88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary Read Online Free

across the bridge from Washington, D.C. I had no clear idea what I was there for. A series of appointments had been made for me, and this was simply the next one on the list, neatly typed by my congressman’s legislative assistant. Joe Early, Democrat from the Third Massachusetts District, was my wife’s second cousin. My brothers-in-law were precinct captains; my father-in-law had worked in Early’s last election. In a transaction recognizable to those familiar with old-fashioned Massachusetts ward politics, the congressman had done a favor for the loyal extended family of a rather clueless, long-haired twenty-three-year-old.
    Long-haired and clueless though I was, “Dotty,” the CIA recruiter, seemed to have all the time in the world for me. She asked questions about my background. I really couldn’t fathom why; there was little remarkable about it. The dutiful eldest son in a Catholic family of seven children, I had grown up in a comfortable house in a comfortable suburb of Worcester, Massachusetts. My childhood had been simple and relatively happy. The nuns who taught me in the local parochial schoolmay have been self-congratulatory in their virtue, but they offered a marvelous education. My summers were spent playing baseball, running through the woods, swimming with friends in our pool, and voraciously reading the biographies of American explorers and military heroes. Unsurprisingly, my instincts growing up were both conservative and deeply patriotic.
    In something of a departure for my family, but perhaps reflective of American upward mobility, at least as it’s sometimes expressed in the Northeast, I was sent away at fifteen to Williston Academy, an old-line brick-and-ivy New England boarding prep school, the sort of place where, in those days, the teachers were still called “masters,” and the boys dressed in jacket and tie for dinner. Although the student body was liberally salted with the names of ethnic Catholics like me, and even a few Jews, the history and tone of the place, symbolized by the Episcopal chapel whose spire dominated the campus, was pure New England WASP. It was an environment that suited me. The sense of social privilege and corresponding obligation that subtly but thoroughly permeated the culture of the school felt comfortable.
    Even Williston was not immune to the social and political ferment of the late sixties and early seventies, but the radical student activism of that anti–Vietnam War period left me cold. The university protesters of my generation, for all their proclaimed idealism, struck me as anything but altruistic: it seemed obvious to me that they didn’t really care a fig about the Vietnamese; they simply didn’t want to be shot at. The supposed vanguard of my generation appeared to me to be transparently self-serving, self-indulgent, and largely ignorant of the American institutions they denigrated.
    Ever since my boyhood brushes with John Paul Jones, Stephen Decatur, and General Douglas MacArthur, I had dreamed of attending one of the military service academies. During my “Upper-Middler” (Junior) year at Williston, I got a pair of nominations to Annapolis, and went with my father for a guided tour of the campus during Plebe Summer. The evident discomfort of the Plebes notwithstanding, I was intrigued by the culture of the place, and by what I perceived as the necessity to simultaneously embrace and resist its heavyauthoritarianism. That, too, suited me. I was ready to go ahead with my application.
    Neither the antimilitary spirit of the times not the attitudes of my classmates could dissuade me, but my father could, and did. Ours was a highly independent family, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times my dad tried directly to influence me on anything. But this was one of those times. “Just remember,” he said. “If you join the Navy, you won’t spend your career doing what you think is best for you; you’ll do what someone else thinks