American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  Tears began running down my face, and I could not stop crying.

  “Thank you. I know what this means,” Abe said. “It will be okay. I will see you soon.”

  Abe took me as far as he could, and watched me as I walked to the glass-windowed booth of the passport officer. After a few minutes of tense discussion, the officer stamped my visa with a loud thud and let me through. I walked through and did not look back. I had so many things on my mind, but one stood out. Jim had asked me dozens of times if I would be there for him when he returned to the United States and got off the plane. He’d arrived before and found no one, and was terrified it would happen again. “Don’t be late,” he would tell me.

  I would be there.

  CHAPTER 34

  THE BLACK TRACFONE ON the bedside table rang, waking Jim from his dream—a recurrent one about walking in the mountains. It was 5:00 a.m. on March 29. For a moment, in the darkness, he had no idea where he was.

  “Hey, I’m about twenty minutes away,” I said over the phone. I was driving Jim’s black Toyota pickup truck down I-95 in the woodlands of North Carolina, trying not to speed. A state trooper in Virginia had pulled me over for going 89 mph in a 70 mph zone. When I told him I was going to meet my fiancé, who had just returned from Afghanistan, he looked at me knowingly, alerted me to other police down the road, and waved me on.

  “Okay, baby,” Jim said. “Be careful.”

  Jim put down the phone, sat up in bed, and rubbed his hands over his clean-shaven face. He was in the upstairs spare room of another Special Forces officer’s house on a quiet cul-de-sac in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He had arrived in the United States from Afghanistan under a military escort three days earlier, and was confined to the area around Fort Bragg. Jim faced a possible general court-martial and, in the worst-case scenario, prison time. The Army protective order prohibiting him from contacting me was still in place, and we had no idea whether it would be lifted. But risk had always been the norm in our relationship, and we decided to break the order.

  “I can’t handle this anymore,” I told him late the day before. I was standing in the front yard of my Bethesda house. I had been back from Afghanistan for about a week, but I was reminded of what seemed like an endless separation from Jim by the yellow ribbons, faded from almost two years of sun and rain, that hung from the posts of the wooden porch. All that time apart, I had lived with an ache in my chest—it fluctuated between dull and sharp but never went away. At times, I was so sure Jim had been killed that I stayed away from the front of the house, afraid of looking out the window and seeing uniformed men coming down the walk. It had grown harder, not easier, to cope with the pain of separation. After everything that had transpired, it was crushing me.

  “I am not okay,” I said, my voice trailing off.

  Jim didn’t hesitate.

  “Come on,” he told me. “Come to me, baby.”

  Several hours later, it was still dark when I drove up the cul-de-sac and walked into the house, as the door was left open for me. As a precaution, he did not come outside to meet me. I knew the house and walked to the foot of the stairs that led to the study and upper bedroom. There in the shadows, I saw Jim.

  He looked like a different man with his face soft and beardless—it was the first time I had ever seen him that way. His head was tilted downward, and he stood still, waiting for me to come to him. I rushed up the stairs and we embraced. He kissed me, his smooth skin unfamiliar to the touch, but his scent and arms around me comforting as always. Tears filled our eyes. He told me again and again that he loved me, and asked me over and over if I would still marry him.

  “Yes. Yes, I will,” I answered.

  The world around us disappeared as we lost ourselves in each other.

  As we lay together, he asked me to recite a verse for him. Ever since our first week together, he had loved to listen to me tell him poems by memory.

  I took a breath, and painted for him a favorite scene from Homer’s epic The Odyssey: Odysseus’s reunion with his wife, Penelope, after the Greek king’s ten-year struggle to return to Ithaca after the Trojan War.

  The more she spoke, the more a deep desire for tears

  welled up inside his breast—he wept as he held the wife

  he loved, the soul of loyalty, in his arms at last.

