Free The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan by Michael Hastings

McChrystal.
    McChrystal’s staff is worrying too much. He gets only one question about Camp Nama—from Senator Carl Levin. He admits to Levin that he was “uncomfortable” with the harsh interrogation techniques used to gather intelligence in Iraq, and says that he “reduce[d]” them when he took over in 2003. He’s got a line prepared on Tillman: “We failed the family,” he says, five years after Pat Tillman’s death. “I apologize for it.”
    Tillman’s parents and the interrogator aren’t getting much traction in the press. They are more or less ignored. The headlines from the confirmation reflect that McChrystal is preordained—he’s Mullen and Gates’s handpicked choice; nothing is going to stop him from getting the job. N EW A PPROACH TO A FGHANISTAN L IKELY, reads
The Washington Post
; N EW C OMMANDER S AYS A FGHAN W AR I S “W INNABLE,” says another paper; and M C C HRYSTAL N OT S URE I F M ORE U.S. F ORCES N EEDED IN A FGHANISTAN , says
U.S. News & World Report
.
    McChrystal gets unanimous confirmation from the Senate. On June 9, 2009, he gets his fourth star.

11    TOTALLY SHIT-FACED
     
APRIL 16, 2010, PARIS
     
    A man I’ll call C. was sitting against the wall in The Duke’s Bar, a cushy hotel watering hole with dark lighting and oak panels on the ground floor of the Westminster. The younger members of the team—Dave, Khosh, and Casey—were crushed in the booth around him.
    C. was a member of the SAS, the most elite British commando unit, and if I used his real name, I could possibly put his life at risk. He was on leave from Afghanistan, and he’d taken the train from London to Paris to hang out with McChrystal’s team. C., in his early thirties, was a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. He was flying back to Kabul on Monday.
    C., I’m told, is a crazy motherfucker. He liked to drive around Kabul in a Toyota Land Cruiser. He kept a nine-millimeter pistol in the driver’s side door compartment, an MP5 submachine gun resting on the driver’s side seat, a LAW rocket launcher in the backseat, and a machine gun mounted in the trunk.
    C. was in the middle of a story: One of his Afghan soldiers had gotten fucked up in a gunfight, badly burned. He needed to get medical help, so he drove the soldier, who was screaming occasionally when not passedout, to a base where Italian doctors were on staff. The Italians refused to treat the patient—he was an Afghan, and they needed some kind of permission first, and it appeared that permission would take hours to get. C. told them to fuck off and tried the next clinic, run by French military doctors. “The fucking frogs told us the same thing,” C. said.
    C. was getting really pissed off. His Afghan soldier was getting closer to death. He drove him to another NATO base. The guards phoned up a doctor. C. talked to the doctor—she seemed like a nice lady, he said.
    Five minutes later, an American man showed up. Where is the doctor? C. asked him. “I’m the doctor,” the man said. “What can I do to help?” He had a really high-pitched voice.
    “The guy was a fucking poof,” C. said. “I swear to God I was expecting to see a girl.” The American doctor treated the Afghan soldier and saved his life. “That American was a good fucking guy,” C. recalled.
    The team jumped back into a conversation about last night’s drama—McChrystal’s dinner with the French minister. Khosh, the Afghan aide-de-camp, had gotten snubbed. The American military attaché in Paris, a colonel, realized that he didn’t have a seat at the table when McChrystal and his entourage arrived to dine with the minister. Rather than bringing this up to McChrystal or the staff, the American attaché pulled Khosh aside and told him he was taking his seat at the table. He made Khosh wait outside for the entire meal.
    This incensed the team.
    “Where the fuck was that attaché’s last posting? Hawaii, then Paris? I mean, what the fuck?” said Dave.
    “It’s fine,” Khosh