Odyssey

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  Sarah nodded.

  “It also perpetuated the whole cycle of commercialization. Just as, earlier, when NSWC – the Naval Special Warfare Command – endorsed Marcus Luttrell’s book, Lone Survivor, it sent a signal to the community that writing books about current operations was acceptable. And because it was a runaway bestseller, a whole generation of team guys saw a lucrative opportunity to cash in on their personal stories.”

  “Surely they deserve those rewards. After their sacrifices.”

  Homer looked out the window. “Maybe. People deserve all kinds of things they don’t get, or shouldn’t have. And you don’t make sacrifices in order to earn rewards.”

  He paused to take a breath of the warming air.

  “There was also blogging about special operations, team guys showing up on the Sunday news talk-show circuit – commenting on domestic and national security affairs. And then, finally, running for office.”

  “Don’t veterans have the right to run for office? Maybe even more of a right?”

  “Of course. What they don’t have the right to do is to run on the SEAL brand. That’s what it started to become. Retired team guys wearing the trident on their suit lapels on TV, benefiting from a halo effect. And raising us to celebrity status wasn’t just bad form, corrupting the whole ecosystem and tarnishing the reputation of the teams and Naval Special Warfare – making a laughingstock of that ethos of quiet professionalism. It was also arguably damaging to national security. A junior officer at the Naval Postgraduate School wrote a thesis making that argument. The paper was called ‘Navy SEALS Gone Wild’.”

  Sarah laughed at this. “Sounds like a bad romance novel.”

  “It kind of does. Anyway, in fairness, it wasn’t just guys on the teams – and only some of them, let me stress, albeit a vocal minority. It was also deliberate efforts of the White House, among others, bringing us all out of the shadows, hurting both security and surprise. There was a real enemy out there – one who was paying attention, and constantly seeking an advantage. Drawing attention to us and our missions undermined the very reason for our existence, and the nature of our work.”

  He sighed out loud.

  “When I joined, it was understood we’d be unsung heroes. Maybe some of your missions would get written about one day, in the military history books. But you’d probably never get a medal. And you definitely wouldn’t get your name in the paper – never mind, you know, streaming video and Tumblr pages. The NDAs every one of us sign are legally binding – and the ethos is supposed to be binding in a much deeper way.”

  He turned and looked out the window and exhaled. “Then again, I’m not so smart. And it’s not for me to judge anyone.”

  Sarah just let the wind noise answer for a while.

  Angel

  Until her own body finally made her speak.

  “Sorry,” Sarah said. “I need a wee.”

  Homer was reminded that Canadians occupied a kind of middle ground between the US and UK, including their use of language. Sarah was already slowing them, but in an open area of highway with perfect visibility and no abandoned vehicles, so Homer didn’t object. She pulled them into the emergency lane and climbed out – but then paused to pull off her belt with its pistol, radio, and knife.

  Homer gave her a Sure that’s a good idea? look.

  “You try pulling down your pants with all that crap on your belt. Oh, yeah, you don’t have to.” In the end, she took the pistol, but put the belt with the rest of its gear down on the driver’s seat, then disappeared around behind the truck.

  Homer sat up in his seat, took a good 360-degree look around – he saw her going some distance down a drainage ditch, which he wasn’t wild about, but would probably be okay – then settled back down again. Mainly to give her some privacy.

  And to enjoy the peace, solitude, and silence.

  * * *

  He perked up again almost instantly – when Sarah’s radio emitted a low screeching noise from the seat, from in its pouch on her belt. The volume was down, but the unit was on.

  Unlike mine, he thought, sitting up quickly…

  He was down to his last radio battery, and Sarah’s spares didn’t fit his, so he had powered it down while they were in a small enclosed space together, to conserve power he might need later. But he instantly recognized that screeching – it was the same kind he’d heard just after taking off from the Kennedy.

  Encrypted traffic on an unencrypted device.

  He slapped at his own radio pouch and the rubberized power button on it. A voice instantly spoke in his ear.

