The Fifth Act, page 8
Bus 2: Guys?
Matt: Regroup by the white wedding hall. Southbound road.
Bus 2: Aborting
Bus 1: Yeah lets fall back to serena
Nick: Any injuries?
Bus 2: None
Bus 1: All good
Bus 3: Only dignity
Matt: I will wait for last bus. Rest of you go back.
From start to finish, this attempt on the South Gate takes a little over an hour.
No one has slept much over the past two days. My wife is brushing her teeth in the bathroom when we finally abort. The day ahead, in which we’ll sightsee with our children, is so psychically disconnected from the night I’ve spent monitoring events in Kabul that I struggle to understand which is real—last night, or today—and conclude that perhaps neither is real, that I am neither here nor there, that I am psychically nowhere.
Then my phone pings with yet another text, though this one isn’t from our aborted convoy. It’s from Rich. He’s at the North Gate. If our convoy can get there, the Marines from 1/8 will let them into the airport. I post this in the chat.
Matt responds, Traffic is a problem even at night. My guess is we will have to stop several hundred meters off. I don’t think we can bring four buses to that gate during the day, based on my previous visits, even if we do have access.
I respond, Understood.
Matt adds, My vote is to go back to the Serena.
Forty minutes later, when the last of the buses arrives at the Serena Hotel, I am in the restaurant of my hotel alone sipping coffee. Our tour guide is in the lobby. Everyone is waiting on me. It’s time to begin the day.
ACT III
THE NORTH GATE
My original instinct was to pull out—and, historically, I like following my instincts.
—PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP
ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY
AUGUST 21, 2017
SCENE I
Lobby of the Essex House, New York, 2016
“And what name is the room under again, sir?”
“Ackerman,” I say. “Nate Ackerman.”
The receptionist clacks furiously on his keyboard, typing out a great deal more than twelve letters. My brother is staying in the hotel. I’ve brought my two children over. We’re supposed to meet him in the lobby and then head to dinner nearby. He’s late and not answering his cell phone, so I think to try the hotel phone but don’t know his room number. My children, who are four and six years old, tug impatiently at my pant legs. They’re bored. They begin to swat at each other. I shush them and press them more closely to my side. The receptionist says, “I’m not seeing him. Can you spell the name for me?”
“Ackerman,” I repeat, then enunciate each letter: “A-C-K-E-R-M-A-N.”
Then behind me I hear, “Elliot Ackerman?”
When I turn around, I’m met by a bearded man with a shaved-bald head. Professorially dressed, he’s wearing a Harris Tweed sports coat with suede elbow patches. In one hand he carries his luggage, a monogrammed calfskin weekender. In the other hand he carries an umbrella; its handle appears to be some type of polished horn. He tucks the umbrella under his left arm and extends his right hand toward me. “Jesus,” he says. “It’s been a long time.”
His name is Dutch; to be exact, it’s been a little more than five years since he and I last saw each other in Afghanistan. A former Marine aviator, Dutch had an accomplished career as a helicopter pilot before giving up the cockpit for a career as a paramilitary case officer. He had flown everything from medevac missions in Fallujah to the president of the United States. When we worked together at the CIA, Dutch was our air officer. Our CTPT relied on him to coordinate everything from close air support to surveillance flights to parachute resupplies. A born eccentric, Dutch existed at the Venn diagram intersection of Allen Dulles’s Cold War CIA and the ensemble cast of a Wes Anderson film. He maintained an exquisite collection of pipes, to include several by Dunhill that he would generously share. On days-long cross-country patrols, I soon took to smoking with Dutch in our truck, our night-vision goggles shielding our eyes, our pipes planted in our mouths and chimneying smoke, while Ali—who was my interpreter in those days—sat in the back, his head lolling out the window sucking at the fresh air. Dutch wore his eccentricity like a suit of armor that insulated him from the harsher realities of our war. He went so far as to found the Shkin Gun, Pipe, and Kennel Club, or what he insisted on referring to as the SGPKC. To become a member, you had to have a gun (which we all did), smoke a pipe (which few of us did), and put out food for the feral dogs we’d adopted (which we all did)—so membership really came down to whether you smoked a pipe. He even had T-shirts made up.
