Ben Shapiro: True Allegiance

The child nodded, tears streaming down his face.

If the soldiers got too close, the Taliban fighters would detonate the donkey, Brett knew.

“Stay back, boys,” Brett shouted, his voice carrying in the still air.

Then he saw it. Because the bomb was mobile, the terrorists couldn’t use one of their hard-lined IEDs—they’d rigged it with a cell phone. Brett could see the phone glowing on the side of the donkey. They were planning to detonate the bomb remotely by calling a number.

And if he called in an EOD team, he knew, the terrorists would simply detonate the bomb, taking the kid with it.

And so he leveled his weapon. The cameraman zoomed in on his face, sweat pouring down his forehead. His thumb fingered the grip, caressed it.

“Come on, baby,” Brett said to himself.

The donkey was now about waddling toward him, the cell phone bouncing in its cloth pack. The child’s eyes went wide.

He fired.

The bullet smashed into the cell phone at an angle, shattering it completely.

The donkey panicked, took off at a dead run right at Brett. Brett fired his handgun two more times into the dirt, forcing the donkey to rear—and then Brett reached up and grabbed its bridle, using his full body weight to pull it to the ground. Then he untied the kid, picked him up off the donkey, and muttered a few comforting words in Pashto.

The kid hugged him around the neck fiercely.

When he looked up, the lens was in his face.

What the hell , he thought.

And he winked.

The video went viral, of course. His face graced the cover of Time— “THE NEW FACE OF THE GOOD WAR,” it touted. The military put him on tour. He became a recruitment tool, the purest example of American military might combined with American caring.

Then Mark Prescott was elected president.

By that time, Brett had been back in the United States for several years, doing cable news, pumping up the war effort. Prescott’s election, however, sent a shock wave through the military infrastructure. Prescott had campaigned on ending the war in Iraq and getting out of Afghanistan as soon as possible. He said the wars had dragged on too long, that military spending could be slashed and the money rededicated to domestic concerns.

As an active military member, Brett couldn’t say anything, of course. Once again, he talked with Ellen about quitting—and this time, she seemed more amenable to it, given the latest breakdowns in Afghanistan. She knew it was a matter of time until they called Brett back there, and with both of them pushing forty, she wanted her husband home.

Then Prescott called.

The election was still two months off. But Prescott, a genius for campaigning, knew that he lacked military credentials—and his opponent, General Harold Hart, had those credentials stacked up. If he could somehow finagle Brett into his camp, he’d have a public relations coup on his hands. Brett patiently explained that he couldn’t be involved in campaigning. Nonetheless, two days later, an anonymous source somehow told The New York Times that Senator Mark Prescott had spoken at length with Colonel Brett Hawthorne—and that Hawthorne would be an integral part of any Prescott administration.

“Asshole,” Brett cursed to Ellen.

“Boss,” Ellen corrected him.

Prescott bumped three points in the polls. By the time of the election, a slim lead had turned into a blowout.

The day after the inauguration, Prescott called again.

“Colonel,” he said, “I’m gonna violate military protocol. I’m bumping you to general, effective immediately.”

Brett was stunned. The youngest general in the Marines was in his mid-forties. Brett had just turned forty-one.

“Sir, I’m flattered, but that’s against all the regulations…”

“I’m the commander in chief, son,” said Prescott genially. “Congratulations.”

The announcement came at the White House. The president beamed as he introduced Brett; Brett shifted uncomfortably, his bulk imposing beside the slim and tailored Prescott. When he stepped to the microphones, for the first time in a long time, his mouth felt dry.

“Why do you deserve this promotion, general?” shouted a reporter.

“I don’t,” he answered truthfully. “There are men ahead of me who deserve it more. But I promise to do my best.” Then he glanced at his commander in chief. Prescott grinned and gave him the thumbs-up.

The newspaper headline the next day said it all: “THE KID TAKES CHARGE.”

Prescott immediately tasked Brett with trotting out his new Afghanistan strategy on national television. He asked him for his advice peremptorily, of course—Brett told him in no uncertain terms that Afghanistan would be lost without a major counterinsurgency surge, akin to the one the British had used in Malaya in the 1950s. Prescott dismissed that possibility out of hand.

“No,” he said. “We’re pulling out. I promised.”

“Sir,” Brett protested, “we’ll lose the country.”

“I have more faith than that, son,” said Prescott.

For six months, Brett followed orders. He kept his mouth shut.

Then, as the casualties mounted, Prescott told Brett that he’d be pulling another ten thousand troops from the country by the end of the year.

“With all due respect, that’s a bad idea, sir,” said Brett.

“It’s happening,” said the president. “Get over it. And, by the way, get familiar with the policy. I need a uniform on television defending this thing.”

Perhaps it was the snide reference to the uniform—the old piece of clothing Brett had once hated, then learned to love. Perhaps it was the casualness with which Prescott perused the casualty reports.

But sitting across from NBC’s Sunday morning anchor, Brett began to feel the pressure and heat build up behind his eyeballs. And suddenly, he began talking. In a wave, he explained all the flaws with Prescott’s policy. He slammed Prescott for precipitously putting American and Afghan lives at risk, for creating a vacuum that could only be filled by al-Qaeda or a similar renewed terror group. He told the news anchor that the president would need to send no less than eighty thousand troops to Afghanistan, and that there could be no timetable for withdrawal. Timetables, he said, would lead the enemy to bide their time, to wait them out, and then to strike.

When he walked off the set, he knew he was finished. It was only a question of when. He knew he’d been insubordinate; he knew the president was the commander in chief. But Brett Hawthorne had worked for better men than Mark Prescott, and his main charge, he had always believed, was not to the president but to the Constitution and to his men. He had to obey the orders of the president, true.

“But,” he later explained to Ellen, “screw those orders. I’ve got men dying over there.”

Three days passed. Then, Prescott hit back.

First, a report appeared in Beat magazine, with anonymous quotes describing Hawthorne as a young gunner, a career military man interested only in bulling his way through china shops and making rank. Prescott himself did an interview defending Hawthorne from such charges, although he admitted—grudgingly, of course—that he hadn’t always seen eye to eye with his new boy, but appreciated Brett’s willingness to speak his mind. After all, hadn’t Lincoln had a team of rivals?

Then, a week later, the real bomb: a report appeared in The New York Times , filled with anonymous accusations of a sexual liaison between Brett and a young reporter, Dianna Kelly. Kelly had requested an interview with Brett a few months before; she’d been studying at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and wanted to write her thesis on counterinsurgency. She was thirty, sexy, and extremely sharp. She’d taken to running with Brett on his morning jogs, quizzing him, questioning him. They spent long nights huddling over maps of the country, with Brett explaining in minute detail how the insurgents would plot their counterattacks.