  “Mortem One-Three from One-Four, how copy?”

  For just one second, he thought maybe he had drifted off in the silence and sunlight and was dreaming again. Then he realized, or figured, that he’d mentally reconstructed most of that transmission. Because, when it repeated, it was more like:

  “—m One – … One-Four, how—”

  “I got you, Ali,” he said into his throat mic. “Send traffic.”

  He knew this was impossible – or at least totally implausible. But it was also somehow true – that was her on the air. He could never mistake her voice, or even that call sign. Also, it wasn’t really impossible, not totally. He checked his watch. It was just conceivable, depending on how Alpha’s journey up the lake and extraction had played out, that they were, at this very moment, in the air somewhere overhead. Or not far.

  Close enough for radio waves. High enough, anyway.

  “Mortem One-Four, One-Three receiving, send traffic.”

  Nothing. No static. Just the silence of the cold windy day.

  He tried again. “Ali, it’s Homer, acknowledge.”

  “—our, any joy? How copy?”

  However little of her transmission he was getting down here, he could be pretty sure she was getting less of his. Probably none. Whatever Ali was transmitting with, from whatever aircraft she was on, the radio would be a lot more powerful than his personal one. He didn’t care. He sent his traffic anyway.

  Prayers didn’t need external power to transmit.

  And what he said next had been building up, to nearly impossible pressure, over his lonely vigil of the night before. It all came out at once, in an emotional rush.

  “Ali – I’m sorry. That I’ve had to do this. That I’m putting you through it all. But I just didn’t have any choice. There was no way for me to go forward – my body, my very flesh, wouldn’t let me – without going back first. There’s no way I can spend the rest of my life wondering. Maybe you can never forgive me for not choosing you. But my family is my home. I can’t leave them behind. I have to know. Whatever I find. And whatever the cost.”

  Finally, he keyed off.

  And it was true: he’d chosen nothing. He did what he had to.

  He also knew it was unlikely in the extreme she’d gotten any of that. But it was no less important to him to have said it.

  He waited half a minute. Nothing came back. He figured that was it, and reached to power off his radio. But his hand froze, as the voice came back, rising up one last time on the cresting waves of the electromagnetic seas.

  “—you stay alive, Homer. Complete your mission. And come back to me. One way or another… you come back.”

  “Solid copy, Ali. And wilco.”

  He still could have no idea how much of his confession had gotten through to her, if any. But now he guessed that something had. She seemed to know he was down here. Or, maybe, she hadn’t heard anything – but somehow knew he was down here anyway. And he didn’t have to doubt she was up there. An angel whispering into his ear, sending her love down from the heavens.

  It wasn’t impossible. And it hadn’t been a dream.

  Just another miracle.

  Rogue Warriors

  “What I miss?”

  Returning and pulling open the door, Sarah got her duty belt back on, climbed in, and got them rolling again. The sun was now starting to get properly low in the sky behind them.

  Homer d
idn’t answer, so she stole a glance across at him. He looked to be slightly in shock, or maybe awe – and she presumed it had to do with all the troubling developments back in the SEAL teams. She let the silence and road noise reign for a while longer, then finally said, “Whatever some of those other guys did, it sounds to me like you held yourself to a higher standard. Which I can’t say is a surprise.”

  Homer looked across at her, appearing ruminative, as if he was only half here. But the mists finally cleared from his face, and he seemed to come back to the truck. He nodded and took a deep breath before answering. His face finally relaxed now, looking bare, or defenseless. Like he’d decided to tell her more. Maybe everything. When he spoke again, his voice was level and affectless.

  Like he was making a confession.

  He said, “All the publicity and media was just the public face of it. Those weren’t the real standards that got violated, that we were supposed to live up to. There was a lot that was never really talked about. Much worse than books, or video games.”

  Homer didn’t continue, and Sarah wrestled with whether to prod him. To drag stuff out that might be private and painful. She finally convinced herself it would be good for him.