I’ve missed him.
When I ask what he’s doing in the city, he explains, “I just got back from a work trip. The wife and I thought we’d take a weekend away.”
I don’t ask him where the work trip was. The security clearances I once held, I no longer do, and I don’t want to put him in an awkward position by asking where he’s been. And so I introduce him to my children instead. They each step forward, say their name, and shake his hand. They look Dutch in the eye as I’ve done my best to teach them. Then their uncle appears in the lobby. Their composure vanishes as they run over to greet him. My mathematician brother—who is also a beloved eccentric—apologizes for being late. He’d dozed off in his room. We’re headed to dinner, and so is Dutch. But he and I agree to meet up in the Essex House bar for a drink at the end of the night, to catch up.
In addition to the work Dutch and I did together on patrols for the CTPT, we also worked together in the gathering of intelligence around Shkin. We each managed a stable of assets, from low-level informants to recruited agents. Certain cases we managed together, one of which was a Waziri tribesman we’d nicknamed “Chuckles,” given a nervous tic of his. When he got anxious, he’d hiccup with laughter. And frequently at inexplicable moments. Chuckles lived in Pakistan, though he often crossed the porous border into Afghanistan to meet with us. His particular area of expertise, or utility, was what we termed “BDAs,” battle damage assessments. These BDAs typically occurred after predator strikes inside Pakistan’s tribal areas, in which we would need to confirm whether we had killed our target.
My first day as a paramilitary case officer came about a year before I met Chuckles. I spent it at CIA headquarters filling out paperwork: a health care plan, a Roth IRA, a parking pass application, a stipend for childcare. This was in the summer of 2009, and I’d come to the CIA after my time in Marine Corps special operations. Having spent my entire adult life working for the federal government, I’d expected the paper chase, but mixed in with the forms, one stood out—Executive Order 12333, which includes this clause: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”
This seemed straightforward enough. Silenced pistols and cyanide-laced cocktails were for the movies; they weren’t the stuff of real intelligence work. So I signed the order. I was giving more thought to whether a rookie like me could land a decent parking spot at the agency’s headquarters in Northern Virginia. A few months later, I began my initial deployment. As a paramilitary case officer, I trained and operated alongside the CTPT, but I also worked alongside non-paramilitary case officers. Our combined work space was always a windowless vault. My colleagues stayed indoors, behind banks of computers, planning out drone strikes. The toll of the months they’d been deployed showed in their sallow complexions. Dossier upon dossier cluttered their desktops—Taliban senior leaders, al-Qaeda operatives, each one targeted for killing. For assassination.
Granted, lawyers working for multiple presidential administrations had drawn up semantic arguments carefully delineating the difference between a targeted killing and an assassination. But when the picture of the person you were trying to kill sat on your desk, when you watched the predator strikes light up the night sky just across the border, and then when you took that same picture and moved it into a file for archiving, it sure felt like an assassination.
The discomfort of my colleagues, where it existed, didn’t stem from the act itself. The dossiers were filled with details about Taliban commanders and al-Qaeda operatives—people we had identified as valid targets, who were known to have killed our comrades in Afghanistan, or to have ambitions to launch attacks in the United States or Western Europe. The discomfort existed because it felt like we were doing something, on a large scale, that we’d sworn not to. Most of us felt as though we were violating Executive Order 12333. Everybody knew what was happening—senior intelligence officials, general officers, the administration, even the American people, who ostensibly would not tolerate assassinations carried out in their name.
In the United States, we veiled these assassination programs behind the highest levels of classification. In Afghanistan and Pakistan—to say nothing of countries from Syria to Yemen to Somalia—these assassination programs became a part of daily life. They were no secret to the residents of these countries, while to us, in our country, these campaigns became a secret we kept from ourselves.
