The men surround me in the headlight-lit court. Safety lies two hundred miles east, in the dark, across country none of us knows—back valleys and passes peopled by warriors who will know where we are, how many we are, and where we are heading. Every one of us knows this, and every one feels the fear in his bones.
“Because we went back when we didn’t have to,” I say, “we know something about ourselves that we didn’t know before. You know now, Chris, that if you fall, I won’t abandon you. I’ll come back, if it costs me my life—and so will Q and so will Junk and so will Chutes. And we know the same about you.” A bottle makes the rounds.
“The contract we signed says nothing about honor. The company doesn’t give a shit. But I do. I fight for money, yeah—but that’s not why I’m here, and it’s not why any of you are here either.”
From inside the compound, Col. Achmed and his sons listen. Two hours from now they’ll be hunting us as if we were animals. But for this moment they know us as men, and we know them.
“What we did today in Nazirabad,” I tell my brothers, “would earn decorations for valor in any army in the world. You know what I’ll give you for it?”
I grab my crotch.
Chris Candelaria laughs.
Chutes follows. The whole crew shakes their heads and rocks back and forth.
You have to lead men sometimes. As unit commander, you have to put words to the bonds of love they feel but may be too embarrassed to speak of—and to the secret aspirations of their hearts, which are invariably selfless and noble. More important, you have to take those actions yourself, first and alone, that they themselves know they should take, but they just haven’t figured it out yet.
3
SALTER
MY NAME IS GENTILHOMME. Don’t even try to pronounce it. My friends call me Gent. Even my wife does, or did while I still had her.
I’m from Algiers. Not the one in North Africa.
Algiers, Louisiana.
Algiers is technically part of New Orleans, but you’ll never hear anyone from Algiers admit that. In Algiers, you’re from Algiers. Remember the movie No Mercy, starring Richard Gere and Kim Basinger? That was shot in Algiers. Algiers is rows of white clapboard houses and parking lots paved with seashells. You get the best muffaletta sandwiches in Algiers and the strongest coffee in the South, straight out of the holds of the ships in the port. Algiers is gang country. Cops are crooked there, and so is everyone else. The town is full of Creoles and Cajuns and long-haired dope-smoking crackers; there’s quite a few Greeks and Turks and lately lots of Russians. Gentrification has not hit Algiers.
Tehran is a lot like Algiers. So are Beirut, Mogadishu, Khartoum. Baghdad is too. Journalists usually compare Baghdad to Los Angeles—the sprawl, the palms, the hellish traffic. But Baghdad is more like New Orleans. Same heat and humidity, same bridges, same big river swinging through the center of town. When I got to Baghdad in 2016, I felt right at home. Both places are run by gangs. There’s a boss in every neighborhood, and every man, woman, and child knows who he is. They say it’s tribes and religion in Baghdad, and that’s true. But in the end a militia is nothing but a well-armed gang. It may take to the streets in God’s name, but it plays by the rules of gangland.
In Baghdad, the neighborhoods are segregated from one another physically and emotionally, just like in New Orleans. Each one is run by a different mob, and each mob is at war with every other mob. A man from Baghdad doesn’t think of himself as a Baghdadi. He identifies with his muhalla, his “kitchen,” his clan, and his tribe. Algiers is just like that. It gets down to specific city blocks. “Where you from, man?” When you hear that on some streets back home, the next thing you hear is a gunshot.
Baghdad is like Algiers too in the sense of time-in-place. In Iraq, tribes go back centuries on the same ground. No grievance is forgotten. The blood of wronged ancestors saturates the dirt; the law is revenge and payback. If you’re born there, you’re stuck in it.
Honest government doesn’t exist in Baghdad or Algiers. You can’t get a driver’s license or a satellite dish without paying somebody off. There’s no middle class in either place. In Algiers or Baghdad you rise or fall based on your connections to street power. Justice never comes from the state, only from the tribe and clan, the boss, the sheikh.
What Westerners call corruption is just life in 75 percent of the world. Americans still don’t understand this. We think the rest of the planet is like us, or would be if it had the same advantages. We live in a bubble in the States. We make decisions and establish policy based on dream conceptions of the wider universe. We think everyone is the same as we are. We think they want the same things we want.
