by Joe Klein
Chapter 3
ONE SKY SOLDIER FALLS, WE ALL FALL
Two years after he was sure his life had ended, Mike Pereira decided to google Eric Greitens. Mike was beginning to entertain the possibility that his life wasn’t over after all, that he might actually have a second act, and Greitens was the first person in authority he’d ever met—certainly not his parents or teachers or his other superior officers—who took an interest in his future and told him he had real potential.
He had met Eric in Balad, Iraq, in the autumn of 2006. It was weird, too, because Greitens was a Navy officer. In Mike’s experience, Navy officers tended to be—well, there was no other way to put it—assholes. In the Army and Marines, junior officers were out downrange with their troops, eating and fighting and crapping with them; the camaraderie began to dissipate as the officers climbed the ranks, but some hint of it always remained. The Navy, however, had this profound, antique class segregation; they acted as if enlisted men were servants. They took out the dry cleaning, served tea. The Navy was hoity-toity, and Mike was a guy who had a large WORKING CLASS tattoo on his back, with the “C” portrayed as a hammer and sickle, the symbol of communism, which later proved embarrassing: he’d gotten the tattoo when he was fifteen and a jerk and had no idea what the hammer and sickle meant.
From the beginning, Greitens was different from any other officer he’d served under—and it was a difficult start, because Mike’s opening move was a screaming, crying, tearing-his-hair-out fit. Eric was the headquarters intelligence liaison for SEAL Team Six at the time; Mike was a private contractor, an intelligence analyst who assessed the information coming from the interrogations of high-value Al Qaeda prisoners held at Balad. The Army had asked him to retire in order to join this special contract unit—it was a complicated business and too secret to be described—but he was still a Sergeant in his soul, still living the military life, and still eating from the Kellogg Brown & Root dining facility (D-Fac), even though he no longer had to wear a uniform.
The work was fascinating, but frustrating. Mike was there in perpetuity, but the officers on the SEAL side of the intel chain came and went on seven-month tours. Just as the SEAL guys were beginning to distinguish Abu-Azzaz from Abu-Ayyud, they were sent home. Mike, meanwhile, had created a four-foot-high, fourteen-foot-wide Wonder Wall—it looked like a circuit board—that mapped out the connections between almost every conceivable Abu of value. There were a thousand names linked on the wall. Greitens was blown away when he saw it.
The problem was, the new military intelligence guys—the ones perpetually rotating in—always felt the need to establish their own bona fides. They had a stream of info, too, coming in from the SEALs downrange, and very often it was excellent information. Sometimes, though, it was not so good. In this particular case, the SEALs were going with a new source who turned out to be a drug addict with a gripe against a particular family. Mike had tried to stop it. “No, not that family, this family. These are the guys you want to hit.” But the SEALs had been adamant and hit the wrong family. They had blown open the door and there had been people—innocent women and children—sleeping near the door, and now they were dead, and Mike was unloading on this spiffy Lieutenant Commander Greitens, yelling and pounding the plywood table and pulling his hair. Unnecessary deaths could set Mike off this way. Eric just sat there, calmly eating a bowl of rice—and Mike was getting pissed at him, too, because why didn’t he tell Mike to put a cork in it?
Finally, after Mike had drained his fuel tank, Eric asked, “What can we do to make it better?”
Whoa. Now that was novel. But Greitens actually was interested; he wanted to know what Mike knew. He sensed Mike knew a lot. They began to work closely together on a new target set that would integrate ground intelligence, signals intelligence, previous missions, and intel gleaned from detainees. The leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had recently been killed. He’d been succeeded by Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who was now the number-one target. Mike put together the intelligence, Eric edited it, and they brought it to the Colonel of a Unit-That-Cannot-Be-Named, who simply loved it. Eric didn’t take the credit the way most officers would; he told the Colonel they had a gold mine in Mike Pereira. Mike received a commander’s coin—a currency of respect in the military—and felt that he had reached his pinnacle of effectiveness.
