News From the Red Desert (30 page)

Walking now, along a well-established footpath. The soldiers seemed more relaxed. Lattice was just ahead of her. “Is this a denial-of-terrain patrol?” she asked.

“No. We don't really do that. The regular army does that fly-the-flag thing. We generally have more concrete objectives.”

“Can you say what that is, today?”

“You know I can't.”

“Can you tell me after you've achieved it?”

“No. But you might draw your own conclusions if you pay attention.”

They were being listened to by the men in front of and behind them. He could no more be seen to be toadying to her than she could, to him. Though everyone in earshot understood that each of these was more interested in the other than anyone on the patrol actually carrying ammunition.

“What you're seeing here is pretty important, even if there isn't a lot of noise right now.”

“Oh?”

“It's like when the tanks were first used at Cambrai in 1918, and suddenly barbed wire could be overcome. Or the sinking of
Prince of Wales
and
Renown
by Japanese torpedo bombers in 1941. In an afternoon battleships became obsolete after sucking up wealth from nations aspiring to greatness for half a century.”

“So what are the current battleships?”

“Armies.”

“Guys like you?”

“Armies aren't guys like me.”

“Every time we invade Iraq we seem to need them, though.”

“We really have to stop doing that.”

“Were we just going to leave the Republican Guard in Kuwait?”

“For a little while, yeah. And blockade them completely. And work from the inside to paralyze the administration. Support the Marsh people uprising, like we said we would. They would have left Kuwait.”

“It worked out, though, that first time. One-hundred-hour ground war. We kicked butt, and got the Japanese to pay for it.”

“The ‘kicking butt' is exactly the problem. All that rah-rah media attention and war-as-infotainment. The worst thing you can do is win a war so handily.”

“The worst thing you can do is win?”

“A war like that, yes. CNN all the time, hardly any casualties, no pain at all at home.”

“Why?”

“ 'Cause then you're just going to go back for more.”

“Winning Gulf War One caused Gulf War Two? Caused 9/11?”

“In about a hundred ways.”

“What's the alternative?”

“SF. No media. No rah-rah. Quiet and shameful things done away from the light. Things that reasonable people understand to be necessary but no one is proud of.”

“Is this off the record, General?”

“No. If something can't be printed, I won't say it.”

“People back home are pretty proud of you guys,” she puffed, as they began to climb a slope.

“They have no idea what they're proud of. Industrial-scale armies need that pride, that rah-rah, because they're so expensive and obvious and visible. So they work it all up, have parades, surround themselves with cameras. And that makes more war inevitable.”

“From your point of view, that's a bad thing?”

“We haven't won a big war since 1945. We should stop fighting them. We do pretty well with the little ones, though.”

Deirdre caught her breath enough to say, “This isn't all just off the top of your head, is it?”

They obtained a goat from a shepherd. A sergeant from Wisconsin, an avid deer hunter, cut its throat and dressed it. It took them a long time to get a fire lit and a bed of coals established, but now they had it on the spit and were roasting it. An hour until sunset. The fire was smoky.

“I thought you guys were on hard rations all the time.”

“MREs are heavy. We try to be self-sufficient.”

“I doubt you've let them roast a goat before, though. The smoke, the conversation with the shepherd—this is for my sake, isn't it?”

“For the sake of your article.”

“Which is the whole reason I've come along.”

“Of course.”

“I mean, you have an agenda.”

He looked at her. “Everyone has an agenda. Ask me what mine is.”

“What's your agenda?”

“To save this shit show from descending completely into chaos.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“By changing the conversation about another surge of mechanized infantry and armour divisions to a different, smarter strategy altogether.”

“By spending half your afternoon on Roasting-Goat Theatre?”

He laughed. “No. Now go get your plate and line up with the men.” He sharpened his KA-BAR on a whetstone. He would be doing the carving.

“Sir, yessir.”

He looked up at her sternly. His mouth was tight. His eyes were not, however, and she nodded at him and stopped herself from smirking. He did-not-smirk back at her. She walked over to her pack to pick up her plate. And her camera. That crackling goat was an arresting image, however staged. Pity they weren't still patrolling on horseback.

When the C-17 finally came to a halt and throttled back, Chayse Simpson, Rami Issay and Major Horner had been waiting for Sara Miller's arrival for three hours. As the roar of the turbo fans settled, the people on the tarmac took their fingers from their ears. Those really were preposterously large transports. Three times the size of the C-130 Hercules. The ramp went down and the battalion of engineers began filing out. There seemed to be no one plausibly associated with a TV network on board, but then a tall woman, dressed in black combat boots, black jeans and a black leather jacket, emerged onto the tarmac with the pilots and the battalion commander. She lowered her sunglasses and looked around. Simpson waved and Sara Miller walked toward them. Major Horner thought she was walking toward him with anticipation. Simpson had dealt with her enough to wish that she really was.

As she drew nearer, Rami Issay worried out loud that he was not sufficiently well dressed. Simpson snapped: “For the love of God. This is Kandahar. She doesn't want to see you in a business suit.” Then: “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to speak sharply.”

“My child, think nothing of it. I understand the stress you are under.”

And for a moment she thought, maybe he really did. And she felt both grateful for his kindness and guilty for her part in what was about to be done to him.

“So, just to be clear. This was never about me learning about SF in the field at all, is it? It's about you launching your broadside. Strategy debate in the media age. You're going to be a YouTube video.”

“If you wish to post this online, I have no objections.”

She balanced the video camera on a rock so that his face remained in frame. “Don't you have to run this sort of thing through your people?”

“They suggested I write a book.”

“What's wrong with writing books?”

He snorted. “There's been a lot of books written. They change nothing.”

“What does?”

“A
Rolling Stone
cover.”

“Jann Wenner would be horrified to hear that generals want him to help them shape policy.”

“No, he wouldn't.”

She paused for a second and considered the point. “You're right. He probably wouldn't.”

“Everyone wants to control the narrative.”

“Clearly.”

“Except the amateurs, maybe.”

“Like who?”

He didn't smile. “So you wanted to ask me about what we've learned from Operation Enduring Freedom?”

“All right, General. Ready? Okay: ‘General Lattice, what would you say have been the important lessons of this war?' ”