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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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June 11th,
2008 - The Six-Letter Word That Changes Everything |
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The Six-Letter
Word That Changes Everything Michael Hensley ordered a sniper under his command named Evan Vela to
kill a man on the field of battle. Vela is in prison. Hensley is not. And a
question persists: For a soldier at war, what is the difference between
killing and murder? By Tom Junod Esquire June 11, 2008 Michael Hensley ordered a
sniper under his command named Evan Vela to kill a man on the field of
battle. Vela is in prison. Hensley is not. And a question persists: For a
soldier at war, what is the difference between killing and murder? On the morning of May 11,
2007, Staff Sergeant Michael Hensley made a radio call to Lieutenant Matthew
Didier. Didier was at the American Patrol Base in Jurf as Sakhr, a Sunni town
on the Euphrates forty-five miles south of Baghdad. Hensley was out in the
field with four of his snipers. He'd left the base around midnight, and
Didier had been waiting to hear from him. Hensley and his men had gone out in
support of an early-morning raid being conducted by Apache Company; now, at
nearly 1100, Hensley was calling to say that he had eyes on an Iraqi male
scouting the banks of the Euphrates and heading in the direction of the place
where Hensley and his men were hiding. Fifteen minutes later, Hensley called
again. He thought the Iraqi had spotted them and was still coming toward
them. Fifteen minutes later, Hensley again: The Iraqi was drawing closer and
had his weapon at the ready. Hensley asked Didier's permission to kill him. It was an odd courtesy. For
one thing, Hensley didn't need Didier's permission to kill in self-defense.
Second, he and Didier were often at odds. Hensley had taken over the snipers
a month and a half earlier, while Didier was on leave, and since Didier's return,
he'd struggled to establish "command and control" of his NCO. The
kill Hensley was proposing was not even the kind of kill that snipers
specialize in. It did not involve distance, or even a rifle. Hensley was
asking permission for a close kill with a handgun. Didier granted his
permission. Fifteen minutes later he heard from Hensley. The Iraqi was dead
an hour after Hensley reported spotting him. In five minutes, a
quick-response team dispatched from Jurf PB found him still warm. He had an
AK-47 in his arms and a large hole in the back of his head. He was small and
skinny. He had some gray in his black beard. He was wearing a blue mandress
and was wearing a checkered scarf around his neck. He was a Sunni and a
member of the al-Janabi tribe. He was identified on-site as Genei Nasir
Khudair al-Janabi. He was once a sergeant in Saddam Hussein's army. Now he
was a farmer and taxi driver. He had a wife and six children. He was
forty-six years old and died about fifteen hundred feet from his home. He was the snipers' eighth
confirmed kill since Hensley had taken over the unit six weeks earlier. An
Army battalion is a small town, and after each of the kills, the snipers
heard rumors at the chow hall. But the close kill was different. "I've
been in the Army for a while," says Lieutenant Colonel Craig Whiteside,
who at the time, in the rank of major, was the battalion's second in command.
"I'd never heard of anyone getting killed with a 9 mil. Believe me,
we've killed a lot of people, and we've killed them in just about every way
possible. That was the only 9-mil kill in the entire deployment. It just
doesn't happen." As a result, Hensley was
asked to write a sworn statement about the killing. "I wrote it pretty
fast," he says. "They had a small laptop and a small printer back
at the base, and I had a statement configured by about three in the
afternoon. Then I read it to the guys. I never told them, like, this is your
story or anything. I basically pulled in the four guys who were with me and
said, 'This is my account of the events.' And I asked if anyone had any
questions. There were no questions." In the statement, Hensley
elaborated on what he had told Didier. He wrote that he never told his men
there was an insurgent coming. He wrote that they were oblivious to the
threat. He wrote that he had hidden behind an earthen berm, and when the
insurgent was within arm's reach, he put him in "a rear naked choke, his
hands still on [his] weapon, struggling to fire it." He also wrote that
the kill was not his own. The sniper Hensley instructed to "pull out his
M9 9mm pistol and quietly take the safety on fire and be prepared to use
it" - the sniper who then "placed 2 9mm rounds in the insurgent's
head" - was named Evan Vela. It was his first kill, but it was Hensley's
story. "I was like, I've given them no reason to doubt me in the past,
they're gonna believe whatever I tell them. If I tell 'em a guy walks into my
hide site with an AK and I choke him down and shoot him in the head, they're
gonna buy it, they're gonna believe it, because it's me." But because it was Hensley,
the story also never died. It morphed. First, members of the Iraqi police
told an American intelligence officer the story of a Sunni who had been
pulled out of his home, tied up, tortured, and executed by American soldiers.
Then there were the members of the battalion who were passing through Baghdad
International on their way back from leave. They were hearing about the close
kill from other battalions, other units: Hey, I hear Hensley climbed up on
the dude's back and shot him in the head ... . Eventually, battalion command
figured they'd have to do something about it. They figured they'd have to
start taking sworn statements. "I had a talk with Major Whiteside about
it," says Major David Butler, now public-affairs officer for the
brigade. "I said, 'Maybe Hensley deserves an award for this. Maybe we
should give him a medal.' " The first time I heard
Michael Hensley referred to as a natural killer was in a conversation with
two of his snipers, Sergeant Anthony Murphy and Sergeant Richard Hand. I had
flown to Alaska shortly after the February 10 conviction of Evan Vela - three
months after the acquittal of Michael Hensley - on charges of murdering Genei
Nasir Khudair al-Janabi. The snipers agreed to talk to me because they wanted
to talk about Vela; they wound up talking about Hensley. It is a corollary:
They are snipers; snipers talk about Hensley. As different as snipers are
supposed to be from most people, that's how different Hensley is from them. "I mean, it's very
self-evident when you meet him that he doesn't conform to what and who you
expect people to be," Hand said. "I mean, he's a genius, but it's
like he's so intelligent that he's autistic or something." I said that I was going to
meet him the next morning, and Murphy offered a suggestion. "Why don't
you just walk right up to him and slap him in the face?" he said.
