I’ll check out her information, but I will tell General Cabrales nothing. Until I know more, there’s no point. I tell myself that despite her threats she can be an asset. I tell myself that despite her threats she has given me valuable information. I tell myself there’s no reason for concern. And then, instead of heading back to work, or calling Maloof to demand he dig deeper, or calling our 2 to pass on the information about the Jesúses, I open my phone and call my daughter.
5
MASON 2006
Nobody likes deploying while their wife is stuck at home with a newborn. You feel like a shitty father, of course. You’ll be overseas, getting decent sleep while your wife is holding down the fort. But there was more to it than that. A few years earlier, it was easy to drop out of college, join the army, and break only my parents’ hearts. Now I had to nail myself down, become a stable thing for this tiny creature to depend on. Be this kind of man—more husband than lover, more father than killer. Be this kind of soldier—more professional than warrior, more Christian than samurai. And as I started to find those definitions for myself, it made it easier to see the sickness infecting Special Forces, a sickness at odds with the very core of who I was becoming.
The deployment wasn’t even a combat deployment, wasn’t to Iraq or Afghanistan but to Colombia. A training mission for the Lanceros, this high-speed commando unit which had been stood up specifically for conducting raids on communist guerrilla compounds deep in the Andean jungles. It was, as Ocho would say, a badass unit with a badass mission. But we weren’t allowed to take part in any of that. Just there to train, so no combat patrols, no raids, no possibility of any kind of action where we might get shot at and, therefore, have the right and the burden and the thrill of shooting back.
One time Ocho caught me flipping through some baby photos Natalia had sent me, a dopey smile on my face. He said, “Don’t get soft on me, maricón.”
“Don’t you miss your kids?” I said.
“First one is special. I held mine forever. But then I started losing my boners.”
“What?”
“It’s true, man. You spend too much time holding babies and shit, your testosterone goes down. It’s science, bitch. I had to go back to the gym, do lots of legs, get my shit hard.”
Ocho was always a wealth of medical information.
“It’s just like this fucking deployment,” he said. “Drills, training patrols, hand-holding Lanceros who definitely don’t need it. By the end of this . . .” He shook his head.
“We’re all going to lose our boners?”
Ocho threw up his hands and shot me a look as if to say, Yeah, obviously.
Perhaps we’d have felt better about the mission if it weren’t for the fact that our Iraq stories were constantly getting one-upped by the Colombians. One of the Lancero NCOs told me about guarding an oil pipeline close to the Venezuelan border. The ELN would attack all the time. They were never trying to shut it down, which would have destroyed the local economy. They’d attack it a little bit, get some publicity, some credibility to secure bribes from contractors and politicians, and some work for local people who’d be sent out to fix the minor damages they inflicted. The locals would repair the pipe, the guerrillas would let the oil flow for a bit and bring in money, and then they’d do it again.
“You know the oil spill of the Exxon Valdez?” he asked me. “When I was there, they spilled ten times that amount. We had six miles of pipe to protect, all of it in heavy jungle. The guerrilla hid in the trees, like monkeys. Quiet jungle, and then gunshots, grenades dropping down. Sometimes they would fill hundred-pound canisters, half with chemicals and half with human shit. My men would get burns from the chemicals, and then the shit would infect the wounds. City people do not know what we went through so they can fill up their cars.”
What do you say to that? It felt a bit like hanging out at your hometown’s local VFW and getting owned by some Vietnam vet, except these guys were our age or younger. We had nothing to compare with this. And part of the whole satisfaction of joining Special Forces is in ascending to a higher level of badassery. You start out as a civilian, then join the army and earn a little more respect. The next step is going infantry or, in my case, the Rangers, which is a step higher than that. And then there’s Special Forces, above which is only CAG and DEVGRU and probably some super-secret squirrel units only the president knows about. And if you’re SF, you’re supposedly a super-soldier. You go overseas, you work with indigs who are supposed to look up to you, to want to be you, while you share with them a camaraderie mixed with a bit of contempt. Indigs are never supposed to be that good—especially not in Afghanistan, where we didn’t even respect the non-U.S. NATO troops, where the running joke was that
