The Fighters

by C. J. Chivers

  Later, McDowell took a Navy posting in Alaska, working for ALCOM, the Pentagon’s Alaskan Command. It was a non-flying staff job. He enjoyed it. He and Jolene bought land and built a house in Wasilla, along Cottonwood Creek, and they now had a second son, Grayson. When McDowell was not working, he hunted big game and fished with the boys for the Pacific salmon that ascended the watersheds and sometimes passed almost through his family’s yard. Outwardly he was the archetype of U.S. Navy success. He cleared NASA’s initial screening for the astronaut program, and was rated highly enough to be in the pipeline to command an aircraft carrier. The Navy signaled that it had big plans for him and that his horizon was boundless. He was selected for F/A-18 squadron command, and had only to decide which course to choose after his next flying tour. And yet sometimes, in spite of this success, McDowell thought of a major life turn. He contemplated a final squadron tour, followed by retirement to Alaska with his family. He’d been away enough to know the costs his Navy life had exacted on those he loved. He knew how it hurt. He kept his hand up for career-enhancing assignments. But a simpler life appealed to him. His mind moved down parallel tracks—the impeccable aviator’s career beside a simpler, comforting dream.

  He was assigned to VFA-41 in 2010 and sailed in 2011 aboard the Stennis, the third carrier he had deployed on in his career. When the ship steamed off Pakistan’s coast, he was not eager to use his weapons. American air-to-ground tactics had changed in ways he generally approved of: Aviators covering ground units under fire often did not attack. Instead they flew down from high elevation and showed themselves, trying to drive the Taliban off by signaling their presence. These tactics were an explicit recognition that in the haste of fast-moving gunfights both pilots and the ground controllers orienting them had erred too often for too many years, killing Afghan civilians as well as Western and Afghan troops. Action, reaction, counteractions. The war’s puzzles were ever harder to solve. Tighter rules reduced risks to civilians but also gave the Taliban more confidence that it would not be targeted, and introduced layers of supervision that could delay aid to ground forces in need. McDowell was not a pacifist. If a unit called for his bombs and he could be sure of his target, he would release them. He remained a product of the warheads-on-foreheads culture in which he had been raised. But he was older now, a veteran of many campaigns. Violence was more complicated than it had been.

  On December 31, McDowell was directed west of Kandahar to patrol over a network of outposts along the northern bank of the Arghandab River. This was the literal birthplace of the Taliban, and since 2010 the Army had expanded its presence in the cropland to confront the Taliban in another of its rural strongholds, much like the Marines were doing to the west. Local fighters, familiar with the trails and walls and irrigation canals, had fought the American offensive ferociously. The valley had become one of the most dangerous locales of the Afghan war.

  McDowell checked in by radio with a ground controller near Forward Operating Base Wilson who used the call sign Heartless. The F/A-18 squadron’s call sign was Vengeance. Heartless and Vengeance exchanged greetings and plans.

  After the first portion of the flight, McDowell and his wingman departed to rendezvous with an aerial tanker. They returned to a unit in contact. Grunts had come under gunfire from across a farmer’s field and wanted air support. Through his targeting pod, McDowell could see American vehicles moving slowly down a dirt road as troops checked for bombs. The Taliban was hidden from the pilots’ view. The F/A-18s circled the fight. Heartless radioed more information. The grunts said they knew a building where attacking gunmen had hidden. They directed McDowell toward one structure, then changed the coordinates. At last they pointed him toward a different place. McDowell did not know which building to watch most closely. The grunts told him it was a hut used for drying grapes.I They fired a yellow smoke grenade at it, hoping he would see.

  From the air, set against the tan earth and light-colored walls, yellow smoke did not offer enough contrast. McDowell could not see it. He kept his targeting pod on what he thought was the correct building, knowing that Heartless could see the feed live. The fight wound down. The radio traffic stopped.

