Forty-Eight X (6 page)

Dr. Wagner’s purchase was handed over to him surreptitiously in a darkened movie theater in Palo Alto. When he exited into daylight, Wagner was surprised to find himself holding an old children’s Winnie-the-Pooh lunch pail filled with dry ice containing sixteen tubes with less than one hundred milliliters of fluid and a few billion sperm. No one took notice. He was just another eccentric professor walking about town. The specimens were then stored in the cryogenic vaults of Stanford University’s genetic research department under the nondescript acronym NOBPRIS. Only Professor Wagner needed to know it was Nobel Prize sperm. It was unusually propitious, he thought, for these unique specimens to fall into his hands at this time. After all, he was, perhaps, the only person in the world who had a truly good use for them.

In the next few days, there were other calls he would make—to his daughter and to his closest friend. They were good-byes, although neither knew it. All his usual relationships were about to end. Professor Julius Wagner had made a bargain that Robert Graham, Francis Galton, and Charles Darwin would have envied. He was about to play God. His bargain, however, was not with the red-horned, pitchfork-wielding devil. It was with the United States government, the devil we all know.

I
t was not until the morning after that first test of his special forces that Colonel McGraw realized one of their weapons had been left behind. Like other seemingly inconsequential events, this one would prove to have far-reaching consequences. And Link McGraw was all too familiar with unintended consequences.

Two years earlier he had led a convoy down the streets of Mosul. The lead vehicle was an HMMWV (M1025) or High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, the colloquial Humvee. The M1025 was equipped with armor and mounted with an M2 .50-caliber machine gun. The crew was trained to scan the terrain before them. The driver kept to the middle of the road and slowly pumped the gas pedal, speeding up and slowing down as if the road was a roller coaster of hills rather than to infinity flat. Two others peered out from an open hatch in the rear.

On the side of the road, Iraqi men were doing “make work” jobs—raking a nonexistent garden on a dirt median strip. With the recorded chant of a muezzin from the ubiquitous minarets, the “gardeners” would stop their work and take time out to lay out their carpets for afternoon prayers. The convoy watched them carefully as they rolled past, fingers on the triggers. Most of the women they passed wore black
chadors
and carried sacks of household food or supplies atop their heads. The children, caked in dust, made play with rocks and dirt, or sticks they pretended were guns. Every once in a while a collection of emaciated dogs would bark and give the convoy a brief token chase.

There was plenty of garbage on the side of the road. But small stuff, household garbage that seemed to perpetually blow in the wind. No one watching seemed concerned about the larger carcass of a dead dog lying not unexpectedly more in the middle of the road. Leave dead dogs where they lay. The sky was pale blue, without a wisp of a cloud. There was not even a hope of rain to dispel the sauna-like climate. The desert air smelled faintly of eucalyptus and lime, but nothing was in bloom. It was just a desert farmer’s burn. And then in an instant, that sweet smell changed to the tearful odor of cordite.

A roadside bomb was embedded in the carcass of the dead dog. The “improvised explosive device,” or IED, contained one pound of C-4, a case of nails, a corroded old 155-mm artillery shell, and a cell phone detonator. It exploded alongside the fourth truck in the convoy of two dozen vehicles and tossed it into the air like a child’s toy. The truck behind it caught fire and was shredded with shrapnel. Amazingly no one was killed. Give credit to truck and body armor. Many limbs would be lost, and several of these soldiers, who with the aid of modern battlefield medicine survived horrific wounds, would die just a few decades later, still relatively young men, bound to wheelchairs, succumbing to the scars of war.

“Make time! Dismount! Dammit, make time,” Lieutenant Colonel McGraw yelled as he scrambled out of his armored vehicle with the rest of his troops. “Take cover. Take cover!” The order came with crackling static over the radios of the remaining vehicles punctuated with explosions and gunfire. There was no panic in his voice. McGraw was certainly anxious, but clearly decisive and in control under fire.

Two hundred men scattered out of the remaining trucks, taking cover behind buildings and concrete dividers on either side of the road.

“We’re taking mortars,” his sergeant major yelled. “And… AKs at ten and five o’clock. We have multiple, shit… multiple casualties.”

The decisions to make war and if so, how to make war were ultimately made by elegantly suited and beribboned uniformed men sitting in antiseptic offices in Washington. They were men with power, men with money, men who fancied themselves as “honorable” and their actions as “noble,” but who were sometimes blinded by their zealotry and patriotism. Time passed. Billions were spent. Thousands died. Tens of thousands were maimed. And though the original war had come to an end, new ones were ready to be fought. And the decision makers would always need soldiers.

One such soldier was Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence (Link) McGraw, who came to sit in a ten-foot prison cell, staring at its stark walls for over a year. A fourth-generation South Carolinian, McGraw was a graduate of the Citadel, the West Point of the South, and a career soldier like his father and his father’s father. He supposed that his twelve-year-old son would have chosen to become a soldier as well if he hadn’t died a year earlier in a boating accident. McGraw had been on a tour of duty in Iraq. He mourned his only son but didn’t return to attend the funeral. The boy was dead, and he had a responsibility to his living “brothers.” Ina way, his son’s passing might have been a strange blessing. How hurtful it would have been for his son to discover the misfortune that had befallen his father, to hear others besmirch his most valuable possession, his honor. In just a few months, the Fates had brought him as low as any man could go. He had suffered the loss of his only son. His wife suffered that grief alone and didn’t understand his explanations about “duty.” What she understood was that she had married a callous, heartless bastard whose only use for an embrace was to choke the life out of an enemy. She buried her son and filed for divorce. And now, Link McGraw sat alone in a military brig—a place he had no doubt he would remain until his brown hair grew gray, his rippled belly became a paunch, his keen mind became Jell-O, or he simply became dust.

