope we find an actual solution.”

  She is now studying for a degree in psychology with a minor in politics at the University of Washington and applying to PhD programs. She has submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the investigation into her husband’s death. She lives with Declan in a beautiful home in a great school district, with parks nearby. She is involved in fundraising for the Special Forces community and remains in touch with Matthew’s former teammates. Declan was diagnosed with autism, and she has been learning about the condition. He has a busy therapy schedule and is doing very well. On Memorial Day weekend, they spend the day at Matthew’s grave in Arlington with a tent, coolers, friends, and family. Recently, she has tried dating again.

  “I’ve tried, I’ve put myself out there. I’ve gone on dates. But how do you fill those shoes?” she said. “I’m not lonely. I’m still in love with my husband, today just as much as yesterday. I hope I love him this much or more every day for the rest of my life. When I married him I promised that I would be his wife until the day that I died. He got out of that deal a little early. I intend
to hold my promise to him, and I intend to die as his wife.”

  She went on, “Yeah, maybe I get a second chapter. Maybe I don’t. And I’m okay either way. I’ve got a fantastic kid who takes all of my time and all of my life. If something else comes along, he will have to be really cool. I won’t date somebody unless I think Matt would love him.”

  ANDY AGONIZED over his decisions for a long time after the ill-fated mission in Marjah that led to the downed helicopter and Mick’s death in the effort to secure a new landing zone. Perhaps they should have hunkered down at the compound. Perhaps Ski’s injuries could have waited until nightfall. Perhaps they could have tried to raid the building from a different direction. He knew one thing for sure: he was proud of the team for finding a way to battle through a terrible situation, and he believed that many more could have died that day if it hadn’t been for their bravery. He was disillusioned with military service and felt like a political pawn that was ultimately abandoned. As the captain, he felt responsible for having put so many men in a bad situation without recourse. He needed a fresh start. He went to business school and landed a well-paying job in tech. He has bought a small cabin in the mountains of Lake Tahoe.

  Dan also struggled with his decisions in Marjah. Like Andy, he felt incredibly proud of how the team had performed during the deployment, and especially under fire during that mission. He did not return to his civilian job and instead spent time at home with his family. He started the Special Forces Warrant Officer Course in the summer of 2016. When he was taken on a tour of Washington to visit the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon, he met the top Special Forces planner and asked him what the strategy was for Afghanistan. The officer stared blankly at him and said, “There is no plan. We keep going there because no commander wants to be the first one to not have a combat rotation.” After completing the course, Dan began a new career at the State Department while also leading a Special Forces team in the National Guard. He figured that perhaps helping to advance diplomacy would prevent wars. He plans to move with his family to work at an embassy overseas and has transitioned to the Army Reserves.