They don’t.
They’re not like us at all.
James Salter was the first general officer I ever heard articulate this. The press accused him of permitting a massacre once, in East Africa during the violence in 2022. He said, “I was obeying a more ancient law.” And he was.
I first met Salter in Iraq, six years before that. I was a twenty-six-year-old platoon sergeant with 3/7—Third Battalion, Seventh Marines—in Mosul at the tail end of the second Iran-Iraq war. Mosul is a Kurdish city with powerful Shiite and Sunni minorities. It sits on top of two of the three biggest oil fields in northern Iraq. The Kurds claim it; the Turks want it; the Iranians went to war to take it.
Mosul’s population was about three hundred thousand then, and every district was at war with every other. I was reading Hobbes’s Leviathan at the time. It was my bible. We had a threat board on the wall of our company office, listing the various militias and self-defense fronts, religious armies, criminal gangs, kidnapping rings and tribal jaishes, jamiats, and arbakais that considered us the enemy. One time I counted the entries: thirty-seven. That didn’t count the uniformed and mufti Iranians, Turks, Armenians, Russians, Georgians, Chechens, Syrians, and Saudis, none of whom recognized the legitimacy of any border and all of whom were certain that, wherever the border was, we Americans were on the wrong side of it. Mosul was then one of the two or three most dangerous places on earth. My company’s AO, Area of Operation, included a dense urban district called the Sumer. The first day I saw it, I understood the place. It was just like home.
From the start it was clear there was no hope of “victory.” My job from Day One was to keep my Marines alive. How did I do that? I protected my guys by making up personally to the boss of our neighborhood, a tribal sheikh named Abd el-Kadr.
When I was in high school, I was an all-city basketball player. Because of this, I was known around town; I was friendly with a lot of the mob guys. I would sign balls for their kids or get them tickets to games, that sort of thing. Anyway, the day came when my future was going to be decided. The boss in our part of town was an old Cajun named Jean-Baptiste Robidoux—they called him Robbie—who had a fried chicken and oyster shack that was his “hooch” or his “spot.” He was there every day, in the porch-fronted room off the alley. I forget how it was communicated to me, maybe by one of Robbie’s sons, but it was made clear that I was to show up and pay my respects.
The scheme was exactly the same in Mosul, except when you went to Robbie’s you had coffee and when you went to Abd el-Kadr’s you had chai tea. But there was the same storefront shop, the same back room, same heat outside in the alley, same sons standing around with guns. At Robbie’s, the weapons were out of sight; at Abd el-Kadr’s, they were in the open. In both places the drinks were served sweet and in little tiny cups. In both places you smoked. In both places you talked about the weather or family for fifteen minutes before you brought up anything of substance. To rush things was bad manners.
I told Robbie I wasn’t going to college; I would enlist in the Marine Corps instead. He asked if I had given this serious thought. I was a smart kid; he didn’t want to see me screw up my life. I said I had thought about it a lot. Reluctantly, Robbie approved. A job would be waiting for me if I wanted it. I thanked him.
Robbie handed me three hundred-dolla
r bills. I was a man now. Actually he didn’t hand me the money; he set it down on the corner of the table. I didn’t pick it up; my daddy did it for me. I had Robbie’s blessing now. It was understood that if the law ever pinched me, I would eat my own ass before I’d give up anything about Robbie or his business. At the same time, if my mother or sisters ever needed something that I or my old man couldn’t provide, Robbie would make sure they were taken care of.
When I met Abd el-Kadr, I immediately understood the drill. From the first minute, I was looking to present him with something—a gift of honor, to express my respect and to establish me and my platoon in the same relation to him as I had been to Robbie back home. I hinted around a bunch of times, but the sheikh would never say what was important to him. He was too sly, and the rules of the game said it was my job to figure it out. One day in another part of the city I chanced to come into contact with a young Iraqi hitter showing off his two-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser with a winch on the front.
