Sometime in the evening of October 6th 2001, an SH-60 Seahawk from the USS Carl Vinson dropped a group of journalists from Reuters off on my ship. I’d made the mistake of identifying myself as the junior officer in the wardroom who could write legible four sentence press releases so I was the collateral duty “public affairs” officer. For the next 24 hours I was assigned to hang out with the journos when I wasn’t on watch. I got to know them a bit. They covered the war in Bosnia. They were the only ones onboard with combat experience.
We set up cameras around the vertical launch systems. Then the sun went down and the war started when a two story Tomahawk missile rumbled out of the aft vertical launch system.
We got some sweet pics.
I was 24 and on my first deployment as a Naval Officer. Six weeks earlier, after a hard summer of chasing down Operation Southern Watch blockade runners out of Saddam’s Iraq, 9/11 diverted us to the Northern Arabian Sea where we watched the largest naval force since World War II assemble off the coast of Pakistan. For six weeks after the initial strike we followed the USS Carl Vinson and the USS Enterprise around in circles while their dirty winged jets launched and returned clean after air strikes. Vinson all day. Enterprise all night. Or was it the other way around. It doesn’t matter. Nothing really matters from that time. Except that it started.
We finally made it home in December. We were the first unit to participate in the strikes and return home. There was a parade on the pier. I invited a girl I’d emailed from the Northern Arabian Sea. The world had changed. Security at the gates of the pier. Locks on airplane doors. Lines at the airport.
It’s possible that we could have left it at that. We did not.
I left the ship life and joined the snake eaters of the small boats in Naval Special Warfare after that deployment. I got married to that girl I emailed from the Northern Arabian Sea. We invaded Iraq. They sent me to Africa. Nowhere for boats in Afghanistan. The river was already secure in Iraq. Then I got out.
I was working for a mechanical engineering company selling contracts to the Navy when my friend’s wife called me to ask if I knew if her husband was part of Operation Red Wings. She’d heard people were killed. Word had gotten out. I didn’t know. I threw up in toilet after I hung up the phone. 14 years ago a book came out about that day. Eight years ago a movie was released about it.
When the Navy pulled me back in, they assigned me to a group that deployed SOF operators to Afghanistan and Iraq. I was the operations officer. I was coaching a T-ball game with my six year old that I’d had with that girl I emailed from the Northern Arabian Sea when one of the Lieutenants I deployed called me from Afghanistan to tell me his Humvee was blown up. Everyone was ok. But he wasn’t exactly sure who to call. So he used his cell phone to call me at my son’s T-ball game. He was a little off.
Then I took a troop of my own. Half of us went to Iraq. I sent the other half to Afghanistan. I went to Iraq. Saddam was three years dead.
The Afghanistan team left a week before mine. Before my plane took off we got word that my friend Dan, a platoon commander from the SEAL Team I was supporting, stepped on a landmine on their first mission. He lost both his legs above the knee. He’s since graduated from Harvard. And won a gold medal as a biathlete at the Paralympics. I didn’t tell the girl I emailed from the Northern Arabian Sea as I kissed her and our three kids goodbye on the tarmac.
When I got back they assigned me to headquarters in the operations shop of the Naval Special Warfare Command. On my way in to work one day, that girl called me to tell me her mother told her that she saw on the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed. I was the Director of Operations for one of the six major commands in Naval Special Warfare. I learned about it from my mother in law. No one talked about it in the office that day, like not talking to the pitcher during a no hitter. Bin Laden wasn’t in Afghanistan.
I got out again. I went to work in consumer technology. Extortion 17 happened. 23 SEALs were killed in a helicopter crash. I didn’t throw up. It was over.
Sometime after we went to my 20th reunion from Annapolis. We were the great class of' ‘99. We honored one of my classmates and friend who was a Force Recon Marine. He’d done tours in Afghanistan. 5. 6? Maybe 4? He killed himself in a base jumping accident eight years earlier. Most of us were pretty sure he was never the same after his time in Afghanistan. He just needed to find the right thing to jump off of.
Yesterday I read that we’ll be leaving Afghanistan this September. I read the news on Twitter. Which didn’t exist when the war started. On WIFI which didn’t exist when the war started. That girl I didn’t really know before the war started was asleep upstairs still. So were our three teenage children.
Somewhere a politician tweeted that they disagreed with the President’s decision. It wasn’t time to leave yet.
You are a great writer. I’m learning quite a bit-