by Joe Klein
It was a mess from the start. They were stuck at Kandahar Air Field for a month. Then they were moved to Camp Bastion, a British fort near Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand. They sat at Bastion, too, even as Echo, Fox, and Golf deployed. “What the hell is going on?” Jake asked Beidler. “They don’t have enough ammo for us?”
“Helicopters, I think,” Shawn said. In truth, the Marines were still trying to figure out where everyone should go.
“We should be out there, protecting our guys,” Jake said.
Which was prescient: a few days later, word came back that Third Platoon of Golf Company—their old platoon—had been hit. A Humvee had been blown up by an IED; four had been killed. Jake and Clay were berserk, trying to find out the names, experiencing a combination of guilt, disgust, and anger.
The names were awful. Clay lost a fire-team buddy, Layton Crass. Jake thought, at first, that he’d also lost a beloved member of his fire-team, Kevin Colbert, a Choctaw Indian from Oklahoma. It turned out that Colbert was still alive, but he had been seriously injured in the blast, with burns over 90 percent of his body. But the worst loss was Sergeant Mike Washington, Jr., the squad leader who had been given the job that Jake had been asked to take. Jake loved Washington. He had come to the Marines directly from high school in Seattle, but somehow Mike could bridge the gap with the older guys like Jake and Clay. He was a tall, handsome black guy, an excellent Marine, smart and funny, able to handle the physical challenges with ease.
Jake had felt good when he learned that Washington had been selected for the squad leader’s job that he’d rejected; Mike would take care of the guys. He’d bring them home. And now, for the second time in two deployments, Jake was thinking: that should have been me in that fucking Humvee. When he heard the news, he rushed out to the edge of Camp Bastion, over to the sandblasted Hesco barriers, and wept. He gathered himself and went back to Beidler. “I want a fucking transfer,” he said. “If we’re not going to be in the fight, I want to go back to my squad and take Mike’s place.”
Shawn calmed him down. The sniper team was a unit; removing Jake would be like pulling the carburetor from an engine. “I know it’s fucked,” Beidler said. “But we’ll be out there soon enough.”
Jake and Clay talked about it that night. They wanted to get out there now. “I would really like to get out there and waste some of those assholes,” Jake said. He looked at Clay, at the calm fury in his eyes, and thought: my brother is right there with me.
They were deployed about a week later to the heavily contested town of Sangin, which sat on the east side of the Helmand River in the north of the province. Jake was amazed by how primitive it was compared to Iraq: there was no infrastructure, no literacy. The Afghan government had zero presence there; the local tribes provided what order there was—and there wasn’t very much. The Taliban were everywhere; IEDs were everywhere. Their battalion would suffer thirty amputations during the deployment.
The conditions for the sniper team were rudimentary as well. They lived in a corner of the British FOB, in tents, in the midst of a sea of gravel. There were no shower trailers, no Porta-Jons. The hygiene was atrocious. They bathed in the river, dumped in Wag Bags, and peed wherever. Jake contracted a MRSA staph infection there.
Much of their work was at night. They would go out in the darkness, establish an oversight position in advance of an American troop movement, and wait for the Taliban to come and try to plant IEDs. It was boring, frustrating work. Clay fell asleep on security watch in the field one night, a near-unpardonable offense. “It was my medications, man,” he said to Beidler.
That didn’t wash at all. “If you can’t handle your medications, bro, you shouldn’t be here,” Shawn said.
“I’ll be okay,” Clay said. “I promise.”
But he wasn’t okay. He wasn’t reliable. He had come to the conclusion that the whole deployment, the whole war, was bullshit. He would complain constantly—and while Jake and some of the other snipers thought Clay’s complaints were valid, he was bumming out the team, cratering morale. Beidler pulled Jake aside. “What’s going on with Clay?”
“He’s got some personal shit he’s working through,” Jake said. “He’ll be all right.”
