Chapter Three
BE BRAVE
Energetically will I meet the enemies of my country… under no circumstances will I ever embarrass my country.
—RANGER CREED
You discover how brave you can be when someone or something you love is threatened. I love America. Some academics—I like to call them the smaht kids with my best Boston accent—try to make this complicated, but it is actually very simple: patriotism is loving, respecting, and serving your country. I am a patriot, and it makes me brave. The time I have spent overseas makes me feel grateful to be an American citizen, confident that the United States is the greatest country on earth, and determined to defend this country and our values. That does not mean I don’t respect or admire some other countries. But I think the United States is special, and I’m not worried about offending the politically correct when I say that. The American flag means something to me when I see it raised, and I am willing to give my life to protect a fellow American if I have to. I think I’ve proved that.
I wear my beliefs and experiences on my body. I’ve got a lot of scars and a bunch of tattoos. One of my tattoos is a flag on the left side of my rib cage that gives the appearance that my skin is getting ripped open and there is an American flag inside of me. The flag is colored red and blue, and the stars are white. I have a Ranger scroll and Ranger tab on my left arm and a crusader cross on my left bicep, with the Ranger crest outlined on it. It symbolizes keeping my own demons in check and also symbolizes my job.
Rangers are like avenging angels and guardian angels, who are pushing back the evil in this world. There is evil out there, and certain people don’t understand that. Many of us want to believe that everyone and everything can be reasoned with. The facts, to me, suggest otherwise. Sometimes you can’t reason with other people. Sometimes they will kill you, either purposefully or because they just don’t care if you happen to be in their line of evil fire. I think this is hard to see clearly when you are living in the United States.
I don’t do what I do because of politics. Once the bullets start to fly, all the political bullshit goes out the window. Bullets do not care about your party affiliation, race, gender, or anything else. Once an operation starts, I am focused on my job and my job has been part of a larger interest, like protecting the country; helping to stop terrorism; or helping destroy or disrupt an attack. Make no mistake, the United States will continue to see lone-wolf attacks against us. Political correctness and partisan differences must be set aside to fight them. We must protect ourselves, and you can’t be afraid to say what you really mean.
I was born in Alamosa, Colorado, a small town on the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, where I spent the early part of my childhood. My mother was my first-grade teacher, and my father was a football coach at Adams State College. I have a younger brother and older sister, and the elementary school we went to was way out in the middle of nowhere.
My brother and I are only a year and a half apart, so we played together constantly growing up. We spent most of our time outside, climbing trees, riding bikes, looking for little bird’s nests and going toad hunting. At that time and place, parents weren’t too worried about their kids playing around the neighborhood, so my golden lab and I would routinely roam on our own to the river about a mile away from our house. No one thought anything of it.
I loved to fish with my grandfather, and I was always out shooting and hunting jackrabbits. I think I got my first BB gun in first or second grade. All the neighbor kids used to have BB gun fights, but our parents stopped that when I shot my brother by accident. My mom gave me a good whipping with my gun and broke it, but my dad felt sorry for me and eventually got me another one. By the time I was in third grade, I had a motorbike and I got in a few good wrecks with that and hurt myself some, but it didn’t seem like a big deal. All that activity and independence seemed very normal, and I think it has served me well.
The childhood I’m describing might sound pretty western and traditional, but my family has our immigrant heritage, which is also part of the American story. My full given name is Kristian Joaquin Paronto. The Joaquin is for my grandfather on my mother’s side, Joaquin Garcia. He was an immigrant from Mexico with an incredible work ethic who came to this country with nothing and eventually built up his own farm in Delta, Colorado. I spent a lot of my childhood running around that land, picking asparagus or shooting, hunting, or fishing. My grandmother’s heritage was Mexican and Navajo Indian. My Spanish is just OK, but it comes rushing back when I’m immersed in a primarily Spanish-speaking environment.
My family fit in with the Mexican community, which was prevalent in Alamosa, where I lived, and in Delta, where my grandparents lived at that time. My brother and I spent time with the kids and migrant workers whose families worked the nearby farms, playing baseball, football, and having rock fights on the country roads. One of the migrant workers from Mexico might have even saved my life when I was around seven years old. We were playing hide-and-seek, and I cracked my head open on the back of a potato truck. I was bleeding, but I had been hiding, so nobody knew where I was. My cousin stumbled over me and ran for help, and it was one of the migrant workers helping on my grandparents’ farm who carried me back to my grandma in his arms.