He and Eric became friends. They ate together. They talked about the future. Eric talked about how he wanted to combine the wisdom of older people with the ambition of younger people back at home. “What are you going to do?” he asked Mike. “What about college? What are your goals?”
Goals? College? He had always wanted to go to college. But no one in his life had ever expected him to do it or told him he should go to college. “You should go to college,” Eric said. “Let’s figure out how to get you to the right place.”
They scheduled a career-counseling meeting. It took place in the Charlie Beckwith Conference Room—Mike would never forget that because it was one of the most important meetings of his life—and Eric became his academic adviser. Eric had taken the time to write out notes about how to find the right school, how to get through the admissions process, and how to establish himself as a force to be reckoned with in the world. “When you get out of the military,” Greitens told him, “you have as strong a possibility of becoming a leader as you do here.”
But you couldn’t just say remarkable things like that to Mike Pereira. You had to understand where Mike was coming from, why all of this seemed so implausible; Mike insisted on it. And so he told Eric about his life, and Eric patiently listened.
Mike had come up very hard; indeed, he’d come from several generations of hard. He was Portuguese, from the Azores, on his father’s side, and Mexican on his mother’s. His father, Ron Pereira, better known as “Doc” because of his otherworldly ability to fix engines of all sorts, had emerged from the human equivalent of primordial slime: Doc’s father had walked out on his mother, who became a prostitute and a drug addict, and then the mistress of a mob guy who dumped her, and then a prostitute once more. At times, she was strung out for days on end. One time Doc had found her covered in blood on the floor: she had tried to cut her hair and cut her ears instead. Another time she was carrying a bottle of drugs in her vagina and it broke; Doc had to clean that up, too.
Doc Pereira started stealing cars when he was ten, just to get by. He was in juvenile prison by the age of twelve and out by the age of fourteen. His mother was murdered when he was fifteen; Doc figured it was his fault for not protecting her. He ran away from the funeral, unwilling to submit himself to foster care. He overdosed on heroin at the age of sixteen and went into rehab. He came out of rehab and began driving long-haul trucks from Canada to Phoenix and selling drugs on the side. He spent four years in jail, when Mike was a boy, after he was caught hauling a shipment of marijuana.
Mike’s mother, Cynthia Lopez, was a Mexican Cinderella. Her parents had crossed the river to get to America. She found solace in religion, deep in religion—and so Mike got deep into religion, too. The family moved around in the San Francisco area, from Watsonville to the East Bay—a house several miles from the epicenter of the 1989 earthquake. Doc had been working on an engine in the basement when the shaking started; Mike and his sister, Amanda, were upstairs, terrified, as the house was falling apart all around them—and then Doc rushed in, swooped them up like Superman, and deposited them in the storm cellar. They moved to Bellingham, Washington, after that. Mike was eight years old. The house was just outside the city line in a rural area; it had a barn out back that Doc used to store and fix cars; in effect, Doc had transformed the property into an auto wreck-yard. The upside was that he had stopped drinking and drugging, and he finally settled into work on a regular basis.
Doc was a big guy, six foot three, 250 pounds, and unpredictable, Superman one minute and the Hulk the next. He was a terrific musician who played guitar with some of the better groups in the San Francisco Bay area and built his ow
n guitars. There was often music and laughter in the house—but he also had a temper. One of Mike’s earliest memories was a pushing match with Amanda, who went to their dad and said that Mike had hit her. Doc grabbed Mike and whipped him with an extension cord. Cynthia took him into the shower to clean him up afterward, and—this was one of his first, indelible memories—he saw his blood running down the drain as she washed him off.
As Mike grew older, the situation with his dad grew worse. He was a rebellious, mouthy teenager. Doc insisted on respect. A lot of the fighting was about standard teenage stuff. Mike had to do chores, lots of them. He’d refuse, he’d taunt Doc, Doc would flash—Cynthia’s first instinct was to protect her boy, which would make Doc even angrier. Even when they weren’t yelling at one another, life pretty much sucked—even the potentially good moments. Cynthia decided Mike needed new carpet for his room, and his dad told him to come along: they were going to the carpet store. But they didn’t go to the carpet store. They went to the Dumpster around the back of the store, and his dad pulled out a hideous piece of orange carpet. “That’s a really nice carpet,” Doc said, and then he threatened, “You better not eat or drink on it. You better keep it clean.”