"That would get his respect right away. He'd love that." They
thought that the idea of me slapping Mike Hensley in the face was absolutely
hilarious, and when I asked them why, Murphy said, "Well, he's a natural
killer, for one thing." Later, when I asked him what he meant by that,
he said, "He'd kill you and two minutes later he'd sit down and finish
that piece of pie." In the morning, I drove
north of Fort Richardson and went to Hensley's apartment. He met me at the
door in a short little zip-up black leather windbreaker with skulls on the
front and the word AFFLICTION printed on the back. There were also skulls on
the back pockets of his tight jeans. There was also a bracelet of flaming
skulls tattooed on his left wrist and a pentagram tattooed on his neck. He
was twenty-seven years old, about six two, and he wore black square-toed
motorcycle boots. When I suggested we go get something to eat, he said,
"Right on," in the deep voice of a radio cowboy. At the same time
there was something soft about him, something vulnerable, something even
slightly effeminate, with his hair combed forward in little bangs and his boy-band
sideburns. Hensley was one of the most lethal snipers in the United States
Army, and the most notorious. But he seemed less a lethal person than a
person trapped in some kind of lethal drag. The rough-trade impression was
accentuated by his hip-slung way of standing and by the shape of his body. He
was hippy. He had gone from going to the gym three times a day to drinking
pretty much all day. His hips were wider than his shoulders. He was also
perfumed by the smell of alcohol working itself out of his body. His hands
sometimes shook. So did everything else. He was twitchy and ticky. He
couldn't keep still. He got up to go to the bathroom a lot. He had a lot of
"nervous behaviors," he said. He was apologetic about them. His
hands were a particular problem; he didn't know what to do with them. He
jammed them in his pockets. He drummed his fingers against any available
surface. He wiggled them in the air as though he were playing the flute. When
he forgot about them, they'd curl up at the wrists until they looked palsied.
The rest of his body would follow suit, his shoulders hunching over his hands
in a kind of protective gesture until his body language was that of a man in
shackles. It was the hands - "the hand thing" - that his men seized
upon when they imitated him in Iraq. They "did" Hensley, and though
he tried to be a good sport, it hurt his feelings. "It was
embarrassing," he said. "I didn't think I acted like that. I was
trying to be perfect. I was trying not to show them any flaws." In fact, he was acutely aware
of his flaws, because he was acutely aware of his difference. So were people
who knew him. His difference was what they remarked on. That was where the
idea that he was a natural killer came from. It wasn't just what people saw
him do with a gun; it was how he carried himself without one. He struck
people as a natural killer because he struck them as unnatural in other ways.
And yet they followed him. The men who made fun of him in Iraq followed him
in Iraq. He was the most lethal sniper in the Army because he made them
lethal. His difference was communicable - transformative - and it eventually
served to highlight the most ineffable difference of all in war: the
difference between killing and murder. "That's the six-letter
word that changes everything," Hensley said. It was ten o'clock in the
morning and we were on our way to a bar in Anchorage to drink Bloody Marys.
He was, and is, still in the Army. He still has a job, and was in the middle
of being transferred to Fort Benning. But because of the mortal taint upon
him - because, as he says, "I'm looked at as a guy who got away with
murder" - nobody called him if he didn't show up. It was better that he
didn't show up. Did he get away with murder? "You know, nobody
thinks they're a bad person. You can talk to the worst murderer, the worst
rapist in prison, and they'll always try to find a way to justify what they
did. And that hits home for me. I mean, when you look at things that way,
maybe what I did was wrong. I refuse to believe it, but who knows? In the
end, it comes down to, When that guy walked in my hide site, I made a
decision. It was my decision. Nobody else made it, nobody else could make it,
because nobody else had the whole picture. Evan Vela killed that guy because
I ordered him to and because he had no reason not to. Was it a good kill?
It's a good kill because I say it's a good kill. That's why I was there.
That's why the battalion put me there." The story of Michael Hensley
is a story of the surge. He deployed with 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry
(Airborne), 4th Brigade, 25th Infantry Division in October 2006 and came home
to Fort Richardson in early December 2007. That Hensley spent nearly five of
those thirteen months in captivity did not make him less relevant to his
battalion's cause or its eventual success. It made him more so. When did the surge begin?