How did I snug things up with Abd el-Kadr? I snatched that Cruiser. The move was more of a military operation than 90 percent of the raids, sweeps, and counter-IED ambushes 3/7 ran legitimately. I planned and rehearsed it with my guys for three weeks. The problem was that the buck who owned the Toyota was the son-in-law of the sheikh in his muhalla, who was way up in the Nawari, a powerful tribe in the city. These characters are like desert Bedouin; they still wear the traditional dishdashas, the Lawrence of Arabia robes. There would be a bloodbath if they knew who had hit them.
We set up a fake checkpoint and took the car in broad daylight, then made it disappear from the impound lot. We had fake names on our uniforms and everything. We took the Cruiser to a chop shop in el-Kadr’s kitchen, where it was repainted, numbers swapped out, new seats, new upholstery; it was a better job than you could get in Detroit. This was totally off the books; if “higher” found out we’d done this, I’d be in the brig for twenty years. I presented the machine to el-Kadr, who of course already knew all about it. He loved it. The prior group in our AO had lost four killed and thirteen wounded during its seven-month tour; ours in the preceding two months had had three hurt, two badly. After the Cruiser, no one fucked with us. We were bulletproof on those streets.
The Toyota was how I first came into contact with Gen. Salter. This was long before his mercenary days. He was a passionate patriot then, a shooting star not only in the Marine Corps (he had already achieved two spectacular tactical successes—in Yemen and Nigeria) but in all the armed forces.
Salter came from a celebrated military family. His father had been a Special Forces major in Vietnam, who went on to wear three stars before he was killed in a chopper crash during Desert Storm; his mother’s dad was Adm. Scott X. Vincent, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Eisenhower and wrote, among a number of other books, The Projection of Power, which was one of the sacred texts of the neocons during the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Salter’s degree is in history from Northwestern; he has a Ph.D. from Duke in political science and has studied at Oxford and the London School of Economics. Commandant of the Marine Corps was a sure thing for Salter, it was assumed, with chairman of the Joint Chiefs to follow. Salter is a widower; he has one son, Robert, a captain in the Marine Corps.
Salter’s command at that time included all the Marines on both sides of the Iran-Iraq border. He himself was in the field all the time. That was his style. His Jump CP, his mobile headquarters, consisted of three unarmored OIF-era Humvees in charge of a six-foot-four, 240-pound gunnery sergeant named Dainty (his real name), with crews that Salter had trained himself, and an Iraqi “terp”—interpreter—named Sayeed who they called Sam and who Salter trusted with his life. Salter would show up anywhere at any hour and just flop down with his Marines and shoot the shit.
I had to make a report to him once, during an operation about a month after snatching the Cruiser. This was at Bagofah, east of the Tigris, in the pancake country not far from ancient Gaugamela, where Alexander defeated Darius to complete his conquest of the Persian Empire. Gen. Salter kept a straight face through most of the report, then, when I was just about finished, he said, “I see your man Abe’s rolling ’round the hood in a fine new piece of iron.”
I said I’d seen the vehicle; it was definitely a primo ride.
“While a Land Cruiser just like it,” Salter said, “went missing from Rashidiyah at just about the same time.”
I said that Sheikh el-Kadr was an influential man; I was sure he had many connections in the auto sales world.
“Yeah,” said Salter. “I hear he got a helluva deal at Gent’s Motors.”
Salter was one of us. He got it. It was Salter who plucked me out of the enlisted ranks, pushed me through four years of college in twenty-seven months, at Uncle Sam’s expense, and got me to the head of the line for OCS and TBS, The Basis School at Quantico, when the waiting lists for both were eighteen months long. He changed my life. I wasn’t the only one he helped either.
Salter’s Marines loved him. Even after the debacle in East Africa in 2022, when Salter was stripped of his stars like MacArthur in Korea and forced to walk the plank in UltraHi-Def and 3-D, the mass of the ground-pounding grunts still stood with him. He was their kind of commander. Even now, a generation since he had worn the uniform of a conventional U.S. fighting force, he could still attract to his service the savviest military minds and the saltiest trigger pullers, not only from Uncle Sam’s vets but also from seasoned professionals of every English-speaking (and Russian and German and Arabic/Pashto/Dari) outfit in the world.
