The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (7 page)

We sat down to dinner. I asked if he minded if I took notes. He said it was okay. We started talking.

I felt comfortable around McChrystal and his team. Why was that? I’d been with them only for a few hours.

Maybe it was the war.

Most of Dave’s adult life had been dominated by war. The rest of the team had been immersed in it for the past decade—even Duncan had spent a year working in Iraq before going to Afghanistan. War consumed me, too. I thought about it all the time. If Dave was the badass Navy SEAL, Duncan the hired PR gun, I had become the “veteran war correspondent.” In 2005, I had started covering Iraq for
Newsweek
. At twenty-five, I was the youngest Baghdad correspondent at the magazine. My younger brother was an infantry platoon leader, fighting in Iraq while I was there covering it. He won a Bronze Star and watched three of his good friends receive life-altering wounds. In 2007 a young woman I loved was killed by Al-Qaeda in Iraq. It was an unbearable experience, and I spent the next year writing a book to honor her memory. I promised myself that I was through with war. Then I covered the U.S. presidential elections, traveling across the country on the campaign trail. Midway through,
right after Hillary Clinton dropped out, I left my job at
Newsweek.
Three months later, I went to Afghanistan for the first time.

Dave and I talked strategy. We talked McChrystal. We talked the players: General Jim Jones, the president’s national security advisor; Clinton, the secretary of state; Eikenberry; Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Iraq and Afghanistan; and President Obama. Jones, Dave said, was “a clown… stuck in 1985.” Dave told me McChrystal viewed Holbrooke as a “wounded animal”: terrified of losing his job, ready to lash out and screw up the entire plan. Dave confirmed what others on the staff had said about Eikenberry: They didn’t like or trust him. Hillary was fine—she had been a big supporter of The Boss. As for Obama? “He’s not a leader,” Dave said. “He’s an orator.” Dave said that McChrystal had been disappointed so far with Obama and the distance the White House kept from Kabul. (Obama had made only one trip to Afghanistan—fourteen months after taking office.) It was severe trash-talking about almost all the major civilian players involved in Afghanistan policy, and over the next few weeks, I would learn that Dave’s feelings were shared by McChrystal and others on the staff as well.

In Dave’s view, McChrystal was “MacArthur without the arrogance.” He’d worked with him in Baghdad. Much of what Dave did in Iraq was classified—he was on a Special Forces team that tracked and killed high-value insurgents and terrorists under the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). McChrystal had transformed JSOC’s culture: He’d linked up the MIT whiz kids with the Special Forces operators, making it the most capable “man-hunting operation on earth,” Dave said.

“The operators are the guys on the
X
,” Dave riffed. The
X
was the target; the bull’s-eye; the spot on the satellite map where the action went down. “Everyone else is supporting the operator. But the operator doesn’t get anywhere near the
X
if the other guys aren’t doing their job.”

Dave told stories, three of which somehow involved strip clubs and waking up smelling like strippers. The stories were all pretty funny, and
his wife gamely put up with them. If you’ve never woken up smelling like a stripper before, perhaps the humor is lost.

We did the date/place swap—I told him when I was in Baghdad, he told me about the times he was there. It was a kind of ritual. The saying: It’s a small war. You run into the same people, or people who were part of the same incidents. Bombings, battles, massacres, scandals. Involved in them or observing them. Each adding details to the experience, details neither could possibly have seen at the time—it’s always too much, it’s always overwhelming, what you see is always just a fraction of the war.

We talked media. There were journalists lining up to write books about McChrystal—they hadn’t decided whom to give the best access to yet, preferring to hold it out as a carrot for better coverage, Duncan said. Dave mentioned a TV reporter who flashed her breasts to get an embed with his Navy SEAL team.

“That’s bullshit,” I said.

“It’s not,” he said.

“Did you look?”

“Of course,” he said.

Dave’s wife shook her head in faux exasperation.

“Duncan,” Dave said, “tell your story about The Famous Television Anchor.”

“Oh, that story,” Duncan said.