Which brings us back to Chuckles. He arrived at the gate to our firebase on the morning after a predator strike in Wana, a hamlet across the border in Pakistan. After being searched, he was escorted to a meeting room, which was little more than a plywood hut with a sofa and coffee table flanked by two plastic chairs. Dutch and I sat in the plastic chairs. Chuckles sat on the deep pleather sofa, which threatened to swallow his slight frame.
“What have you got for us?” asked Dutch.
A bowl of M&M’s sat on the table. Chuckles had already taken a palmful, which seemed to be his breakfast. He ate them one at a time as he spoke. “Yesterday afternoon, there was an explosion not far from the Wana bazaar.”
He paused, as if for dramatic effect. He volleyed his gaze between me and Dutch, blinking repeatedly. His long, dark, almost feminine eyelashes fluttered as he tried to get a read on us. “Really?” I said. “Was anyone hurt in the explosion?”
“Yes,” he answered cautiously. “Four Talibs were killed.” He popped a couple more M&M’s into his mouth. His shoulders hiccupped as he began to laugh.
Yesterday’s strike had taken out a single vehicle, so four dead Talibs made sense. I asked, “Do you know who they were?”
He shook his head. “I could maybe find out.”
I glanced at Dutch. Historically, Chuckles didn’t respond well to complex follow-on taskings. Asking him to find out would likely prove more hassle than it was worth. Furthermore, the strike had targeted a senior Taliban commander named Nazir. Neither Dutch nor I wanted Chuckles to know about our interest in Nazir or that we’d nearly pinpointed his location. Dutch chimed in, moving our debriefing in a slightly different direction: “Did you see the strike?”
“No,” said Chuckles. “I only heard about it.”
“Where?” I asked.
“In my cousin’s shop,” said Chuckles. “Some people had been nearby when the explosion happened, and they were talking about it.”
“Who?” asked Dutch.
Chuckles stared at the ceiling as if reassembling the scene from memory. “At my cousin’s shop was . . .” And he began to list a series of names, none of whom we recognized as being individuals of any intelligence value, though we dutifully copied down each name in our notes. Then, as Chuckles came to the end of this recounting, he added a final name: “And Commander Nazir, he was there too.”
“Commander Nazir was at your cousin’s shop?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Chuckles. “He often comes there.”
I glanced at Dutch. Chuckles, noting that glance, began to laugh again. He then stuffed a few more M&M’s into his mouth.
“How often does he come?” Dutch asked.
Chuckles told us that Commander Nazir would typically arrive at his cousin’s shop for tea and conversation once or twice a week in the afternoon. Dutch stood from his chair and sat on the sofa, so that he now flanked Chuckles. I did the same. Facing us was Dutch’s computer. He had brought up a satellite map of Wana on its screen. “Could you show us where your cousin’s shop is?”
Chuckles leaned forward. He stared into the computer as though looking over the side of a cliff. I explained that the orientation of the satellite image was from overhead. He blinked a couple of times, tucking his chin toward his chest like he was overcome by vertigo.
Dutch and I had seen this problem before. If a person wasn’t familiar with reading maps or had never seen their home from the vantage point of a satellite, the overhead imagery could be difficult to comprehend and would require us to reorient their perspective and walk them through what they were seeing. Dutch, ever the aviator, took up this task. “Imagine you are like a bird—”
Chuckles interjected, “Like the hawk?”
“Yes, like the hawk,” said Dutch, who even began flapping his arms like wings for effect. “You are flying over Wana. What you see in this image is what the hawk would see looking down from the sky. Do you understand?”
Chuckles gave an encouraging grin. He liked thinking of himself as a hawk. When his attention returned to the satellite imagery, he sat silently between us, blinking his eyes and kneading his stubbly chin. He still couldn’t pinpoint the location of his cousin’s shop.
Now I tried. “How about from the military base?” I pointed to one of the largest congregations of buildings on the map. “Can you tell us how you would walk to your cousin’s shop from there?”