We cross the Iraq border ninety-six hours after bolting from Col. Achmed’s. Where are Salter and his armatures? It was under Salter’s orders, relayed via his adjutant Pete Petrocelli, that our team made the run into Nazirabad to retrieve the engineers and the technical report that they were preparing.
We strike the UAV screen of the northernmost formation just after noon. A drone picks us up as we descend via smugglers’ tracks from the Zagros Mountains. This is high desert country, cloudless, shadeless, waterless, with a sky so clear we can see the Firefly spy-bird, no bigger than a pizza box, soaring half a mile above us. With intense relief we transmit our security signature and report that we are carrying wounded who need urgent care. The fly’s scanners give us the once-over; within ninety seconds, orders appear on the screen of the All Force Tracker on my dashboard. We are to proceed to a trig point twelve miles east-northeast, where we will be met by a CASEVAC chopper and two HSDs, high-speed picket cars of the perimeter security force. We will be VDBed—video debriefed—in place.
When the commanding officer of any outfit, battalion sized or larger, moves outside the wire—meaning into hostile or potentially hostile territory—he does so shielded by concentric rings of satellite, drone, air, and ground security. Like a flagship at sea, the number one cheese advances as the epicenter of a task force arrayed around him in defensive circles. That’s the way it’s supposed to be—the way, we assume, that Salter will be operating, as commander of the dominant Western combat force in a theater where tactical nukes have supposedly been deployed within the past 120 hours.
But when our team arrives at the debriefing point—a barren wash between two basalt ridges, which coincides with the easternmost point of Force Insertion’s advancing formation—we see not only the two light HSDs that are supposed to meet us, but a cloaking truck, two satcomm dish cruisers, a three-vehicle CAAT antiarmor team, and a pair of eight-wheeled MI-1 fuel tankers. That’s a Jump CP if I’ve ever seen one.
We pull in and brake. The CAAT teams’ missile tubes track us all the way. The comm screens on our dash depixelate, jammed by the cloaking truck. A surveillance satellite looking down would see nothing but fuzz.
“Peace, babies!” Chris dismounts, still in his tux jacket. “It’s only us chickens.”
He and I step forward, readying our scan-tabs to verify our identities. A bearded officer intercepts us. “Drop your drawers, girls. The only ID I trust is a full cavity
search.”
“Hayward,” I say. “You asshole!”
The officer clamps me in a bear hug.
I ask him what scam he’s running in this hellhole.
“Watching out for the boss!”
I introduce Chris. Tim Hayward was an airborne lieutenant colonel when I knew him in Yemen and Uganda, six and seven years ago. He is the most lethal specimen of warrior I have ever known. He ran the assassin’s course at the School of the Americas; he has trained the SAS and the Spetsnaz in chemical and biological warfare. He can kill you with a heart attack, make you choke on a chicken bone, rig your brakes to fail at the exact moment you’re highballing down a mountain pass. He also has a master’s in international relations, five kids, and a gorgeous Belarusian wife who took silver in the biathlon at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
“Come on,” he says, “let’s get your wounded outa here.”
The CASEVAC bird, an extended-range War Hawk comes whoomping in; Hayward and his troopers help Chutes, Q, and Junk get our engineer and the others aboard. Where is Salter? “You’ll see him,” says Hayward, “in sixty seconds.” He leads us over to the video debrief rig, which is just an encryption cam mounted on the light bar of one of their trucks. The operator is just slating Chris and me, when we hear surface engines approaching from the west and see two rooster tails of dust emerge from behind the basalt ridge.
A pair of HSDs skim into view, moving fast and tracking toward us. The vehicles have no armor, no doors, and no windshields—just two aircraft-type seats slung between four all-terrain tires, with a light bar overhead and a roll cage tubed around. Materials are all superlight, stealth composite, even the 2.7-inch rocket clusters topside and finned-round autosights fore and aft. No vehicle that rolls on wheels can keep up with one of these speeders, and nothing that flies can zero its sights on them. I don’t know what the military version costs, but the civilian type, made by Ford with a Rolls-Royce engine, goes for 2.1 mill.