The official start date was February 2007. The start date for 1-501 came a
few months later. That's because the surge started in Baghdad, and the
Geronimos, as the parachutists of 1-501 are called, were operating in Babil
Province, with its three-city cordon of sectarian strife called the Triangle
of Death. If the surge in Baghdad was about manpower, the surge in Babil was
about money. It was about convincing local tribes that it was in their best
interests to stop feeding the insurgency and start dining off the American
dollar. By that standard, the surge began in the Triangle of Death when a
local Sunni engineer began acting as a broker between the battalion
commander, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Balcavage, and Sheik Sabah, the head of
the engineer's al-Janabi tribe. This occurred about halfway through 1-501's
deployment. It also occurred a few weeks after the close kill of Genei Nasir
Khudair al-Janabi. And in the coincidence of the two events there is a
demonstration of the blood ambivalence at the heart of the new American way
of war. "My soldiers are
paratroopers," Balcavage says. "And when paratroopers come to a
country, all they want to do is kill and break stuff. Well, you can do that
all day long without any progress. You've got to do it with the Iraqis. You
can't win a war just by killing people." But then, you can't win a
war just by paying people, either, or else it wouldn't be war. And Balcavage
was at war before the surge took hold. His men were being shot at by snipers and
blown up by IEDs. They were taking mortar fire. In the IED attack that gave
the battalion its first combat fatality, on December 20, 2006, one of the
survivors lost not only his legs below the knee but also his penis, and the
soldier who died was electrocuted by a power line transformed by the blast
into a lethal whip. A month later, in Karballa, death arrived in the form of
insurgents who came to a city-council meeting dressed as American soldiers,
then killed one of ours and kidnapped and killed four more. In the first few
months of 2007, Balcavage says, there were attacks on his men almost daily,
and what was most disturbing and dispiriting about them, most dangerous to
morale, was not their frequency but rather their air of impunity. The
Geronimos were getting killed without killing back, and as Balcavage says,
"We were questioning how much success we were having at the time."
More to the point, he'd realized that "money wasn't going to work
without pressure." He'd become "absolutely convinced that you
cannot succeed if you don't have a hammer." He did not have a hammer.
Usually, snipers occupy that role - they're a "battalion-level
asset," like mortars, to be employed at the discretion of the battalion
commander. But Balcavage's snipers had a leadership problem, and as a result
they had what Balcavage calls an "acidic morale problem." They
either weren't "putting themselves in position to get shots" or
were putting themselves in position and discovering they didn't bring the proper
weapons, like, say, sniper rifles. They were letting guys get away. They were
either not pulling the trigger or pulling the trigger and, Balcavage says,
"winging guys." Through the first five months of the deployment,
October through March, they had one kill, and it was characteristic. The
platoon leader had to wait hours before he gave his snipers permission to
take the shot, and then the shooter hit the target in the leg. The man
dragged himself thirty-five meters before bleeding out. On another occasion,
a sniper blasted away at two guys surrounded by livestock. He slaughtered the
livestock and spared the guys, hitting one in the leg and letting the other
get away. "How does that happen?" Balcavage's sergeant major,
Bernie Knight, asks. "You're a sniper - how do you miss? I'm a one-shot,
one-kill kind of guy - and these guys just weren't doing it." As one of
the snipers themselves, Richard Hand, says: "We were looked at as kind
of failures - kind of a joke, in a way." Balcavage and Knight were
after more than comic relief. "We had to have something that said, 'Hey,
if you're coming at us, this is what we got,' " Knight says. In March,
what they had was a job opening in the sniper section of the scout platoon.
And then they had Michael Hensley. He was not officially a sniper, at least
not in Iraq. He was a squad leader in Apache Company. But he was a prodigy.
The son of Christian missionaries - he remembers his upbringing as
"Amishlike" - he'd already been in the Army nine years. With the
help of an experienced and gifted spotter, he had won the Army's
international sniper competition in 2002, when he was twenty-two. He was a
sniper in Afghanistan in 2003. He'd helped train snipers at Fort Richardson.
And in the Triangle of Death, he was one of the first of the Geronimos to
draw blood. It was in February. It was in Jurf as Sakhr. It was during a town
meeting. There was mortar fire from across the Euphrates. One of Hensley's
men, Cody Anderson, saw the flash of binoculars and said, "I think I see
a guy." Hensley said, "If he pokes his head up again, I'm going to
take him out." He did not have a high-powered sniper's rifle. He had the
basic rifle of the American infantry, the M4. It is basically a .22. The guy
across the river was anywhere from three hundred to four hundred meters away.
It is not the kind of shot typically made with an M4. "So Hensley says,
'I see him, I see him,' " says Anderson. "And I'm like, 'Where?'
And he's telling me, 'He's right fucking there, he's right fucking there.' So
I start laying down suppressive fire, I start shooting in the general
vicinity, and Sergeant Hensley, he's like plink plunk." The natural
killer had his first kill, with an M4. Imagine what he could do with a
.50-caliber sniper rifle. Imagine what he could do with a dozen men. Hensley had a girlfriend.
She was very beautiful. She was also trouble. He met her at the bar in
Anchorage where he liked to ease his hangovers with Bloody Marys. Her name
was Tennille. She had a thing about men with bald heads and tattoos. He had a
thing about women who emanated dark mysteries. Tennille's mystery was that
she had been on and off heroin since she was eighteen. Hensley's was that he
was Hensley. He had gone through life knowing that he was "not like
anyone else. One day maybe someone can come down from another planet and
explain me." But Tennille explained him to himself by being a female
version of him. She took him home to meet her parents. He scared them to
death, but then they saw his manners and heard the courtliness in his voice
when he talked to their daughter and they loved him like a son. When he came
home on leave in January 2007 and Tennille told them of his intentions, they
thought he had saved her. He hadn't killed anyone yet when he said goodbye to
her and went back to Iraq. Then in February he killed the man across the
Euphrates with an M4. In March the Red Cross gave him an emergency message
from Tennille's parents. They were asking him to come home. Tennille was
dead. She'd overdosed. She died in the apartment she shared with Hensley. She
was found sitting against a wall, with no pants on. She had been there
awhile. Her official date of death was March 1. He took emergency leave. The
apartment was full of the terrible residue of her decay. He cleaned it
himself. He was not one to shirk missions. Besides, he was angry at her
stupid ass, and angry at the Army. "Every relationship I've ever had
I've sacrificed to the Army," he says. The cleanup helped him focus his
anger. He got the pentagram on his neck in Anchorage and then went back to
Iraq in the third week of March. On the way back he heard that he'd been
selected to lead the sniper section. He was at the airport in Iraq, waiting
to get started, when he ran into a sniper who was also returning from leave.