“You’ve got to talk to Clay, bro. He’s got to get his act together.”
Jake tried to appeal to Clay’s sense of duty and integrity. “You’ve got a job to do,” he told Clay after the sleeping incident. “You signed up for this. You have to do it—because if you don’t, if you’re not out there doing your job well, some of your brothers are not going to make it home. Clay, you do not want to be responsible for that. You do not want to live with that.”
Clay knew Jake was right. He promised to get his shit together. “I definitely do not want to be the guy who gets someone killed.”
And he did try, very hard. That was one of the toughest things for Jake, watching Clay trying so hard and sometimes struggling. Clay was never asked to be a shooter when they were out on a mission, but he held positions of great responsibility. He was integral to the team’s first coordinated shot. Two shooters were trained on two men in a group of Taliban, several hundred yards away. Clay counted down: “I have control,” he said calmly. “I have control. Stand by. Firing on the T of two. Five . . . four . . . three . . . t”—two Taliban dropped in their tracks—“two.” There was immense technical satisfaction in this, and there was vengeance for all their comrades who’d been blown up by IEDs, but Clay remained troubled. What were they doing out there in Sangin? What was the point?
There were rumors that they were going to be pulled out of Sangin and moved into a major battalion-sized set-piece battle for control of the town of Nowzad. That would make sense: taking territory, rather than just sweeping it and watching the Taliban leak back in like dirty water. But it never happened.
As the weeks passed, there were days that Clay simply did not want to go out on missions. “I cannot fight this war,” he told Jake. The reaction from their superiors was sympathetic at first. Everyone was exhausted. It was high summer, scorching, damp from all the irrigation water and yet dusty, with no amenities. No computers, no electricity for nonessential business, like watching DVDs. So, sure, it made sense that Clay really did need a break—you certainly didn’t want him in the field if he thought he would be a liability. But the days Clay stayed in began to increase, and finally the platoon Sergeant said to him, “Hunt, you’re on tent watch until further notice.” And he spent several weeks hanging out at the FOB, while the rest of the team went out on an extended mission.
Jake continued to protect him as best he could; he remained loyal, defended Clay to the others—and the rest of his teammates understood what Jake was doing and why. Shawn Beidler felt terrible about it—he really liked Clay, and they would remain friends when they got home—but the guy just couldn’t hack it downrange.
On one of their last patrols, the sniper team took an overwatch position in an old stone house, one of the more prodigious structures in the area, providing security for an Echo Company sweep through the adjoining farmland. They stashed the owner and his family in the basement and, situated on the second floor, tried to pick off the Taliban who were attempting to pick off Echo. As the sun rose and a hot day began, they saw children running out to the Taliban positions, carrying things—ammo, food, water, it was hard to tell. It seemed an organized operation, and they tried to put eyes on the organizer. Wheeler went downstairs and thought he saw the guy, a religious sort with a long beard, wearing a dark djellaba (or “man dress,” as the Marines called it). But it was impossible to get a shot at him without blowing their position. There was some debate about shooting one of the kids, a girl with an RPG tube running out toward the Taliban, but nobody was really up for that either.
As the sun arced toward midday, the Taliban called it quits and retired from the field. Beidler’s sniper team received a radio message that it was cool to pack up and leave. Normally they would have waited till nightfall, but there was a
Cobra gunship in the air, ready to escort them out.
Jake walked point. He took two steps out of the compound, with Beidler just behind him. “Wood, hold,” Shawn said. “Is that the motherfucker?” Jake followed the line of Beidler’s sniper rifle and saw a man with a long beard standing in front of a rude mud hut, proselytizing vehemently, waving his arms in front of five children. Wheeler confirmed it was the guy he’d seen before.
Jake looked at the man, who seemed to be angry with a very young boy, gesturing out to the field and then back to the mud hut and out to the field again. He didn’t feel good about shooting the guy in the midst of the kids, but he told Shawn, “If this is the guy, let’s smoke him.”