I grew up believing that the United States is the greatest country in the world, but I did not grow up wanting to be an Army Ranger. I started to think about serving, generally, when I was a student at Mesa State University and began to talk with recruiters from different branches of the military. The Army recruiter in the student center showed me a video from the 75th Ranger Regiment, and I was intrigued. I remember asking him, “Do guys ever quit when they’re trying to become Rangers?” He replied with an emphatic, “YES!!” and I was sold. I wanted to test myself. It seemed tough, but I don’t think I really understood what I was joining until I actually got into the Army. Seeing men who had been serving as Rangers for their whole careers was inspiring. The respect that other guys in the military showed me when I said I was planning to be a Ranger was motivating. Once I actually began training and testing to be a Ranger, I knew I had found my path.
Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, Delta Force operators, Green Berets, Air Force Pararescuemen, MARSOC (US Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command), and other elite forces in various military branches are part of the special operations community. The different branches of the military have unique areas of expertise and some distinctive forms of training, but all special ops units are made up of skilled soldiers, Rangers, Marines, seamen, and airmen who have trained and tested in special selection courses under intense and brutal conditions. The 75th Ranger Regiment is the largest special ops combat element in the US Army and the best light infantry fighting force on the planet. Rangers can be sent to the front lines and beyond, deep into enemy territory. If special ops forces are called in, it’s going to be a high-pressure situation. We are expected to perform not just adequately but heroically, no matter what is going on. We are trained to be a strike force that can be called on to rescue civilians, prisoners of war, or other forces in trouble; to go into hostile territory to monitor or assess enemy operations; and to seize, destroy, or capture enemy airfields and facilities.
Our team in Benghazi were all former special operators and Marines who brought our training, skills, and commitment to bear on September 11, 2012. We had all been prepared for operations that might be riskier than regular military operations either because of different techniques being used or because there could be fewer assets and less support than there might be in a conventional battle.
What makes someone volunteer to put his life on the line by going into enemy territory? For me, it is patriotism, love, and gratitude for the blessing of my citizenship. I grew up believing that the United States was the greatest, most powerful nation in the world. I took many of the comforts and freedoms we enjoy for granted. Many Americans still take the rights and freedoms established in the Constitution for granted. Some want to pick and choose among constitutional rights and downplay some of them, such as the right to bear arms, to worship as we will, or to speak freely. I believe the threats against our freedoms are real. We need to name those threats and fight them when we see them, with honesty and integrity.
Whenever I come home to the United States after working overseas, it is like taking a trip to Disneyland. Americans do not appreciate how well we have it. Now, you might find it hard to feel the truth of that if you are struggling to get by. Or you might be skeptical because you have just returned from a vacation overseas and things looked pretty good wherever you were staying. No. People all around the world are suffering in ways most of us in the United States don’t have to think about. Children are hungry and unsafe, living in chaotic and hopeless situations. I don’t recommend it, but go live in one of the places I’ve been and immerse yourself in the culture, eat the food, and live off the local economy, and then get back to me. Many Americans do not appreciate the simple reality that we are largely able to go about our daily lives and pursue our goals freely and safely, without the threat of government repercussions and without the real possibility of an IED explosion while we’re out running our errands. Maybe some of us have a little more of that fear now, but it cannot be compared to the situations in which many people live around the world.
My views are informed by my time on the ground and the many episodes of violence I have witnessed. A particular day in Baghdad in 2005 while I was providing security for the State Department is never far from my mind. I was the detail leader for a visit that the acting ambassador was making to the compound of a local imam in the Mansour district of Baghdad. This was not a covert operation. We were the visible security for the Department of State, and I was there with a huge team all day. The meeting between the ambassador and the imam lasted for several hours, and I was working outside the compound all day. The atmosphere was tense, and the visit was attracting a lot of local attention. My buddy Joe noticed civilians using their cell phones to take pictures of our armored Suburbans and the Humvees of the military convoy that had come with us. A black Mercedes sped up and seemed to be starting to make a run at the front gate of the compound, but Joe went out with a mini–machine gun and drew down on the car from about seventy-five feet away. He deterred the car, which went flying past the compound. So a few things felt eerie, but, at the same time, it was a pretty normal day in Baghdad.