Chuckles laughed nervously. He didn’t know the way.
“Or from here?” I said, pointing to an open field by one of the main roads. “From the sports grounds—how would you get to your cousin’s shop from there?”
He took another handful of M&M’s, as though if he ate enough of our candy, he might be able to see the world below the way we needed him to see it. With his mouth filled, he continued to stare vacantly at our map.
Clearly, this wasn’t working. “Okay,” I said, “why don’t you pick a place that everyone knows and tell us how to get to your cousin’s shop from there.”
Chuckles glanced back at me. “A place that everyone knows?”
“Yes,” added Dutch. “Pick a place that is familiar to you.”
Chuckles knitted his eyebrows together. He inhaled a ponderous breath and then exhaled in an excited rush. He’d figured out the perfect place. “Commander Nazir’s house!” he said. “I can show you how to get to my cousin’s shop from Commander Nazir’s house!”
I crossed my arms over my chest. Dutch shut his notebook.
We asked Chuckles if he would just show us where Commander Nazir lived.
Seven years pass. I’ve put my children to bed and made my way back to the bar of the Essex House; here, Dutch and I are telling the old stories, including that one. He reminds me that the raw intelligence we gleaned from Chuckles that day found its way into the president’s daily briefing—the two of us had received a congratulatory cable from headquarters—and not for the first time, we laugh about how terrifying it is to imagine that a direct line could exist from Chuckles to the president of the United States. I then wonder aloud about whatever happened to Chuckles.
“Oh, he’s still there,” says Dutch.
“He is?”
“Yeah.” Dutch takes a sip of his cocktail. “I probably saw him . . . I dunno, three or four weeks ago.”
It’s hard for me to get my mind around this. In the intervening years, Chuckles has become a totem within my memory more than a person. I ask what he’s doing these days.
“Same shit,” says Dutch. “BDAs mostly. He got in a bit of trouble a few years back, selling the same intel to different case officers. But he’s still working for us. What else is he going to do?”
“So you were back in Afghanistan for this last trip?”
“Yeah,” says Dutch. “I’m mostly in and out of there these days.”
“I would’ve thought it had slowed down.”
“Why would you think that?”
I unhinge my jaw to speak but realize I don’t really know why I thought that. Perhaps, like with Chuckles, the war had come to exist so prominently in my memory that it was difficult to imagine that it still existed in the present.
Dutch explains that the drawdown of conventional forces from Afghanistan has led to an increasing reliance on clandestine forces. That burden, combined with the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as well as commitments in Yemen, Somalia, and even Ukraine, keep him on the road more than half the year. Like a gourmand who’s tried every dish on the menu only to discover he likes the house special the best, Dutch explains his enduring affinity for Afghanistan.
He glances at his watch. It’s late, and his wife is upstairs waiting.
I tell him that it’d be good to see him again.
“It would,” he says. “I’m headed back in a few weeks.”
“Then maybe we could grab lunch one day around here?”
“No, sorry,” he says. “I meant that I’m headed back to Afghanistan in a few weeks. Not here.” Dutch has no idea when he’ll next be in New York. We swap numbers nonetheless, and he promises that if he ever does make it back he’ll call.
SCENE II
The Hotel Danieli, Venice
My wife’s father was well into his fifties when she was born. He and her mother had a twenty-year age difference. Long before he had my wife, and long before he met her mother, he’d fought in the Second World War. He’d served in the OSS back then, in East Asia. He earned a Bronze Star for rescuing downed fliers from behind enemy lines. He spoke fluent French. In photos, he is debonair, with a pencil-thin mustache; he sits at a table with other OSS officers in front of a map, where they are no doubt planning one of these daring rescue missions. He returned home after the war and became a trial lawyer, one revered within his community. Stories are still told about his greatest cases and closing arguments. I wish I’d met him. People in my wife’s family wish that I’d met him. He is most often compared to two people, both fictional characters: Atticus Finch and James Bond.