Jake would later write, “The man jerked as if punched in the chest, and behind him the drab wall exploded in color as his heart erupted out his back. In an instant the man dropped to the ground . . . the splotch of red slowly dripping down the tan mud wall. Nothingness was replaced with screaming, the terrified shrieks of five children who, after a moment of disbelief, fled in every direction from the confines of my scope. I blinked, and suddenly my scope was empty.”
PART III
Finding Home
Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier
I have seen worse sights than this.
—THE ILIAD
Chapter 1
THE DIAMOND STANDARD
On the last day of April 2007, Eric Greitens parked his pickup near his apartment in Washington, D.C., and was just stepping out of it when his phone rang. It was Joel Poudrier, who was back home in North Carolina, recovering from his head wound. “Eric, I got some bad news,” he said. “Travis was killed in Fallujah yesterday. A sniper.”
Eric went numb. “No,” he said softly. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion on the street. A taxi pulled up, stopped, emptied out laughing passengers, and took off. People sleepwalked their daily lives, doing errands. Eric was distracted, then disturbed by the normality: Was there anyone for blocks around—anyone in this capital city—thinking, at that moment, about the men and women like Travis who were, at that moment, in mortal danger in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Joel thought he’d lost Eric. “Hey, you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Eric said, but he didn’t seem okay to Joel.
“Hey look, Eric, I’m going back in a few weeks.”
“You’re going back?”
His wound was healed. He needed to be back with his men. “But I was thinking that I really want to visit the Manions before I go. They live up in Pennsylvania. You want to come with me?”
“Absolutely,” Eric said. “Of course.”
Eric had rented a Capitol Hill flat during his year as a White House fellow. He’d sublet it during his tour in Iraq to Mike Lumpkin, who was serving as a Naval Special Warfare liaison to the Congress. It was a small, sparsely furnished place. Joel Poudrier thought it was like a starving artist setup. “Hey, I’ve got something to show you,” Eric said when Joel arrived to drive him up to Pennsylvania. He opened one of his Navy gear bags and pulled out his body armor. There was blood all over it. “Your blood,” Eric said with a smile.
“You think I could have some of that back?” Joel asked.
“Too late,” Eric said. “You forgot to duck.”
Tom and Janet Manion lived in a beautiful home in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He was a retired Marine lieutenant colonel, now an executive with Johnson & Johnson, and every bit as rectitudinous as his son, who had been buried a few weeks earlier at Arlington National Cemetery. The Manions had been too stunned to talk with Travis’s Marine buddies who’d attended the funeral. But now they were curious about what Fallujah had been like and how Travis had been regarded. Joel and Eric were the first of Travis’s comrades to sit down with them and really talk about their son.
Joel, who knew Travis better than Eric did, took the lead. Tom Manion had maps of Fallujah, and they went down to his office to look at them—Janet Manion wanted no part of this. Joel showed Tom the Pizza Slice and talked about how the patrols operated, how well Travis had worked with the Iraqis; Eric talked about being out on patrol with Travis, how strong he’d been. Joel had brought some photos from Travis’s MiTT team.
“Tell me about them,” Tom asked Joel, pointing to a picture of the team. He wanted to know about each one, individually.
“And who’s that?” Tom asked, pointing to an imposing Iraqi officer.
“That’s Colonel Ali,” Joel said. “He’s a really great leader. The guy never took a cut for himself when he paid his men, which is saying something for the Iraqis. He actually”—and here Joel hesitated—“he insisted on saying a few words at the memorial service they had for Travis in Fallujah. You would have loved it, sir. All the Iraqis who worked with Travis’s MiTT team were there. They all respected him, sir,” Joel concluded. “He showed them what a true warrior and a true leader looked like.”
