American Spartan Read online

  DEDICATION

  For my beloved mother and father, Joy and Haney,

  and my parents-in-law, James and Judy,

  wise teachers all, who have touched many lives with their “little,

  nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.”

  and

  In memory of Malik Noor Afzhal, a great man.

  EPIGRAPH

  It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.

  —T. E. LAWRENCE

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Maps

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  List of Participants

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Photographic Insert

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  MAPS

  PROLOGUE

  NIGHT WAS FALLING ON the valley.

  Beneath the Hindu Kush Mountains, the terraced fields, and the rock-strewn grazing lands, an isolated band of American soldiers and Afghans returned from patrol, navigating the rugged terrain. They wore night vision goggles to see in the darkness, and passed without a whisper through mud-brick farming villages clustered along Afghanistan’s Konar River. They’d been summoned by their commander, a man who never let them forget that Taliban insurgents could be watching from the high ground. The sky was pitch black by the time the men reached their walled outpost, a typical Afghan compound, or qalat, and made their way to the makeshift operations center inside.

  Dressed in traditional tunics and baggy pants, most of the men were Pashtuns, members of the powerful ethnic group whose tribes had dominated the border with western Pakistan for thousands of years. But the Taliban was Pashtun, too. The remote outpost was situated on the edge of the village of Mangwel in Afghanistan’s Konar Province. Konar was considered by the U.S. military to contain a witches’ brew of hard-core foreign and local insurgents, and its valleys had proven some of the deadliest battlefields in Afghanistan. In a 2005 ambush, insurgents in Konar left only a lone survivor, Marcus Luttrell, when they killed three members of a four-man Navy SEAL team and then shot down a quick reaction force helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), sending sixteen more U.S. troopers to their deaths. It was one of the biggest American losses of the war. Intense fighting had led U.S. forces to abandon some Konar outposts in 2009 and 2010, including one named Restrepo.

  A few miles to the east lay Pakistan’s tribal territory, and another hundred miles beyond that was the teeming Pakistani city of Abbottabad, the hideout of Al Qaeda terrorist group leader Osama bin Laden. Members of Al Qaeda as well as the Afghan and Pakistani factions of the Taliban and other radical Islamic groups had sanctuaries on the Pakistani side of the border. Insurgent fighters moved unfettered along mountain trails into Konar Province and other parts of eastern Afghanistan to stage attacks on U.S. forces. Al Qaeda and the Taliban alike sought to strengthen their grip on Konar. The Pashtun tribes that held sway in these villages and valleys were the only force that in the long run could stand in their way. Osama bin Laden understood the power of tribes at a strategic and visceral level. He took refuge in tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan and often appeared in propaganda videos wearing the traditional dagger of his Yemeni tribal ancestors.

  Two tribesmen, Hakim Jan and Umara Khan, shouldered their AK-47 rifles at the end of their guard shift and climbed down wooden ladders to join the other men in the central courtyard of the small camp. They were members of the force of twenty Afghan tribal police that lived in the Mangwel qalat together with a dozen U.S. soldiers. The American mission was simple: to empower the tribe to push the insurgents out. The lives of everyone in the camp depended on it.

  Conditions in the camp were austere. The commander made sure they stayed that way. It had crude outhouses and no running water. All of the men slept on cots in canvas tents. They ate the same food, too, mainly beans, rice, and flatbread. The commander knew that the hardship could bring these strangers together. Soon the men were conversing in broken Pashto and English as they went about their work—cleaning weapons, loading bullets into magazines, repairing vehicles, standing guard.

  Staff Sgt. Robert Chase, a thirty-two-year-old U.S. infantry squad leader, and Pfc. Jeremiah “Miah” Hicks appeared before the assembled soldiers and Afghan tribesmen. They carefully unfolded an eight-foot-long American flag and, each holding one upper corner, unfurled it before the group.

  Then their commander, Special Forces Maj. Jim Gant, wearing a black Afghan tunic and pants with a fitted maroon kandari cap, stepped in front of the flag. The bearded forty-three-year-old Green Beret addressed his men.

  “Today, we had our revenge, our badal,” he said, using the Pashto word for “retribution.” “I am proud to fight alongside you,” he went on. “Tonight, in honor of that, I will bleed.”

  Gant drew an eight-inch Spartan Harsey knife, a gift from the father of a fallen Special Forces teammate. As a captain, Gant had embraced the Spartan warrior ethos of sacrifice and courage and used it to inspire every unit he’d commanded. Gant believed in the depth of his being that men had to be willing to die for one another without hesitation if they were to be victorious in battle. He also believed that the ancient code of honor that Spartans lived by was, at its core, no different from the one that underpinned Pashtun tribal law.

  He had carefully planned this meeting to inspire both his American and Afghan men, and he had already asked that a goat be slaughtered and prepared in the Pashtun tradition.

  Gripping the Spartan knife in his right hand, Gant slowly slit long, deep gashes between the thumb and index finger of his left hand—one cut each for seven of his friends killed in Afghanistan. The blood ran down his hand and dripped onto the broken ground.

