The Fighters

by C. J. Chivers

  The war against the Islamic State was not McDowell’s to fight. He had been a contender for aircraft carrier command, and was a member of the tiny ring of his service’s rising leadership class, on the cusp of Navy royalty. But he retained the sensibilities of the Texas cotton farm where he had been raised. Before the Islamic State became a household name, he had already opted out, and asked not to be considered for high-profile command. He wanted to see more of Jolene and their two sons, Landon and Grayson, who had spent much of their lives with their father away. He sought stateside jobs in the Navy and by 2017 was a captain in the Department of Defense’s Alaskan Command, the director of its plans and policy shop, seeking to finish his career in the state he had chosen for a home.

  In the summer, the water that flowed along the McDowell property sometimes filled with spawning Pacific salmon. He tried to take time off during the runs.

  * * *

  Leo Kryszewski recovered from most of the wounds he had received in the rocket attack at Balad. The first months were difficult. Soon after arriving home, he attended a memorial service for Major Syverson, who had been killed at his side, at a chapel at Fort Campbell. Kryszewski had been in Iraq nineteen days. Many of his Special Forces peers had not been aware he had been overseas. Others heard rumors that he had died, and were startled to find him in the chapel alive. He was bandaged, in pain, and sedated. He struggled through the ceremony. One moment he was trying to remain awake. The next he was in tears.

  The road back was long. Kryszewski needed three surgeries to remove large pieces of shrapnel and six other outpatient procedures for smaller metal bits that remained in his flesh. He was racked with survivor’s guilt. By the fall of 2004 he had worked himself back into shape for full duty and was assigned for two years to a special mission unit in Virginia and prohibited from discussing his new work. His duties occasionally took him back to Balad Air Base, and on the one-year anniversary of the rocket attack he returned to the PX where the rocket had hit him, Major Syverson, and Master Sergeant Crowder. It was a rare experience. Few soldiers have the chance to revisit the ground where they were wounded, much less within a year. He walked the area outside, stopped at the small staircase by the entrance, and wandered the aisles inside the store. The blast damage on the exterior wall remained. The front door had been replaced.

  Try as he might, Kryszewski could not force the ground to match his memories. It felt as if he had never been there before.

  The following year, after being promoted to master sergeant, he transferred back to the Fifth Special Forces Group at Fort Campbell and was assigned as team sergeant of ODA 591. (The team was later redesignated ODA 5331, as part of Fifth Group’s expansion.) In 2007 the team was sent via Balad to Nasiriyah, where it partnered with a six-hundred-member Iraqi SWAT unit. The contest for control of Iraq had divided into wars within wars. Much of the American conventional military effort was in or near Baghdad or the Sunni population centers north and west of the capital. Kryszewski’s team and several others were ordered to help Iraqi security forces against Iranian-backed Shiite groups in the south, most notably against Jaysh al-Mahdi and the small Soldiers of Heaven cult, which was trying to gain control in Nasiriyah. After a series of pitched battles in 2008, the team returned to the States, and Kryszewski was assigned to the group’s support company as its first sergeant.

  In late 2009 Kryszewski retired, ending a twenty-four-year career. In 2010 he joined the police department in Clarksville, Tennessee, and passed an unhappy run of months as a traffic cop, ending with his divorce and a dismissal from the police job. He considered both events blessings. As a police officer responding to a traffic accident, he had met Cindy Russell, the daughter of a career Navy sailor who was volunteering with the Special Forces Association, and had just helped arrange an association reunion. Russell had been part of the military community her entire life. They dated, fell in love, and were married. She helped him to rethink his post-Army career. Soon after leaving the force, where he earned about $30,000 a year, he joined a private contracting firm, Wexford Group International, which paid him as much as $1,200 a day. He returned to Afghanistan as an armed embedded civilian adviser and worked alongside Special Forces teams.

  Kryszewski stayed with the firm through 2015, spending most of his time deployed, often in outposts that were rocketed. He remained a combatant even as his hair grayed, and was involved in several more raids or other actions. He finally had enough. One night, after a pair of rockets landed near where he was sleeping, he decided to return home for good. He was offered a job with another firm, Quiet Professionals, that allowed him to work in the States. He and his family relocated to Tampa.