  McDowell circled, watching, seeing little, waiting for follow-up. There was nothing more from Heartless. With fuel running low, Vengeance had to leave. The Taliban had fought directly underneath them and ghosted away.

  Back on ship, McDowell wrote of his hesitation and of the satisfaction of restraint.

  Both us and the troops were thinking the same thing I think. Inside that grape hut are two insurgents who deserve to die. But we didn’t know if they were alone. I thought about that house back in Kosovo I accidentally struck 12 years ago . . . this felt a lot like that, except this time I wasn’t going to drop . . . who might be inside . . . kids? . . . maybe more insurgents, but who knows, and the hut was surrounded by other mud buildings. Who knows, maybe a school, maybe an orphanage.

  Funny how things have changed in how I view things. As a JOII I prayed to be able to see action and be in combat. Now I pray I don’t have to see combat and can avoid having to drop. Though I don’t think about it much, or try not to, there’s still a lot of blood on my hands from my first two deployments . . . all from people we intended to kill (as far as I know), but it’s the not knowing for sure that always makes me pause. Glad I didn’t drop today. Hope I can make it through this deployment without dropping.

  Happy New Year, Afghanistan.

  A few days later McDowell was back over Afghanistan, this time far west in Farah Province, near Iran, supporting an Italian unit searching a mountainside for arms caches and rockets. The planes descended and buzzed the mountain, hoping to flush out any Taliban fighters. Nothing happened. The Taliban did not show. But the flight left an impression on its pilot. A former farmer himself, McDowell was moved by the scenes he saw at low altitude—a village on a riverbed amid brown, sun-scorched terrain. The poverty seemed extraordinary. He wondered how Afghans managed to raise anything there. He wondered how people ate. He wondered about his role. Some of the world’s most expensive attack aircraft were being applied to small and seemingly unsolvable tactical problems in remote corners of the earth.

  The next week he performed a similar role, flying low down the length of a canyon northwest of Kandahar to help an American unit that had been airlifted into the canyon earlier in the day and come under fire.

  The Stennis was soon to be replaced. On January 11 the squadron flew its final supporting flights of its Afghan tour. McDowell had not dropped a bomb. Depending on the carrier’s next tour, when he would be a commanding officer, his service in war might have ended for good. In his stateroom, taking notes to himself, he admitted to feeling relief.

  I can’t bear the thought of injuring anyone who doesn’t deserve it, especially if a child were injured during an attack. I think back to the house I accidentally bombed in Kosovo and wonder who was in it. . . . I hope no one. But I don’t want that kind of haunting anymore. I’m glad it’s over. I hope my days of flying in combat are over.

  On January 13, clear of its requirements to have planes over Afghanistan, the ship had a no-fly day, and sailors passed their hours with maintenance. The Stennis sailed away from its box in the North Arabian Sea. The next day McDowell was scheduled for a flight in which his Super Hornet would serve as a tanker to pass fuel to aircraft awaiting turns to land on the ship’s flight deck.

  It was a routine mission, and potentially boring compared to the more complicated flights over Afghanistan. But as the evening light grew soft, something special happened. Out in the pattern around the ship, far above the surface of the sea, McDowell encountered a flat and level deck of clouds.

  He felt a rush of joy. Clouds, in his experience, were usually dynamic. They tended to have vertical development. They did not often settle into stable pancake shapes. The clouds before him were something he rarely saw, much less when he had time to spare. He descended and closed on them. He was happy—even elated.

&nb
sp; Although F/A-18s can fly at supersonic speeds, in many flights there are no visual cues that give an aviator a frame of reference. Aside from the g’s experienced, a pilot often has little sense of how fast an aircraft is moving. High-speed, low-level flights change all that. Cues appear outside the cockpit’s windscreen. The ground in its myriad details, or waves on the ocean’s surface, whip by in an extraordinary and constantly changing view. A pilot literally sees speed. It registers in the brain like danger, a threat. The body reacts involuntarily, feeding the pilot adrenaline with such intensity that it creates a sensation with its own nickname. Ground rush, aviators call it—an unmatched high. Supervisors frown upon pilots who get hooked on ground rush. Chasing its fix is a fine way to lose an aircraft and get killed.