The Famous Television Anchor, whose name Duncan asked me not to reveal, was a big personality at an American network. She was doing a story on McChrystal. They were in a Blackhawk helicopter. Duncan was sitting next to the anchor. One of McChrystal’s things was that his entourage didn’t travel in body armor, which played a key role in this story. The anchor kept cupping her breasts. She looked at Duncan, who had a quizzical expression on his face. “It’s my implants—they get cold,” she told Duncan. “I have to hold up little heat packs to them”—the kind skiers
use to warm their gloves. “Here, you can feel them.” The anchor grabbed Duncan’s hands and pressed them to her breasts.

“That’s a crazy story,” I said. “It’s fucking unbelievable.”

My colleagues had a number of creative ways to build trust with the subjects of their reporting, apparently. And to an outsider, perhaps that kind of behavior might seem outrageous. But most correspondents I knew would go to extreme lengths to get a story—they regularly risked their lives, after all—in what was a highly competitive field. I actually sympathized with the two reporters, and I knew it was especially difficult for women journalists in war zones. They were always subjected to a kind of leering chauvinism, while male reporters could more easily play at being a soldier in this theater of macho men.

After a two-hour dinner, we grabbed a taxi and returned to the Westminster. I walked back to the Hotel Rivoli from there.

MAY TO JUNE 2009, WASHINGTON, DC

It’s Friday night at the Pentagon, May 8, 2009, and Charlie Flynn is sitting at his desk in the outer office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He’s McChrystal’s executive officer, the closest to the man besides his wife—Charlie has been living with McChrystal at his house in the suburbs for a few months, commuting home on weekends to see his family in Virginia. Charlie is getting ready to leave for the weekend when Stan asks to talk to him.

They’re giving me the job in Afghanistan, he tells Charlie.

“You don’t have to answer right now,” McChrystal says. “But when you go home this weekend, talk to your wife about it.”

“Sir, I’m with you; I don’t need to talk to my wife,” Charlie says. McChrystal tells him okay—but talk to your wife. He’ll be in touch on Sunday.

Charlie is like
fuck, yeah
. Charlie can’t wait to get out of the Pentagon. He’s spent eight of the last ten years deployed in combat. He’s known McChrystal since ’88, when he was a first lieutenant on assignment in Fort Benning, Georgia, living in the same temporary housing, their wives
pregnant around the same time. They strike up a friendship—an up-and-coming lieutenant and a young major. They both like long runs and drinking beer, and they both love the Army.

They cross paths again, living on the same base in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, with the XVIII Airborne. Charlie starts to get command, they part ways—McChrystal goes off to do Harvard, Charlie goes to the Naval College. They both do Iraq—Charlie does two rotations in Iraq, and one in Afghanistan.

Charlie is a battalion commander in Afghanistan in 2002. There’s only one American brigade there; he says the rest are Special Forces. “We didn’t really know what we were doing in Afghanistan,” he says about that time. “We thought we did, but we didn’t know.”

About halfway through his rotation, the invasion of Iraq begins.

“There was this big sucking sound of resources leaving Afghanistan,” he says. “Where is all the fuel going, where is all the aircraft going?” There was no such thing as counterinsurgency then. He was going out in Helmand in rough conditions, living out in the field three weeks at a time, hunting Al-Qaeda or Taliban. After Baghdad, though, Afghanistan gets pushed aside—Charlie doesn’t think he’ll be back again. He spends the next few years coming in and out of Iraq.

On Sunday, McChrystal calls.

Yeah, I’m in. Who else?

Mike Flynn, of course. Charlie and Mike are two of the nine Flynn children. A military family. Their dad deployed to Korea. They got a taste of what it means when the country doesn’t know it’s at war. Their mom would be walking down the street in the small town in Rhode Island where they lived, going to Martin’s, a neighborhood store. Where’s your husband? the storekeeper asked. His mother would say, Oh, he’s in Korea. Oh yeah, that’s right; tell him I say hello. Charlie remembers thinking: Why don’t these people know that the Korean War is going on? (Why don’t these people know about Iraq? Afghanistan? Don’t they
know
?) “Simple fact,” says Charlie. “If you aren’t there, you don’t understand.”