  Pain still plagued him. The wars were not far away. Sometimes in bed he would find sores on his skin. When he rubbed them they would bleed. These were small pieces of shrapnel or debris working their way out years after being blasted in. He was attuned to life in a deployed team, to the rhythms of readiness and the habits of wariness that keep soldiers alive. He struggled to fit into a quieter life, and became angry. Cindy loved him and knew he needed her. She watched her husband closely, and studied PTSD on her own time. She urged him to understand that dark moods and short temper, along with constant vigilance, did not have to be his normal. With her at his side, he enrolled in care at the VA in Tampa. He started therapy to unpack his memories and reset his behaviors, to accept the past and adjust to the present. He knew the wars had not succeeded. He wondered if it would have been better if the United States had not invaded Iraq. But after all the violence and close calls, he had learned to separate his personal service from the larger march of American foreign policy. He had not picked his missions, much less the reasons Washington chose to go to war. As a soldier it’s not up to me to decide, he thought. He had done his duty and given his best, and if his service had helped anyone, even a single person, he felt his role was worth it.

  Leo moved forward. He considered his treatment superb and by 2017 he thought he was feeling better. But he was not done. In August of 2017 he and Cindy were driving home from a movie in Tampa, when they were caught in a thunderstorm. It was a summer Florida classic. Rain came down in sheets. Wind roared. Lighting flashed, then flashed again. Thunder shook the car. Leo was activated. The rocket that had hit him in 2004, and all the near misses by other rockets in the years after, had left him rewired.

  Behind the wheel of his Dodge Ram 3500, he began shaking.

  He was too rattled to drive. He pulled over. He and Cindy switched seats so she could drive the rest of the way home.

  It was pouring still when she pulled into the driveway of their home. Leo stepped out of the truck’s passenger-side door. He intended to dash through the downpour to the open garage. Lightning flashed again. It seemed almost to hit him. His defenses crumbled. He panicked. He dove to the ground and stayed there, pressed flat to the soggy lawn as an explosive roar encased him. He cupped his hands behind his head.

  Facedown, trembling, crying, he was waiting to die. Hurry up and come kill me, he thought.

  Cindy was on the other side of the big truck and did not see him drop. But as she gathered her purse and made her way to the garage, she noticed Leo was not inside. She spun and saw him in a fetal position on the lawn, shaking violently in the rain. Her reaction was as instantaneous and involuntary as Leo’s. But it was different. She was not fighting fear. She was compelled to save him.

  She bounded across the driveway, dove onto her husband, and covered him with her body.

  For a moment they lay there, in the wind and driving rain. She felt him beneath her. He was tensed, terrified, and curled up in a protective posture, his muscles flexed tight. His breathing was deep and fast. She pressed her mouth close to his ear, telling him she was there, and that he was safe.

  “It’s okay, baby,” she said. “It’s all right. It’s okay.”

  Leo did not answer.

  She stayed sprawled atop him, shielding him from the lashing gusts. She repeated the words, soothing hi
m. Rain soaked her clothes and hair.

  “I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” Cindy said.

  After a few minutes Leo’s muscles started to unclench. He was still breathing with an animal fear. But he was returning to himself. She kept comforting him.

  Leo stood up.

  Cindy stood with him. She took his hand, led him to the open door, kicking her purse toward the garage until they were inside. She walked him through the house to the bathroom, where she removed his soggy clothes and put a dry robe around him. She guided him to their bedroom, and gently had him lie down.

  The room was quiet. Neither of them spoke.

  She took her place on the bed and placed her mouth close to his ear again, so he could hear the rhythm of her breathing. She waited. She knew he needed time. She just breathed, purposefully, steadily, signaling security and calm.

  Gradually his breathing matched hers.

  After a while Leo knew it was over. His wife was holding him. In her embrace he recognized an unusual sensation: He felt safe.

  He was back.