  As a younger man McDowell sometimes chased it anyhow. It was an exhilarating thrill, the experience of flying in a hyper-stimulating fashion. As a commander by rank and an executive officer by position, he was expected to behave differently. His seniority and flight hours attuned him to his place in the machine. He emanated self-control. His days flying fast and low over sand were behind him.

  But clouds? This was something else. The cloud deck gave him a substitute for the ground, and a means to realize that old high. This, too, had its nickname: cloud surfing. By dropping his Super Hornet just above the top of the clouds, he could skim along the surface of this horizontal barrier, soak in visual feedback resembling what he’d get flying close to the dirt, and stimulate adrenaline flow. He could fly even lower to the cloud than he would dare to the earth, so close that it seemed as if the skin of the Super Hornet would scrape the clouds and be peeled away. And there was no danger of striking anything, nothing to fear.

  McDowell made his first pass.

  No matter what his mind knew, his body could not be convinced.

  Adrenaline poured into his bloodstream. He was electrified, supercharged, ecstatic. He reached the end of the cloud, climbed, turned around, dove, and surfed back. Racing above vapor just below his feet, Commander McDowell was happier than during any of his recent flights above Afghanistan. He was alive.

  On the first flight of his life, as a child taking off out of San Diego on a passenger jet, McDowell had looked out the window as the plane entered thick gray clouds from below. He was still staring out when it broke through into light. The sight of the tops of the clouds, a brilliant vista he had never seen before, cemented his desire to fly. It helped set his life on its course. Cloud surfing above the North Arabian Sea, filled with rapture and wonder, seduced by a spontaneous pleasure, McDowell was carried back to that moment.

  For thirty minutes, in an attack aircraft with no bombs, he raced back and forth, the wars behind him, soaring as if through a celestial place. It was as close to heaven, he thought, as a living man could get.

  * * *

  I. In areas with large grape harvests, Afghan insurgents often used grape-drying huts—thick buildings of dried mud with ventilation slits—as firing positions. This made sense. The drying huts were ideal bunkers. Their walls stopped bullets and light shrapnel, and the slits doubled as parapets.

  II. Acronym for “Junior Officer.”

  President Obama won reelection 2012, and as he began his second term the war in Afghanistan, upon which he had focused the Pentagon four years before, remained a brutal contest against a Taliban that had survived his surge. But the Afghan forces were more numerous, and since 2011 the American military had been leaving its Afghan bases and returning home. By late 2013 its force in Afghanistan had fallen below 50,000 troops, with plans to fall below 20,000 by the end of 2014, and perhaps a nearly complete withdrawal for 2016. Both Iraq and Afghanistan were sliding back toward violence. The Islamic State of Iraq, the Sunni terrorist organization that had not existed prior to the American invasion, had expanded into Syria and was gathering strength under yet another name, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. It held American hostages, was luring recruits from abroad, and was soon to break out and encourage terrorist attacks across much of the world.

  TWELVE

  * * *

  * * *

  THE FIGHTER

  Gail Kirby’s Demand

  “I am not the same Mom who sent her son to Iraq.”

  NOVEMBER 4, 2013

  Inside the George W. Bush Presidential Center in University Park, Texas

  Former president George W. Bush opened the door to his office and looked upon his guests. The entire family of former Navy corpsman Dustin E. Kirby—Doc himself, along with his parents and his brother and sister—stood before him. They were eager and anxious, unsure what to expect from the man who had sent Doc to war.

  Bush extended his hand. He was the picture of a gracious host. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “Welcome, welcome.”