Matt: Regroup by the white wedding hall. Southbound road.
Bus 2: Aborting
Bus 1: Yeah lets fall back to serena
Nick: Any injuries?
Bus 2: None
Bus 1: All good
Bus 3: Only dignity
Matt: I will wait for last bus. Rest of you go back.
From start to finish, this attempt on the South Gate takes a little over an hour.
No one has slept much over the past two days. My wife is brushing her teeth in the bathroom when we finally abort. The day ahead, in which we’ll sightsee with our children, is so psychically disconnected from the night I’ve spent monitoring events in Kabul that I struggle to understand which is real—last night, or today—and conclude that perhaps neither is real, that I am neither here nor there, that I am psychically nowhere.
Then my phone pings with yet another text, though this one isn’t from our aborted convoy. It’s from Rich. He’s at the North Gate. If our convoy can get there, the Marines from 1/8 will let them into the airport. I post this in the chat.
Matt responds, Traffic is a problem even at night. My guess is we will have to stop several hundred meters off. I don’t think we can bring four buses to that gate during the day, based on my previous visits, even if we do have access.
I respond, Understood.
Matt adds, My vote is to go back to the Serena.
Forty minutes later, when the last of the buses arrives at the Serena Hotel, I am in the restaurant of my hotel alone sipping coffee. Our tour guide is in the lobby. Everyone is waiting on me. It’s time to begin the day.
ACT III
THE NORTH GATE
My original instinct was to pull out—and, historically, I like following my instincts.
—PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP
ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY
AUGUST 21, 2017
SCENE I
Lobby of the Essex House, New York, 2016
“And what name is the room under again, sir?”
“Ackerman,” I say. “Nate Ackerman.”
The receptionist clacks furiously on his keyboard, typing out a great deal more than twelve letters. My brother is staying in the hotel. I’ve brought my two children over. We’re supposed to meet him in the lobby and then head to dinner nearby. He’s late and not answering his cell phone, so I think to try the hotel phone but don’t know his room number. My children, who are four and six years old, tug impatiently at my pant legs. They’re bored. They begin to swat at each other. I shush them and press them more closely to my side. The receptionist says, “I’m not seeing him. Can you spell the name for me?”
“Ackerman,” I repeat, then enunciate each letter: “A-C-K-E-R-M-A-N.”
Then behind me I hear, “Elliot Ackerman?”
When I turn around, I’m met by a bearded man with a shaved-bald head. Professorially dressed, he’s wearing a Harris Tweed sports coat with suede elbow patches. In one hand he carries his luggage, a monogrammed calfskin weekender. In the other hand he carries an umbrella; its handle appears to be some type of polished horn. He tucks the umbrella under his left arm and extends his right hand toward me. “Jesus,” he says. “It’s been a long time.”
His name is Dutch; to be exact, it’s been a little more than five years since he and I last saw each other in Afghanistan. A former Marine aviator, Dutch had an accomplished career as a helicopter pilot before giving up the cockpit for a career as a paramilitary case officer. He had flown everything from medevac missions in Fallujah to the president of the United States. When we worked together at the CIA, Dutch was our air officer. Our CTPT relied on him to coordinate everything from close air support to surveillance flights to parachute resupplies. A born eccentric, Dutch existed at the Venn diagram intersection of Allen Dulles’s Cold War CIA and the ensemble cast of a Wes Anderson film. He maintained an exquisite collection of pipes, to include several by Dunhill that he would generously share. On days-long cross-country patrols, I soon took to smoking with Dutch in our truck, our night-vision goggles shielding our eyes, our pipes planted in our mouths and chimneying smoke, while Ali—who was my interpreter in those days—sat in the back, his head lolling out the window sucking at the fresh air. Dutch wore his eccentricity like a suit of armor that insulated him from the harsher realities of our war. He went so far as to found the Shkin Gun, Pipe, and Kennel Club, or what he insisted on referring to as the SGPKC. To become a member, you had to have a gun (which we all did), smoke a pipe (which few of us did), and put out food for the feral dogs we’d adopted (which we all did)—so membership really came down to whether you smoked a pipe. He even had T-shirts made up.