It was Evan Vela. Evan Vela has a wife. Her
name is Alyssa. Her last name is not Vela. Her last name is Carnahan. So is
Evan's. His father, Curtis Carnahan, adopted him when he was a little boy,
but Evan never changed his name on his social security card, and the Army
wouldn't accept anything else. His father has very long hair and a
"Hippie Parking Only" sign planted in his driveway in Idaho. Evan
looks like a handsome Mexican boxer. He's always been pretty quiet. He's
known Alyssa since eighth grade. Back then he never said a word. They dated
in high school, but she got tired of dragging everything out of him, and they
drifted apart. When she was living in Portland, Oregon, she heard that he'd
joined the Army, and he heard that she was free from her boyfriend. He drove
from Idaho to see her, and they talked for hours. They got married on May 5,
2006. Alyssa already had a son named Jarom, and Evan never called him
anything but his son and planned to adopt him. Alyssa was a Mormon, and in
September 2006, before his deployment, Evan was baptized in the Church of
Latter-day Saints. He was a scout in Iraq, but in December he became a
sniper. Alyssa was pregnant with Blair, and in March Evan came home for the
birth. He was very quiet, almost like the old Evan. He was very happy when he
held Blair for the first time, but also very sad because he felt unworthy of
her. He loved the Army, but he told Alyssa he was very uneasy with the
prospect of killing. He hadn't killed anyone yet, but he knew he would have
to. He was a sniper. Before he went back to Iraq, he met with his bishop, and
his bishop read him some Mormon scripture and gave him a video called Let Not
Your Heart Be Troubled: A Message of Peace for Latter-day Saints in Military
Service. The teaching was that if he went to war in the spirit of love, even
for those whose blood had to be shed, then the shedding of blood would not be
counted as sin. He drove very slowly to the airport, trying to stop time
because of what he was going back to. He did not know that he was going back
to Hensley. Vela was not like Hensley.
Hensley was not like Vela. But they'd gone on leave at the same time, and now
at the airport Vela heard that Hensley was going to be his boss. With his
bald head and his tattoo and his twitches, Hensley was the most recognizable
NCO in the Army, and Vela approached him. Vela had gone home to celebrate a
life and Hensley to grieve a death, but what they talked about now was
business. Hensley asked Vela very detailed questions about the kinds of
weapons the squad had and what each man in the section was capable of. Vela
understood that it was Hensley's way of asking what he was capable of. They
never talked about home, and besides, once Hensley took over, Vela went on so
many missions with him that he called home less and less and found that even
when he did, there was less and less he could talk about. The snipers got a kill right
after Hensley took charge. It was April 7. Hensley wasn't there. He was on
another mission. It was Murphy's kill. He had seen a man walking toward him with
a weapon. It was a hot day and the heat was causing the light to dance. It
was hard to see even through a scope. Murphy pulled the trigger and shot the
man through the head. The weapon Murphy thought he was carrying turned out to
be a length of plastic pipe. Was the man an innocent? Nobody in Iraq was
innocent. But as Sergeant Major Knight liked to say, "He was innocent
that day." Murphy went back to base knowing that he'd be investigated.
He was not surprised that the company commander, Major Butler, was there to
meet him. He was surprised by what Butler said: "I just want to tell you
not to second-guess yourself. You did your job. You felt threatened, and you
pulled the trigger. That's what you're supposed to do. That's what we want.
Way to go." There was an investigation,
and Murphy was found blameless. It was a matter of intent. Clearly his intent
was not criminal. Clearly his intent was to kill and not to murder. The
distinction was so important that there was a meeting about it. The meeting
was so important that Knight and Balcavage addressed the snipers themselves.
What they said was pretty clear: If you have the shot, take the shot. If you
feel threatened, take the shot. We'll back you. How what they said was taken
was another matter. Balcavage and Knight thought they were offering
assurance. They thought they were clarifying the rules of engagement. They
thought they were clarifying the ineluctable line between killing for cause
and murder. To kill, you need PID - positive identification. You need
evidence of hostile action or hostile intent. You need "reasonable
certainty" that the human being you are about to dispose of presents a
threat. The snipers thought
something different. They had all been part of the scout platoon. There used
to be six of them, and they went out attached to scout teams. Now there were
a dozen of them. Now there were half as many scouts and twice as many
snipers, and the snipers were going out on their own, in small kill teams.
The restructuring was Hensley's idea, and it was lethal. Everything now was
oriented toward the kill, and Hensley's snipers looked at the meeting as a
final restructuring of what was expected and what was allowed. They thought instead of
assurance they were being offered license. They thought that Balcavage and
Knight were revising the ROE instead of clarifying them, with perception of
threat trumping evidence of threat as the rationale for pulling the trigger.
Most significantly, they thought - and later, they testified in court - that
they were being pressured by Balcavage and Knight for more production, in the
way of "increased kills." Balcavage denies this:
"I never said, I want you to increase our kills. Was that my intent?