  The invitation to visit the presidential center, extended at the Texas Motor Speedway the afternoon before, left no time for the family to gather dress clothes. Doc had come to Texas to be honored at a NASCAR race. He was dressed for speedway stands. He stood in front of the former president in jeans, a plaid shirt, and a black baseball cap. A 7.62-millimeter rifle round dangled from a necklace made of parachute cord.

  Bush wore a suit jacket. He chided Kirby for the hat. “You’re wearing a cover indoors?” he said.

  Kirby had voted for Bush in 2004 while Iraq spiraled deeper into violence. In only a few seconds of seeing the former president in person, he noticed things he could like. The man opened his own doors. He greeted guests without staff. His eyes looked sincere. Nothing about him was officious. He had less attitude than some of the officers and first sergeants Kirby had known. But life had carried Kirby past protocol. He was not going to apologize for his look. He kept the hat on his head.

  “I’m not on active duty no more,” he said. “I’m retired, sir.”

  Bush did not take the bait. He led the family into the room.

  It had been almost four years since Bush left office and nearly seven since Kirby had been shot. Time had been kinder to the former commander in chief than to the corpsman. Kirby had endured more than two dozen surgeries. His jaw had been rebuilt with a bone graft, screws, and plates. The work had not set him right. His bottom teeth did not align with those on top, and a section of his mouth was a food trap that he often had to clear with his index finger when he ate. He was in constant pain and self-conscious about his appearance. He had gained fifty pounds. He was medically retired, unemployed, divorced, and disfigured. He was also on probation in the state of Georgia for a reckless-driving conviction. Years of drinking had left their mark.

  A battlefield corpsman with two Purple Hearts, Kirby matched a stereotype revered in the American imagination and celebrated in official discourse. And yet he was not entirely free. He needed permission from his probation officer to cross the Georgia state line.

  He sat in a chair across from his old commander in chief. He’d taken a long road here, and experienced Bush’s war from a perspective a president would be unlikely to understand. So much had happened. It was late now. What could either man say?

  Beside him, his mother, Gail, looked on. Her son might not know what to say. She did not have that problem. She had prepared for this moment. She waited anxiously, biding her time.

  * * *

  Dustin Kirby woke in Landstuhl, Germany, on December 27, 2006, two days after the bullet slammed into his face. He had been unconscious since the anesthesia washed through him on the first operating table in Iraq. He slept through a pair of flights and returned to consciousness slowly, with no idea where he was. He did not feel like himself. He felt heavy, as if something were pressing him to the bed.

  As a trained health care provider, he forced himself to assess. An understanding of his circumstance formed. He was alive. He recognized that he was in a hospital. He was not sure where but it did not feel like Iraq. He was breathing, but not through his nose—a tube entered his trachea. He remembered: the rooftop bunker, the blow to the face, his teeth and a piece of his jaw in a
bloody pile by his knees, a helicopter ride, trying to stay awake as the blood rolled from his chin to his chest to his thighs. A nurse walked into the room.

  “Oh, you’re awake,” she said. “Let me go get the doctor.”

  She hurried away.

  Doc thought she sounded nervous. His mind was foggy but working. She’s trying to stay calm.

  A doctor appeared. He was accompanied by a staff sergeant Kirby did not know and a younger Marine from Doc’s battalion who had been wounded before him. Both men were looking at their feet.

  Kirby did not have to be told what it meant. They don’t know what to say.

  The doctor did. He caught his patient up: He’d been shot in the face two days ago and was stabilized in Iraq before being flown here to Germany, where the staff was assessing him and planned to put him on a flight to the United States soon. The doctor described what the bullet had done. Kirby’s mind seized on stray words and phrases: “missing bone,” “fractured jaw,” “lost teeth.”

  What the hell is this guy saying? he thought.

  The doctor asked him if he understood.

  He didn’t. But he was busily taking in more details than the doctor had shared. His eyes followed the breathing tube to the ventilator. He was a serious case. He nodded, to make the doctor go away.

  The two Marines remained.