I got home to Vermont. I wrote the first draft of the story in forty-eight hours, sending a rambling fifteen thousand words to my editor, Eric Bates. The draft expressed my conflicting feelings—I’d liked hanging out with McChrystal and his team, yet I hated the war. Everything that I’d seen and heard and knew about the war would not reflect well on them—they were an unchecked force, steamrolling the civilian leadership, flipping them the giant bird along the way. What they told me, I realized, revealed the attitudes behind one of the most brazen assaults on civilian control of the military that the Pentagon’s generals had ever attempted. Not that I didn’t think all of their complaints were unjustified— if I were in their shoes, I’d probably be pissed if I thought that the civilians who gave the orders didn’t actually appear to be committed to the war. On the other hand, McChrystal and other military officials had pushed Obama to get the mission they wanted. In Iraq, the generals could always blame Bush and Rumsfeld for starting the war—they just followed orders. Not so here: Though Obama had pushed fixing the war in Afghanistan during the campaign as a slap at Bush, he wouldn’t have gotten much support if he had campaigned on tripling the size of the conflict. Obama resisted doing so, but the military leadership pushed hard and played dirty to get the war in Afghanistan they wanted. It shouldn’t have come as much of a shock to McChrystal and his team that after getting politically jujitsued the White House would be less than enthusiastic.
Over the next three weeks, Eric and I went through two more drafts of the story. Under his guidance, the piece took shape. Eric had more than twenty-five years’ experience in reporting and editing investigative pieces, earning seven National Magazine awards, the industry’s highest honor. I knew McChrystal’s team wouldn’t be happy with the way the story was shaping up. It was the classic journalist dilemma. Janet Malcolm had famously described journalism as the art of seduction and betrayal. Any reporter who didn’t see journalism as “morally indefensible” was either “too stupid” or “too full of himself,” she wrote. I disagreed. Without shutting the door on the possibility that I was both stupid and full of myself, I’d never bought into the seduction and betrayal conceit. At most, journalism—particularly when writing about media-hungry public figures—was like the seduction of a prostitute. The relationship was transactional. They weren’t talking to me because they liked me or because I impressed them; they were talking to me because they wanted the cover of Rolling Stone.
Should I not write it? On a personal level, part of me didn’t want to disappoint McChrystal and Dave and Casey and Flynn and Duncan—part of me wanted to write a story that pleased them. Dave had even called me and left a voicemail, asking what I’d been up to. The month I spent with them was exciting, and I’d gotten a privileged view from inside a top military command. If I wrote the story I wanted to write, it would be years before I ever had that view again. The access I’d gotten was unprecedented. But what do you do with it? Bury the story? Write a puff piece to ensure further access? Or write what actually happened?
I knew, too, that McChrystal and his team could play rough with reporters and hadn’t hesitated in the past to launch personal smear campaigns against them. Three months earlier, Jerome Starkey, a reporter for The Times of London, had broken a story about the killing of two pregnant Afghan women, a teenage girl, and two other men by a Special Forces team. McChrystal’s command had tried to cover it up, originally issuing a press release and claiming to CNN that the Taliban had killed the women in an “honor killing.” That wasn’t true, and the more Starkey dug, the more horrible the story became: The killings happened during a night raid, and the ISAF soldiers even dug bullets out of the bodies of the Afghan women to hide the atrocity. Rather than own up to what had happened, Admiral Gregory Smith and Duncan Boothby called up rival outlets and reporters to “brief” against Starkey, saying he wasn’t a credible journalist because he used to write for The Sun, a British tabloid. Smith sent out a press release which named Starkey twice, saying his allegations of a “cover-up” incident were “categorically false”; the release also said he “incorrectly quoted” Admiral Smith. Within days, though, Starkey’s reporting was confirmed by a UN investigation, an Afghan investigation, and a story in The New York Times—there had been an atrocity, there had been a cover-up, and Smith and ISAF had been lying. Sheepishly, Smith released another statement, acknowledging ISAF’s responsibility for five deaths. They quietly took the press releases down from the ISAF website. No one on McChrystal’s staff, or anyone in command of the Special Forces unit responsible for the killing, was punished.
