Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter

Author:Lea Carpenter [Carpenter, Lea]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780307960719
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2013-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

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VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA,

NOVEMBER 2010

Jason walks into his Team CO’s office. The elder officer has a photograph up on the screen of his laptop: a series of fire trucks, ten or twelve of them, parked perpendicularly along a leafy suburban street, their ladders lifted and—hung across and between each pair of facing trucks—an American flag. Looking down the line was like looking into an Escher print; the way the flags were arranged made them seem to go on forever, a neat trick of the eye. The flags that day had been thirty feet by thirty feet each, to give some sense of the scale of the scene.

Jason has seen this picture before. It is from a funeral procession given for an operator KIA in 2005, an operator who risked his life to save the lives of his colleagues (only one of whom would survive), and who went on to receive the Medal of Honor posthumously—the fourth of five MOH recipients from the NSW community, two of whom came from these latest wars, the other three from Vietnam. The medal was created in 1862, when war was more central to the culture’s psyche, and not only because it was occurring on our own ground. Six hundred twenty-five thousand lives were lost in Civil War combat when the U.S. population was at 31.4 million. Those dead were 1.988 percent of the population. For the Global War on Terror, to date, that same number stood at 0.002 percent. And it was not standing still. Jason remembers Kipling reading out loud one night, “Due to the nature of its criteria, the Medal of Honor is often awarded posthumously.” Its ribbon is blue, like water.

What happened that day in ’05, in Kunar Province, is well known within the community; it’s another celebrated story of heroism, battle, and courage, of how wars are fought now against enemies who don’t always look like threats, in places where you wouldn’t want to honeymoon. It’s also emblematic of how operators don’t leave their men behind. That day was a tragedy that involved a moral lesson. Across Teams, guys would argue and analyze the story of the goat herders and their goats, and how the guys that day—there were only four of them—had to decide whether to slaughter the goats, and the herders, or let them go and risk that they talk and betray the operators’ presence to the Taliban. The vote that day came down on the side of conscience. It came down on the side of the herders, who were civilians. You cannot kill civilians.

The herders didn’t keep their secret. The result of that vote of conscience and rule was one of the largest losses of life in the Afghanistan campaign and in Special Operations Forces history. A lieutenant and three petty officers: this was the scope of their brigade. Estimates of the enemy contingent that arrived to take them down: around two hundred. All sixteen men on the quick reaction force copter died; rocket-propelled grenade. The one survivor on the ground was taken in by a Pashtun villager.

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