Send a Courier

Those who work without knowledge will damage more than they can fix and those who walk quickly on the wrong path will only distance themselves from their goal.

—Arabic proverb

The field station’s reply awaited me the following evening when I returned from my session with CAPTUS: Not possible, can’t spare anyone to courier them. Not possible to send them. The field station offered to send them to Headquarters, however. Headquarters could then send them on to me.

“Bah!” I said to the computer screen.

This was a useless proposal. It would take many weeks for the documents to arrive. It would take far too long. Headquarters was for all practical purposes as far away from me as the country where the papers now sat futilely—and I needed them here. For all practical purposes, as far as this aspect of the case was concerned, I was working in a pre-electronic and pre-aviation era.

The text on my computer screen was green. I tend to work with the overhead lights of my office off. My officemate had finished for the day shortly after I had come back from the interrogation facility. I looked around the cramped, slightly musty office, glancing at the stacked gray safes, the maps piled on a credenza, the drawn venetian blind of the window by my desk, and the one personal touch someone had put there: a wall calendar of scenes of small-town American life.

I knew how to resolve this little dilemma. I cabled my reply, the words floating green and disembodied before me in the near dark. Of course, I thanked the field for their explanation and expressed understanding for their resource constraints. I then cabled Headquarters, requesting that they send a courier from the United States to the station holding the documents to retrieve them and bring them to me, the interrogation team leader. Headquarters existed to manage and facilitate field operations. CAPTUS was an HVT, a high-priority detainee; his documents were critical to the interrogation. And with my request, I had just arranged for someone to get a trip around the world for me.

I stretched a moment, satisfied at my solution, and strolled to a different part of the station to chat briefly with a couple of colleagues who were also working late. One of them described his work briefly.

This colleague’s operation was equally important as mine, but had an entirely different tenor, I thought. He had a lot to work with.

I was envious. My colleague had a straightforward case. He was interrogating someone who really did have blood on his hands.

“So my guy plays dumb, or we’re stupid to have him,” I said, sitting on the edge of a desk, “and your guy is an arrogant, benighted, little shit with a death wish.”

“That seems to be about it,” my colleague replied.

My operational cables, intelligence reports, trace requests, accounting reports, comments on field queries, requests for guidance and “requirements” based on information I had obtained that day, comments on intelligence reports and operational cables received from elsewhere in the world that were relevant to my work concluded, I shut down the computer, spun off the safe, secured the office, and left the focused quiet of the office to drive through sultry night air to a dinner party at a colleague’s house. I arrived well into the dinner. He had been kind enough to invite several of us long-term TDYers for an evening of tall tales and American beer. The gathering was perfectly pleasant, amidst our host’s collection of African memorabilia.

I enjoyed speaking for a while with one of the officers present, a former career soldier named Josh. He was XXXXXXXXX rangy and fit XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX. Josh was not an experienced case officer, but he struck me as a solid professional I would trust. He had spent many years in one dusty or dank Third World backwater or another XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX . Josh spoke perfect Arabic. He spoke softly but was frank, and with understated amusement and irritation noted people’s self-deluding foibles. He made these observations more from an instinctive inclination to pith cant than from malice. He spoke simply and directly, and distrusted those who spun tales or puffed themselves up. I found Josh engaging, confident enough in himself to acknowledge ignorance and to welcome help.

Over dinner, though, Josh found himself the somewhat unwilling star of the evening. One of the dinner party guests prevailed upon him to relate the astounding tale of one of his XXXXXXXXXXX XXXX training exercises many years earlier. He told us that he had been doing airborne training. Routine. He said that he enjoyed the free fall directly out of the plane, as he had many times before. At the appropriate altitude he pulled on the rip cord . . . and the chute failed to open.

Josh said that he had not felt any particular fear, just irritation at the technical failure. He wrestled with his chute for several thousand feet of descent, trying to get it to billow and open. He twisted and turned, wrestled and pulled. Nothing. Finally, with only seconds before he smashed into the ground, he said that he suddenly remembered that he had a reserve chute. “I felt really stupid. That was my main sentiment—that was all,” he said. He hastened to pull the string on the reserve but was too late. He crashed through tree branches, which broke his fall to some extent, but he still hit the ground at high speed. The impact broke his back. In an amazing stroke of luck, the break did not paralyze him. He healed over the course of six months and was able to return to active service.

“I always knew as I was falling that I would survive,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Never doubted it. I was too busy to feel scared. I just felt stupid. A tree limb broke my fall. My last words were ‘Oh, shit!’”

The one other truly memorable twist to the evening was when our host, to his wife’s good-natured chagrin and the consternation of the neighbors, insisted on wildly playing his bagpipes outside in his garden for twenty minutes, causing all the neighborhood dogs to bay and howl and yap and bark to the dissonant trills and wheezes of the “music.”