Mike’s brains were spotted quickly by the powers that be: he was placed in the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) track in elementary school. His father did acknowledge it from time to time: “For a smart kid,” he said, “you’re pretty fucking stupid.”
He could do extremely well in school when he was interested in something, but he wasn’t interested in much, and if the teacher was even remotely reminiscent of his dad, he just wouldn’t go to class. His high school algebra teacher was, for example, a primo jerk, and Mike decided to boycott. He skipped everything but the tests, which he aced, just to show the guy how little his actual teaching mattered. He was in constant trouble with the principal, suspended, reinstated; he dropped out, came back, got suspended and reinstated again. When he was fourteen, his mother walked out. She took Amanda with her, but not Mike. He remained in the wreck-yard with his father, who took out his frustrations by beating up cars. One time Doc was trying to get the brakes off a car, and he was sweating and cussing, and he slipped and cut his hand open and began slamming his fist into the car, blood flying everywhere. “She’s going to kick, she’s going to buck, she’s going to fight, she’s going to make you sweat, she’s going to make you bleed, but you can’t let that motherfucker win,” he told Mike, who found it hilarious and terrifying—and ultimately, years later, inspirational: his dad had taught him to do a tough job, how not to quit, how to fight for what he wanted. But he’d only realize that later.
After six impossible months with Doc, Mike left. He moved around from friend to friend—the hospitality usually wore out after a couple days—until one friend’s parents invited him to stay forever. They said they wanted to care for him as a foster child. What they really wanted, he soon realized, was the money that came from the state for doing that. They were in debt, and Mike could liberate them. When the foster care deal fell through, they kicked him out.
He took to living in his car, spending nights in the First Baptist Church parking lot. The minister knew him and took pity on him and allowed him to shower inside every so often. His diet consisted of hot dogs and soda, a combo he could buy at Home Depot for $1.60—he found the money by stealing small change from unlocked cars. His one actual meal each week came on Sunday, when his mother took him to Denny’s.
Mike’s parking-lot life ended when he turned sixteen and got a part-time job in a Les Schwab tire store. He saw an ad for a room with extremely cheap rent; it turned out to be a house populated by seven ex-cons who had just come out of halfway houses. It was old and ramshackle, and the ex-cons ranged from sad to creepy, but it was better than living in his car, so he took it. He was needed at the shop, and at times he had to skip class to work there. “Look, I’m on my own. I’ve got to work to live,” he told the principal, who decided to cut him some slack. But some slack wasn’t nearly enough. His boss at the tire shop wanted him full-time, so he dropped out of school—which put him a rung above most of his friends, who had dropped out of high school and were either in juvie hall or dead into drugs. A few weeks later, he came back to the house one night and looked at his hands. They were filthy. They looked like his father’s hands. “I guess everyone in my family is fated to live with grease under their fingernails,” he said to himself. He thought about the tire shop. He was the youngest person working there; there were men in their sixties who had worked there all their lives. He couldn’t imagine living that way, raising a family and having kids that way. “I’ve got to throw myself out into the world,” he thought, “and see what happens.”
He went to an Army recruiter. They took him on a tour of Fort Lewis, which was nearby. They showed him the firing range. They were all hoo-ah about shooting guns and blowing stuff up. But that didn’t impress Mike very much; he’d experienced far too many explosions at home. Then they took him to the D-Fac. He had never seen so much food. It was like a dream. There were hamburgers cooking on a grill, hot dishes, a pasta bar, a long row of fruit and desserts, vegetables, a pile of grilled cheese sandwiches, and ice cream. “Sign me up,” he said. He felt as if he had been recruited into heaven.