  I have my protector, he thought. She’s not going to let anything hurt me anymore.

  He remembered this kind of feeling. It was the same sense of security he had once drawn from his Special Forces teams, even when in danger, all across the world. He admitted it: He needed more help. The next day Leo went back to the VA to start the rest of the work. Cindy was beside him.

  All that war, all that time, all the ways he had changed. Her love, Leo thought, was bringing him home.

  * * *

  After meeting President Bush, Doc Kirby returned to Georgia and served the remainder of his probation quietly.

  His despair dissipated. He and his family grew closer. His anger at Lauren eased, and he reached an understanding about the failure of his marriage. I don’t even hold no ill will. I truly don’t look at it for anything but what it was: We were really young, and if we had managed to meet our expectations it might have been different. But we both lost a lot. We thought things were going to be different and it didn’t work out that way. He thought the sergeants whose actions Marines in his platoon said had wronged him—whether for losing a rifle, or for putting him on the rooftop post as punishment for urinating in a bottle—deserved peace, too. Blame games would change nothing for the better. They would only cause more pain.

  As he moved toward accepting the ugliest episodes of his past, he and Brandi grew closer, and he took on a larger role in her young daughters’ lives. He began introducing himself as their father. By 2014, Brandi had delivered two more daughters. Kirby was the father of four. In a few short years he went from crushing loneliness to being a partner with Brandi in a busy family. He was recovering emotionally, adjusting to his life outside the Navy and away from the Marines at last.

  Physically he was in decline. Insomnia drained him, leaving him fatigued, which was amplified by the hypervigilance associated with his PTSD. He was worn down by migraines, and his mouth’s chronic pain was almost unbearable. He had learned to compensate in his speech and could communicate well enough, even over the phone. But his surgeries, which once held promise, did not carry him as far as he or his doctors had hoped. He could eat only soft foods, and had trouble with each bite. He drooled. His remaining teeth ached; the bare gums were tender. His lower jaw did not quite align with his upper palate. Nurses had always asked him where his pain was, on a scale of 1 to 10. On a good day, he figured he was a steady 7. Often he was worse, including when his mouth shed tissue or debris. One day it was a small shard of bone, another a tiny screw. In early 2015, faced with throbbing pain, Doc extracted two teeth while standing before a mirror. He pulled them out with the pliers on his Leatherman tool.

  His mother, Gail, was despondent. She could see that even as his family life improved, he was at risk of unraveling. She was tired of the simple narratives of recovery that formed part of the military’s presentation of its wounded veterans. Her son was suffering. He was backsliding. The Veterans Administration was not doing enough. The president had seemed an ally. The rest of the government did not.

  In 2007, while his wounds were fresh, Doc had been hosted by Jack Doyle, an investment portfolio manager, at a gala benefit dinner given by the Marine Corps–Law Enforcement Foundation, a private organization that provides scholarships to children of Marines and law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty. It was a grand night at the Waldorf Astoria, and during the ceremonies Doc met a pair of brothers, a dentist and a doctor, who told him that if he ever needed medical attention, they would help.

  He thought little of it at the time but had mentioned it to his mother. Eight years later, Gail found Doyle’s email address and asked him for help. Doyle’s brother-in-law had been killed in the World Trade Center attacks. He felt personally connected to the veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In less than two weeks he found a dentist willing to shepherd Doc through a fresh round of reconstructive surgery in New York.

  In the spring of 2016, three surgeons led by Dr. David L. Hirsch, the reconstruction director of maxillofacial surgery at the New York Head and Neck Institute, removed the hardware that held Doc’s rebuilt lower jaw together for almost a decade and replaced it with a titanium plate fashioned through computer-assisted design. Doc felt the change immediately. His bite was properly aligned. The throbbing ended. For the first time since a bullet passed through his head, the moving parts of his face seemed to fit. In follow-up procedures he received dental implants to replace his damaged teeth. No longer self-conscious about his scar tissue and mismatched jaw, he started smiling again. Sometimes his smile was outsized. In the autumn of 2016 he did something he once thought he would never do again: He bit an apple, clean through.

