Peter Maass, A Bulletproof Mind nytimes.com
Excerpt:
Miller let out a knucklehead laugh as he said this; for him, it was a foolishly obvious point. Indeed, when the Kandahar assault was completed and he left his command post to survey the carnage he had managed, he said he did not feel horror or regret -- just a grim awareness that there will be a lot more C.Q.B. for American soldiers in coming years. ''We're going to have to hunt 'em down,'' Miller said.
Miller remained in Afghanistan for almost four months and did everything he trained for: combat, patrols, surveillance, negotiations. For several crucial days, he was even in charge of security for the new leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. He completed his duties and returned home in March to his wife and three children.
That said, the experience has left its marks on Miller. North of Kandahar, before the Taliban fled, a Special Forces team was hit accidentally by a misguided smart bomb. Three men were killed, and two of them were good friends of his. ''If I could have those guys back, I would gladly give it all up,'' Miller said as we sat in a planning room at his battalion headquarters, which is a surprisingly unimpressive place, with leaking pipes and mold growing on the ceiling tiles. The United States military is a $355-billion-a-year outfit, but few of those dollars are lavished on the aged cinder block buildings housing the Fifth Group. Miller continued: ''There's probably a little guilt, like, Jesus, I wanted to see action so bad. . . . ''
Suddenly he stopped talking. He took several deep breaths, looking down at the floor. Then he hurriedly got up and headed for the bathroom. Through tears, he said, ''I promised I wasn't going to do this.''
Several minutes elapsed. I poured myself some coffee as I waited for him to return. I was not terribly surprised by his lapse into sadness. I spent three days with him at Fort Campbell, grabbing meals with him and his Special Forces colleagues, going on a five-mile run with him in the Kentucky backwoods. I heard him laugh at himself and his commanders and the absurdity of the world around him. But I also heard him turn cold serious when the phone rang in his office and he answered with his usual greeting, ''Hello, this is not a secure line.'' His temperament was adaptive, exquisitely calibrated to the moment. And here was a moment where Miller was allowing himself to be reflective.
In Special Forces training, flexibility is sought out and reinforced in recruits. Respond to the situation, they are taught; don't be rigid, stay aware of your environment. In the model Special Forces soldier -- and not all of them are, not by a long shot -- those maxims apply to emotions too. Block them out in combat, but don't ignore them afterward.
Miller emerged from the bathroom and said: ''I don't feel guilty for wanting to do something. We wanted to go, hell, yeah. Everybody wanted to. The big lesson I took was, Be careful what you ask for, because it's a horribly costly business. I don't have any doubt about the value of the sacrifice. I'm not sitting here gnashing my teeth like Vietnam or something, going, 'God, it's such a waste, the flower of our youth.' I mean, it was necessary. A friendly-fire accident -- that happens. It's the nature of war.'' Miller had a logical argument, but emotions don't always respond to logic.
Miller talked about other difficulties he had faced in Afghanistan. In January, Special Forces soldiers discovered a series of Taliban ammunition depots. The decision was made to blow up the dumps so that fugitive Taliban or Qaeda fighters could not sneak back and re-arm. Two ordnance experts and a medic were assigned to the job. They were all blown up doing it; either they mishandled the explosives or were killed by a booby trap.
''The most wonderful guys in the world,'' Miller told me. ''We could have waited and handed it off to an engineer unit and said, 'It's your problem.' We made the decision to do it ourselves right away. It was the wrong thing to do. We should have just left it. Two guys I knew really well. It shows the seriousness of the business, which I had never fully internalized. I would just laugh when my bosses would say, 'This is a serious business.' Well, guess what? Now I'm the moron going, 'This is serious business.' ''
The Special Forces are well trained, but that does not mean they will come back alive or sound, especially if they fight a war that should not be fought or embark on missions that are poorly planned. Their bodies are not bulletproof, nor are their minds. The discipline that is driven into them in training and at their bases can wear down if a war is long enough or murky enough or if they see too many of their comrades killed or injured. The ousting of the Taliban (though not what followed it) had the merit of being well executed and mercifully brief, yet still there was a price to pay.
I stayed in touch with Miller after my visit to Fort Campbell. We had developed a running joke, because he couldn't talk to me about his next mission, which I knew was Iraq, and which he knew I knew was Iraq. The soldiers of the Fifth Group specialize in the Middle East, and they wear desert fatigues even at Fort Campbell, with their names printed above their breast pockets in Arabic. I would ask, when I called Miller, how things were going, and as September became October and Congress passed a resolution authorizing war, his responses went from ''not doing much'' to ''it's getting busier'' to ''real busy.''
''If there's going to be a fight, we want to be in it,'' he said last month. ''But it's more deliberate this time. Last time, it really was naivete.'' He mentioned that the widows and children of his fallen friends still live in his close community; he is reminded of their sacrifice every day. ''The cost is huge and it requires serious deliberation. I'm privileged and truly want to be a part of it, but it's not cheap. It's not a big laugh.'' |