  He stared into the shocked faces of his men.

  “Today was a long time in coming for us,” Gant said, his face drawn and voice tense. Some eighteen hours earlier, on May 2, 2011, U.S. Navy SEALs had stormed a fortified three-story house in Abbottabad. They’d gunned down Osama bin Laden and packed up a treasure trove of Al Qaeda’s strategic and tactical plans as well as its leader’s personal effects.

  “Osama bin Laden was a coward and a murderer,” Gant continued. “He killed innocent men, women, and children in our country. Thousands of them. His actions have cost your great country thousands of lives and hurt relations between Muslims and Christians all over the world.”

  He watched the shock become hushed recognition. Gant was shedding his blood in honor of the dead, and it was vital that his men understood this.

  “Now if we could just have a moment of silence for all of our friends, for all of the people who have been killed . . .”

  The Afghans and Americans, indistinguishable one from the other i
n the darkness, stood shoulder to shoulder and bowed their heads. They remembered their fallen comrades and the homes they were fighting for near and far, and they smelled the rich scent of simmering goat that awaited them.

  CHAPTER 1

  SEVEN THOUSAND MILES AWAY from that otherworldly corner of Afghanistan, the lights flickered off and on in my Bethesda, Maryland, rental house. Rain pelted against the cellar window and dripped onto the sill through a crack in the glass.

  I watched a small pool of rain swell until it overflowed in a thin stream down the wall, the trickle triggering in me a disproportionate flood of doom.

  It was September 2012. I was living temporarily in a one-bedroom basement apartment with my fiancé, my fourteen-year-old daughter Kathryn, a stray cat, and God knew how many camelback crickets.

  Kathryn’s makeshift “room” had no walls, only crimson bedsheets attached by clothespins to a rope I strung along the ceiling. The setup cost $13.91 from the hardware store—not bad. There was no kitchen. We boiled macaroni in a microwave and ate on paper plates. Putting the best spin I could on the latest Dickensian twist in our lives, I told Kathryn hardship was good for her—she would thank me one day. She shot me a look that said maybe, maybe not.

  As a war correspondent turned author, I’d been surviving on savings for most of the past year. I was near the end of a torturous four-year separation and divorce and was trying to help my four children survive the fallout from a failed relationship that I could never make up for. I was having to assert my right of media privilege to keep my book materials out of divorce court.

  All of which explained why we were holed up in the basement. I had sublet the upstairs to four foreign students—three Chinese and one Dutch—who were covering my rent. Everything had been going all right until one of the Chinese had a chauvinistic fit and posted a sign on his bedroom door warning: “No dogs or Europeans allowed.”

  Under other circumstances, I would have kicked him out, but I could not—I needed his money. So instead, I kept trying to make peace, which was one of my bigger mistakes in life.

  A sharp rap on the door at the top of the musty stairwell alerted me that one of the students wanted something. I ran up the stairs, opened the door, and came face-to-face with the rich, overweight Chinese bully holding an overflowing hamper of dirty laundry.

  “I’ll wash that,” I said, determined to keep his toxicity out of our space. “Do you want everything in the dryer?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll put it back at the top of the stairs when it’s done,” I said.

  I closed the door.

  Peace out, bitches.

  I dumped his laundry into the washer, braced myself against the machine with both hands, and took a deep breath.

  Then, when I thought nothing else could go wrong, the storm hit.

  I rushed upstairs to shut the windows, just in time to see a huge gust of wind blow a sheet of rain across the backyard and send a sixty-foot-tall oak tree crashing through the roof of the house, inches from where I stood.

  It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

  I was supposed to be sitting in a lounge chair on a beach, sipping a glass of wine, enjoying my family and professional success.

  How had I gotten here?

  A Kansas native along with my parents, I drew inspiration from the pioneer roots and open prairies of my childhood. Growing up in Seattle, Ireland, and Greece, I was given every advantage a middle-class family of six could offer. My dad, an economics professor, had high expectations for me and never handicapped me because I was a girl. He taught me to sail, ski, do math, and change a tire. He had the wisdom to make me work at a local Texaco gas station at the age of fourteen—my first task was to clean the men’s bathroom. My mother, who had a master’s degree in education but chose to be a stay-at-home mom, taught me courage and advised me to always have the ability to be independent. And my parents let me run. I traveled alone in the Greek islands at the age of fifteen, and at seventeen worked as a paramedic in Nicaragua.

  As a Harvard undergraduate, I earned an honors degree in government and East Asian studies, spent a year studying social sciences in French at the selective Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, and did stints researching China at the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency. From there I went to Hong Kong to study Mandarin Chinese on a graduate fellowship from the Rotary Club. Bridling at the constraints of government work, I decided I was better cut out to serve the public through journalism. I landed a job at United Press International in Hong Kong. My mentor there, a chain-smoking veteran Vietnam War correspondent named Sylvana Foa, gave me the break I sought and assigned me to the UPI Beijing bureau.