  He probably hasn’t had confession in a while.

  “Again, just us two here. And what happens in…” She looked up to check an exit sign. “…Shanksville, stays in Shanksville.”

  “Probably for good reason,” Homer said.

  They both laughed at this.

  But Homer’s smile faded again, even as the light in the sky behind them was starting to fade. “In my honest moments, I think a lot of it was in our DNA from the beginning. Hell, Marcinko’s own memoir was called Rogue Warrior. From the start, there was a kind of rowdy drinking culture, a feeling of being above the rules, if not the law itself. There’s a famous story of an old-school admiral viewing a Team Six training exercise, then coming to the bar afterward – and here were all these guys with thick beards, tattoos, earrings. And he was like, ‘These chuckleheads are in my Navy?’”

  Sarah laughed. “They sound like pirates.”

  Homer nodded. “Probably not by accident. And it wasn’t just their fashion sense. They also acted like brigands sometimes. There was drunk-driving, narcotics use, crashed rental cars. In the end, Marcinko served prison time for contractor and expenses fraud. Later, there was a purge of leadership, to try to professionalize the force. And it appeared to work. Modern-day DEVGRU guys were better educated, more athletic – and, mainly, older and more mature. We still pushed limits – but they tended to be operational ones. And especially our own limits, physical and mental. But, then, with the demands and stresses of non-stop deployments in the counter-terror wars, years of nightly raids… some of the old bad habits started to creep back in.”

  “Bad habits like what? More trashed rental cars?”

  “No. Worse.” Homer reached around to touch the patch on his shoulder, which depicted a Native American warrior in profile, with two crossed tomahawks beneath, all on a red field. “Like the use of tomahawks as an actual combat weapon. Everyone in Red Squadron got one of these.”

  “That was your squadron? Didn’t I read somewhere the team that got bin Laden was largely drawn from Red Squadron?”

  Homer shrugged. “You probably read all kinds of things about that mission that weren’t true. Anyway, you only become one of the Redmen in an initiation ceremony, when you receive your tomahawk. They’re beautiful objects, crafted by Daniel Walker, a knife maker in North Carolina. Same man who forged blades for the film The Last of the Mohicans.”

  “Nice.”

  “Yeah. But the point of a ceremony is supposed to be that the weapon is ceremonial. Nobody ever carried them into combat. Not until sort of the later stages of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria… There were these intense periods where guys in the deployed squadron or on detachment were going out every night – and logging ten to fifteen kills every night. Sometimes twenty-five. These killing fests started to become routine.”

  “Forgive me, but killing’s got to be part of the job. Necessary.”

  “Sure – regrettable, but necessary. What wasn’t necessary was…” Homer looked reluctant to go on. He did anyway. “What wasn’t necessary was emerging from raids covered in blood – other people’s. Sometimes, for high-value targets, we needed to cut off fingertips or patches of scalp for DNA analysis. But then, that started to blur into scalping. And, just every once in a while, and it was usually deniable… mutilation.”

  Sarah whistled. “Speaking of higher standards.”

  “Yeah. That one’s not so high. It’s not even professionalism. Just basic human decency. I’m convinced it was a tiny minority. Somebody I knew outside the teams once told me he felt like a third of us literally thought we were Apache warriors. I think that’s too high an estimate – but it doesn’t take too many cowboys to make a big negative impression.”

  “Or too many Indians. How many were there? In DEVGRU.”

  “Never more than about three hundred operators, at our peak. Times five in support personnel.” Homer took a breath. “It’s also perhaps fair to remember that a lot of the guys, particularly after so long, started to have noticeable TBI symptoms.”

  “TBI – traumatic brain injury? From IED blasts?”

