This made him come off more than a little flat in front of the cameras, he could feel it, but he wasn’t ready to burst forth with his true emotions.
And the press wasn’t going easy on him at all.
After opening with a superficial update on the hunt, little more than a promise that all was being done and no stone would be left unturned, Ryan announced that the Pentagon would be putting proposals on his desk by the end of the day to help protect servicemen and -women at home and abroad. From here he offered a subdued but sincere expression of condolences for the victims and their families, and then he opened the room up to questions, with the caveat that he would not be able to answer questions related directly to the ongoing terrorism investigations.
A White House correspondent from CNN went first after being called on by Ryan. “Mr. President, does the fact that ISIS seems to have matured in their abilities to where they can now attack our military inside the United States indicate that your strategy to destroy them in the Middle East has been a failure?”
Jack wasn’t surprised by this question at all, but he took his time thinking over his answer before speaking. Finally he said, “I don’t believe so, Lauren. It is in keeping with the normal actions of rebel groups, going back millennia, that when they lose ground on the battlefield, they try to take back ground in the public forum.
“They will commit more suicide attacks on the battlefield, and we’re seeing that. And they will work as hard as they can to attack the West in the West. And we’re seeing that as well with what’s going on currently at home, and in Europe, which has been an Islamic State battleground for the past two years.”
Another reporter, this one from the AP, asked, “Do we know the size of the force here in the United States?”
“We have some estimates, yes, and it is a relatively small number. I can’t give you that number, unfortunately, because we can’t let our enemy know everything we know about them. We have to protect our sources and methods.”
The AP reporter said, “Five? Ten? One hundred? One thousand?”
Ryan reiterated, “I can’t give you that number, Chuck. Obviously several Islamic State terrorists have been killed in the commission of their attacks so far. We expect more to be killed or captured if they continue, due to the diligence of federal, state, and local law enforcement. Our threat levels are at their highest point, and our intelligence on the subject is good and getting better. We will root them out as quickly as possible, and while that doesn’t answer your fair question, that’s all I can give you right now.”
An older reporter who worked for McClatchy said, “What are you asking citizens to do to be safe? Should America just hunker down at home until the threat has passed?”
Ryan frowned for a moment. “Absolutely not, Richard. Let’s keep this in perspective for the average U.S. citizen. It is a sad fact that there were more than fifty shootings in Chicago over the weekend, with seven dead. There exists, quite unfortunately, violence all around us. What is happening with these Islamic State terrorists in our borders is of utmost concern to us, but I would not want the average American citizen to do anything more than report any concerns you may have to your local law enforcement agency.
“People have a reasonable tendency to do one of two things when they listen to someone in the government warn them of a threat. They either tune out or they freak out. I don’t want Americans doing either thing. They need to understand there are real threats, but we are working with skill and diligence to remove these threats.”
Now the ABC chief national security reporter, Susan Hayes, said, “Americans have watched us fight against the Islamic State for much of your term. We have some Special Forces and some airpower over there, but so far we haven’t been able to stop them. Yes, they have shrunk in some areas, but if you look at a map of territory controlled by ISIS, you see it remains larger than many other Middle Eastern nations. Will you consider new steps to ramp up the war against ISIS in light of the fact they are over here now, killing people within our borders?”
Ryan considered this carefully, like a professor wanting to give his student the proper context for his answer. “When you see on television that ISIS has conquered a new city, it is important for you to understand what that means. The media portrays these events by showing a map with an ever-moving, and often expanding, red blob indicating the so-called borders of the Islamic State. The truth is, ISIS has fought weak enemies, many of whom have run without putting up resistance. We should not think of them as really owning much territory at all. They come in, scare local police and government away, set up roadblocks and send out a couple pickup trucks full of men, which serve as death squads. They aren’t governing, they aren’t turning these locations into real strongholds. They can roll a few more trucks up a local road, and then the next day someone redraws the map of their ‘borders’ to make it look like they’ve pushed their front line thirty miles overnight. They didn’t advance their front line. They drove a convoy of trucks from one village to the next without being destroyed.
“We have intelligence and special mission units in the area, so those of us privy to classified intelligence know the media reports are not accurate.”
A reporter from The New York Times called out, “Then why haven’t we defeated them?”
“Two words, Michael. Civilian casualties. Two more words, related to the first two. Human shields. ISIS lives and operates within cities and congested areas. We find a group of Islamic State fighters out in the open and we do our best to put an A-10 or an Apache on them as quick as our people can task them. But we aren’t going to shell cities, no matter who is in there that needs rooting out.”
Susan Hayes spoke again, this time without being called upon. “So are you saying there will be no new offensive against ISIS despite the fact they are now bringing the war to our cities?”