People were going about their normal activities in the neighborhood, and children were playing at their homes. I remember seeing two schoolgirls play in the yard across the street from the back gate of the imam’s compound. They looked like sisters, maybe seven or eight years old, in little jeans and T-shirts and plastic flip-flops. They were bouncing a ball and playing outdoors in their yard all day. I’m careful when I interact with local children overseas because I don’t ever want to frighten them or get them into trouble, but I also want to be friendly and have them think well of us. At some point during the day, I waved at them, and one of them waved shyly and smiled and then kept playing. I thought about how surreal it must have been to have our kind of security detail as the background of their normal childhood activity.
When it was time for the ambassador to leave, I went ahead with a military Humvee to set up a tactical control point (TCP) about a quarter of a mile away for his trip back to the embassy. When you set up a TCP, you block an intersection so that the person you are protecting can go through quickly and avoid an attack. When you are stopped at an intersection, you can become a vulnerable target for a vehicle bomb, especially if you seem as if you might be of high value. We set up and waited for the ambassador, who was taking longer than expected. As you can imagine, any delays were annoying to the locals because we were tying up their traffic. As we waited and traffic backed up, another US military convoy going about its own business in the other direction got stuck in the roadblock, too. Finally, the ambassador’s car shot through, and I guided the convoy to bypass the line while we held the TCP for the trail team that was following the ambassador. As I waited, feeling good that we were about to wrap up the day up, there was a huge explosion. A VBIED (vehicle-borne improvised explosive device) had detonated at the imam’s compound. Even from my distance, I could feel it rattle the ground and see the smoke and dust that immediately rose into the sky, carrying debris. I called the trail team on the radio, confirmed that they were OK, and held the TCP for them to get through. Our whole team was, miraculously, intact. As we followed them back toward the embassy into the Green Zone, I saw one of the helicopters we called Little Birds peel off back toward the explosion site.
When the pilot returned, he was upset and full of news about our close call. It sounded as though a black Mercedes had set up by the back gate of the compound and the other military convoy that I had let through the TCP had gotten hit. I don’t know if it was the same car that had taken a run at the front gate earlier in the day. And I don’t know if the convoy just became a target of opportunity as it drove by, but it was hit and a soldier in an upper turret of the Humvee was injured. The Little Bird picked him up, and the pilot told me about flying him back for medical help. He also told me about seeing a father holding his little girl, who had been cut in half by that VBIED. I felt sick because I knew he was talking about one of the girls I had watched playing off and on all day long. The girls had been in their own yard, right across from the back gate.
About a month before the VBIED exploded in front of those little girls, I was standing on Haifa Street in Baghdad, right outside a spot known as Little Assassins’ Gate when a big cargo truck came flying toward me. I raised my machine gun in one hand, pinched all five fingers of my other hand together, and raised them skyward. That is called “the onion,” and people understand it to mean “back off.” The truck kept coming. I had seconds to make a decision about whether to pull my trigger. I considered the truck, thinking that normally a VBIED would be smaller. There appeared to be more than one person in the cab of the truck, which was also not normal for a car bomb. As they got closer, I could see that one of the passengers was a kid. The car screeched to a stop about fifteen feet in front of me. The man driving looked terrified, and so did the young boy, about seven or eight years old, sitting next to him. I approached the cab slowly with my gun up and pulled a picture of my own son out of my pocket. I put it up against the window so they could see it. I pointed back and forth between the picture and myself, and then I pointed at his son and smiled. The driver relaxed, smiled, and pulled over.
GRS guys are often assigned to protect diplomats, but I sometimes think that we were ambassadors in our own way. Official ambassadors spend their time meeting with ministers and dignitaries. We are interacting with people on the ground, and in some cases we are the first Americans they meet. That is why it is critical that GRS operators not be tightly wired all the time.
The reality of my job is that we aren’t sent anywhere to make friends. We are trained to protect and defend, which sometimes requires attacking. Ranger training is all about preparing for the reality of what that means. Before you can go to Ranger School, first you must go through what is now called the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program (RASP). When I was going through training it was called the Ranger Indoctrination Program (RIP), and that is how I am going to refer to it here. The experience is always changing, but the purpose of the program is to teach the basic skills required of a Ranger and to assess a soldier’s ability to be a member of the 75th Ranger Regiment. I entered it after I completed basic training and Airborne School.