McGraw’s home now was in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, headquarters for the U.S. army’s Combined Arms Center (CAC). CAC’s mission was to prepare the army’s leaders for war—with today’s war being the “global war on terrorism.” Leavenworth, however, was better known to most as the place where the army held its prisoners, those soldiers who had committed grievous crimes in the eyes of the military—thieves, murderers, rapists. Interestingly, there were no cowards held in Leavenworth. The military could not advertise that there were cowards in its ranks. Combat fatigue, shell shock, post-traumatic stress disorder, call it what you may, but there were no cowards. Such “illnesses” were crimes worthy of discharge, not prison. The men held here were, by and large, adept at killing, just sometimes the wrong people.

In his fifteen years in the army, Link McGraw had seen bullets fly in Somalia, in Bosnia, in the first Gulf War, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. He had risen rapidly to the rank of lieutenant colonel in command of a battalion. He led mostly brave men, and he led by example. While the army advertised that it taught leadership, there was no classroom that could teach judgment under fire, decisiveness, or courage. That was something that came either with hard-fought experience or naturally. Link McGraw felt it was in his genes. He had been a colonel and had felt confident that someday he would make general. But now he had no rank. He was just prisoner #697042K.

Ironically, his father, a retired army colonel, never wanted his son to become a military man. He felt that the sense of honor the U.S. military had maintained for centuries had been betrayed in Vietnam. His father took up ministering, that other family tradition, after his military service. That role, too, probably tempered his taste for the military life and prompted his decision to keep his son out of it. So, after a conservative upbringing and education at a seminary high school in Charleston, Link’s father unexpectedly sent his only son to the godless north to college, as opposed to where Link had wanted to go, the military academies of the Citadel or West Point. For two years McGraw attended the most liberal of educational palaces in America, NYU, where no rational student or professor would ever even think of becoming a soldier. Link did well there. He was orderly and disciplined, lessons learned from a military family. While the dorm rooms of his peers were covered with posters of rock stars and athletes, his wall was draped with an American flag. He was a misfit. At the end of his sophomore year, he protested a protest.

The furor of that day was called “Irangate.” A civil war was raging in Nicaragua. Guerillas were trying to overthrow the Sandinistas, the Communist regime that had just come to power. The Reagan administration opposed the Communists and supported the rebels, the Contras. Congress, however, decided it didn’t want to get involved in a Central American war and passed a law, the Boland Amendment, making it a crime to aid the Contras.

“While Communist governments can support Communist rebel groups around the world,” McGraw lectured his peers, “we’re forbidden by our own laws to support pro-American dissent. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the United States had more woes. Americans were being held hostage in Lebanon by Islamic terrorists. Colonel Oliver North, who had links to the CIA, conjured up a scheme to solve both problems. The Israelis would supply American-made missiles to Iran. In exchange, Iran would mediate the release of American hostages held in Lebanon, and money from the sale of arms would be laundered and funneled to the Contras. The people who were involved in this intricate plan to bypass Congress—Reagan, George Bush, the Ayatollah, the Israeli prime minister, and of course Oliver North—all lied about it. The president and vice-president claimed ignorance. Only Oliver North was found guilty of lying to Congress. Link McGraw, however, respected North and what he had tried to achieve. In the midst of all the acrimony against Irangate on NYU’s campus, he ardently defended the man. It didn’t matter that he’d lied to Congress. McGraw made it a point to quote one statement North made to Congress that he felt was absolutely true. And with that truth, nothing else mattered to him at all.

“I haven’t,” Oliver North had testified, “in the twenty-three years I have been in the uniformed services of the United States of America, ever violated an order—not one.”

“A soldier obeys orders,” McGraw argued to his classmates. “If any blame is to be dealt out, it ought to go to the politicians who gave those orders and who make illogical and fickle foreign policy.”

McGraw’s peers shunned him for his views, and his professors spoke openly of him as “a bit Neanderthal.” But after his sophomore year, McGraw established the decisiveness and independence he would exhibit for the rest of his life. He became his own man, not the man his father wanted him to be. He applied for a transfer. In a matter of a few weeks, he went from the towers of Manhattan to the hallowed halls of the Citadel and altered his persona overnight from a ne’er-do-well to a respected and lauded leader. What a difference a little geography makes.

His career was upward bound from the moment he swore allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and became an officer in the United States army at graduation. He knew how to carry out an order, how to accomplish a task, and more importantly, when to give credit to superiors for work he had done well. He rose more rapidly than even some West Point grads.

Lawrence McGraw’s fall came three years after President George W. Bush had announced victory in Iraq. It was on the streets of Mosul in northern Iraq where he was confronted by his life-changing challenge. He was given a mission to encircle an enclave of about fifty homes suspected of harboring leftover loyalists of Saddam Hussein and sectarian religious terrorists. A “high-priority” target it was called. He knew security had been breached when his command of nearly twenty armored personnel carriers, two tanks, and 250 men was hit by two IEDs. He left a team to secure that area and handle the casualties and then moved on to carry out his primary mission. Then his troops began taking mortar and machine-gun fire from nearby rooftops.

“Stand fast,” Colonel McGraw yelled into his radio. Then turning to a captain, “Lay fifty caliber into that house and bring up three platoons to take cover over there.”