and tossed his head in the air and stepped sideways.
Miller grabbed the stallion’s reins and pulled himself around until he faced forward. Somehow he kicked his right foot and then his left into the stirrups. Blood trickled down his arm onto the stallion’s back. Behind him, Miller heard the hard snap of a 9-millimeter magazine being jammed into a pistol.
Miller pushed his legs into the horse’s heavy flanks.
He heard three shots, loud and close. The stallion whinnied and jumped and reared up. Miller grabbed at the reins and tried to hang on, but his feet slid out of the stirrups and—
He fell, landing on his right shoulder. He heard as much as felt his collarbone crack. When he tried to sit up, a highway of fire flew down his arm and across his chest. He knew he should run, but instead slipped onto his left side and cradled his right arm in his left. Stan grabbed the horse. Amadullah walked over to Miller and grabbed his right arm and tugged. The pain was so intense that Miller couldn’t even scream. He must have passed out for a few seconds, because when he opened his eyes Amadullah and Stan stood in front of him. Miller felt the blood trickling down his skull and getting caught in his hair, and he knew he wasn’t going anywhere.
Stan knelt down and looked at Miller. Miller raised his head to make eye contact, an effort that sent a shiver of agony through Miller’s arm. “I’m only going to ask you one more time. If I think you’re not telling the truth, I’m going to let Amadullah do what he likes with you. Did John Wells ever call you, e-mail you, anything?”
“No. I swear.”
Stan looked at him with those cold blue eyes and finally nodded. Miller bit his tongue so he wouldn’t beg, and Stan put his pistol under Miller’s chin. Miller closed his eyes and tried to pray again, for real this time. But it was no good. He couldn’t remember the words, Arabic wasn’t his language and had never been, and he’d never been the churchy type anyway. All he could think of was Biggie Smalls, Tupac Amaru Shakur’s Brooklyn twin, standing onstage, a microphone to his mouth, singing,
And Stan squeezed the trigger.
19
The soldiers formed neat lines on the airfield, a camouflage rectangle of men and women fifty wide, forty deep. About two thousand soldiers in all, half the brigade. Wells looked them over from a makeshift wooden stage, as Colonel Sean Brown, the base commander, stepped to the podium.
“Soldiers of the 7th Strykers, I have the pleasure of introducing John Wells. I’m sure all of you remember how he stopped the attack on Times Square a few years back. Took a bullet doing it. What you may not know is that Mr. Wells spent years in Afghanistan both before and after September eleventh. He knows the Taliban and al- Qaeda from the inside out. He’s a hero, plain and simple. Join me in giving a Dragon’s roar to Mr. Wells.”
ARRANGING THE SPEECH at FOB Jackson proved easy. The Strykers had turned into the Army’s ugly and unloved stepchild. Their soldiers ranked last on the list for everything, including celebrity visits. Wells wasn’t Carrie Underwood, but he was better than nothing. Colonel Brown was happy to have him.
“Why don’t you come in two days?” Brown said. “We can have dinner and I’ll give you a tactical briefing. You can talk the next afternoon. I’ll make sure the whole base shows, bring in the guys from the outposts, too.”
The night before he arrived, Shafer filled him in on the brigade’s records. “They’re spread pretty thin, across eastern Kandahar and Zabul. They spend a lot of their time playing defense, having to react.”
“You see any specific platoons or companies that I should focus on?”
“One or two, sure.”
Wells waited for more, but Shafer stayed quiet. “Gonna tell me which ones?”
“I’d rather not, not right away. Better for you to give this speech fresh.”
“What if the company’s on patrol when I get there, doesn’t even hear what I’m saying?”
“Let’s try it my way first. I have a feeling about this. Let them come to you.”
“And a speech is going to make them do that?”
“If it’s the right speech.”
The next afternoon, Wells rolled out of Kandahar with a platoon Colonel Brown sent to pick him up. At the base, Brown waited. He had a ropy neck and a strong handshake. He led Wells to the brigade’s Combat Operations Center, a house-size wooden building surrounded by satellite dishes and filled with high-res flat-screen monitors. His office had four laptops and three corkboards covered with maps and Excel spreadsheets and letters to and from the Pentagon. Even without fighting the Taliban, running a brigade was a full-time job.
“Looks like you have a lot of downtime.”
“You should have seen it before we got organized. Coffee?” Brown had an expensive coffeemaker on his desk, well away from the laptops. “My wife sent me this thing and I’ve finally learned how to use it.”
Wells nodded, and Brown poured them two cups. “You came a long way to see us.”
“Hadn’t been here in a while. I missed it.”
“And has it changed?”
“I think I have. Maybe I’m just older.”
“I don’t think any of us thought this war would last this long.”
“Except the Taliban.”
“True enough. You enjoy your first Stryker ride?”
“I guess you get used to not having windows after a while.”
“Not everybody. I suspect the next generation, if there is a next generation, will have that V-shaped hull that you see on the new trucks, the Cougars and the Gators. Turns out that’s a pretty good way to keep guys alive.”
“How’s morale?”
“I assume we’re just talking. This isn’t going into a report.”
Wells nodded.
“It’s been a long tour and the guys are ready for it to be over. In just the last two months, we’ve had three guys evaced to Landstuhl for mental health problems. Lot of home-life stress. At least a hundred divorces.”
“Are you in line with other brigades?”
“Little bit worse. This tour hasn’t been great for my career. No way around the fact that these vehicles we ride in are not ideal. Compared to a Humvee, you can argue for them. Okay, they’re not as maneuverable, but they’re better armored and they carry a whole squad. But the debate isn’t Stryker versus Humvee anymore. It’s Stryker versus MRAP. MRAPs have as much armor as the Stryker and the safer hull design. And they’re more maneuverable than Strykers, too. And cheaper. So all the Stryker really gives us is the chance to put a whole squad in a single vehicle, instead of two or three. Which is nice when we come out under fire. But mostly we don’t.”
“And the guys know it.”
“Doesn’t take long to figure out. So that’s bad for morale. And they hear about the Marines fighting in Helmand and the airborne getting busy in western Kandahar and they know that we’ve been stuck off to the side driving Highway 1. That said, I believe we’ve done a solid job here, given the constraints. We’ve kept the highway clean. We’ve found tons of caches. We’ve supported the ANA and ANP.” The Afghan Army and police. “Have we degraded the Taliban directly as much as I’d like? No, but we’ve been directed to keep civilian casualties to a minimum and that hurts our ability to engage. We leave the high-value targets to SF, and those guys operate independently.”
“How many confirmed kills does the brigade have?”
“About a hundred fifty since we arrived.”
Wells controlled his surprise. This brigade, which had five thousand soldiers and occupied vital territory, had