  Joy, warm as the joy that shipwrecked sailors feel

  when they catch sight of land—Poseidon has struck

  their well-rigged ship on the open sea with gale winds,

  and crushing walls of waves, and only a few escape,

  swimming, struggling out of the frothing surf to reach the

  shore, their bodies crusted with salt, but buoyed up with joy

  as they plant their feet on solid ground again,

  spared a deadly fate. So joyous now to her

  the sight of her husband vivid in her gaze,

  that her white arms, embracing his neck,

  would never for a moment let him go.

  Jim smiled weakly. He was depleted, having returned from Afghanistan only a few days before. After a silence, he began to speak about what had happened.

  “Ann, this has changed everything,” he said. “They have taken my honor. They took everything from me but you,” he said. He felt he was no longer a warrior; he had been stripped of his rifle and his ability to fight for his soldiers and his Afghan friends and family.

  “But through all of this, you have been there. You know that other person,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know him.”

  I looked at the walls of the room we were in, and in a flash I was back in Mangwel. It was a warm summer night, and Jim and I were resting in our room in the shipping container.

  “Do you see these walls?” Jim had asked me, looking around that room in Mangwel. “They are keeping many things away from us. One day, maybe it will be five years from now, or maybe ten, we will be somewhere and we will miss these walls, this room, this time. You will miss the man I am here,” he told me. “And I will miss the person you are here, too.”

  In coming days and weeks in Fayetteville, those words resonated in my mind as Jim’s crisis of identity deepened. We stayed together out of sight much of the time. To our relief, the protective order separating us expired and was not reinstated.

  One afternoon, sitting on the floor in the one-bedroom apartment he was renting, Jim said he no longer felt that his names—Jim to his friends, Kirk to his family—suited him. He decided to adopt the Spartan lambda symbol as an alternative, and started signing his emails with “^.” He did not tell me at first, but I saw the symbol and understood. From that day on, at his request and out of respect for his feelings, I was unable to call him by any name, and only wrote to him as “^.” I found myself strangely speechless in the course of our daily life, unable to call him to dinner or get his attention from another room. It was a painful void, one we both felt.

  Not only did he no longer know himself, he was utterly detached from his surroundings. He grasped for ways to explain it.

  “It’s like watching a movie that is in color, but my eyes only see black and white,” he said. “It is as if I have a sharp knife, but it cannot cut my hand. I have a dull knife that will slice right through me.”

  AT FORT BRAGG AND within the Special Forces community, wild rumors began circulating about Jim. Even before he was pulled out of Konar, gossip had spread about Jim inside the USASOC headquarters, a multistory high-security building surrounded by a grassy parade ground and pine trees.

  “There is a belief in that building that you went COL Kurtz and went totally native,” a Special Forces officer wrote to Jim in early March, referring to the rogue Green Beret colonel in the 1979 Vietnam War epic film, Apocalypse Now. “There is even a rumor around USASOC headquarters that you married an Afghan girl.”

  As word of his downfall spread, Jim’s already exaggerated mystique began taking on larger-than-life proportions. Detractors and desk jockeys jealous of Jim smelled blood. On
e story making the rounds was that he was the ringleader of a drugs, prostitution, and gunrunning operation in Afghanistan. When Jim was flown back to Bragg under escort, the Special Forces officer sent to pick him up at the airport was advised to take at least three men, or better yet military police. “They said he was a maniac,” said Maj. Travis Worlock, the headquarters company commander for USASOC. “It was horribly blown out of proportion.”

  In April, Jim obtained a copy of Lt. Col. Kirila’s complete Article 15-6 investigation into the alleged misconduct by him, Dan, and the rest of his team.

  Reading the two-hundred-page document, which contained dozens of photographs taken as evidence from our room in the shipping container, was surreal. The investigation contained facts but also many false or inaccurate statements. It recognized the achievements of Jim and his team, but also created a sensationalized, tabloid picture of Jim’s misdeeds.

  “The activities of ODA 3430G in the Konar since January 2012 must be characterized as being operationally and tactically significant successes,” Kirila wrote. “However, there have also been a series of unethical activities.”

