“This is the last time?” she asked.
“I promise,” he replied, as he had so many times before. Dagus rubbed his chin, thinking.
“I don’t know, Len… ”
He frowned at Brianna and said, “I really do care about you. I can’t help myself.”
Brianna made as if to continue resisting.
Then she relented, giving in to his physical presence and the deal she had struck.
CHAPTER 62
Matt Garrett, his mission completed, sat in the back of the C-17 Globe-master aircraft. He was tired, having been without sleep for what seemed like weeks. He drifted in and out of consciousness, unable to believe what had transpired and what had to come next.
So close, yet so far. The thoughts shot across his mind’s eye like burning arrows slung from an archer’s bow, the words leaving a smoking trail. The attack across the Afghanistan border. Watching Zach on the Predator feed run from the enemy. The attack into Kunar Province. And then the linkup with the guide where they had come so close.
He stared at the flag-draped coffin shackled to the center of the large cargo bay. No one should die alone, he thought to himself. Yet, the coffin was a solitaire, and perhaps rightfully so. Singularity sometimes accords the appropriate attention.
As the C-17 glided through the night sky over some part of the world in between Afghanistan and the United States, Matt couldn’t help but wonder about the price of it all. The cost, in human terms, of this war. These wars. Could you separate them, Iraq and Afghanistan, he wondered?
His singular actions two years before had helped save the nation and his brother, and now he felt powerless and impotent. He disagreed with so much, so many, yet continued to soldier on in an effort to make a difference from within, as so many heroes do. He had tried talking to the director about his concerns, but his insights had fallen on deaf ears. Presently, his just rage was muted against the Globemaster’s droning engines.
He thought of Amanda Garrett, his niece, and all that she had been through. He had received an update prior to his departure. A friend had passed him a note that his brother’s house had been burned to the ground. Insult to injury. But that was their way, he knew.
Then the newspaper article questioning Zach’s integrity. He shook his head, staring absently at the black, granular no-slip pads spaced evenly along the silver metal flooring of the C-17.
Matt remembered a passage from Sun Tzu which he had always kept in the back of his mind: The wise general cannot be manipulated. He may withdraw, but when he does, moves so swiftly that he cannot be overtaken. His retirements are designed to entice the enemy, to unbalance him, and to create a situation favorable for a decisive counterstroke.
Poor Amanda had been kept off balance her entire seventeen years, Matt thought. The women that surrounded her were generals in their own battle-space. They directed Amanda around like a pawn, a foot soldier, in their private war to destroy. What had his brother done to deserve such treatment? What could he have done? More importantly, especially now, what had Amanda done to be so abused, to have her memories of her father be tarnished or erased?
Justice? Matt’s wandering mind tapped on all of the world’s issues, large and small, in the long airplane ride. Where is the justice in the soldier killed on the battlefield where incompetent generals applied insufficient force, and inept intelligence analysts missed all of the signals? Where is the justice in the Marine killed in a war whose causus belli is now proven a myth, a ghost that never was? Where is the justice in a young girl used as a weapon against her father? Millions of children, abused in such a fashion, he guessed, without so much as the hope of a chance for something better. Left to fight for themselves, yet seduced by the luxuries of the high mass-consuming society of today. Most, he presumed, chose not to fight, and simply followed the path of least resistance. In their wake, they left behind the charred remains of a father’s dignity or a soldier’s idealism.
Better yet, Matt steamed, where is the outrage? Where are those that would stand up for these heroes, the soldiers and the children, sometimes one and the same, who, with immature wisdom, trust our leaders? As in love, he considered, in life we all look for heroes. We overlook obvious faults or flaws. The old saying, “You want it bad, you get it bad,” came to his mind. We all knew intuitively, he simmered, that invading Iraq before finishing the fight in Afghanistan was wrong. Now America’s treasure was just trying to keep pace. He mused that serfs and peasants could rarely influence public policy, but they sure as hell could go die for the same. Life in a kingdom, not a republic.
He stared at the patterns of rivets in the fuselage, wondering why those politicians who most avoided war in their youth sought it with such vigor in their political careers. In this era of Rostovian High Mass Consumption, the Secular Spiritual Stagnation that has followed not only rots at the collective soul of the nation, but also erodes the individual’s morality, Matt thought.
He thought about Department of Defense policymakers who were most responsible for the Iraq invasion and scoffed. Morons who don’t know the cost of war. This stagnation creates a disembodiment with our most senior public leaders that manifests itself in a form of irony. Because they have nothing vested, they seem to think they have everything to gain.
Where was the finesse that should have followed 9-11? Pursue the legitimate war in Afghanistan with enough force to block the egresses into Pakistan. Jump the 82nd Airborne Division into Khowst and Jalalabad while you air assault the 101st Airborne Division into the mountain passes in Kunar, Nangahar, and Paktika. Use Special Forces to embed with the Pakistan military along the border. Then attack with the Northern Alliance from Mazir e Sharif to the south to destroy Al Qaeda first, followed by the Taliban. Contain Iraq and further strangulate that country through diplomatic initiatives with Syria and Iran. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Instead, Matt fumed, we limped into Afghanistan the one time the American public has asked for, and deserved, a head on a platter. Flawed from the start, the plan had allowed nearly all of the Al Qaeda senior leadership to escape while Taliban cannon fodder held at bay the meager forces that were attacking. Inexplicably, the focus was already shifting to Iraq, where we had led with the chin of the American soldier and Marine. He shook his head in disgust and looked across the casket.
Joining Matt on this journey home was Mary Ann Singlaub, a reporter from Charlotte. She had her story, he guessed, and she was done. Sitting across from him, he saw in her beautiful face the anguish that only true caring could bring. The coffin was situated between them like a barrier. Singlaub was openly weeping as she stared at the flag tucked securely around the metal container. Strangely, her agony helped ease his.
How much more are we going to take? What is the end state? How much longer can we go on without mobilizing the country? It seemed odd to Matt that Americans were enjoying a peacetime standard of living while their all-volunteer force fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eversoll had said to him, “Sir, the military is at war. The nation is at the mall.”
Yet, neither were they mobilized internally, he reflected, as he began to think about Amanda again. That a child could be so manipulated in plain view only underscored his point.
The coffin fastened down in the middle of the C-17 would remain an unmistakable reminder of the cost of war, so close and so personal.