Mike and Charlie—back for another adventure. Growing up, they had wild times. Mike Flynn crashes four—count, four—automobiles. He gets in one wreck with Charlie. Crossing an intersection, a car slams into them, a T-bone. Charlie and Mike climb out of their car—they’re okay. The other car—blood. Mike looks at it, sees the dead body. Oh, shit. They tell their dad. Nothing shocks their dad—Korean War vet, father of nine.

Mike Flynn is on board. They just need to work his transfer from his division.

Charlie opens up an office in the basement of the Pentagon. It’s down in the National Military Command Center (NMCC), and he finds an empty room kept open for emergencies, like when Russia invaded Georgia. It’s supposed to be where the Af/Pak cell is, but Charlie commandeers the space to prepare for Afghanistan. Putting in new phone lines; getting the computers up; getting ready for McChrystal’s testimony before Congress; getting McChrystal’s vaccinations, making sure he goes to the dentist. Calling the people they trust: gathering the best people and minds, he says.

“People would say, ‘What am I going to do?’ ” Charlie says. “We’d say, don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.”

McChrystal needs an aide-de-camp.

Thirty-two-year-old Major Casey Welch walks into his grandmother’s house in Kentucky. “Did you hear that McKiernan or McSomething got fired?” she asks him. On Tuesday, he gets the call—Casey has been recommended by his last battalion commander, who knows McChrystal. On Thursday, Casey is in the Pentagon for an interview with The Boss, which ends up lasting only ten minutes. Casey has spent three of the past five years deployed. He’s just returned from Samarra, Iraq, six months ago. He’s recently married. Only one caveat: If it’s going to be more than
a year, tell him now. McChrystal okays the year—he knows Casey would stay longer if he asked, but he’s gracious enough not to ask.

Casey gets a seat in the basement, working the phones. He joins Charlie and Lieutenant Commander John Pitta; Pitta is a fighter pilot, twice deployed to Iraq, who’d been doing nights as a watch officer in the NMCC. He’s part of the team now, working days in the basement while he’s still on the night shift. The phones are ringing off the hook—Mullen gives them carte blanche to pull in anyone, in any branch of the service. It’s crazy, says Pitta, a blur. Other guys are arriving and they don’t even have badges to get into the Pentagon, so they have to be escorted to the bathroom.

Dave Silverman is thinking of retiring—he’s thirty-three, he’s done enough. He’s thinking of the private sector. He gets the call—for Stan, he’ll do it. He’d been under him on a SEAL team in Baghdad and felt it was an opportunity he couldn’t turn down. Duncan gets recommended through Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell to do press. Caldwell, once the top military spokesperson in Iraq, had relied on Duncan’s advice in Baghdad, becoming known as the general’s “Cardinal Richelieu,” the influential advisor behind the curtain. Before Iraq, Duncan had worked for a public relations firm in Connecticut, though he’d also tried his hand at the theater, performing onstage in Durham, North Carolina. One reviewer described him as “a gifted young actor.” He arrives in the Pentagon, starts working on McChrystal’s congressional confirmation. Duncan knows it could be a rough fight. McChrystal’s role in the cover-up of the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman, an NFL star who joined the Army Rangers, is going to come up; Camp Nama, a base in Iraq that McChrystal was linked to after allegations of torture there were reported, is going to come up. These two red flags, seemingly ignored by Gates and Obama when they chose him for the job, wouldn’t likely be dismissed by the media. McChrystal, until that point, has only a few Google hits—he is nearly a blank slate, a known unknown, with brief mentions here and
there of his JSOC days, his involvement in the Tillman fiasco, and a few cameos in Human Rights Watch reports. It’s Duncan’s job to guide the reporters as they pick up the chalk to sketch a fuller picture of the man.

Jake McFerren? Hell yes. A retired colonel, and McChrystal’s West Point roommate. Jake and Stan would go on double dates with their wives, once taking them to dinner at a Jack in the Box when the ladies were dressed in formal wear for a dance. Jake spent the last few years at NATO in Brussels. He gets named his top civilian political advisor, “responsible for helping foster international relations with the 44 countries that currently make up the coalition forces,” his job description will read. He’s also “one of the general’s old army drinking buddies,” another journalist will later note.