True Allegiance

by Ben Shapiro

  Brett didn’t care about that. He turned, irked—and found himself face-to-face with a beautiful young woman, about seventeen, staring aggressively at him.

  “No,” she said, “I expected better from a cadet. Hanging around here, driving away all the customers.”

  “And what if I do drive them all away? What if I was the last man left on earth, standing right here, at this shop?” He couldn’t believe his mouth was moving this well, considering his tongue had turned to glue against his molars. “Would you do me the honor of letting me take you for a walk along the pier?”

  He flashed what he hoped was his most charming smile.

  “I’ve been asked by cadets before, and I’ll be asked by cadets again,” she shot back, without hesitation. “And if you’ll wipe that grin that looks like you’re eating tacks and manure off your face—and if you buy one of these here pictures—I’ll think about it.”

  The smile disappeared. His hand flashed to his wallet. He took out a $20 bill, fingered it, then handed it over, pointing at a watercolor of a palmetto-lined road along the shore. “I’ll take that one.” She handed it over. “So, how about it?”

  She raised an eyebrow in mockery. “No. I think I’ll pass.”

  He felt the frustration rise in his chest. “But I just bought the picture!”

  “I’m not that cheap a date,” she laughed. This time, the musicality of it pierced him.

  So maybe his way with words didn’t win Ellen. But his persistence did. By the time he bought his fifth picture, she agreed to a walk. By the tenth, they were going steady. Two years later, they were married.

  After college, Brett and Ellen moved to Quantico for Brett’s Marine training. He hadn’t liked The Citadel, but it had wormed its way into him—the need to serve, the belief in discipline, the recognition that somebody had to stand between the barbarians and the gates. The uniform. The camaraderie.

  Although he’d graduated top of his class at The Citadel, at Quantico his star truly began to rise. The brass’s eye settled on him as he bust record after record in training. By the time of the Gulf War, he’d been promoted to first lieutenant. He had also learned Arabic.

  He was just twenty-two when they sent him to Saudi Arabia; the war was already winding down. Operation Desert Sabre had been a full-fledged success, and the famed left hook had already busted the Iraqi defenses wide open. But he heard the promises; he heard the broadcasts in February 1991 promising that those who rose up against Saddam would be liberated. And he watched in horror as those promises were abandoned, as the Kurds were gassed in the streets.

  When he returned to the United States, he talked with Ellen about getting out. The mission shook him. Yes, they’d saved Kuwait from Saddam, saved the Saudi oil fields. But what about the children, spittle flecking from their mouths, spasming to death? What about the Kurds fleeing their homes, forced into Turkey, dying all along the way? He’d seen the images on television, and he’d heard the broadcast; he knew that those people had risen up, hoping that the United States would stand with them.

  Eventually, the decision became simple: he could stay in and try to wield influence on the inside. Or he could leave.

  Ellen wanted him to leave. She told him she was tired of the military life; she’d traveled enough. She was tired of losing him for months at a time, tired of him coming home with that empty look in his eyes, tired of the formality and the cheap military hole-ups. She also told him she was pregnant.

  For the first time since Iraq, she saw the light come back into his eyes.

  “Okay,” he finally told her. “When the baby is born, I’ll let them know. The timing works out just right.” Then he kissed her, felt the softness of her lips, and knew everything would be all right.

  Three weeks later, in the middle of the night, Ellen woke him, screaming. Her voice cracked as it reached the apex, shrieks over and over in the night, blood on the sheets, her hands clawing at her face. He picked her up in his powerful arms, held her tight, so small against him. He rushed her to the car, foot to the floorboard, one hand gripping hers—and her hand gripping his so tight he thought she might break his fingers.

  Afterward, the doctors told them children were out of the question.

  Whether it was unwillingness to leave the life, principled practicality, or a cowardly need for something to cling to—or a mix of all three, Brett eventually came to suspect—he stayed in.

  And he rose.