He needed a high school diploma in order to sign on the dotted line, and he threw himself on the mercy of a guidance counselor named Sue Jamtsa, who approached his various teachers and promised that Mike would be in attendance and socialized for his last semester of school. He graduated from Squalicum High School that spring.
Mike loved the Army from day one. He loved boot camp. He loved having a secure place to sleep every night. He was amazed that he had access to the D-Fac any time he wanted to go there. And his aptitude test results were off the charts. The Army decided to train him as an intelligence analyst and sent him to Germany.
Germany was like a theme park. American soldiers were rock stars—even if they’d been wreck-yard scum back home. Maybe not all the girls, but a lot of them, wanted to be with G.I. Joe. And for those who couldn’t find a girl, there was a brigade of prostitutes, some of whom were not bad at all. But for Mike, the real thrill was the knowledge that he was no longer alone in the world. The other intelligence trainees were very much like him—high school fuckups with big IQs from tough families. Everyone had a story. One guy had been abused by an uncle. Another guy had a sister who was into drugs and prostitution. Camaraderie—real brotherhood—for most troops was forged downrange; camaraderie for the intel trainees was forged in the back alleys of Sachsenhausen, helping a fallen comrade who had just been punched in the nose by a prostitute and was bleeding profusely. Camaraderie was learning that, rare as they were and antisocial as they had been, they could talk about the most terrible stuff freely, without being betrayed.
Mike did well in training. He was sent to Italy to be part of an intel analysis operation focused on the Middle East, which was located on the same base as the 173rd Airborne Brigade, the “Sky Soldiers.” He did well enough there, too, and was sent to PLDC—Primary Leadership Development Course, a training program for Sergeants. “It’s like a ritual,” he would later say. “You go to the woods for a few days, they beat the hell out of you, and you come back a Sergeant.” The first time he was singled out and told to drop and do push-ups, he realized that someone next to him had also dropped, unbidden, and was doing push-ups—and the trainer was yelling at the guy, “What are you doing down? I didn’t tell you to drop.”
“One Sky Soldier falls, we all fall,” Dante Cannelli responded. After that, every time one of the seven guys from the 173rd was told to drop, they all dropped. Cannelli was a medic, a gentle soul, and he quickly became the best friend Mike Pereira had ever had. They had barbecues together, got drunk together, started dating two Italian girls who happened to be friends.
Mike met Georgia Rostirolla at a bar called the Crazy Bull, which was—it was clear from the name—a place for Italian women to meet G.I. Joes. His fri
end Curry, a charismatic counterintelligence expert, had dragged him there. “Pereira, we gotta get you out on the town,” Curry said. “And here’s how we’re going to do it. You’re going to walk up to the ten most beautiful women in the bar, and the odds are that one of them is going to want to talk to you.” Georgia was number four. She was small, but an absolute stunner. She spoke impeccable English. Mike was not the most confident Casanova; he was good-looking in a nerdy, ectomorphic way, with an intense, academic air about him. He was right there, Georgia thought. There was nothing duplicitous about him. Nothing dangerous either. He was a good guy. They started dating in September 2003 and were living together by February 2004. Soon after that, both Mike and Dante were sent to Afghanistan. Mike went to the detainee interrogation unit at Bagram Air Base, just north of Kabul; Dante went downrange to Paktia province with the 173rd Airborne.
Mike was able to do some serious work at Bagram. He interrogated prisoners—but quickly realized that no one was cross-referencing the intel coming from the interviews, and he set out to do that. Before long, he was interrogating both the regular detainees and the high-value prisoners held by the special operators in a separate shed. In July 2005, four high-value Al Qaeda prisoners broke out of Bagram, probably with the help of Afghan guards. Mike did a quick analysis of all the information that had been gathered on them and found that all four came from the same small town in Pakistan. He requested SIGINT (signals intelligence—drones, phone monitoring, that sort of thing), and the four were found in their hometown and apprehended. Mike became something of an intel celebrity after that; he received accolades all the way up the chain of command to Vice President Dick Cheney.