American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  Jim held on to my arm as we left LeBrocq’s resting place with the rest of the mourners, walking between the gravestones on the damp grass. The cemetery was a gut-wrenching place for both Jim and me, in different ways. He had fought with men buried there. For my part, after years of writing about the war dead and receiving reports on every single military casualty, I recognized far too many names on the headstones and knew their stories. And every time I wrote about one of the fallen, I would eventually hear from the family. It could be days later, or months. But it always happened, because they could never know enough. The questions they asked me were as surprising as they were heartbreaking: “Was he cold when he died? Was he alone?”

  Jim and I shared an unspoken bond through our acquaintance with the sacrifice of men like LeBrocq. The sadness ran through us, eased ever so slightly by the poignant notes of “Taps” at the end of LeBrocq’s ceremony. The wind whipped around us as we walked out the gate of the burial grounds and down tree-lined Memorial Drive to the Arlington Cemetery Metro station, where we waited for a train. Jim was shivering in his thin jacket, plaid shirt, and mismatched tie, and his hands were freezing. His eyes were sallow and he looked drained.

  A train rumbled into the station and screeched to a stop. We got on. Jim looked out the window as the train accelerated past the cemetery, a grim landscape he passed every day on the way to and from language school.

  “I don’t want to be buried there,” he said. “At Arlington, there is no differentiation between warriors and soldiers, between fighters and cowards.”

  We stopped at a coffee shop in Crystal City to warm up a little before I went back to work at the Post. He asked me again whether I would have dinner with him. I said yes.

  Then I smiled and added: “Listening, although we are already in agreement,” referring to a Pashto proverb he taught me. He laughed.

  Unexpectedly and mysteriously for us both, over the next few days we fell headlong in love.

  It was one of the most emotionally intense weeks of our lives. For me, falling in love with Jim felt like stepping into a Humvee for a night raid in Baghdad. It was tense and exhilarating, there was no turning back, and I never knew what lay around the next corner. Jim compared it to boarding a helicopter together and lifting off.

  A few days into it, he wrote me a note asking me to marry him. I laughed it off.

  Neither of us was looking for a relationship. I had been separated from my husband for a year, and Jim was also separated and headed for divorce within a few months. Outwardly we were an unlikely couple. We came from starkly different cultural, social, and professional worlds, ones frequently at odds. He was a self-taught graduate of New Mexico State University; I was a Harvard-educated professor’s daughter. He had roots in Texas and considered George Bush a capable wartime leader; I grew up in Seattle and reported for a liberal East Coast newspaper. He was a member of a secretive military unit; my job for years was to ferret out and expose secrets about the military. Peel back the externals, though, and we were more alike than it seemed—adventurous, intellectually curious, passionate about our work, and rebels of sorts.

  Our relationship crossed so many lines and broke so many unspoken rules that if we had hesitated, we might have faltered.

  “Don’t look down,” he would warn me. “Just jump. I will catch you.”

  We needed each other.

  I was making the leap from a long-troubled marriage and anguishing over its impact on my three younger children, who were living with me. Suffering from my own combat trauma, I needed a comrade to cry and laugh with. I thought about the wars every day and cared deeply about the people involved. “You have two families now,” one of my military friends told me.

  Jim was hurting, too, personally and professionally. He felt incredible pressure over his mission—the mission of his lifetime. He needed to steel himself to kill again, to go back to that place in his mind, to become that other person. He had to be ready to give his life for everything he believed in. Part of him expected—wanted, even—to go to Afghanistan and die in battle, to prove beyond a doubt he was the warrior he said he was. But he was living so hard he risked never making it there.

  Drinking all day, he was barely eating. One afternoon he told me he wanted to show me one of his favorite movie scenes. It was a montage of Nicolas Cage as his character drank himself to death in the movie Leaving Las Vegas. Sleep for Jim came only in spurts. Nightmares made him cry out and sit up in bed. I spent as much time with him as I could, telling my children I had to help a very sick friend.

  Some nights Jim got into bar fights in the worst parts of DC. Once I arrived at his apartment and found his fists cut up and blood all over the sink and floor. I took a deep breath and cleaned it off. On the bathroom counter, he had a bowl full of multicolored pills that turned out to be speed, Valium, and a lot of painkillers such as Percocet. I later found out he was addicted to Percocet and had used cocaine. He was also cutting himself. He would slit the throat of one of the figures tattooed on his arms and let the blood stream out onto the floor. One day he told me he had a present for me. I opened up a black-and-white checkered Afghan scarf and found wrapped inside four plain wooden hearts. He had written the words “I love you Meena” on them with his blood. Meena is the Pashto word for “everything” or “love.” It was his name for me.

  Jim scared a lot of people. I might have been afraid of him, too, had I not seen what combat could do to men. Instead, his behavior seemed oddly familiar. I felt as though I had known him for a very long time. On top of that, what made all his craziness less frightening was that he was open about it—at least more open than most.

  Days and nights blurred together as we spent hour upon hour talking in his apartment, oblivious to the world outside. One night I shared one of my favorite pastimes with him by reciting poetry. As he listened to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot, he wept at its beauty, and because no one had ever done that for him before.