Travis’s sister, Ryan, who owned several clothing stores, joined them for dinner. Janet had prepared a wonderful meal—and Eric was deeply moved by their graciousness. He realized that he and Joel had taken Travis’s place at the table; the Manions felt the same way. After dinner, they went downstairs to a covered patio, where the real conversation began.
Tom and Janet were angry—Janet, particularly—about how the war was being portrayed in the media. “Travis called us once a week and he didn’t sound anything like the news reports we’ve been hearing,” Janet said. “He was optimistic. He said things were getting better. What do you guys think? Was Travis right?”
They assured Janet that Travis’s team had been doing very effective work. Eric knew that it was too soon to tell if Fallujah was really calming down, but he wanted to reassure these lovely, shattered people. As it happened, Travis was prescient: a little more than a month after his death, in June 2007, al-Anbar province quieted considerably; there were days, then weeks, when no shots were fired—not just in Fallujah, but throughout the province. The local tribes had turned against Al Qaeda; General Petraeus was signing up their young men to become Sons of Iraq, a paid militia force.
The Manions asked Joel why he was going back to Iraq. “My guys are there,” Joel said. “I’ve got to complete my mission.” Ryan would remember her mother saying that she wished Travis’s mission could continue as well.
“What do you think Travis’s legacy should be?” Eric asked.
Janet said that Travis’s friends had encouraged them to put an ad in the local paper advertising the creation of a Travis Manion Memorial Fund. Somehow the ad had gone viral in the online military community, and $200,000 had come in from all over the country. She and Eric began to talk about how that money should be spent. She was thinking about providing Travis Manion college scholarships for students at his alma mater, La Salle High School.
Eric was struck by this. He hadn’t given much thought to how his generation of veterans would be remembered. He and Joel talked about it all the way back to Washington. He remembered the quote from Thucydides’ account of Pericles’ funeral oration: “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”
Eventually, Ryan Manion would sell the two clothing stores she owned and take charge of the Travis Manion Foundation. It seemed more important work than worrying if she had enough size 8 jeans in stock. Eventually, the Travis Manion Foundation would provide funding for eighteen Mission Continues fellows, including four of the first five—and then annually award a Travis Manion fellowship to one of the more promising TMC candidates. One of the first would go to Jake Wood of Team Rubicon.
For the moment, though, Eric drove through the darkness, back to Washington, overwhelmed by the realization that his generation of warriors—fighters of two forlorn wars—was about to take its place in history. The active duty military represented a tiny portion of the American population, and the actual warriors a fragment of that. Eric thought about the admirable qualities, the moral and mental discipline that Travis Manion brought t
o Fallujah and would have brought home. Somehow—he wasn’t sure how—those qualities had to be leveraged and, as Pericles suggested, woven into the lives of others.
Eric had served his White House fellowship at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He wasn’t thrilled by the assignment at first. HUD was a sleepy backwater in the George W. Bush administration. Eric was hoping for Treasury or the National Security Council—but the HUD Secretary, Alphonso Jackson, took a personal interest in the White House fellows program, interviewed Eric himself, and gave him an office right down the hall from his own. And then on August 29, 2005, the week before Eric was to begin his fellowship, Hurricane Katrina demolished New Orleans and HUD wasn’t so sleepy anymore.
On Eric’s first day in the job, Secretary Jackson’s special assistant Kim Kendrick handed him a piece of paper and said, “Take a look at this and see what you can do with it.”
It was a message from the Auburn University College of Architecture offering to help with the planning and rebuilding of New Orleans. Eric called the dean of the school, who didn’t have any specific ideas but said, “We’ve got a whole bunch of students and faculty who want to help in some way.” He then called several other schools of architecture, all of whom wanted to help but weren’t sure how. He wrote a brisk, five-point military action memo proposing a program—the Universities Rebuilding America Partnership (URAP)—that would give federal grants to schools of architecture that joined with local community development agencies to plan and build new housing in the battered neighborhoods of New Orleans. He handed it to Kim Kendrick that night.