Absolutely. The role of the sniper is to engage and destroy the enemy. Do we
want to do that more? Yes, as long as it gives us the overall effect that we
were looking for. And the effect that we were looking for was paranoia in the
enemy. We wanted to say, You either stop what you're doing, or this is what
we're doing. We don't use snipers to make friends with people. We use them to
destroy the enemy." The snipers had no problem
with Balcavage's message, whether explicit or implicit. "You hear that
we were pressured to get more kills," Anthony Murphy says. "Well,
what's not politically correct is that we wanted more kills. I mean, why would
we not want to kill the enemy that's killing us? Yeah, of course we want to
kill them. Legitimate targets, man." They were all in agreement on the
subject of killing. What they were not in agreement on was the subject of
murder. The difference wasn't moral but legal, and Hensley was right. It was
the six-letter word that changed everything. It was a reminder that the
natural divide between officer and enlisted man could turn into a divide
between accuser and accused, and so when Sergeant Major Knight said, at the
end of the meeting, "Now, we don't want to turn you guys into murderers
or anything," he believed he was saying what had to be said, and that
neither he nor Balcavage nor anyone else ever encouraged the snipers to
commit murder. What Murphy remembers, however, was saying to himself:
"Okaaaaay, what did he say that for? They're up telling us to go out and
kill people. What's he talking about murder for? Who the hell ever said
anything about murder?" Hensley went out on every
mission after that. Between missions he was training his men. When he wasn't
training his men, he was working out. When he wasn't working out, he was
committing operational details to memory. He wasn't eating - his men say he
didn't need to eat. He wasn't sleeping - his men say he didn't need to sleep
and that he moved just as much when he was sleeping as he did when he was
awake. He talked just as much when he was sleeping as he did when he was
awake, and about the same thing: missions. Hensley had some ideas. He had
some objectives. He had an agenda. He wanted to show what his snipers could
do and what he could do with his snipers. "I didn't have a lot of guys
who went to sniper school. I had a lot of young guys I was training in the
field. I couldn't kill the enemy from afar. So I used more unorthodox,
guerrilla-type tactics." Longer missions. Longer distances. Heavier
rucks. Smaller teams. Smaller footprints. More speed. More stealth. More
invisibility. More isolation. More risk. If he couldn't turn his men into the
classical ideal of snipers, he'd turn them into something else. He'd turn
them into stalkers, and so a lot of their kills would occur well within three
hundred meters. "A lot of our kills were close." The first real Hensley
mission was against snipers from the other side. They were in Jurf as Sakhr.
"They were really tormenting our guys," says Sergeant Major Knight.
"They created a little bit of a morale problem. We had some guys afraid
to go out. They went out, but they thought about it." But Hensley was a
sniper. Even when he was a squad leader in Jurf as Sakhr, he thought like a
sniper. So now he had an idea. "I'm like, Okay,
they're setting a pattern. Why can't we put some snipers out there that they
don't know are there? We insert at nighttime. We lay down in a hide. We put
on some vegetation. We sit there. Nobody knows we're there. I'll even go in
two days prior, so no one really knows I'm there. And I stay hidden. I stay
unseen. And I use Apache Company as bait. They come down, get shot at. We
shoot whoever's doing the shooting. And that's exactly how the first mission
went." It was on April 13. Sergeant
Richard Hand and Sergeant Robert Redfern were the shooters. They were hiding
up to their necks in a canal full of black water. They were there for hours.
Then four insurgent snipers engaged Apache Company and began running away.
They ran directly toward the canal. Hand and Redfern rose up out of the water
and shot each man at the dead run. Shot them through the lungs, through the
throat, through the head. They had grenades on them and high-powered
ammunition. It was an outstanding kill - "pivotal to our success in
Jurf," as Balcavage says. The next day, Hensley went
after a man he thought was laying IEDs. There was a checkpoint outside Jurf
as Sakhr called Checkpoint 312. It was a bad checkpoint for IEDs. Hensley had
seen a house near the checkpoint and had thought that if he were in the IED
business, he'd be making use of it. He decided to check it out. He crawled
around and thought he saw a man laying command wire. He wound up stalking the
man for hours, crawling around with a hundred-plus pounds of rucksack on his
back. He liked crawling. He liked the mud, liked smearing it on his face. He
was ordered to go back and check the man one more time before he left. He was
advancing on him with his SR-25 raised when the man bent down. Was he
reaching for a weapon? Hensley perceived a threat, in accordance with what
Balcavage and Knight had told him. He shot the man through the heart. The
man's wife and children began screaming, "because I essentially shot him
in his front yard. I mean, right in front of his family. So of course they're
going to be a little hysterical." The man was not carrying a weapon, but
a search of the site turned up a spool of command wire. It seemed like another
good kill. It was the natural killer's second kill, and later David Petta,
one of Hensley's youngest snipers, would remember Hensley squatting near the
body, saying, "I hate this part of my job. No, I love this part of my
job." Two weeks later, they went
after the mortars. It was up north, at a place called Fish Farms. It was a
little like Hensley imagined Vietnam to be, so green it was almost jungly,
with black water all over the place, and grass up to your waist. It was a big
mission, involving more than just the snipers. The Iraqi army was supposed to
engage the mortars, and the snipers were supposed to shoot anyone they saw
running away - the "squirters." It went as planned. There was an
engagement, and Lieutenant Didier saw a squirter. Then he lost him. Hensley
saw some guy swinging a sickle in the middle of the field. He was cutting
grass. He was working. But nobody worked in Iraq. Hens-ley described the guy
to Didier. Was it the guy Didier'd seen? Didier said it sounded like him. He
granted permission to engage. Hensley was the spotter and Specialist Jorge
Sandoval was the shooter. The spotter is the leader on any sniper team; the
shooter is just, in Hensley's words, "the monkey on the trigger."