“Susan, nobody on planet Earth wants a massive U.S. invasion into Iraq and Syria more than ISIS. If we return to the Middle East in large numbers, the Islamic State knows their ranks will be flooded by recruits, extremism in the cities will skyrocket, and support for their heinous aims will go up. The average ISIS fighter, poorly trained, poorly equipped, motivated by nothing other than a vague hope of an Islamic State and a specific belief in exaltation in the afterlife . . . this guy doesn’t have a prayer of ever shooting down an F-18, seeing an American Special Forces operator in his rifle sight, or winning a fight with a drone or a smart bomb. But if we flood the zone, if we put a couple hundred thousand American men and women in their area, well . . . some of these guys just might get their sights on what they see as an infidel, and that is the best thing they can hope for in their life.”
Ryan shook his head slowly. “I have no intention of giving them the opportunity they crave.
“Now, the United States is at the vanguard of fighting this evil group, and we will continue to be there, leading from the front. If we see tactical ways to increase our involvement that make sense, we will do just that.”
Ryan took a few more questions, most along the same lines as the others. He closed with, “As soon as we have more to report, the attorney general, the secretary of homeland security, and the secretary of defense will be speaking publicly as the need arises.”
After Ryan left the press briefing room, Arnie Van Damm was there by his side.
Ryan said, “What did you think?”
“Not your best performance, Jack.”
“Tell me why.” Jack did not disagree, but he valued Arnie’s input.
“You were talking like a historian in there.”
“In my own defense, I am a historian, Arnie.”
“Do you think that’s what people want to hear? That what’s happening now is simply a long-standing insurgent tactic, and nothing to be alarmed about?”
“I didn’t say it like that.”
“That’s how it sounded.” Van Damm pointed in the
direction of the stairs to the Situation Room. “Back down there you sounded like you wanted to pick up a machine gun and lead the attack into Mosul yourself. That’s what the public needs to hear. Not a poli-sci lecture about Third World madmen and street crime in Chicago.”
Ryan thought Arnie had a point, but he said, “I wasn’t ready to be honest with the way I feel right now. We need more of a plan, less groping in the dark. I’ll talk to the public when we are prosecuting this fight against the intelligence leak and the terrorists in some meaningful way.” Together they entered the Oval. “For now we are on the back foot, and I couldn’t let that show in my emotions.”
42
This Iraqi village hadn’t been much, probably just a few thousand had lived here before the war, but now it was nothing more than a battle-scarred wound built into the hills. A wasteland of destruction, just a dozen kilometers northeast of Mosul, it had been abandoned by ISIS the day before, and now twenty-two-year-old commander Beritan Nerway led her all-female platoon carefully through the streets on the northern side of the town, their wire- or wooden-stocked Kalashnikovs at their shoulders They slowly picked their way through the broken stones in their boots and tennis shoes.
These women were Kurds from the YPJ, an abbreviation in Kurdish for Women’s Protection Unit. They were a rebel force, not part of the Peshmerga, although they fought the same foe.
Beritan was a nom de guerre; her real name was Daria. She gave herself the war name of Beritan in honor of Kurdish female battalion commander Beritan, who led seven hundred male and female troops during the Kurdish civil war in 1992 and threw herself off a cliff when she ran out of ammunition.
Kurdish women had a long history of fighting, but never more so than over the past three years fighting ISIS. They’d helped push them back out of this town the afternoon before: over a wide canal they’d watched from their forward positions as trucks and tanks and technicals escaped, heading back into the suburbs of Mosul, fewer than twenty kilometers south.
But by the time of the enemy pullout it was too dark to cross the canal to move into the town, so the YPJ waited till daylight to send in troops to check through what was left. Now several platoons like Beritan’s, male and female alike, were picking through the rubble to make certain ISIS had not booby-trapped the buildings or the roads, or even left forces behind to slow the YPJ’s advance in this small section of the war.
Beritan knew there could be danger around any corner, a tank tucked into any alley or a machine gun emplacement hidden in any crater or darkened window.
Her radio chirped where it was attached to her shoulder strap. One of her snipers on the far side of the canal reported possible movement in a window two blocks ahead of the YPJ position.
Beritan and her fighters all tucked behind cover on the broken street, but not before the crack of a rifle echoed in the rubble of the town and the first woman fell dead to a sniper’s bullet.
Then the gunfire seemed to come from every nook and cranny of the broken buildings.
Beritan and her unit of forty were cut off from other forces and supported only by mortars and DShK machine guns back at the YPJ lines. Serious firepower, but firepower that needed good targeting information.
Targeting information they weren’t getting through their binoculars.
Beritan realized she and her women would have to climb up from their cover and expose themselves to press the fight to the ISIS snipers.
—
Fifteen kilometers to the north and five thousand feet in the air, Pyro 1-1 and Pyro 1-2, two Apache helicopters, circled in a wide racetrack pattern. They were in the area in support of a nearby coordinated attack by Peshmerga forces supported by U.S. Special Forces and a JTAC, a Joint Terminal Attack Controller, a soldier on the ground with the ability to call in support from artillery fires and rotary-wing and fixed-wing assets in the area.
So far the Peshmerga advance had not been met with any resistance; they’d walked into a town picked clean and abandoned by ISIS, so the pair of Apaches circling in the desert had had little to do but listen in on the four radio frequencies in their ears as they flew around.