  Gail Kirby kept an autographed copy of President Bush’s book in her home. She remembered something he had told her in his office. “You speak with passion,” he said. That much was true. But passion had limits. Gail wanted to support the wars, to believe they were right not only in ambition but in practice. Al Qaeda, after all, had attacked the United States, setting in motion the huge and lethal machine that descended upon Afghanistan and Iraq. Hunting down al Qaeda was just. But much of what had happened since perplexed her, and the war machine seemed to have no Off button. She knew things had gone wrong, but most of all she knew that the people who had answered Washington’s call had come home to a government that did not give them adequate support. Her passion could not overcome that.

  Questions burned in her. Why had her son’s face been rebuilt with pro bono private care? Was this the country we wanted to be?

  Gail’s aversion to politics spared the government her wrath; there was only so much one person could take on. She looked for good where she could and then goodness appeared. The private doctors who stepped in where the government had failed gave her a phenomenon to marvel at: the return of her oldest son. She was in awe of Dusty, at how he had turned it around. She saw it in his eyes. I was always proud of him, but now I am proud of every part of him, she would think. He’s got a grip. He’s got a grip. She could call it many things. Blessing in catastrophe, grace amid horror, salvage from waste. Compassion where coarseness and indifference had reigned. God’s hand. Luck. Whatever it was, her son had been restored. She wished it could be extended to the rest, to those for whom it was not too late. How many lives had these wars wrecked?

  * * *

  I. The Marines’ presence served to harden the Taliban and perhaps improve its skills, including in fielding more sophisticated IEDs. Among them were directional fragmentation charges that could be detonated by remote control with receivers that were offset and away from the device. These could be used against patrols equipped with portable jammers.

  Author’s Note Regarding the Cover

  The photograph on the cover of this book captures the beginning of the ambush of an American foot patrol on the afternoon of April 15, 2009, beside the Korengal River in Afghanistan. It shows three soldiers from Second Platoon, Brav
o Company, First Battalion of the Twenty-Sixth Infantry. Specialist Robert Soto, the platoon radio operator, is in the foreground. Specialist Robert Oxman and Specialist Dustin Parkison, a M240B machine gun team from Third Squad, are crouched together in the upper right. The image was made seconds after an improvised explosive device had exploded under a trail, killing a fourth soldier from the platoon, Private First Class Richard A. Dewater, and as the Taliban began firing rifles, machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades against Americans in the ravine. Specialist Soto, who had been walking with Dewater and was blown over by the blast, had regained his feet and was running for cover. Specialist Oxman and Specialist Parkison were scanning the hills and stone houses above, looking for the gunmen firing on them, and about to move to a better position from which to fire back. The image was made by Tyler Hicks of the New York Times.

  Author’s Note on Sources

  The reporting of this book was initially organized around firsthand observations in the United States, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and aboard the USS John C. Stennis and several military aircraft. It began with being present during the attack on the World Trade Center and continued with repeated cycles of work in Afghanistan and Iraq, including in Afghanistan in late 2001 and early 2002 (overlapping with Leo KryszewskiI) and in Iraq in late 2002 and 2003, followed by reporting in the field alongside other characters—Dustin Kirby, Robert Soto, Jarrod Neff—during certain events described in these pages. These include the rocket attacks that killed much of the family of Haji Mohammad Karim, the sniper shot that struck Lance Corporal Colin Smith during the daytime raid on the outskirts of Karma, and the explosion that killed Private First Class Richard Dewater beside the Korengal River. In 2012 I was in the backseat of an F/A-18 combat sortie behind Layne McDowell as he was catapulted from the Stennis, flew up the boulevard in Pakistan, and patrolled over southern Afghanistan. During the sortie, McDowell flew a low pass to suppress Taliban fighters harassing a ground unit below. I was also present at Doc Kirby’s home in Georgia immediately after he was medically retired from the Navy in 2012. In 2016 I observed Dr. David Hirsch and two other surgeons perform the surgical reconstruction of Kirby’s face in an operating room in Manhattan.