  He concluded that Jim had violated General Order 1B by possessing alcohol and controlled medications and consuming alcohol—which was true—as well as by having “sexually explicit signage and devices as well as unexploded ordnance” in his room. He did have some mortar rounds and grenades in our room. The “sexually explicit device” (not devices) mentioned was a gag Christmas gift sitting packaged in a box under his bed—a ridiculous, sixteen-inch-long dildo. A photograph of it, in its box, was contained in the investigation. Similarly, the “signage” consisted of a couple of raunchy jokes.

  Although Jim had clearly broken the rules by drinking, by those standards the vast majority of Special Forces teams would have to be removed immediately from the battlefield.

  “Eighty to ninety percent of teams downrange have alcohol,” said a senior Special Forces noncommissioned officer. “It is rare not to.” The fact that alcohol is epidemic among deployed Green Berets is common knowledge inside the Special Forces community. “I would say it is more like a hundred percent of teams,” said a field-grade Special Forces officer who, like Jim, had just returned from Afghanistan. “Most teams have a knack for acquiring alcohol,” he said. It was also well-known that a significant but smaller percentage of Special Forces soldiers used steroids while deployed. Many teams also hoarded prescription narcotics in case of injuries, said another Special Forces officer.

  My own firsthand experience as a reporter had taught me that drinking was practically the norm on Special Forces teams. Every Special Forces unit that I had ever spent time with in Iraq and Afghanistan possessed alcohol.

  Similarly, pornography and explicit signs were prevalent in Special Forces camps. Kirila had only to walk a short distance from Jim’s room to another barracks that was covered with photographs of naked women. No one was charged with misconduct for that, however.

  “There is a huge discipline problem within the force” after a decade of war, said a senior noncommissioned Special Forces officer. “It’s worn-out,” he said. As a result, the number of Special Forces tab revocations has increased significantly in recent years, he said.

  Kirila found that, as Roberts alleged, the team did routinely provide the Afghan Local Police with fuel for their Ford Ranger trucks, despite a directive that the police are supposed to obtain fuel from the Afghan government. However, Kirila noted “it is a common practice throughout Afghanistan for BSO [battlespace owner] and SOF [Special Operations Forces] assets to provide fuel for ALP in support of mission objectives.” He said that “the allegations of improper disbursement of fuel are technically correct; however, it has been CJSOTF-A practice to never let a mission fail because the Afghan logistics process or institution was unequal to the task. A preliminary estimate of this situation yields a prevalence of this activity.”

  Similarly, Kirila discovered that Roberts’s accusations that Jim had falsified the number of workers on the camp were incorrect, and resulted because Roberts did not know about the workers at Chowkay.

  Roberts was also wrong in accusing Jim of failing to report his injuries, Kirila said. “The investigating officer was able to find the concussion reports and found them to have been submitted to higher appropriately,” he wrote.

  Overall, Kirila found that “1LT Roberts’s initial sworn statement although mainly accurate, reflects a measure of speculation and failure to adequately check all his facts prior to writing his initial statement. Subsequent investigation revealed that some of his allegations were inaccurate or at a minimum not based upon evidence.”

  As for me, Kirila found indications that Jim had an “inappropriate relationship” with me. As evidence, the investigation included a photo of a handwritten sign above our bed in which Jim told me he loved me, and photographs of me including two in which I was partly nude. The investigation incorrectly asserted that Jim was married, despite the fact that he divorced in 2010. Kirila reported that I had lived with Jim in Konar and traveled with the team, but much about my status remained unclear, he acknowledged. “According to Honeylee Tembaldor, US Embassy—Afghanistan, Ms. Tyson has no authority to be here, however her status is questionable.”

  In fact, I did have U.S. government approval to work in Afghanistan. Unknown to Kirila, I had official letters of authorization from the Department of Defense as part of my contracting work conducting educational assistance and outreach for rural women in Konar. I was employed in that work by Dr. Dave Warner, who operated the Taj in Jalalabad and worked for the company MindTel. I was also supported in those activities as a volunteer for the Rotary Club of San Diego.