It was June 15. I took a break from writing to check the Internet. There was an incredible headline on the Drudge Report about General David Petraeus. I clicked through and watched the clip from C-SPAN.
Petraeus was testifying in Washington at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. I’d learn later that he was jet-lagged from a trip to the Middle East. I’d watched him testify half a dozen times before—most memorably when he was the commander of U.S. troops at the height of the Iraq War. I didn’t notice anything wrong, but a source close to him would later tell me that Petraeus didn’t drink enough water that morning: “No one wants to be sitting there with a full bladder,” a senior military official close to Petraeus told me. “Those who ask the questions get to go in and out—but if you’re the one sitting there in front of the cameras, you have to stay there the entire time.”
Senator John McCain took the floor. McCain wanted Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, to say that the deadline President Obama had set for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan—July 2011—was a bad idea. Petraeus was no fan of the deadline, but he was too shrewd to be drawn into such an obvious spat with his commander in chief. As he evaded McCain’s badgering with an almost Clintonian ease, McCain started to get frustrated.
“Do you believe that we will begin a drawdown of forces in July 2011, given the situation as it exists today?” McCain prodded, rephrasing his question for the third time.
“It’s not a given as the situation exists today,” Petraeus corrected. “It’s given as projections are for that time.”
“You believe we can begin a drawdown in July 2011, under the projected plans we have?” McCain persisted.
“That’s the policy, and I support it,” Petraeus answered, taking a sip of water.
“I understand you support the policy,” McCain snapped. He tried again to press Petraeus for an answer, and even resorted to quoting Vice President Joe Biden: “In July of 2011, you’re going to see a whole lot of people moving out—bet on it.” But a minute later, the expression on McCain’s face suddenly changed from one of exasperation to befuddlement. Petraeus had fainted, slumping forward in his chair. “Oh my God,” McCain gasped.
The general regained consciousness a few seconds later. He was escorted out of the hearing room with the help of his aides. He returned under his own power a half hour later. He’d gotten dehydrated, a combination of missing breakfast, jet lag, and, critically, not enough water. But the committee, shaken by the unexpected turn of events, decided to adjourn for the day.
It seemed like a strange omen. A crack in the facade of Petraeus over the most critical issue of the war—the military still bucking Obama’s promise to start drawing down American troops.
That week, Duncan called me. He’d been in contact with the fact-checkers from Rolling Stone.
I went outside on my porch to smoke a cigarette.
We talked for about forty minutes. I went through the story with him—I told him again I was writing about the night in Paris. I told him I was writing about the tensions between the civilian and military sides.
“That night in Paris,” he said. “That was sort of off the record.”
Sort of off the record? What did that mean? That was the first time he had said that. It wasn’t true, either.
“Come on, man, you had asked that I put it in proper context. I’ve done that.”
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“Your story,” he said. “It sounds serious. I was expecting it to be fun.”
“No, it’s pretty serious,” I said.
“Should I be worried about it?”
How to answer?
“Well, it’s probably going to cause you a headache for a few days, but you guys have been through worse,” I said, thinking of the London conference, the 60 Minutes interview, and the leak of the strategic assessment.
“I’d like to work with you again,” he said. “There’s another story you could do—about Karzai and the palace.”
“Sounds great,” I said.
“If, that is, we like your story.”
“Yeah, well, it’s been good working with you. I appreciate all your help. Hope we can work together again sometime.”
He hung up. I hung up. It was business. Everyone involved was a professional. I’d heard from other sources that Duncan was worried about what the story would say—he’d been telling people about the wild times in Paris and Berlin. He’d told a State Department official that the story would “either be fun, or end my career.”
Rolling Stone closed the story. It was set for publication next week. Lady Gaga, not Stan McChrystal, was going to be on the cover.