  Homer nodded. “That was part of it. Most everyone had the experience of passing too close to a roadside bomb as it went off – but then all the vehicles are still operational, and nobody’s missing a leg, so it’s like, bang on the roof and shout, ‘Hey, hit it, we’re good to go.’ But that doesn’t mean your brain didn’t just get bashed into the side of your skull. And it wasn’t just IEDs. Even the smaller explosives we used to breach compounds on raids – a few of those, or even a few dozen, were no big deal. But you started having guys go out every night for six months at a time, doing a deployment every year, or more, for over a decade – hundreds of missions in a career. More breaching charges in training. And the grenade blasts indoors – including the new thermobaric grenades we asked for, and got. Getting battered and banged around on high-speed assault boats.”

  “Didn’t people who suffered TBI get treated?”

  “You have to understand the culture. We were all performing at a very high level. And we were stretched thin. There were never enough of us – and nobody could do what we do. So the culture was that you just blast on through. Really, that mindset gets imprinted in the first week of BUD/S: you might die – but you never quit. And complaining is not rewarded. Only winning is.”

  “So you think brain injuries caused erratic behavior?”

  “I don’t know. I think it was part of it. I guess I’m trying to give people the benefit of the doubt. And I wish it was only a question of how they treated the insurgents they’d already killed.”

  “There was worse?”

  Homer’s gaze lowered slightly, toward the dash. “It’s hard to know, harder to judge. It’s dark, you’re going a million miles an hour, you’re on stimulants to stay awake, Ambien to sleep. Bigger groups of us started going out – which seemed to result in fewer bad guys, if any, left alive at the end. And with so many targets, the lines start to blur – a-Q terrorist, insurgent head-hacker, Taliban subcommander… or just facilitators, financiers. Farmers paid a few dollars a day to pick up a rifle. Kids in with a bad crowd. It got harder to keep track. Which is no excuse.”

  “Excuse for what?”

  “Indiscriminate killing. There were a few incidents that crossed the line. Some Afghan villagers, and a British commander, accused one of our teams of killing all the men in a hamlet. It didn’t get much attention. Then, in 2009, some team guys joined CIA and Afghan paramilitaries in a raid that left a whole bunch of young men dead – and neither the Afghan government nor NATO were too happy. I swear…” He trailed off.

  “What?”

  “It’s almost funny. Integrity, as a baseline expectation, is drilled in from day one at INDOC. We were told that if you lost a piece of equipment, you p
ut in a chit to get it replaced – you didn’t take someone else’s gear. It had happened in the past, and those guys were gone. Simply, you didn’t lie, cheat, or steal.”

  Sarah’s eyes widened. “I don’t hear murder on that list.”

  “Yeah, no. I guess not.” Homer shook his head. “There was another raid, by Blue Squadron in Helmand, south of Lashkar Gah, that I learned about from someone who was there, and who I trust. That one definitely left every male dead. Village elders complained, some of the witnesses reported summary executions. The squadron commander said the men were killed because they all had guns. But of course they did – virtually every male in Helmand, if not all of Afghanistan, has a gun. AKs there are like cell phones here. But you could usually tell a family gun from an insurgent’s because they didn’t have extra ammo. Even one of our big trumpeted successes, freeing an American aid worker in a textbook hostage rescue – she later publicly questioned why we had to kill all her captors.”

  “Wasn’t there oversight? From the military or government?”

  “Yeah, you’d think. But even when suspicions were raised about misconduct, outside oversight was limited. JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, which runs both DEVGRU and Delta, overwhelmingly ran their own inquiries. I think there must have been a half-dozen of them. But they were never referred on to Navy or DoD. The rule was, JSOC investigates JSOC.”

  “So the fox polices the henhouse.”

  “Basically.”

  “What about the government? I thought civilian control over the military was a major feature of American democracy.”

  “Yeah. Amazing the features of American democracy that got eroded in those last days… In this case, though, Congress just didn’t want to know. Not too much, anyway. They wanted the results, without the culpability.”

  “Did Delta also have these kinds of problems?”

  “Virtually none. Or else they did a better job of keeping them under wraps. They always had a reputation of going by the book, being pros. We had a reputation, probably deservedly, as cowboys.”