I’ve missed him.
When I ask what he’s doing in the city, he explains, “I just got back from a work trip. The wife and I thought we’d take a weekend away.”
I don’t ask him where the work trip was. The security clearances I once held, I no longer do, and I don’t want to put him in an awkward position by asking where he’s been. And so I introduce him to my children instead. They each step forward, say their name, and shake his hand. They look Dutch in the eye as I’ve done my best to teach them. Then their uncle appears in the lobby. Their composure vanishes as they run over to greet him. My mathematician brother—who is also a beloved eccentric—apologizes for being late. He’d dozed off in his room. We’re headed to dinner, and so is Dutch. But he and I agree to meet up in the Essex House bar for a drink at the end of the night, to catch up.
In addition to the work Dutch and I did together on patrols for the CTPT, we also worked together in the gathering of intelligence around Shkin. We each managed a stable of assets, from low-level informants to recruited agents. Certain cases we managed together, one of which was a Waziri tribesman we’d nicknamed “Chuckles,” given a nervous tic of his. When he got anxious, he’d hiccup with laughter. And frequently at inexplicable moments. Chuckles lived in Pakistan, though he often crossed the porous border into Afghanistan to meet with us. His particular area of expertise, or utility, was what we termed “BDAs,” battle damage assessments. These BDAs typically occurred after predator strikes inside Pakistan’s tribal areas, in which we would need to confirm whether we had killed our target.
My first day as a paramilitary case officer came about a year before I met Chuckles. I spent it at CIA headquarters filling out paperwork: a health care plan, a Roth IRA, a parking pass application, a stipend for childcare. This was in the summer of 2009, and I’d come to the CIA after my time in Marine Corps special operations. Having spent my entire adult life working for the federal government, I’d expected the paper chase, but mixed in with the forms, one stood out—Executive Order 12333, which includes this clause: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”
This seemed straightforward enough. Silenced pistols and cyanide-laced cocktails were for the movies; they weren’t the stuff of real intelligence work. So I signed the order. I was giving more thought to whether a rookie like me could land a decent parking spot at the agency’s headquarters in Northern Virginia. A few months later, I began my initial deployment. As a paramilitary case officer, I trained and operated alongside the CTPT, but I also worked alongside non-paramilitary case officers. Our combined work space was always a windowless vault. My colleagues stayed indoors, behind banks of computers, planning out drone strikes. The toll of the months they’d been deployed showed in their sallow complexions. Dossier upon dossier cluttered their desktops—Taliban senior leaders, al-Qaeda operatives, each one targeted for killing. For assassination.
Granted, lawyers working for multiple presidential administrations had drawn up semantic arguments carefully delineating the difference between a targeted killing and an assassination. But when the picture of the person you were trying to kill sat on your desk, when you watched the predator strikes light up the night sky just across the border, and then when you took that same picture and moved it into a file for archiving, it sure felt like an assassination.
The discomfort of my colleagues, where it existed, didn’t stem from the act itself. The dossiers were filled with details about Taliban commanders and al-Qaeda operatives—people we had identified as valid targets, who were known to have killed our comrades in Afghanistan, or to have ambitions to launch attacks in the United States or Western Europe. The discomfort existed because it felt like we were doing something, on a large scale, that we’d sworn not to. Most of us felt as though we were violating Executive Order 12333. Everybody knew what was happening—senior intelligence officials, general officers, the administration, even the American people, who ostensibly would not tolerate assassinations carried out in their name.
In the United States, we veiled these assassination programs behind the highest levels of classification. In Afghanistan and Pakistan—to say nothing of countries from Syria to Yemen to Somalia—these assassination programs became a part of daily life. They were no secret to the residents of these countries, while to us, in our country, these campaigns became a secret we kept from ourselves.