  In China, I learned how to be a journalist the hard way, cutting my teeth against one of the most secretive and oppressive governments on earth. I gained fluency in Mandarin and learned the social customs and mannerisms so well that in some places native Chinese didn’t believe I was an American, mistaking me for a member of one of western China’s minority groups. Despite being detained twice in mainland China and kicked out of Tibet, I was able to make my way into ordinary people’s homes, underground churches, ancient clan temples, political dissident networks, migrant tenements, and Tibetan nomad communities. The Christian Science Monitor ran my articles and submitted them for a Pulitzer Prize. The articles formed the basis for a book I coauthored with my then husband, entitled Chinese Awakenings: Life Stories from the Unofficial China.

  From Beijing, I moved on to Chicago and a new investigative challenge: probing the biggest African American gang in the region, the Gangster Disciples, and its leader, Larry Hoover. I wrote a series of articles that was one of three finalists for a Society of Professional Journalists prize. We moved to Washington, where I covered Congress during the Clinton impeachment proceedings as well as national security.

  Then came the September 11 terrorist attacks, which I wrote about in a front-page story for the Christian Science Monitor. The next day, my editor called and again asked me to take on the Pentagon beat. I had turned down the job a few months earlier because I was working at home to care for my four young children, James, Sarah, Scott, and Kathryn. After the terrorist strike, though, I felt I had no choice. I was a trained reporter, and I needed to do my job—not only in the public interest but to stay informed for my family. I said yes.

  Starting with the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq in 2003, I covered the wars and embedded with dozens of U.S. military units. Almost immediately, I realized the public badly needed observers to translate the world of the military and hold it accountable. The challenge of reporting on the armed forces had parallels to news gathering in China. The military spoke a different language. It was a huge bureaucracy, extremely mistrustful of outsiders and especially reporters. And I’d sat in enough Pentagon briefings to know the Washington spin was nowhere near the realities of life of a combat soldier on the ground. I didn’t just want Americans to know the facts about the wars; I wanted them to care. I felt obligated to get as close as I could to the taste, smell, and feel of combat.

  I had other, more personal reasons for heading into the war zone. After many years during which my life revolved around giving birth, nursing my babies, and caring for my children at home, universal experiences of women, I wanted to see whether I could know and understand warfare, the most primal and universal proving ground of men. I struggled with leaving my children, even for a few weeks at a time. But as I watched members of the military leave their families time and again for a year or longer, I had to ask myself why my family and I should not make a sacrifice that paled in comparison. So I planned meticulously for my absences, timing trips when I could enlist the help of relatives, arranging backup care, and leaving detailed calendars of soccer schedules and music lessons. I believed that on some level my children would benefit from my example and experience. I knew how isolated and sheltered the public was from the costs of military interventi
on, and I wanted to educate my sons and daughters about the consequences of their country going to war. Still, saying goodbye was the most wrenching thing I had ever done. It was for them and other loved ones that I calibrated the risks I took. Intellectually, I grew numb to the danger I faced. I was not depressed or suicidal, but to a degree I stopped caring about my own life.

  And then I met Jim Gant.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE CALL CAME IN to Fort Bliss, Texas, at about 10:00 a.m. on October 29, 2009. Jim was ordered to board a U.S. Airways flight out of El Paso, Texas, destined for Fayetteville, North Carolina. From there he was to report to Fort Bragg, the home of the Army’s Airborne and Special Operations Forces. His gear had already been shipped to the Middle East with an Iraq-bound armored brigade that was deploying within days from Bliss. But the brigade would leave one liaison officer short.

  On November 2, after Jim arrived at Bragg, he was ushered into a video teleconference room. He took a seat, stared into a blank fifty-two-inch flat-panel television, and waited for Adm. Eric Thor Olson, commander of all the U.S. military’s fifty-eight thousand Special Operations Forces, to appear on-screen. Jim’s entire fighting life—the only life he’d ever known—came down to this conference call. He’d shed his blood with scores of men. But now he stood alone.

  Jim’s hair was too long. His sideburns were not regulation. Tattoos of Achilles on his right arm and the goddess of magic and war, Hecate, on his left poked out from his faded gray-green camouflage uniform. He’d been a Green Beret for nearly twenty years. Waiting for the four-star commander, Jim no longer cared if he ever ranked higher than major. A mentor long ago had told him, “You are the best soldier I’ve ever known, and the worst soldier I’ve ever known.” Jim didn’t argue.

  In 1986, Jim was inspired to enlist in the Army by Robin Moore’s classic Vietnam exposé The Green Berets—a book that was published as fiction because the Pentagon objected to Moore’s embedding with Special Forces. He signed up straight out of Mayfield High School in Las Cruces, New Mexico. But his reasons for joining had little to do with his reasons for staying. The Green Beret tactics in Vietnam captivated him. No carpet-bombing from thirty thousand feet. They fought alongside Montagnard tribesmen against the Viet Cong, taking back land village by village. The Green Berets fought hand-to-hand, close-up, on the ground. And that kind of fighting was in Jim’s blood.