All he has to do is breathe, relax, and squeeze. Hensley could have taken the
shot himself, he says, "but I wanted Sandoval to get his kill. He's in
the prone, down in the grass, and he's saying, 'I can't see nothing, Sarge.
All I can see is the top of his head.' I'm like, 'Well, that's all you got to
hit.' " Hensley called the shot, Sandoval squeezed the trigger, and the
top of the man's head parted like the Red Sea. That was April 27. The next
week there would be a firefight with insurgents inside a house, which lasted
until Hensley called in fire from an Apache helicopter and the Apache
obliterated the house and everyone in it, including, Hensley claims, women
and children. The week after that, there would be the close kill of May 11,
and that would be the sniper section's last. It was either a successful run
or a deadly spree, and Hensley still believes it proves his point. "I
proved that we could have won this war a long time ago if we did what's
necessary to win. I proved it! I proved that just one squad - one squad - if
allowed to use the right strategy, allowed to use the right techniques, could
yield a result. Did that in a few short months. And if it could be done with
my squad, it could be done with any squad. It ain't that we don't have the
tools. It ain't that we're not smart enough. It's that there's a certain risk
factor that commanders refuse to accept. They refuse to do what's necessary
to conquer. They don't think the juice is worth the squeeze." On May 17, a 1st Battalion
convoy got hit by an EFP. It's a nightmare weapon, a metaphor for the
insurgency, a molten and molting thing made not to penetrate armor with force
but rather to pass through it with heat. It killed two soldiers, and one of
them didn't know that he'd been passed through, that he'd been transgressed;
he was helping another soldier when he died. One of them died in the arms of
the company commander, who was coming in to take the place of Major David
Butler, who was rotating out. The new company commander was still soaked with
blood when he stood before Lieutenant Colonel Balcavage and said,
"Captain Charles Levine, reporting for duty, sir!" It was six days after the
May 11 close kill, and it was the last day of Michael Hensley's war.
Balcavage was set to go on leave, and right before he did, he received his
first feelers from Sheik Sabah. "He's a bad guy," the Sunni who
acted as intermediary told Balcavage, "but we're going to have to deal
with him now." The sheik was, indeed, rumored to have connections to Al
Qaeda in Iraq. But Balcavage made the decision to deal with him. The payments
began in the wake of Hensley's escalation, and the Geronimos never suffered
another combat fatality. Of course, there was
fighting, hard fighting, still to be done. But the kind of fighting that
Hensley stood for - the kind of killing that Hensley stood for - became
unnecessary, indeed a liability, especially in the eyes of Captain Levine.
Captain Butler? Captain Butler tried to be one of the guys. Some of the
snipers thought he wanted to be a sniper. But Levine was a different kind of
officer. He didn't understand - he objected to - the "aura that these
guys are supposed to have, as snipers. Okay? It's not Delta Force, it's not
the movies. It's just a job. It's not a calling, if you will. These guys have
a skill, and it's long-range marksmanship. But let's not make them something
they're not. Sniper is an E-3 [low-ranked] position. They're like truck
drivers." On June 12, Michael Hensley
was still a sniper, and he was all aura. He was, in the words of one of his
men, "a fucking badass." He was, in the words of another, "one
lethal motherfucker." He was living in face paint by this time, as if
he'd found, in camouflage, another tattoo. He didn't take it off when he went
to bed. He put more on. He was eating less, sleeping less, drinking a caffeinated
nitric-oxide supplement called NO-Xplode like it was water, and sometimes
instead of water. He was working out more. He was ripped. He would go down to
chow and play his metal on his headphones so loud you could hear it ten feet
away, and his troublesome hands would be whirling with the drummer, beat for
beat, as if he'd finally set them free. An IP - a member of the Iraqi police -
called him the Painted Demon, and it stuck. "I had everything under
control," he says. He looked out of control, sure. But he had everything
under control because he had his men under control. Later on, Sergeant Major
Knight would say, "He had an agenda and was bringing them all in, one
man at a time." It's not too far from the truth. He had given them their
purpose - in the coin of kills - and they had given him their loyalty. He was
using them to fight his war against the Iraqis, and he was using them to
fight his war against the Army, and he was winning both. Steven Kipling, the
platoon sergeant who had opposed him since he took over the snipers, had been
relieved. Hensley was acting platoon sergeant, and though Knight had decided
he wasn't ready and Didier had recommended against him, he was not only
campaigning for the full-time job but proposing the expansion of the snipers
into an entire platoon. And as for Didier - nobody listened to Didier. On
June 12, the scout platoon was pulling security at a shrine that had been
leveled by a car bomb. It was a tense mission, and some of them wanted to
engage. Didier was there. But the men - one of Hensley's snipers, and then
two of Didier's scouts - asked Hensley. Didier called a meeting. He
stood next to Hensley and said, "I'm the motherfucking commanding
officer here. I'm the one with the authority. If any of you want to engage,
you ask me." Then he turned to Hens-ley and told him that his men
weren't wearing body armor. He was right. They were Hensley's men, and
Hensley's men didn't wear body armor when it was like 130 degrees out. They
wore what Hensley wore. They wore T-shirts and bandanas and paint. They were
cool. But the standard for security situations was body armor, and Didier
told Hensley to enforce the standard. Hensley said, "You just said
you're the motherfucking CO. You enforce the standard." Hensley walked away. Didier
followed him. They went into a Humvee. "Are you telling me that you're
not going to follow my order?" Didier asked. "I'm telling you that