Both of the Apache AH-64E Guardian aircraft had plenty of fuel today. Right now they circled at endurance speed, seventy knots, giving them more time in the air in case they were needed to the south.
Captain Carrie Ann Davenport mentally tuned out the four radio frequencies broadcasting in her ears and spoke to CWO Troy Oakley through the permanently open intercom between the two of them, negating the need to push any buttons to transmit to each other. He was seated only six feet behind and above her in the cockpit, but out of her view except through a small mirror over her head on the door frame.
She glanced at it and said, “I remember learning at Fort Rucker that each flight hour of the Apache, even if we’re just hanging out like this, costs thirty grand.”
Oakley said, “Thirty-two thousand, five hundred fifty dollars, ma’am.”
She laughed over her mic. “Then this is an expensive sightseeing flight.”
“If you see any sights, do let me know. Just looks like undulating dirt as far as the eye can see.”
The captain replied, “Don’t worry. At the rate things are going, the fighting will be in Mosul in another month. My guess is we’ll have plenty to see there.”
“Yeah, like SAMs corkscrewing right up at us. I imagine that will be a lively time for us both.”
“And then when we win,” she said, “we just hand the city over to the Iraqi government.”
“Do you want it, ma’am?”
“Ha, no, thanks. I just mean I bet the Iraqis will run it like crooks.”
Oakley chuckled into his mic. “If history is any guide, yes. But good ol’ corruption like you see in the rest of the world, around here anyway, is a major step up from the current conditions.”
Carrie Ann Davenport replied, “Roger that. Stealing money from the state coffer is a shit thing to do, but the local government is choppin’ off people’s heads now. We aren’t helping to turn the place into a bastion of truth and justice, but we are making it a little better, I guess.”
The young woman had become something of a cynic regarding the fighting here. She had no illusions Iraq would turn into a democratic nation, but she certainly did see the logic in uprooting ISIS as quickly and efficiently as possible.
And there was something else she was feeling today. The excitement of going home. This was her last flight before two weeks’ leave, and while she would spend roughly thirty percent of her leave either getting home or traveling back to Iraq, she’d have more than a week of family, friends, and whatever the hell she wanted to do, wear, eat, drink, or say.
After three months of life at a forward operating base, she couldn’t wait.
Carrie Ann spoke through the intercom. “I don’t know about you, Oak, I’m kinda looking forward to getting a little break from flying these unfriendly skies.”
“Just thinking the same thing. Seventy-two hours from now I’m going to be in my backyard with a beer, two kids crawling all over me, and a wife who isn’t sick of me being home just yet. That’s as close to paradise as it gets for an old dude like me. How ’bout you? Any big plans for your leave, ma’am?”
The undulating landscape raced by below at seventy-five knots while Oakley and Davenport both thought about home.
“I’ll just hang out in Cleveland most of the time with my folks, but I’m going to D.C. for the weekend to see some friends and go to a party. Should be fun. And then, just about the time I finally get the smell of JP8 out of my skin, I’ll turn around and head back here.”
Oak said, “I’ve got to build a swing set. And according to Carla, the kids already took some of the pieces out of the box the thing came in, so you can guaran-damn-tee I’ll be scrounging through my junk drawer to find—”
Just then their headsets came alive. It was the
JOC, the Joint Operations Center, far behind the action back in Turkey. The call was a TIC alert, which meant troops were in contact, and then a set of coordinates. The tasking officer spoke to Pyro flight directly.
“Pyro One-One, how copy?”
“Solid copy,” said Davenport.
“We are going to hold One-Two where it is and send you to this grid. We got a call from YPJ. It’s a small unit of them pinned down by multiple snipers. That’s pretty much all we know. There is no JTAC embedded with them, so you’ll just have to evaluate the situation from above and see if you can intercede without endangering friendlies.”
Nobody liked flying into an unknown area without contact with friendlies on the ground. Carrie acknowledged the order and Oakley turned toward the location, already saved on his screen.
The captain said, “Great. Any idea what YPJ look like? I mean, I’ve seen their flag, but can you tell them apart at one hundred knots and five kilometers away?”
“Not really,” Oak confirmed.
—
As they approached the town from the north, they raced over the front lines of the YPJ on the north side of a wide culvert, flying at five thousand feet. Carrie Ann knew the sniper positions were somewhere a mile to the south, right inside a very congested-looking conglomeration of broken buildings that had once been a small town. She slaved the thirty-millimeter cannon to her right eye for now. With friendlies down in the area, she probably wouldn’t use rockets, and her load-out of six Hellfires meant she’d have to be choosy about using a missile on an individual with a rifle, although she wouldn’t hesitate to do so as long as there were TICs, or troops-in-contact.
The cannon was accurate to within three meters, good but not perfect, but she could fire ten or twenty rounds at a burst and nail anything she could see with its dual-purpose shells— armor-piercing for light-armor targets, and high explosive as an area weapon.