On the first full day of RIP, everyone was medically processed and we were assigned to our rack at the barracks, four guys to a room. There were paintings and murals on the old cinder-block walls of the hallways in our barracks. There were images of scrolls with Ranger berets and one of a Ranger shooting an M-16. I don’t know who painted them or when they were painted. They felt a little like accomplished graffiti or even a public art project, not unlike what you’d see in a park, except for the subject matter. I walked to the end of a long hallway to get my linens and stopped in my tracks. There was a life-sized painting of a Viet Cong from the torso up, and his head was exploding with a bullet through it. It was large, technically skillful, realistic, and shocking. It felt authentic, as though the artist had known what he was painting. I was reminded, when I looked at it, that war is death. Of course, I had thought about that many times, but there was something about seeing that painted image in that space that was different from watching a movie. These guys are death dealers, I thought, and I’m training to join them. I remember wondering if I was doing the right thing. Am I OK to kill somebody like that? Right in the head? I wasn’t sure how to interpret the image, either. Was it promoting death? Almost celebrating it? I couldn’t decide. I wondered if this was right and whether I should quit.
If anyone quit over that picture, I’ll never know. But it gave me a good rattling, and I imagine it rattled some other guys too. It is important to acknowledge the reality of war. War is not reasonable. War happens when you can no longer reason with the enemy. People will die. They will die in awful ways. It’s important to acknowledge the gravity of what you could be asked to do. I accepted it. This was going to be my job. I wasn’t thinking “This is cool.” You don’t want to kill anybody, you want to live and let live in peace. But sometimes you have to kill people to keep other people safe and you have to kill people if they’re trying to kill you. The enemy should know that if they push us, if they come after us, we will blow their heads right off.
Radical Islam is a threat to the United States. It is the defining national security challenge of our time. We will lose the battle if we don’t get serious and coordinated about fighting it. I don’t want us to experience in the United States what I got used to over the last ten years overseas, listening to gunfire and explosions and seeing people, including children, blown up in front of my eyes. It might be hard to wrap your head around it, but that could happen here if we don’t stand up and fight.
People and policy makers need to listen to the men and women who have been immersed in that culture and who have actually fought on the ground. When I, or other veterans, speak about this, it is not based on things we have watched on television or read on Twitter. I believe that we need a series of congressional hearings and a new 9/11 Commission–style report to help us strategize properly. And I believe that the leadership of that commission should include elected representatives who actually have experience, on the ground, fighting in the Global War on Terror. People who watch the fight on monitors in a war room are not enough.
Pro-American Muslims have an important role to play in this battle. Particularly in Afghanistan, I have worked closely on the ground with many fine Muslim people who were working as interpreters or guarding our gates, and I was moved by their commitment to the United States.
In Kabul, our government was working with the Afghan National Army (ANA) to provide security for the outer perimeter of Camp Phoenix off of Jalalabad Road (we used to call it J-bad). The ANA’s responsibilities included checking the identification of anyone who approached the main gate of the outer perimeter of the camp. Remote detonation of bombs was less frequent at that time, so if someone pulled up in a VBIED, he wanted to get as close as possible to the target before detonating himself by putting two wires together to initiate the explosion. The US military was the next gate down, so our forces were capable of quickly swarming a car or overpowering an enemy. The ANA was the first line of defense.
We started calling one of the guards on that team “Rambo.” It was an unlikely nickname for an unassuming guy in his thirties who was about five feet seven, but he had guts. As cars approached the gate, the drivers had to roll down their windows to answer his questions or he wouldn’t let them through. On at least three verified occasions, Rambo physically dived into a VBEID and fought to hold the driver’s hands apart so that he could not detonate. Not once, not twice, but three times, this Afghan citizen stopped attacks on our military with his bare hands, by jumping in and putting his own body on the line to keep a terrorist from igniting a bomb.
Rambo was a man of extraordinary courage, as are many of the pro-American Muslims who take risks to help us overseas. There are many people of Middle Eastern heritage who love and admire America, who have served in and alongside US forces, and who have demonstrated real dedication to freedom. These people have enormous value in the fight against radical Islam. They are patriots and deserve our support. But we must also abandon political correctness and overhaul our vetting system for immigrants and refugees for every person coming in from anywhere, not only the Middle East.