  By Kosovo, he was a captain. By September 11, he was a major. A major who, by simple coincidence, knew Pashto. He’d thought it prudent when, after the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, he first heard of some piece of shit named Osama bin Laden, holed up somewhere in Afghanistan.

  That little fact made him one of the first men on the ground in Afghanistan. He knew little of the country’s culture, but his knowledge of the language made him a valuable commodity. They assigned him to a unit working in direct contact with the heads of the Northern Alliance, the band of horse-riding tribesmen tasked with taking down the Taliban. It was all very Lawrence of Arabia, Brett thought. Except that Peter O’Toole never had to deal with roadside bombs or donkeys laden with explosives or the lure of the opium trade. And T. E. Lawrence hadn’t missed his wife, either, of course.

  And he missed Ellen.

  After the quick victory over the Taliban, CENTCOM in Afghanistan ordered his promotion to lieutenant colonel—the youngest in the Marines—and assigned him to the security team for central Kabul. That Pashto was really paying off.

  It also put him in direct contact, on a daily basis, with the president of the new Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. It turned out that Afghanistan’s new president didn’t trust the US ambassador to Afghanistan; soon, the only American he’d talk with was Brett.

  Brett saw the man as a corrupt tribal leader thrust into national leadership. He also told the American ambassador as much, and his superiors. It seemed to have no impact. All those issues were ignored; too much money was changing hands, too much politics shaping the game. The Afghan president wanted permanent US military bases, but a blind eye turned to his own corruption; the Americans wanted permanent US bases, but a guarantee of more participation by the Afghan military to help transition away from the use of US forces; the ambassador just wanted to be left alone.

  Daily, he missed Ellen more and more. He was thirty-seven now; they’d spent nearly a decade in this on-and-off relationship. It was, he had concluded, inhumane.

  One night, he unloaded it all to Ellen. She told him that he’d worked too hard to give it up—that he could still make a difference. He heard the musicality of her voice, her lips kissing him through the phone.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said. “It always is.”

  “Okay,” he grumbled half-heartedly. “But let’s keep thinking about it.”

  “Take a bullet for you, babe,” she said.

  “Take a bullet for you, sweetheart,” he replied, their usual sign-off.

  He still wanted to go home. More than ever.

  Then, all at once, things changed.

  It started in May, when Newsweek reported that US interrogators had desecrated a Koran by flushing it down the toilet at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They later retracted the story, but the damage was done. Riots broke out across the Muslim world; at least seventeen people were murdered in the streets of Afghanistan, and more than a hundred brutally injured. Mullahs in the northeast of the country threatened a new jihad against the United States if the interrogators weren’t turned over for sharia prosecution.

  The deal for the military bases was all but dead. The administration was scrambling. The Afghan president, in an attempt to appease his inflamed population, demanded that US troops change their rules of engagement to avoid civilian casualties—in the process, endangering more American soldiers.

  Then Colonel Brett Hawthorne saved the day.
>
  He’d been ushering a CNN crew around—“Gotta keep these schmucks from reporting that we eat Muslims,” he told Ellen—showing them Kabul. He handed candies to the children, spoke Pashto with the shopkeepers. The marketplace was crowded at this time of day, vendors hawking their wares; the security presence was heavy, too.

  All of this fell within the normal spectrum. But Brett felt something was off. He had developed a sixth sense about these things, spending all these years in-country. The market normally buzzed with activity, but now it seemed just a tick too quiet.

  The members of the CNN crew were yawning. One of them leaned up against the pole of a stall, camera still fixed to his eye. “Colonel,” he said lazily, “I think we’ve got about enough footage.” Brett turned to speak—and from behind the cameraman, he saw a child on a donkey, about three hundred feet away.

  His service weapon, a Beretta M9, was in his hand before he even felt it leave his holster. That motion became smooth after thousands upon thousands of repeats. The cameraman perked up, then swiveled to see what Brett was looking at. Other Marines began to pay attention now, brought their M4s to their shoulders. Vendors swept up their goods, ran from the square, emptying it almost instantaneously.