On Saturday, I got back on a plane from the Burlington International Airport to JFK to Dubai, then another Safi Airways flight to Kabul. By Monday morning, I’d taken a C-130 from Kabul to Kandahar Airfield. My next assignment for Men’s Journal was to embed with a Kiowa helicopter unit.
The Kiowas were small, two-seat scout helicopters that had been around since Vietnam. Lately they were being used like attack helicopters for close-quarters fighting, flying near constant patrols in southern Afghanistan. It was one of the more dangerous jobs in the war—certainly one of the most dangerous aircrafts to pilot. The Kiowas were shot at regularly and had a reputation for crashing—the second-highest crash rate among Army aircraft.
I was staying in a room at the media support center, a two-floor building with a series of dorms on the first floor and a second floor with a public affairs staff. It looked like a metallic barn with a flat roof. It had been a long day. I’d spent it outside on the flight line, getting briefings about the helicopters. I was feeling dehydrated. The temperature had risen to about 120 degrees.
I figured I would have a couple of days on the ground to finish my Kiowa story before the McChrystal story dropped on Thursday. I assumed the story would get some attention in Washington, maybe get in the news for a few hours. But I didn’t expect much else. I’d been writing about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past five years. Usually, most news stories and the wars themselves were ignored. Back in the United States, the media were focused on the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
I didn’t have Internet access, and only had two cell phones with me—one with an international number and another with a local Afghan number.
I was about to go to bed around one A.M. My cell phone buzzed. It was a text message from a friend. It said that the Associated Press was running with a story, quoting my article, saying that McChrystal had felt “betrayed” by Eikenberry over the leak of the cable he’d written to Washington.
Huh. The story had leaked. I shut my phone off and tried to go to sleep. I wasn’t very successful. A few hours later, I turned my phone back on. There were about fifteen new text messages.
Lucian Read, the photographer I was on assignment with, was getting his cameras ready.
“Hey, man, looks like my story is getting some pickup,” I said.
We had breakfast, then waited for our ride across the base to take us out to the flight lines. We were going to get a demonstration of how the Kiowas worked.
The airfield had undergone a massive expansion in recent months. There were row after row of helicopters parked, separated by stalls made up of blast walls, each parking spot marked with a letter and a number. There were Apache helicopters, Blackhawks, and Kiowas, lined up like rental cars at Hertz. The temperature was already more than 100 degrees. The metal on the aircraft burned bare skin; an egg could literally be cooked on the concrete runway.
We were hanging out with the pilots and mechanics, climbing in and out of the aircraft.
An Apache pilot and I started chatting.
“Hey, man, have you seen this McChrystal story everyone is talking about?”
“Uh, yeah, I wrote it.”
“What? That’s fucking crazy!”
I got a call from a friend at The Washington Post. Could I send him a copy of the story? I didn’t have my own copy of the PDF from Rolling Stone, but a contact at CNN had sent a leaked copy to me.
I ran in off the flight line, logged on to a computer, and forwarded him the PDF that had been forwarded to me from CNN.
It was the first time I’d checked my e-mail since I’d arrived in Kandahar. That was unusual, but it had been a hassle finding good Internet connections. There were dozens of e-mails regarding the story. I was surprised by how fast it was spreading. It wasn’t up on the website yet, but it seemed dozens of people in the government and the media had copies.
There was also an e-mail from Duncan.
“Michael, read your story. It has certainly created a reaction. What are you planning for promotion? Doing broadcast?”
“D, thanks for the note,” I responded. “Yes, a bit surprised. Not sure what RS has planned, but will give you heads up.”
There was another e-mail from a McChrystal staffer.
“McChrystal’s been called back to Washington,” the e-mail said.
I took Lucian aside.
“Dude, McChrystal just got called back to Washington. It looks like I’m going to have to deal with this now.”