  “I feel as though I am deep underwater,” he told me one day as I lay in his arms in his room. “I can look up and see a little bit of light, but I can’t reach it. I can’t breathe.”

  Often he contrasted his own darkness with my light. He was drawn to me and my inherent optimism and happiness.

  “Your light hurts me,” he said, his blue eyes cold and ancient. “I have many shields and weapons, but your light pierces straight through them.”

  He was cutting through my armor, too, making his way into my most heavily guarded rooms. We both knew that our time was limited, and that we might not ever fall in love that way again. Just to have known it, though, was enough. One day as he embraced me in the kitchen of his apartment, I told him so.

  “It just doesn’t matter anymore,” I said.

  He understood and hugged me harder. “No,” he said, “nothing else matters.”

  The deeper we fell in love, the harder it was to be apart.

  In February, after a huge blizzard brought Washington to a standstill, Jim trudged through the two-foot-deep snow to my house at night and tapped on my bedroom window. At first he didn’t come through the front door out of consideration for my children. I pushed the window up and he crawled through, shaking with cold. We stayed together until sunrise, when he left to go lift weights and study Pashto.

  Jim began to imagine a future, and he started pulling out of his self-destructive state. He was coming back to life, and doing it before my eyes.

  “You make me want to be a better person,” he told me.

  Without me ever asking, he cut back sharply on his drinking and quit abusing painkillers—virtually cold turkey. Every night for about a week, he stayed with me and I held him as he sweated and shook through withdrawal from the drugs. One night I cooked him some chicken and dumplings, and he ate bowl after bowl of it.

  “It is like blood,” he said of the rich soup, asking me to make him some more.

  Finally one night he stopped shaking. He had made it through. The next morn
ing he woke up and smiled at me, his face glowing in a way I had never seen before.

  “You have saved my life,” he said.

  ONE AFTERNOON IN APRIL 2010, as his deployment approached, Jim asked me to meet him at Rick’s Tattoos on the second floor of a redbrick building in Arlington, Virginia. Established in 1970, the tattoo studio had cartoon blondes in swimsuits painted on the window and boasted some talented artists. Jim’s tattoos during his years at war were never frivolous—each one spoke something powerful about his identity, as did the one he would get that day.

  Jim greeted me with a kiss and pulled out a piece of paper with four words in Afghan lettering written by his Pashto teacher, a young man named Najmal. After speaking with the artist, he invited me to sit and watch as she inscribed on his body words that described the cornerstone of what he stood for and was about to do.

  I looked as he winced while the artist moved her tattoo machine around his right wrist, writing in black, indelible ink the Pashto words ghairat and nang, meaning “individual honor” and “collective honor.” On the top of his left wrist she traced the word namoos, referring to those things a man has—women, land, and guns—that he must protect. Underneath, she tattooed our Pashto name for each other—meena.

  We had started talking about me joining him in Afghanistan. Jim was excited to take me to Mangwel to meet Noor Afzhal and the tribe, to make that forever part of our life together. The country, the war, the sacrifice, the suffering—both of us felt passionate about it. We were convinced that a deep understanding of the Pashtun tribes and their needs was critical to any positive outcome of the war. We wanted badly to help the tribal people. And we were willing to risk everything to put his strategy to the test on the ground. Only by giving it our all would we find out how far he could succeed.

  As most would view it, I crossed over to the dark side professionally by becoming involved with Jim, and he with me. I saw it differently, particularly because he is so open about his own failings and those of the U.S. military and Special Forces. If anything, through being close to Jim I have gained a far more unvarnished view of the military and its flaws, having seen the institution from the inside. We talked about writing a book that would chronicle his efforts and work with Noor Afzhal and the tribes, so that others could draw lessons from it. We had no idea then how we would pull it off, but we knew we wanted to try.

  Jim believed he could recruit one Pashtun tribe after another in eastern Afghanistan, and that this just might be enough to achieve a tipping point in the war. But even as he packed his duffel bags and memorized Pashto sayings, he was troubled by doubts about whether the American political and military leadership would back him up and stay the course. One morning he woke up in my bed ashen-faced. In his nightmare, he had been walking down a narrow road past a cemetery in an Afghan village, one that may have been Mangwel or was similar to Mangwel. It was night, and the qalats beside the road were burning, their walls crumbling. He looked beyond them and realized that the entire village was flaming, a huge orange glow. It was deserted.

  “It was very clear it was a village that had been standing, and I had caused its destruction,” he told me. Jim always trusted his dreams and visions, and this one was a horrible premonition.

  But it was too late. Afghanistan was deteriorating, his mission was under way, and Jim believed that it was the only one with any chance of success. He was willing to bet his life on it.

  So he prepared to deploy as he always had. He took the Spartan shield that he wore around his neck and placed it in my hand. “This will keep you safe,” he said. In its place, I gave him an inch-high golden lighthouse on a leather cord. It was a replica of the tall brick Cape Hatteras light station that beams over dangerous shoals off the North Carolina coast—I said it would guide him to the shore.