I've been in the Army ten years and I've worked too hard to listen to a punk
like you," Hensley said. Didier told Hensley to get
out of the Humvee and find a seat away from his men. "Sergeant Hensley,
you're relieved," he said. Hensley sat alone. Didier called his
remaining NCOs together, his remaining team leaders, and said, "Are you
going to follow my orders, or do I have a mutiny on my hands?" They
answered that his orders would be followed. There were MPs on hand, being
used for transport, and they escorted Hensley back to the base. He was no
longer an acting platoon sergeant. He was no longer sniper-section leader. He
was no longer even a sniper. Suddenly, the Painted Demon was as anachronistic
as some terra-cotta god of war. On June 19, Captain Levine
approached Staff Sergeant Hensley outside the base. It was a week after
Hensley had been relieved of duty. "I remember crouching down on the
rocks with him," Levine says. "The first thing I asked him was 'How
are you doing?' That's the first thing I ask all the soldiers. 'How are you
doing?' " Levine was a tall, physically imposing man with a tic. He
blinked a lot. When he spoke, he both habitually asked for feedback -
"Are you with me? Do you understand what I'm saying?" - and
remained oblivious to it. He was in his early forties. He had come late to
the Army and late to religious feeling, and so believed above all in the
natural goodness of the American soldier. Hensley disappointed him. "I
said, 'What's up? What happened with Lieutenant Didier?' " Levine
remembers. "Hensley said, 'Sir, I don't want to listen to anything he
fucking has to say.' I said, 'Well, some of your guys were walking around
without body armor. You yourself did not have on body armor.' And he replied,
'Sir, I don't really give a shit about body armor. Anyone gets within three
hundred meters of me, I'm going to kill him.' And when he told me that,
that's when I realized he is not fit to continue leading soldiers in combat.
That's when I realized I had a soldier who was not right mentally." Hensley had thought that
there was only one person in the world who was remotely like him, and that
was Tennille. He had just met another. He called Levine "Blinky."
He did not know that he had just found his perfect antagonist, and his
inevitable accuser. They all knew about the lie.
And because they knew about the lie, they knew about the kill. A lie does
something to a kill, even - or especially - in war. It's transformative. It
changes its very nature. You can kill a man in war and never talk about it
again. But if you lie about killing a man in war, you can never not talk
about it again. A lie puts a kill in the realm of conscience. And that's what
happened with the snipers. Sandoval talked about the
May 11 close kill. He kept saying, "That was fucked up, that was fucked
up." Finally, he told his friend Alexander Flores about it. He said that
they hadn't seen a man with an AK-47 approaching the hide. They hadn't seen
anyone. They were asleep - Redfern, Hand, Sandoval, even Hensley, even Vela,
who was supposed to be pulling security with the 9 mil. It was so freaking
hot, and they were all so freaking tired. On May 8, they'd gone on a mission
at 0400. They were out for a day and a half with no sleep. They'd gotten back
to the base just before midnight May 9. They tried to rest on May 10, but at
midnight they had to be back out again. It was mid-morning when the Iraqi
tried going out to his pump house to turn his water on. He climbed over an
earthen berm and stumbled on the five sleeping soldiers. When Sandoval woke
up, Vela and the Iraqi were just kind of staring at each other. Sandoval told
Vela to get the gun in his face. Then Vela woke up Hensley. Hensley, in his
own recollection, says that he woke up to see an Iraqi "in a squat, the
traditional Muslim squat thing. He had his hands up in the air." Hensley
went behind him, yanked his head back in a choke, then knocked the wind out
of him with a knee to the back. The Iraqi was on the ground when Redfern
said, "We've got a boy." "Well, wave him
in," Hensley said. The boy came in. He was a
teenager, but he was so slight, the Americans thought he was twelve. He
looked at the man on the ground. "Father," he said in English. The degree to which Hensley
had been keeping the snipers together by force of his own charisma and his
own will and his own singular example was apparent as soon as he was relieved
of duty. The sniper section fell apart. Or, to be more specific: On June 20,
Alexander Flores and David Petta fell asleep, and then it fell apart. They
were the only two soldiers in the section not deemed mission-ready. They were
supposed to be pulling security. They fell asleep twice. They had to be
disciplined. They objected. They said that if they were disciplined, they'd
go to the chaplain with what they knew about May 11. Of course, as Hensley says,
"that never would have happened if I'd been there. I'd have handled
it." And even Petta agrees. "I don't think it would have all come
out if Hensley was there. Things would have kept going forward ... ." But Hensley wasn't there.
Vela and Hand were. Vela was acting leader of the sniper section and Hand was
the acting scout platoon sergeant. Vela went to Hens-ley and asked him what
to do about Flores and Petta. Hensley said, "If you don't follow
through, they own you." Then he said, "They don't have anything.
They weren't there. If CID [the Army's Criminal Investigation Division] comes
around, don't talk to them. If you don't give them a statement, they can't
touch us." Flores and Petta went to
Chaplain Dan Hardin at two o'clock on June 21, 2007. Two hours later, Levine
says, "I was coming out of the operations center at the base, and I saw
the chaplain standing on the railing. He said, 'Charles, I just spoke to two
of your soldiers. I think you should listen to what they have to say.'"
Levine did, and so did Sergeant Major Knight and Major Whiteside. With
Balcavage on leave, Whiteside was the commanding officer of the battalion.
"I called CID on the spot," Whiteside says. "They said, 'When
do you need us there?' I said, 'Yesterday.' They said, 'It'll take a week.' I
said, 'No, you don't understand. It's our own soldiers ... .'" Levine keeps a list of what
he did next. For their own protection, he put Flores and Petta in a trailer.
