Frederick Forsyth: The Kill List

He was named Christopher after his paternal grandfather, but since that senior U.S. Marine officer was always called Chris, and to avoid confusion, the baby was nicknamed Kit, the reference to the old frontiersman being entirely coincidental.

Also fortuitous was the birth date: November 10th, the date of the birth of the United States Marine Corps in 1775.

Captain Alvin Carson was away in Vietnam, where fighting was ferocious and would remain so for a further five years. But his tour was close to its end, so he was permitted home for Christmas to be reunited with his wife and two small daughters and to hold his firstborn son.

He returned to Vietnam after the New Year, finally returning to the sprawling Marine base at Pendleton in 1970. His next posting was no posting, since he remained at Pendleton for three years, seeing his boy grow through toddler stage to four and a half.

Here, far from those lethal jungles, the couple could live a customary “on base” life between the married quarters’ home, his office, the social club, the PX commissary and the base church. And he could teach his son to swim in the Del Mar Boat Basin. He sometimes thought back to those Pendleton years as the days of wine and roses.

The year 1973 saw him transferred to another “with family” posting at Quantico, just outside Washington, D.C. Back then, Quantico was just a huge mosquito- and tick-infested wilderness where a small boy could chase squirrels and raccoons through the woods.

The Carson family was still on base when Henry Kissinger and the North Vietnamese Le Duc Tho met outside Paris and hammered out the accords that brought to a formal end the decade of slaughter now called the Vietnam War.

The now-major Carson returned for his third tour in Vietnam, a place still seething with menace as the North Vietnamese army poised itself to break the Paris Accords by invading the south. But he was repatriated early, just before the last mad scramble from the embassy roof to the last aircraft out of the airport.

Through those years, his son, Kit, went through the normal stages of a small American boy — Little League baseball, Cub Scouts and school. In the summer of 1974, Maj. Carson and family were transferred to a third enormous Marine base — Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

As second in command of his battalion, Maj. Carson worked out of the 8th Marines HQ on C Street and lived with wife and three children in the sprawl of married officers’ housing. It was never mentioned what the growing boy might like to be when he grew up. He was born into the heart of two families: the Carsons and the Corps. It was just assumed he would follow his grandfather and father into officer school and wear the uniform.

From 1978 to 1981, Maj. Carson was tasked to a long-overdue sea posting at Norfolk, the great U.S. Navy and Marine base on the south side of Chesapeake Bay in northern Virginia. The family lived on the base, the major went to sea as a Marine officer on the USS Nimitz , the pride of the carrier fleet. It was from this vantage point that he witnessed the fiasco of Operation Eagle Claw, also known as Desert One, the forlorn attempt to rescue the U.S. diplomats being held hostage in Tehran by “students” in the thrall of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Major Carson stood with long-range binoculars on the bridge wing of the Nimitz and watched the eight huge Sea Stallion helicopters roar away toward the coast to back up the Green Berets and Rangers who would make the snatch and bring the liberated diplomats back to safety offshore.

And he watched most of them limp back. First the two that broke down over the Iranian coast because they had no sand filters and had run into a dust storm. The others carrying the wounded after one of the choppers had flown into the windshield of a Hercules, causing a fireball. He remained bitter about that memory, and the foolish planning that had caused it, for the rest of his days.

From the summer of 1981 to 1984, Maj. Carson was posted with his family to London as the U.S. Marine attaché at the embassy in Grosvenor Square. Kit was enrolled at the American School in St. John’s Wood. Later, the boy looked back with affection on his three London years. It was the time of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and their remarkable partnership.

Charlie Price was made ambassador and became the most popular American in town. There were parties and balls. The Falklands were invaded and liberated. A week before British paras entered Port Stanley, Ronald Reagan made a state visit to London. In a lineup at the embassy, the Carson family was presented to Queen Elizabeth. And fourteen-year-old Kit Carson had his first crush on a girl. And his father reached his twenty-year mark in the Corps.

Alvin Carson was promoted to command the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, as a lieutenant colonel, and the family transferred to Kaneohe Bay in the Hawaiian Islands, a considerably different climate from London. For the teenage boy, it was a time of surfing, snorkeling, diving, fishing and taking a more-than-active interest in girls.

By sixteen he was developing as a formidable athlete, but his school grades also showed he hosted a very fast-moving brain. When a year later his father was promoted G3 and sent back to the mainland, Kit Carson was an Eagle Scout and a freshman in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. The presumption made years before was coming true; he was on an unstoppable glide path to follow his father into the ranks of U.S. Marine officers.

Back in the States, a college degree beckoned. He was sent to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he resided on campus for four years, majoring in history and chemistry. And there were three long summer vacations. These were devoted to jump school, scuba school and Officer Candidates School at Quantico.

He graduated in the spring of 1989, aged twenty, and simultaneously got his college degree and his single shoulder bar as a second lieutenant in the Corps. His father, now a one-star general, and his mother, both bursting with pride, were at the ceremony.

His first posting was to Basic School until Christmas, then Infantry Officer Course until March 1990, emerging as the Distinguished Honor Graduate. Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia, followed, and with his Ranger tab he was shipped to Twentynine Palms, California.

There he attended the Air/Ground Combat Center, known as the Stumps, and was then posted to the 1st Battalion, 7th Regiment, on the same base. Then, on August 2, 1990, a man named Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The U.S. Marines went back to war, and Lt. Kit Carson went with them.

Once the decision was taken that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait could not be allowed to stand, a grand coalition was formed, and ranged along the Iraqi/Saudi Arabian desert border from the Arabian Gulf in the east to the Jordanian border in the west.

The U.S. Marines came in the form of the Marine Expeditionary Force under General Walter Bloomer, and this encompassed the 1st Marine Division, commanded by General Mike Myatt. A very long way down the pecking order was 2nd Lt. Kit Carson. The division was posted to the extreme eastern end of the Coalition line, with only the blue waters of the Gulf to its right.

The first month, stupefyingly hot August, was a time of feverish activity. The entire division, with its armor and artillery, had to be disembarked and posted along the sector to be covered. An armada of freight ships arrived at the hitherto sleepy oil port of al-Jubail to discharge the impedimenta required to equip, lodge and keep supplied an entire U.S. division. It was not until September that Kit Carson got his assignment interview. It was with an acid-tongued veteran major, probably passed over at that rank and not happy about it.