  One of the soldiers moved toward the donkey. “Get away from it!” Brett barked.

  The child began to cry. The cameraman zoomed in eagerly. This was absolute gold: a crying Afghan child, frightened to death by the awful Americans. Brett shouted to the kid in Pashto. “They’re watching us, aren’t they?”

  The child nodded, tears streaming down his face.

  If the soldiers got too close, the Taliban fighters would detonate the donkey, Brett knew.

  “Stay back, boys,” Brett shouted, his voice carrying in the still air.

  Then he saw it. Because the bomb was mobile, the terrorists couldn’t use one of their hard-lined IEDs—they’d rigged it with a cell phone. Brett could see the phone glowing on the side of the donkey. They were planning to detonate the bomb remotely by calling a number.

  And if he called in an EOD team, he knew, the terrorists would simply detonate the bomb, taking the kid with it.

  And so he leveled his weapon. The cameraman zoomed in on his face, sweat pouring down his forehead. His thumb fingered the grip, caressed it.

  “Come on, baby,” Brett said to himself.

  The donkey was now about waddling toward him, the cell phone bouncing in its cloth pack. The child’s eyes went wide.

  He fired.

  The bullet smashed into the cell phone at an angle, shattering it completely.

  The donkey panicked, took off at a dead run right at Brett. Brett fired his handgun two more times into the dirt, forcing the donkey to rear—and then Brett reached up and grabbed its bridle, using his full body weight to pull it to the ground. Then he untied the kid, picked him up off the donkey, and muttered a few comforting words in Pashto.

  The kid hugged him around the neck fiercely.

  When he looked up, the lens was in his face.

  What the hell, he thought.

  And he winked.

  The video went viral, of course. His face graced the cover of Time—“THE NEW FACE OF THE GOOD WAR,” it touted. The military put him on tour. He became a recruitment tool, the purest example of American military might combined with American caring.

  Then Mark Prescott was elected president.

  By that time, Brett had been back in the United States for several years, doing cable news, pumping up the war effort. Prescott’s election, however, sent a shock wave through the military infrastructure. Prescott had campaigned on ending the war in Iraq and getting out of Afghanistan as soon as possible. He said the wars had dragged on too long, that military spending could be slashed and the money rededicated to domestic concerns.

  As an active military member, Brett couldn’t say anything, of course. Once again, he talked with Ellen about quitting—and this time, she seemed more amenable to it, given the latest breakdowns in Afghanistan. She knew it was a matter of time until they called Brett back there, and with both of them pushing forty, she wanted her husband home.

  Then Prescott called.

  The election was still two months off. But Prescott, a genius for campaigning, knew that he lacked military credentials—and his opponent, General Harold Hart, had those credentials stacked up. If he could somehow finagle Brett into his camp, he’d have a public relations coup on his hands. Brett patiently explained that he couldn’t be involved in campaigning. Nonetheless, two days later, an anonymous source somehow told The New York Times that Senator Mark Prescott had spoken at length with Colonel Brett Hawthorne—and that Hawthorne would be an integral part of any Prescott administration.

  “Asshole,” Brett cursed to Ellen.

  “Boss,” Ellen corrected him.

  Prescott bumped three points in the polls. By the time of the election, a slim lead had turned into a blowout.

  The day after the inauguration, Prescott called again.

  “Colonel,” he said, “I’m gonna violate military protocol. I’m bumping you to general, effective immediately.”

  Brett was stunned. The youngest general in the Marines was in his mid-forties. Brett had just turned forty-one.

  “Sir, I’m flattered, but that’s against all the regulations…”

  “I’m the commander in chief, son,” said Prescott genially. “Congratulations.”

  The announcement came at the White House. The president beamed as he introduced Brett; Brett shifted uncomfortably, his bulk imposing beside the slim and tailored Prescott. When he stepped to the microphones, for the first time in a long time, his mouth felt dry.