I spent another few hours with the Kiowa unit, then headed back to the media support center. I had free time until three A.M. the next morning, when the Kiowa unit was going to come pick us up and bring us out on a morning flight. The pilots would wake up at three A.M. to be ready for a six A.M. flight.
I spent the next ten hours on the phone, doing radio and television interviews.
I had a bad sunburn. I was dehydrated and wasn’t eating anything. I didn’t know which way the story was going to go. I kept getting texts about whether or not McChrystal would be fired.
I didn’t think it was possible for him to be fired. No way.
Without good communications and e-mail, I felt vulnerable. I felt like the situation could at any minute spiral out of control.
My phones kept ringing. It was triggering some strange kind of post-traumatic stress. I was in a war zone. I was not in a comfortable place. I felt like I had when I was fifteen and had eaten two tabs of acid and a bag of mushrooms at a warehouse in downtown Montreal. As the skyline had started to collapse, I put on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which, in retrospect, had been a mistake.
I was, in the parlance of the times, about to be in the middle of a “media firestorm.”
I got another text. McChrystal had issued an apology.
They weren’t denying it—which would have been difficult to do anyway because of the tape recordings and notes I had of the interviews. And they weren’t personally attacking me yet, either. By apologizing, they had confirmed the validity of the story. I was relieved.
I had to calm down. This was me doing my job. In a media firestorm, I knew I needed to be clearheaded and rational, yet the excitement and adrenaline and fatigue conspired to put me at my least clearheaded and rational. The bigger the wave a story makes, the bigger the receding tide of bullshit is likely to be. McChrystal apologized and he’d been ordered back to Washington, so the media hadn’t gotten around to training its fire on me yet.
At around midnight, I hung up the phone after another interview. I’d been on the phone for almost ten hours straight, talking.
Lucian pulled me aside. “Mike, earlier, you sounded good. That time, not so much.”
I needed to get out of Kandahar. I kept getting warnings
from friends and other colleagues in the media: It’s not safe for you there. Someone might try to take you out or attack you. They meant Americans. I thought the fears were overblown, but it added to a sense of insecurity in an already insecure place.
At three A.M., one of the pilots came over to pick Lucian and me up. I drank a Red Bull to stay awake. We picked up the other pilots from their barracks across town and piled into the van.
Captain Stephen Irving got into the van last. He was leading the mission. The temperature had dropped to a bearable 75 degrees. Floodlights and kicked-up dust lent the black sky an eerie pinkish tint, giving the flattened air base the feel of an empty fairground after the carnies have cleared out. The hum of diesel generators and the overflight of jets were a constant background noise.
We crawled along the road. There was a ten-mile-per-hour speed limit on base, and it was well enforced.
I found a certain kind of peace: Focus on the story with the Kiowa pilots.
“You’ll get a ticket if you don’t have your civilian driver’s license from the states on your person,” said Chief Warrant Officer Joshua Price, Irving’s copilot.
“Oh shit, I forgot my PT belt, too. I wonder if they’re going to shoot me,” another pilot chimed in. He was talking about the bright orange or yellow reflective belts that U.S. troops are required to wear on base so they don’t get hit by vehicles. Like the speed limit, it was one of those strange rules in a war zone—rockets might be landing every night, a Taliban dude with an RPG might be preparing, right now, to blow your tail rotor off, but you can’t leave home without a bright orange reflector belt.
“If we get pulled over, you should know we’re prepared to throw you under the bus,” Officer Price told the pilot who’d forgotten his belt. Price was from Alabama and spoke in an expansive southern drawl. “We should make it our mission in Banshee troop to get so many tickets they run out of fucking paper.”
The van arrived at Banshee troop headquarters. There was a plywood porch with a leather couch and a flat-screen television, which opened up into a briefing room with a large table and maps. A line of the pilots’ old-school cavalry hats—worn with dress uniforms, like what Robert Duvall wears in Apocalypse Now—were hung up along the top of the wall, complete with sets of honorary silver and gold spurs.
The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan Page 28