  Despite its weaknesses, the Article 15-6 investigation served as the basis for Schwartz and other commanders to crack down on Jim. With each successive action, it seemed the accusations against Jim grew more spectacular.

  Schwartz and Linn wrote a new “relief for cause” Officer Evaluation Report (OER) for Jim, replacing an OER a month earlier that had praised his work. In February, after Schwartz ordered Jim to carry out the challenging and deadly assignment in Chowkay, he described Jim as “an outstanding officer who has performed brilliantly in Afghanistan.” “Jim is a true combat leader, and his passion for the Village Stability Operations mission is unmatched by any officer in the CJSOTF-A. His unprecedented success conducting VSO, as well as his ability to articulate his mission to senior leadership, has had a strategic impact on our operations in Afghanistan,” he wrote. Schwartz may have disliked Jim, but given Jim’s performance he had little choice but to recommend him for promotion to lieutenant colonel. He said Jim should be placed in “the most demanding assignments in the Special Forces Regiment, preferably in combat.”

  But after the March investigation, Schwartz completely changed his tone to one of shock and disgust. “MAJ Gant violated every value that the Army stands for,” he said. Breaking General Order 1B was “despicable” and “inexcusable,” he said. He referred to me as Jim’s “paramour” and cast my presence as a strategic risk. “By providing his paramour unimpeded access to classified documents in a combat zone, MAJ Gant compromised the US mission in Afghanistan,” he wrote.

  However, during my years as a Pentagon reporter, I had been given access to classified information by military personnel on countless occasions. When Petraeus was the top commander in Iraq, for example, he allowed me and other reporters to sit in on a highly classified briefing at his Baghdad headquarters that lasted about an hour—all I had to do was sign a nondisclosure agreement. Then as well as with Jim, I had not compromised that information. Moreover, the harsh conditions in which we were living in Mangwel and Chowkay made it impossible to secure classified materials in accordance with Army regulations. Afghans and Americans without security clearances had access to those materials, as they did at other remote Special Forces outposts.

  The officer evaluation also accused Jim of putting the lives of his U.S. soldiers and Afghan partner forces at
extreme risk by using members of his team to “facilitate” my movement in Afghanistan.

  Yet while I traveled with Jim and his team on many occasions, he never conducted a mission with the sole purpose of transporting me somewhere. Any risk involved with those missions would have existed whether I was there or not. One could argue that my presence with Jim’s team on patrols in villages and other missions increased the safety of the team because it demonstrated Jim’s great trust in the Afghans who were protecting us.

  Nevertheless, based on the Kirila findings, Schwartz recommended in late March that Jim be court-martialed, stripped of his Special Forces tab, and forced out of the Army.

  A few days later, Brig. Gen. Christopher Haas moved to do just that.

  On April 4 at his command in Kabul, Haas signed a memo initiating the revocation of Jim’s Special Forces tab. In addition to the charges related to drugs and alcohol and having an inappropriate relationship with me, Haas added something new: Jim, he said, had used “unconventional” tactics against the enemy.

  “During your time in command, you purposefully and repeatedly endangered the lives of your Soldiers. You taught, and ordered executed, unconventional and unsafe ‘figure-8’ immediate actions in response to enemy contact. You painted inappropriate and unauthorized symbols on Government vehicles, painted the symbol on your vehicle a different color, then challenged the enemy to try and kill you without consideration to your Service Members’ lives or well being. You sent ‘night letters’ to the enemy, further drawing dangerous attention to yourself and subordinates. These are the same Soldiers that you have the duty to properly train, mentor, lead and most importantly, defend.”

  The irony was that Jim, while conducting highly aggressive operations, had never lost a man. In his view, using unorthodox, provocative tactics was the best way to outwit insurgents and keep them on their heels. The “unauthorized symbols” Haas referred to were Spartan lambdas.