I RETURNED TO THE U.S. a couple of days before Christmas, when the holiday season was in full swing. It was wonderful to see the family again, and to drive through our neighborhood and say hello to friends and neighbors who had no idea where I had been. As usual, our house was warmly decorated and the Christmas tree was up and glowing brightly.
Despite the ambiance, I was unable to muster any holiday spirit, and I had the sense that I had left something undone back in Afghanistan; that maybe I had made the wrong decision in coming home. I was taking a few days of leave during the holidays, but I was anxious to get back to work even though I didn’t know exactly what that would be when I returned. I did know I’d be reporting back to NE Division and that my time with CTC/SO was at its end.
A couple of weeks later, on my first day back at Headquarters, I decided that before reporting in to my new office I would stop by CTC to say hello to my colleagues there. Because the office had moved, I had to find it, and when I did I was impressed by the large office space it now occupied. The place was completely changed. There were many more people assigned there so a lot of faces I didn’t recognize.
While making my cubicle rounds saying hello to the people I knew, I happened to look up at a TV that was tuned to a news channel. I immediately recognized the face in the photograph being shown on the news report, and my stomach knotted up. It was Nathan Chapman, killed in action in Afghanistan. I didn’t want to believe it. Memories of the brief time I had spent with him instantly came flooding to my mind. Recalling his unrelenting humor, his irrepressible energy, and generally larger than life personality, made it even harder to accept that he was now dead.
As the news report continued, pictures of his wife and children were shown. They looked like a perfect family, and I remembered Nathan talking about them while we had breakfast together on my birthday only three weeks before. The reporter commented that Nathan was the first soldier to be killed by hostile fire in Afghanistan. Mike Spann was the Agency’s first enemy-killed casualty, and now Nathan held that distinction for the military.
The people around me headed off to a staff meeting. I was invited to attend but didn’t. After hearing the news of Nathan’s death, I just wanted to escape for a while.
I made my way through the rows of now empty cubicles toward the front door. As I did, I passed by a huge video monitor mounted on the wall. On the screen was a video feed that was streaming live images of six ghostly figures slowly making their way in single file down a dark and barren mountainside. They didn’t look like much more than stick men, their silhouettes glowing white against the mud-brown color of the ground. It was night where they were and they probably thought they couldn’t be seen. But they were wrong. The darkness could not hide them. They were absolutely luminous, in fact.
I looked around to ask if anyone knew where this was taking place, but there was no one to ask. They had all gone to the meeting. It was just the wide screen monitor, the six figures, and me.
There was no sound accompanying the video feed and no noise from the empty office. It was totally quiet. Although the men were thousands of miles away, I felt like I was there, high above their heads, secretly sharing a private moment with them from my omnipotent perch. I continued to watch and noticed that the group was using good military discipline, keeping their distance from one another as they picked their way around rocks and boulders. They made progress, but it was slow and the mountain was big.
Suddenly, silently, something new appeared on the upper left of the screen. It was a piece of earth erupting upward. Circular in shape, it lifted straight out of the ground and directly toward me. It reminded me of a splash of chocolate milk. It was not particularly close to the stick figures, but then, other splashes of earth followed. Rapidly the splashes rose up and within a few seconds they completely filled the screen.
How many splashes were there? I couldn’t tell. Dozens I suspected. I knew they had to be caused by bombs from conventional aircraft. The residue from the explosions filled the air and blended into a solid gray haze that obscured my view of what laid below. It didn’t matter. I knew that even if I could have seen the ground clearly, I wouldn’t have been able to see the stick figures anymore. They had been transformed from ghostly silhouettes to just ghosts.
I realized this was how it had all started those months before. Me standing in front of a screen, not at CIA, but at FBI Headquarters, watching violent images of planes crashing, buildings falling, and people dying. Now it was ending for me in much the same way. The difference this time was that the violence I was watching was not happening in my country, and it was not innocent people who were dying. Given the nature of the counterterrorism business, that was probably as good an indicator of success, or at least progress, as any.
I remained alone standing in front of the now dark monitor in the quiet room. Everyone was still at the meeting. It was business as usual, something I would have to get used to. It was Headquarters after all.