  “Why do you deserve this promotion, general?” shouted a reporter.

  “I don’t,” he answered truthfully. “There are men ahead of me who deserve it more. But I promise to do my best.” Then he glanced at his commander in chief. Prescott grinned and gave him the thumbs-up.

  The newspaper headline the next day said it all: “THE KID TAKES CHARGE.”

  Prescott immediately tasked Brett with trotting out his new Afghanistan strategy on national television. He asked him for his advice peremptorily, of course—Brett told him in no uncertain terms that Afghanistan would be lost without a major counterinsurgency surge, akin to the one the British had used in Malaya in the 1950s. Prescott dismissed that possibility out of hand.

  “No,” he said. “We’re pulling out. I promised.”

  “Sir,” Brett protested, “we’ll lose the country.”

  “I have more faith than that, son,” said Prescott.

  For six months, Brett followed orders. He kept his mouth shut.

  Then, as the casualties mounted, Prescott told Brett that he’d be pulling another ten thousand troops from the country by the end of the year.

  “With all due respect, that’s a bad idea, sir,” said Brett.

  “It’s happening,” said the president. “Get over it. And, by the way, get familiar with the policy. I need a uniform on television defending this thing.”

  Perhaps it was the snide reference to the uniform—the old piece of clothing Brett had once hated, then learned to love. Perhaps it was the casualness with which Prescott perused the casualty reports.

  But sitting across from NBC’s Sunday morning anchor, Brett began to feel the pressure and heat build up behind his eyeballs. And suddenly, he began talking. In a wave, he explained all the flaws with Prescott’s policy. He slammed Prescott for precipitously putting American and Afghan lives at risk, for creating a vacuum that could only be filled by al-Qaeda or a similar renewed terror group. He told the news anchor that the president would need to send no less than eighty thousand troops to Afghanistan, and that there could be no timetable for withdrawal. Timetables, he said, would lead the enemy to bide their time, to wait them out, and then to strike.

  Whe
n he walked off the set, he knew he was finished. It was only a question of when. He knew he’d been insubordinate; he knew the president was the commander in chief. But Brett Hawthorne had worked for better men than Mark Prescott, and his main charge, he had always believed, was not to the president but to the Constitution and to his men. He had to obey the orders of the president, true.

  “But,” he later explained to Ellen, “screw those orders. I’ve got men dying over there.”

  Three days passed. Then, Prescott hit back.

  First, a report appeared in Beat magazine, with anonymous quotes describing Hawthorne as a young gunner, a career military man interested only in bulling his way through china shops and making rank. Prescott himself did an interview defending Hawthorne from such charges, although he admitted—grudgingly, of course—that he hadn’t always seen eye to eye with his new boy, but appreciated Brett’s willingness to speak his mind. After all, hadn’t Lincoln had a team of rivals?

  Then, a week later, the real bomb: a report appeared in The New York Times, filled with anonymous accusations of a sexual liaison between Brett and a young reporter, Dianna Kelly. Kelly had requested an interview with Brett a few months before; she’d been studying at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and wanted to write her thesis on counterinsurgency. She was thirty, sexy, and extremely sharp. She’d taken to running with Brett on his morning jogs, quizzing him, questioning him. They spent long nights huddling over maps of the country, with Brett explaining in minute detail how the insurgents would plot their counterattacks.

  Brett couldn’t honestly say he was surprised when he saw Kelly’s face on the cover of the New York Daily News, tears in her eyes. In the article by muckraker Jack Blatch, she said Brett had slept with her, that he’d promised to leave his wife for her. She said she’d been in love with him, had made love to him in his office.

  Ellen didn’t even ask him about it.

  The next day, Prescott called him to the White House. “General,” he said, a sad smile on his face, “I think it would be best if you resigned. We’ll give you a big send-off. You’ll go out a hero.”