Which brings us back to Chuckles. He arrived at the gate to our firebase on the morning after a predator strike in Wana, a hamlet across the border in Pakistan. After being searched, he was escorted to a meeting room, which was little more than a plywood hut with a sofa and coffee table flanked by two plastic chairs. Dutch and I sat in the plastic chairs. Chuckles sat on the deep pleather sofa, which threatened to swallow his slight frame.
“What have you got for us?” asked Dutch.
A bowl of M&M’s sat on the table. Chuckles had already taken a palmful, which seemed to be his breakfast. He ate them one at a time as he spoke. “Yesterday afternoon, there was an explosion not far from the Wana bazaar.”
He paused, as if for dramatic effect. He volleyed his gaze between me and Dutch, blinking repeatedly. His long, dark, almost feminine eyelashes fluttered as he tried to get a read on us. “Really?” I said. “Was anyone hurt in the explosion?”
“Yes,” he answered cautiously. “Four Talibs were killed.” He popped a couple more M&M’s into his mouth. His shoulders hiccupped as he began to laugh.
Yesterday’s strike had taken out a single vehicle, so four dead Talibs made sense. I asked, “Do you know who they were?”
He shook his head. “I could maybe find out.”
I glanced at Dutch. Historically, Chuckles didn’t respond well to complex follow-on taskings. Asking him to find out would likely prove more hassle than it was worth. Furthermore, the strike had targeted a senior Taliban commander named Nazir. Neither Dutch nor I wanted Chuckles to know about our interest in Nazir or that we’d nearly pinpointed his location. Dutch chimed in, moving our debriefing in a slightly different direction: “Did you see the strike?”
“No,” said Chuckles. “I only heard about it.”
“Where?” I asked.
“In my cousin’s shop,” said Chuckles. “Some people had been nearby when the explosion happened, and they were talking about it.”
“Who?” asked Dutch.
Chuckles stared at the ceiling as if reassembling the scene from memory. “At my cousin’s shop was . . .” And he began to list a series of names, none of whom we recognized as being individuals of any intelligence value, though we dutifully copied down each name in our notes. Then, as Chuckles came to the end of this recounting, he added a final name: “And Commander Nazir, he was there too.”
“Commander Nazir was at your cousin’s shop?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Chuckles. “He often comes there.”
I glanced at Dutch. Chuckles, noting that glance, began to laugh again. He then stuffed a few more M&M’s into his mouth.
“How often does he come?” Dutch asked.
Chuckles told us that Commander Nazir would typically arrive at his cousin’s shop for tea and conversation once or twice a week in the afternoon. Dutch stood from his chair and sat on the sofa, so that he now flanked Chuckles. I did the same. Facing us was Dutch’s computer. He had brought up a satellite map of Wana on its screen. “Could you show us where your cousin’s shop is?”
Chuckles leaned forward. He stared into the computer as though looking over the side of a cliff. I explained that the orientation of the satellite image was from overhead. He blinked a couple of times, tucking his chin toward his chest like he was overcome by vertigo.
Dutch and I had seen this problem before. If a person wasn’t familiar with reading maps or had never seen their home from the vantage point of a satellite, the overhead imagery could be difficult to comprehend and would require us to reorient their perspective and walk them through what they were seeing. Dutch, ever the aviator, took up this task. “Imagine you are like a bird—”
Chuckles interjected, “Like the hawk?”
“Yes, like the hawk,” said Dutch, who even began flapping his arms like wings for effect. “You are flying over Wana. What you see in this image is what the hawk would see looking down from the sky. Do you understand?”
Chuckles gave an encouraging grin. He liked thinking of himself as a hawk. When his attention returned to the satellite imagery, he sat silently between us, blinking his eyes and kneading his stubbly chin. He still couldn’t pinpoint the location of his cousin’s shop.
Now I tried. “How about from the military base?” I pointed to one of the largest congregations of buildings on the map. “Can you tell us how you would walk to your cousin’s shop from there?”
