American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  Other higher-up officers in Jim’s chain of command told him they felt collectively responsible for his undoing. “You altered the course of the war in the northeastern region of the country reaching into Pakistan,” said one officer who had served with Jim. “Commanders take advantage of you over the years. We keep you out there when you obviously need a break and are exhibiting symptoms of stress that we as a system placed you under. Even after you were hit with an IED, we just left you out there. Then we punish you for the results of our own decision making.”

  In late June 2012, Bolduc signed an officer evaluation saying Jim had made “invaluable” contributions to the Afghanistan mission under his command in 2010 and 2011, and was a “must select” for promotion to lieutenant colonel.

  In late July, the Department of the Army, unaware of the adverse actions, announced Jim’s promotion to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Congratulations began pouring into his official email.

  Jim, knowing the promotion would eventually be reversed, declined it—a rare step that required the approval of Army Secretary John McHugh.

  A few months later, the Army acted again, this time demoting Jim for the purpose of retirement to the rank of captain.

  LIVING WITH JIM IN Fayetteville, I stayed close by his side as the arrows kept flying at him, one after another.

  His mind and body were battered and broken after nearly two straight years in combat. A series of medical and psychological exams unsurprisingly diagnosed him with PTSD and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Ever since I had known Jim he had shown anxiety in confined or crowded spaces, an extreme startle response to sudden or loud noises, and other textbook symptoms of PTSD. Now, I had to be more careful than ever not to walk up behind him without him seeing me; we had three close calls. New concerns emerged. His brain was not functioning as well as it had in the past; he felt confused and forgetful and sometimes had trouble connecting thoughts and emotions.

  One warm, humid morning in mid-June, Jim was scheduled to have four MRI scans of his brain, hip, shoulder, and back. He doubted he could tolerate two hours strapped down in the imaging machine bombarded by loud noises, but the tests were critical, so I went with him to see if he could stand it. An Army doctor, a sympathetic Vietnam veteran “Doc” Earl Benson, sent him to a civilian facility that had open-ended MRI machines. Jim took a sleeping pill and changed into a surgical gown. Then we went into the chilly, sterile MRI room and he lay down as instructed on a table. A technician gave us both earplugs. Then she fastened a mask—similar to a baseball catcher’s mask—over his face and used a cushion to keep his head straight. I held his hand, and a technician pressed a button that moved the table inside the MRI machine.

  Then came the loud, jarring noise of the machine, which seemed to be mimicking gunfire.

  Jim’s eyes popped open. He squeezed my hand so tightly that it hurt.

  I held on. He squeezed harder.

  So it went, off and on, for about two hours. Finally the noise stopped.

  Doctors would have to remove some small metal shards from his head, and also scrape away scar tissue that was impairing his hearing from multiple perforations of the eardrum. In addition, the exams helped diagnose severe shoulder pain—likely caused by the January 16 IED blast—that was preventing him from using his shoulder.

  Jim had sometimes described himself to me as a kind of Don Qui-xote, riding an old horse and carrying a scratched and dented shield.

  “You are my knight in armor,” I would tease him gently.

  He smiled. “Yes, that is exactly what I am.”

  We had many happy times, when the sun would break through the clouds. We were living for the summer in his old house in Fayetteville caring for his two younger children, Tristen and Scout, until school started. Jim enjoyed doting on his son and daughter, taking them to the movies and buying them their favorite foods. He signed up online for a minister’s certificate and performed a wedding ceremony for Tony Siriwardene, his comrade from ODA 316, who married the sister of another 316 member, Mark Read. We laughed and cried together with Dan and reminisced with him at the dinner table. We started watching the Academy Award Best Picture-winning movies of the past fifty years. Most days we worked out at the gym or went running together on the rust-colored dirt trails around Fort Bragg. In the warm summer evenings, Jim would ask me to put on a dress and go out to shoot a few games of pool with him in local bars. Or he would play music and slow dance with me in our room. He liked to listen to me play the piano, never mind that it was out of tune and had some broken keys.

  But all around us, darkness kept pressing in. Professionally, physically, and emotionally, Jim felt beaten down. He was so angry, depressed, and exhausted.

  One day, he was watching one of his favorite video scenes, the boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier for the world heavyweight championship in Manila in 1975. Ali won the match by answering the bell for the fifteenth round, when Frazier could not.

  “All I have to do is stand up, and I will win,” he told me. He would stand, stagger, fall, and get up again.

  He needed to rest, but he could not—apart from his own battles with the Army, he felt obligated to help Dan, Fernando, and other comrades who were struggling against the Army bureaucracy.

  Jim was drinking more heavily, including just prior to his mandatory appointments in the Army Substance Abuse Program known as ASAP. He knew he needed to cut back or stop. “Just not yet,” he would say. “I know this may sound bad,” he told me. “But right now, alcohol is like my friend.”

  Outwardly, he voiced confidence that he would recover, but he admitted to those closest to him that he might not make it. He tried to find a psychologist in the Army and met with two or three but encountered no one he felt he could completely trust.

