True Allegiance

Daily, he missed Ellen more and more. He was thirty-seven now; they’d spent nearly a decade in this on-and-off relationship. It was, he had concluded, inhumane.

One night, he unloaded it all to Ellen. She told him that he’d worked too hard to give it up—that he could still make a difference. He heard the musicality of her voice, her lips kissing him through the phone.

“It’ll be okay,” she said. “It always is.”

“Okay,” he grumbled half-heartedly. “But let’s keep thinking about it.”

“Take a bullet for you, babe,” she said.

“Take a bullet for you, sweetheart,” he replied, their usual sign-off.

He still wanted to go home. More than ever.

Then, all at once, things changed.

It started in May, when Newsweek reported that US interrogators had desecrated a Koran by flushing it down the toilet at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They later retracted the story, but the damage was done. Riots broke out across the Muslim world; at least seventeen people were murdered in the streets of Afghanistan, and more than a hundred brutally injured. Mullahs in the northeast of the country threatened a new jihad against the United States if the interrogators weren’t turned over for sharia prosecution.

The deal for the military bases was all but dead. The administration was scrambling. The Afghan president, in an attempt to appease his inflamed population, demanded that US troops change their rules of engagement to avoid civilian casualties—in the process, endangering more American soldiers.

Then Colonel Brett Hawthorne saved the day.

He’d been ushering a CNN crew around—“Gotta keep these schmucks from reporting that we eat Muslims,” he told Ellen—showing them Kabul. He handed candies to the children, spoke Pashto with the shopkeepers. The marketplace was crowded at this time of day, vendors hawking their wares; the security presence was heavy, too.

All of this fell within the normal spectrum. But Brett felt something was off. He had developed a sixth sense about these things, spending all these years in-country. The market normally buzzed with activity, but now it seemed just a tick too quiet.

The members of the CNN crew were yawning. One of them leaned up against the pole of a stall, camera still fixed to his eye. “Colonel,” he said lazily, “I think we’ve got about enough footage.” Brett turned to speak—and from behind the cameraman, he saw a child on a donkey, about three hundred feet away.

His service weapon, a Beretta M9, was in his hand before he even felt it leave his holster. That motion became smooth after thousands upon thousands of repeats. The cameraman perked up, then swiveled to see what Brett was looking at. Other Marines began to pay attention now, brought their M4s to their shoulders. Vendors swept up their goods, ran from the square, emptying it almost instantaneously.

One of the soldiers moved toward the donkey. “Get away from it!” Brett barked.

The child began to cry. The cameraman zoomed in eagerly. This was absolute gold: a crying Afghan child, frightened to death by the awful Americans. Brett shouted to the kid in Pashto. “They’re watching us, aren’t they?”

The child nodded, tears streaming down his face.

If the soldiers got too close, the Taliban fighters would detonate the donkey, Brett knew.

“Stay back, boys,” Brett shouted, his voice carrying in the still air.

Then he saw it. Because the bomb was mobile, the terrorists couldn’t use one of their hard-lined IEDs—they’d rigged it with a cell phone. Brett could see the phone glowing on the side of the donkey. They were planning to detonate the bomb remotely by calling a number.

And if he called in an EOD team, he knew, the terrorists would simply detonate the bomb, taking the kid with it.

And so he leveled his weapon. The cameraman zoomed in on his face, sweat pouring down his forehead. His thumb fingered the grip, caressed it.

“Come on, baby,” Brett said to himself.

The donkey was now about waddling toward him, the cell phone bouncing in its cloth pack. The child’s eyes went wide.

He fired.

The bullet smashed into the cell phone at an angle, shattering it completely.

The donkey panicked, took off at a dead run right at Brett. Brett fired his handgun two more times into the dirt, forcing the donkey to rear—and then Brett reached up and grabbed its bridle, using his full body weight to pull it to the ground. Then he untied the kid, picked him up off the donkey, and muttered a few comforting words in Pashto.

The kid hugged him around the neck fiercely.

When he looked up, the lens was in his face.

What the hell, he thought.

And he winked.

The video went viral, of course. His face graced the cover of Time—“THE NEW FACE OF THE GOOD WAR,” it touted. The military put him on tour. He became a recruitment tool, the purest example of American military might combined with American caring.

Then Mark Prescott was elected president.