  Many soldiers—perhaps to protect their loved ones—choose never to speak of the possibility of their death, almost as if making it taboo would prevent it from happening. Jim embraced the idea as the essence of who he was. At first it was hard for me to hear him talk about it, but I gradually came to understand and accept it. Jim had a very real and tangible acceptance of his own death as the consequence of his decision to be a warrior. Thousands of times in his head, he had played through the possibility of giving his life on the battlefield and watching his own burial. On some days he wished to die fighting because he believed it was all he was good at, and because he found it difficult to envision any future for himself beyond that. He also had an urge to seal his legacy by proving once and for all that he would bravely lay down his life when the time came. Over and over, he imagined his death in a special place he created in his mind, a white hallway lined with the people who loved him, with a door at the end.

  So Jim packed his gear and wrote his goodbye letters, and when he boarded the plane at Dulles Airport on June 16, 2010, in his mind he was already dead.

  CHAPTER 10

  A FEW DAYS AFTER Jim landed in the Afghan capital in June 2010, Gen. David Petraeus walked into his well-appointed office at the Kabul headquarters of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), assuming his new position as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

  In an unexpected switch, Petraeus had agreed almost overnight to replace Gen. Stanley McChrystal and take the reins of what by some measures is the longest U.S. war. President Obama had abruptly fired McChrystal on June 23 following the publication of a Rolling Stone article that attributed remarks ridiculing key Obama administration officials to McChrystal and his staff. Then the president asked Petraeus to take charge of the faltering campaign.

  Petraeus had a slew of reasons to turn Obama down. He had often said that the war in Afghanistan was a far more intractable challenge than the fight he’d been widely credited with winning in Iraq. The Afghan post was a step down from Petraeus’s job as head of U.S. Central Command, where he oversaw the entire Middle East and Central Asia, including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. On a personal level, Petraeus had been deployed for more than five and a half years since the September 11 terrorist attacks. And he had recently recovered from early-stage cancer, diagnosed in 2009.

  At his Senate confirmation hearing, Petraeus looked tired. Nevertheless, his testimony left no doubt that he wanted to put more time on Obama’s clock.

  “It is important to note the president’s reminder in recent days that July 2011 will mark the beginning of a process, not the date when the U.S. heads for the exits and turns out the lights,” Petraeus told the senators. The drawdown will be “responsible” and “based on conditions on the ground,” Petraeus emphasized.

  What Petraeus didn’t reveal during the hearing was a key behind-the-scenes initiative he was pushing with Afghan president Karzai to create village defense forces—inspired in part by Jim’s ideas. Petraeus considered the plan a “game changer.” According to his own “counterinsurgency math,” Afghanistan had less than half the number of security forces it needed to cover the population of about thirty million. He wanted to use Special Forces teams to recruit thousands of rural Afghan tribesmen to help fill the gap. After his confirmation, he called Karzai twice to discuss the plan, but reached no agreement.

  In early July 2010, Petraeus walked into the presidential palace in Kabul for his first face-to-face meeting with Karzai as the U.S. commander in Afghanistan. With only twelve months left on Obama’s clock, it was now or never. If Petraeus didn’t get Afghanistan’s president to sign off on the village defense program, it would be a major setback for his counterinsurgency strategy.

  But from the other side of the desk, Karzai had reasons to put up stiff resistance to the United States’ local security initiative. Karzai knew how delicate his hold on the country was. He was nervous about arming Afghanistan’s most seasoned warriors. In his view, the isolated tribesmen had little concept of Afghanistan as a nation-state seeking to scratch out a prosperous niche in an interconnected global economy. If anything, the tribes in the hills and deserts had contempt for the goings-on in Kabu
l and viewed the urban world as base and dishonorable. And the Taliban drew its rank and file from the same local tribes that Petraeus sought to arm and empower. The Taliban’s jihad was not just against the infidels; it was against westernized, educated, and pragmatic men such as himself.

  Still, Karzai was above all a survivor, a master of discerning the winds of power and capturing them to his advantage. He referred to the Taliban as a “great evil” one day and offered to negotiate a place for them in his government the day after. Karzai played Afghanistan’s powerful factions and ethnic groups off one another by means of titles and tribute in the form of political appointments and cash payoffs. He’d even tapped the powerful Northern Alliance Tajik responsible for his arrest and interrogation in 1994, Mohammed Fahim, as defense minister. Fahim later became the seniormost of Afghanistan’s two vice presidents. Karzai made his enemies allies.

  In the early July 2010 meeting with Petraeus, Karzai was acutely aware that his relationship with the United States, critical to his selection as Afghanistan’s president after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, was as complex as his relationship with his fellow Afghans. He genuflected to the Stars and Stripes one day and damned them the next. But by far the greatest source of his power and money was represented by the highly decorated four-star officer sitting in his office. To say no to Petraeus would alienate his most important benefactor and could halt the flow of the aid that kept him in power. And if the money stopped, his allies would revert to threats.

  So Karzai didn’t say no—but he didn’t say yes, either. He told Petraeus that he and other senior Afghan officials were concerned that the program to arm local tribesmen would result in the creation of militias that would threaten the government’s power. No program would be approved without a direct tie-in to the central government, he demanded.