  Often he told me he wished he had died fighting in Afghanistan.

  “Not a cheap death, something hard,” he said. “Then I could have proven to everyone, in that one action, that I am who I say I am.”

  He spoke of suicide, and told me many times that were it not for me, he would already have killed himself.

  For my part, the urgent responsibility I felt to recount Jim’s story grew as his grip on life became increasingly tenuous. I wanted to relate what happened to Jim in a way that would help heal him and other similarly haunted men, by letting the broader society know what they had gone through, so their sacrifices would never be forgotten. To be able to do that I had to listen without judging him and be willing to experience some of the terror, grief, and rage that he had.

  We slept on a foam mattress covered with thick blankets on the floor, with a loaded pistol inches away and a knife in the closet. He didn’t feel safe in his neighborhood in Fayetteville, and had the gun for our protection. But at one point he fell into such a depth of depression that I started to worry about the weapons.

  On Friday, June 22, Jim drove to Worlock’s personnel office on Fort Bragg at the appointed time to sign the paperwork for the revocation of his Special Forces tab.

  Revoking the tab meant that Jim’s service in the Special Forces Regiment would be expunged from his official military record. He could no longer wear the tab or Green Beret.

  But when Jim arrived at Worlock’s office, he was told the printer was broken. He would have to return on the following Monday.

  Dan came over for dinner, and gave Jim his own Special Forces tab, which he had worn since he was a sergeant on ODA 316. Dan pointed out that because Jim had also earned a Green Beret as an enlisted soldier, he technically still could wear the tab—only his officer tab had been revoked. Jim placed the tab in a small picture frame over a bloodred image of Marlon Brando as the bald Colonel Kurtz. A short time later, Jim shaved his head.

  The next day, Jim woke up in an especially dark mood. Starting early in the morning, he drank, more than usual. That night as we ate dinner with Scout, his twelve-year-old daughter, he got up and left the table. When he did not return after about fifteen minutes, I felt uneasy and went
to check on him. I found him lying on the floor in the closet of our room, his body curled up in a ball. An arm’s length away lay his pistol. I knelt down beside him and put my arms around him.

  He started sobbing—hard sobs so full of anguish that it was almost unbearable to see and hear.

  “Talk to me!” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “Please!”

  “I am scared,” he said. “I am going to die. I have a gun right there. It’s right there!” he said.

  “You are not dying,” I said. “I am not going to let you.”

  He looked into my eyes, and I saw his were tear-filled but very cold—on the edge of fury.

  “When I can’t see anything, I grab on to you,” he said. “I know you, I don’t know anyone else. You are the only one left.

  “I am so angry,” he said, shaking. “But I have nothing to fight. Where is my enemy?”

  I held him for several minutes. Then it was time to pick up his fourteen-year-old son, Tristen, from a friend’s house across town.

  For the first time, he asked me to drive. On the way, he started vomiting into a plastic bag that I pulled out of the backseat.

  “It isn’t worth it, is it?” he asked me bitterly. “I am not worth it.”

  Just then a summer thunderstorm struck, pelting the truck with rain. I turned on the wipers and kept driving. Lightning flashed, illuminating the rain-washed streets with a harsh bluish light as thunder crashed nearby. Jim ducked and held his arm up in front of his face. Then came more lightning and thunder, making Jim startle each time.

  We made it back.

  On Monday, he signed the tab revocation papers. That night in a light drizzle, we walked around the statues of Special Forces legends Dick Meadows and Bull Simons on the parade grounds of the USASOC compound.

  The next day, without warning, he collapsed on his knees in the kitchen.

  “I feel like I am losing control of my mind,” he said. “Am I going crazy?”

  “You act crazy sometimes. You have combat stress. But are you out of your mind? No,” I said.

  “Are you scared of me?”

  “No, I’m not,” I said.

  The very next afternoon, we were in our room resting, when he turned to me.

  “What would you think about that?”

  “About what?”

  “What would you think about that. Not how you would feel in your heart, but what would you think?”

  “About what?”

  “If I did that?”

  “Did what?”

  “If I killed myself, what would you think?”

  I paused for a second.

  “If you killed yourself, I could never separate how I felt in my heart and what I thought.”

  “Yes, you probably could not,” he said.

  As Jim seemed to go into free-fall, I racked my brain for what to do. What was I missing? Should I put away his gun? But I could not—especially in light of Pashtunwali and his honor. He needed something to fight for.

  That evening, I decided to speak with him. We went to our room and sat on our bed on the floor. I took his hand.

  “I am very concerned how you have been talking about killing yourself. I know you are in a huge amount of pain,” I said.

  His eyes welled up.

  “I have been in this place for a very long time,” he said.

  “Do you think about it a lot?” I asked. “Should we put away the gun and knives and pills?”

  “Are you afraid?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think I am capable of figuring out a way to kill myself?”

  “Yes, but what if you suddenly went into an abyss of depression, it would be better not to have those things around.”

  “If I am going to kill myself, I am going to have a very detailed and complete plan,” he said.