Chuckles laughed nervously. He didn’t know the way.
“Or from here?” I said, pointing to an open field by one of the main roads. “From the sports grounds—how would you get to your cousin’s shop from there?”
He took another handful of M&M’s, as though if he ate enough of our candy, he might be able to see the world below the way we needed him to see it. With his mouth filled, he continued to stare vacantly at our map.
Clearly, this wasn’t working. “Okay,” I said, “why don’t you pick a place that everyone knows and tell us how to get to your cousin’s shop from there.”
Chuckles glanced back at me. “A place that everyone knows?”
“Yes,” added Dutch. “Pick a place that is familiar to you.”
Chuckles knitted his eyebrows together. He inhaled a ponderous breath and then exhaled in an excited rush. He’d figured out the perfect place. “Commander Nazir’s house!” he said. “I can show you how to get to my cousin’s shop from Commander Nazir’s house!”
I crossed my arms over my chest. Dutch shut his notebook.
We asked Chuckles if he would just show us where Commander Nazir lived.
Seven years pass. I’ve put my children to bed and made my way back to the bar of the Essex House; here, Dutch and I are telling the old stories, including that one. He reminds me that the raw intelligence we gleaned from Chuckles that day found its way into the president’s daily briefing—the two of us had received a congratulatory cable from headquarters—and not for the first time, we laugh about how terrifying it is to imagine that a direct line could exist from Chuckles to the president of the United States. I then wonder aloud about whatever happened to Chuckles.
“Oh, he’s still there,” says Dutch.
“He is?”
“Yeah.” Dutch takes a sip of his cocktail. “I probably saw him . . . I dunno, three or four weeks ago.”
It’s hard for me to get my mind around this. In the intervening years, Chuckles has become a totem within my memory more than a person. I ask what he’s doing these days.
“Same shit,” says Dutch. “BDAs mostly. He got in a bit of trouble a few years back, selling the same intel to different case officers. But he’s still working for us. What else is he going to do?”
“So you were back in Afghanistan for this last trip?”
“Yeah,” says Dutch. “I’m mostly in and out of there these days.”
“I would’ve thought it had slowed down.”
“Why would you think that?”
I unhinge my jaw to speak but realize I don’t really know why I thought that. Perhaps, like with Chuckles, the war had come to exist so prominently in my memory that it was difficult to imagine that it still existed in the present.
Dutch explains that the drawdown of conventional forces from Afghanistan has led to an increasing reliance on clandestine forces. That burden, combined with the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as well as commitments in Yemen, Somalia, and even Ukraine, keep him on the road more than half the year. Like a gourmand who’s tried every dish on the menu only to discover he likes the house special the best, Dutch explains his enduring affinity for Afghanistan.
He glances at his watch. It’s late, and his wife is upstairs waiting.
I tell him that it’d be good to see him again.
“It would,” he says. “I’m headed back in a few weeks.”
“Then maybe we could grab lunch one day around here?”
“No, sorry,” he says. “I meant that I’m headed back to Afghanistan in a few weeks. Not here.” Dutch has no idea when he’ll next be in New York. We swap numbers nonetheless, and he promises that if he ever does make it back he’ll call.
SCENE II
The Hotel Danieli, Venice
My wife’s father was well into his fifties when she was born. He and her mother had a twenty-year age difference. Long before he had my wife, and long before he met her mother, he’d fought in the Second World War. He’d served in the OSS back then, in East Asia. He earned a Bronze Star for rescuing downed fliers from behind enemy lines. He spoke fluent French. In photos, he is debonair, with a pencil-thin mustache; he sits at a table with other OSS officers in front of a map, where they are no doubt planning one of these daring rescue missions. He returned home after the war and became a trial lawyer, one revered within his community. Stories are still told about his greatest cases and closing arguments. I wish I’d met him. People in my wife’s family wish that I’d met him. He is most often compared to two people, both fictional characters: Atticus Finch and James Bond.
