Here, Right Matters by Alexander Vindman

Author:Alexander Vindman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2021-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Danger

I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

I’d kept in steady touch with one of my early army mentors, Omar Jones, the operations officer who let me run the operation to capture Abu Bakar in Iraq. When I was considering going to the White House to serve on the National Security Council staff, Major General Jones connected me with two senior officers already at NSC, and one of them told me, point-blank, “This will be the most dangerous and challenging environment you’ve ever worked in.”

He added, “including combat assignments.”

This officer had had multiple deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, so I took his point. The danger at NSC would be of a different kind, but the landscape and the people would be just as shifting and unpredictable, the situations possibly harder for someone like me—an infantry officer, not a political animal—to read and respond to. There was little training for the kinds of challenging situations I would now have to face. I’d risen to the top echelon of the profession, and that was exciting: working at the heart of the most sensitive global drama on behalf of the United States. The great strategic conflict between the United States and Russia, my most in-demand area of expertise, had entered a new phase, in part thanks to my work on the Joint staff. The National Security Council was the logical next step. And yet with the increased excitement and importance came increased danger. But as an infantry guy, I knew that at times there’s danger simply in operating at all.

What I couldn’t see clearly were the brewing domestic political schemes in which the Trump administration was even then choosing to involve itself—and how domestic political chicanery would come to involve Russia and Ukraine, the key countries under my purview for U.S. strategy and policy. That’s where the danger lay for me. Not seeing it coming, I would pay a great price.

One of the things I’ve heard said about me, even by those sympathetic to my story, is that, like Icarus of ancient Greek mythology, who flew with feather-and-wax wings, while at NSC, I simply got too close to the sun. The analogy suggests that there might have been hubris involved in my fall from grace at NSC, after I reported the presidential misconduct I was privy to. That action led to my testifying before the House, and to further reprisals, and then to my eventual decision—the hardest fall I took—to retire from the army.

Certainly I’d risen high and fast, with growing confidence. There’s no doubt, too, that at times in my life, my inclination against self-deterrence and my all-important trust in my gut have led me astray. Trying to tough out an ankle injury in Ranger School; jumping supertanker wakes with Eug in a fourteen-foot speedboat; rolling the Humvee that necessitated Operation Cabbage Patch—confidence can be a doubled-edged sword.

But I’d matured—partly thanks to the lessons I’d learned from mistakes like those. Moreover, I don’t think the Icarus reference is apt. I didn’t fall because I flew too close to the sun.

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