  The sadness of the thought overwhelmed me. Then tears began to roll down his cheeks. I reached out to hold him but he pushed my arm away, and motioned with his hand for me to stay back.

  I looked into his eyes. They were the same hard, cold, angry eyes from the night when he was curled up in the closet.

  “The voices are not there anymore,” he told me slowly.

  His words sank in, their pain striking me deeply. I knew how much they meant to him.

  “The ones that made me great, that would speak with me and tell me, ‘Get up! Work hard! Prepare for battle!’ The ones that would tell me I was a coward because I was not fighting, that I had to go to war. Those voices are not there. They have abandoned me, too,” he said. “The silence is devastating.”

  IN MID-AUGUST, AT THE end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, we received a phone call from Imran saying his family was feasting and he, Ish, and Abe wanted to speak with us from Jalalabad over Skype.

  Jim was excited to see the brothers for the first time since he left Afghanistan. He asked me to iron his best Afghan clothes—a brown tunic and pants—that Abe had given him. I put on a scarf and dress. Dan came to the house.

  Suddenly, Ish, Abe, and Imran were sitting before us on the carpet in one of the rooms of their large Jalalabad home. We began talking and laughing, but the sight of our Afghan brothers was an emotional overload for Jim. He said a few words, then choked up. All he could do was reach out toward the computer screen, as if trying to touch them. Then he left the house. Later, I found him wandering through the neighborhood in his Afghan clothes with a large wooden staff.

  A big part of Jim and me still resided in Afghanistan. We spoke about it every day. We had each spent years overseas, but our experiences during the past two years in Afghanistan fundamentally changed how we felt about being American. News of our comrades there came to us in bits and pieces, mostly in calls from Abe, Ish, and Imran.

  WE LEARNED THAT THE qalat in Chowkay had been abandoned by Capt. Fleming and his team about a month after Jim and Dan were pulled out. After the team alienated the arbakai, who in turn stopped manning the observation points in the high ground, Taliban attacks intensified again on the qalat. The team lost critical intelligence on the Taliban that Jim had gained through his relationships with arbakai commander Sadiq and others. Fleming decided occupying the qalat was untenable, and blamed it on Jim by claiming it was in a poor location.

  Meanwhile, the growing spate of killings of U.S. soldiers by Afghan forces was undermining the American mission in Afghanistan. Top military commander Gen. Allen responded by suspending joint operations and ordering a re-vetting of the Afghan forces—thereby increasing the alienation between the two groups. The trends underscored how critical and unique was the close rapport of Jim’s team with the Afghans who protected them.

  After Jim was pulled out by his command, the Taliban insurgents celebrated, claiming they had killed him.

  “Your son is gone!” one of the Taliban commanders taunted Haji Jan Dahd.

  “Pray that he has left! If he were here, you would be dead,” Jan Dahd replied.

  In May, Imran was the first of his brothers to travel back to Mangwel since Jim had been forced out of the country. He described the trip to me in an email.

  I took the Spin Jumat Bridge and from there I took the road in front of Penich.

  The area where we hit the IED in the tree used to have a lot of ALP in it—remember all Niq’s guys were out there all the time? Now there is no one around. I asked Niq what was going on. He said the government told them if they went out of their village and took casualties or faced any trouble, they would be responsible, not the government. He said they don’t get any help from the US Army guys, such as fuel, water, or ammo.

  On the way to Mangwel I didn’t see any ALP in the area at all, and when I got into Mangwel it was like walking in a graveyard. No one was out in the village.

  Most of the schoolteachers and other random people think that Jim was killed in Dewagal Valley. I told them that I talk to Jim all the time, but they wouldn’t believe me. I don’t know where they heard that Jim was shot in Dewagal
. Asif and Sitting Bull understand that he is alive. They are all heartbroken, not that Jim did anything wrong, but because of what Jim’s own did to him. They know he will be back one day to see them again.

  I told them Jim’s words: “Achilles absent, is Achilles still.”

  The phrase was one of Jim’s favorites and came from a passage in Homer’s Iliad. The warrior Achilles slays his foe Hector in revenge for the death of Patroclus, who was pretending to be Achilles. Standing over Hector’s dead body, Achilles says:

  At least is Hector stretch’d upon the plain,

  Who fear’d no vengeance for Patroclus slain?

  Then, prince, you should have fear’d what you now feel;

  Achilles absent, was Achilles still.

  MONTHS LATER, WINTER BROUGHT the first dusting of snow on the mountains around Mangwel. Noor Afzhal, his wooden cane in hand, watched a group of workers as they lay one stone upon another, building a new qalat.

  To everyone who asked, he said the same thing:

  “You’d better not give me any trouble,” he said. “Jim is coming back to live here.”

  Yet by the beginning of January the air was so cold it took a man’s breath away. Soon afterward, the cruel winter winds stole away the body of one man, and the spirit of another.

  On the chilly evening of January 11, 2013, at about nine o’clock, I received a call from Imran. It was the middle of the night in Jalalabad.

  “Just a few minutes ago, I got a call from Asif in Mangwel,” Imran said. “Sitting Bull has passed away . . . a stroke.”