Robert Kaplan - Imperial Grunts

Silence. Static. Then: “Yes.”

“How many? How bad?”

“One.”

“How bad?”

A long silence. “He’s seriously hurt.”

The room went more silent, if that was possible. “Seriously hurt” was code language in the Special Operations community. If you were KIA (killed in action), your widow got only $200,000 and had to move out of military housing in several weeks. But if you had been “medically retired” before death, your wife got a pension and your children’s schooling was paid for through college, among other benefits. It was a cruel system, the curse of Big Government, to such an extent that the law was to be changed. But that hadn’t happened yet. So when someone had been critically wounded, the race was on to keep him alive, sometimes for only a few hours, until Washington issued a “control number” which began the retirement process. The nipper net for personal e-mail was immediately shut down and all satellite phone calls forbidden; no chances could be taken that anyone in the U.S. could know what happened until that control number was issued. Only then could the news get out.

The good news was that a control number was issued in time. The bad news was that Staff Sgt. Paul A. Sweeney of Lake Ariel, Pennsylvania, died a few hours later. [56] At the time of his death, Sweeney was promotable to sergeant first class. War, like travel, was life in compression. You expected one dramatic event, Newark, and you got another, a memorial service.

When ODA-371’s dust-ridden convoy of ground mobility vehicles and up-armors arrived at the forward operating base bearing Sgt. Paulie Sweeney’s flag-draped coffin, the B-team was there to greet it, and many quiet embraces ensued among grown men. At 7:30 a.m. Zulu (noon local time), everyone walked silently to the airstrip and gathered for the “ramp ceremony” that would transfer Sgt. Sweeney’s remains from Mortuary Affairs to the C-130 for the trip home.

It marked the first time that I saw Green Berets actually wearing Green Berets, rather than helmets, ball caps, boonie caps, or patrol caps. Nearby was the old terminal building, where little stone monuments had been erected by President Karzai’s new government to the victims of 9/11, and to Special Forces, the British SAS, and the Canadian Light Infantry Princess Patricia’s Regiment—“damn good regiment, real ass-kickers,” an American sergeant told me quietly.

Ramp ceremonies were known to combine spareness and brevity with deep emotion. This was no exception. The coffin with the American flag was placed on a simple plywood dais in front of the C-130’s open fuselage. The plane’s engine droned throughout. Capt. Lee Nelson, the 3rd Battalion’s chaplain, as well as the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Apalachicola in the Florida Panhandle, wearing a camouflage stole, told the assembled uniformed mass: “We gather together to say goodbye to our brother, fallen comrade, staff sergeant, husband, father, and American: Paul Sweeney. Paul’s lord and savior, Jesus Christ, believed that nothing is greater than giving life for one’s family, country, justice, and the liberation of the oppressed. Here are the words of another warrior, named David, written some three thousand years ago.” In a mild southern twang, Capt. Nelson, an awkward and intense man, then recited the Twenty-third Psalm:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

The chaplain said a few more words, linking the warriors of the Bible with those of Special Forces. Here, according to W. J. Cash, was the “essentially Hebraic” spirit of the evangelical South, which demanded

the Jehovah of the Old Testament: a God who might be seen, a God who had been seen. A passionate… tyrant, to be trembled before, but whose favor was the sweeter for that. A personal God, a God for the individualist, a God whose representatives were not silken priests but preachers risen from the people themselves. 16

Preachers like Capt. Nelson, for instance. For the spirit of the United States military was fiercely evangelical, even as it was fiercely ecumenical. While meals ready to eat were provided that were both kosher and halal, and soldiers of all races, religions, and regions of the country were surely welcomed into the ranks, the fact was that not all races, religions, and regional types joined up in equal numbers, so it was that the martial evangelicalism of the South gave the U.S. military its true religious soul.

This was part of a logical historical pattern, for as Cash informs us, southern evangelicalism has always followed the same steady direction—back to the stern Mosaic ideal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. 17American power in Afghanistan and elsewhere may have had universalist motives—the advancement of women’s rights, a liberal social order, and so on—but the American military, by necessity, played a significant role in that enterprise. And like all militaries, its ranks required a more aboriginal level of altruism than that of the universalist society it sought to bring about.

The moment that Capt. Nelson finished reading the Twenty-third Psalm, the sound system played the thumping, rousing song from the John Wayne movie The Green Berets, written by author Robin Moore and Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler in the early Vietnam days, as an honor guard bore Sweeney’s coffin into the C-130’s cavernous belly: [57] Sgt. Sadler, an 18 Delta medic in Vietnam, also wrote a song, “Spit and Polish,” making fun of REMFs who cared only about what a soldier looked like.

There was no playing of “Taps,” no national anthem, only this song—one that, at the moment, only the cynical would view as corny.

“It never gets any easier, that’s why they pay us the big bucks,” one of the warrant officers half joked as we all walked back to the forward operating base. Then everyone got back to cleaning and repairing vehicles. The men of ODA-371 rejected a suggestion from the upper echelons for a longer memorial service the following day. They would all pay their tributes in person to Paulie’s family when they got home. Meanwhile, they told me, the best tribute to their fallen comrade was to return to their firebase.

Later, at chow, I was sitting with Maj. Helms, lamenting the postponement of Newark, when an aide walked over to say that the major was wanted immediately in the forward operating base. The aide whispered something else to Helms, who then told me to quickly pack my gear.

There was heavy “green-on-green” fighting—Afghans fighting Afghans—going on in the town of Gereshk, located on the strategic ring road west of Kandahar, in Helmand Province. The fighting was moving closer to the firebase, which was held by only seven Green Berets, because the rest of ODA-371 and -375 had driven to Kandahar with Sweeney’s remains for the ramp ceremony. It would take three or four hours for them to drive back, during which time the base might be overrun. Thus, two Chinooks with Special Forces troops would fly immediately to Gereshk, to secure the base.