He ordered his First Sergeant to go to where the snipers and scouts lived and
secure - confiscate - their belongings. He secured Hensley's weapon, because
"if what I was told was true, then we have someone whose criteria for
killing another human being is different from yours and mine." He
separated Hensley from the rest of the platoon, because he believed that he
had already "gotten under these guys' skins," and that he would try
to influence the investigation. He was right. "I had guys doing things
for me," Hensley says, "going to everybody's computer and cameras,
deleting pictures in bad taste, deleting possibly incriminating stuff. I have
my loyal band of men while I'm being escorted around under armed guard ...
." The platoon was separated
from the rest of the battalion. They were put in a big tent with wooden
partitions separating the pallet beds. And they were investigated for murder.
All the kills were investigated and all the men were investigated and all the
men were made to feel like murderers. "Once CID comes in, all they're
doing is fucking hitting on you," Richard Hand says. "They're
trying to prove that something went bad. There's no innocent until proven
guilty. It's: You're fucking guilty." If they were murderers, they might
not have talked. Even if they were natural killers, they might not have
talked. But they weren't either of those things. They were American soldiers,
whose job happened to be killing people. Sure, they talked. "It was
every man for himself after a while," David Petta says. And to this day,
it's what gets at Hensley. "I thought my men would stay loyal till the
end," he says. "I was proven wrong." Hensley stuck to the
statement he made on May 11: They killed a guy who was carrying an AK-47.
Then the CID tried to break him. They brought up Tennille. "They
misjudged my character, because they thought that would be something that
would break me down," Hensley says. "They thought it would force
some heavy emotion from me. Well, it may have. But it wasn't anything that's
gonna make me admit to being the guy on the grassy knoll. I'm not that
stupid. So all it did was make me angry. That's basically where they lost me,
and I invoked my rights. I was like, All right, I'm out of here." And Vela? He tried to be
like Mike, he really did. His first interrogation at the hands of the CID
lasted seven hours. He stuck to Hensley's version of the close kill. He was
holding out on the second day when the CID's lead investigator entered the
room. He asked everyone to leave and then closed the door. As Vela later
testified, "He told me I would never see my family again." After
fifteen minutes, the door opened. The investigator said that Evan Vela was
ready to make a statement. The CID misjudged Hensley, but it was Hensley who
had misjudged Vela: "He turned out to be much more of a sensitive guy
than he ever was when he worked for me," he says. "And that tells
me he may have acted the way he acted around me to impress me. And, looking
back, I think a lot of guys were like that. I think a lot of guys looked up
to me and wanted to impress me." It is one of the few regrets he has,
one of the few mistakes he'll admit: "I thought I had everything under
control because I trusted my men. I was stupid. They were weak. It'll never
happen again." He let the boy go. He does
not know why. He can be merciful. That is even the word Anthony Murphy uses
to describe him. "He's vicious but merciful. You can see his
mercifulness, surrounded by his spirit, and his weirdness." It wasn't
like he killed every person who crossed his path. It wasn't even like he
killed everyone who compromised a hide site. Vela and a few other snipers had
been compromised in April; Hensley told them to let the guy go. Now he told
the boy to go. But, he says, "as soon as I released the boy, I knew the
father was going to die." He didn't know it before
then. He didn't know it until he watched the boy leave. Then he was like, Oh,
that's why I sent him away. He got on the radio. He started making calls to
Didier. The father was still on the ground. He was still alive. He did not
speak English, so he couldn't know what was being said. But Hensley "had
already made the decision. I was committed at that point, you know? I was
already in decisive mode. So I set up a little scenario in my mind. I was
like, All right, I got a guy 200 meters out ... then I got a guy 150 meters
out ... all right, I see a weapon ...
I got a guy 100 meters out, I'd like permission to do a close kill. It's like
a tragic Shakespeare play. I have the ending - and I don't have to do
anything but sit and watch - because I know." Nobody else did.
"Redfern and Sandoval are up in the pump house. They keep turning
around. 'Hey, what are we gonna do, Sarge - what are we gonna do?' 'Shut the
fuck up and look that way. You ain't concerned with what we're gonna do.
Hand, you're on the berm, shut the fuck up and look that way. You ain't
concerned with what we're gonna do.' And I was like, 'Evan, you got your
pistol?' He's like, 'Yeah.' I was like, 'You ready?' Ready meaning: Is there
a bullet in the chamber? Is the weapon ready? Not, Are you ready mentally?
And then I said, 'All right. Shoot him.' He pulled the pistol out and he shot
the guy once in the head, and then
he started making some gurgling noises - the guy was making gurgling noises
like, aaaahhckkkkk - a really loud noise, almost as if his blood were
draining back into his body cavity. I said something to the effect of,
'That's freaky, shoot him again.' And Vela shot him again. Whether the bullet
impacted him or not, I don't know. But I think it did. Whatever." They had taken an AK-47 with
them on the mission. It had figured significantly in Hensley's stagecraft.
Now he put it on the body. Or he directed one of his men to. The killing, he
said, "is legitimate to me; it's not legitimate to the law. So I got two
choices. I can do something illegal, like put a gun on him, or I can go to
jail for murder. I don't know where you stand ethically on all of that, but
that is what it is. And if doing something that is a little dishonest keeps
me and my men from going to jail one day, I am going to be a little
dishonest. If the law causes my men to get killed, the law will be broken. If
lying prevents me from going to jail, I'm going to lie." He broke the law. He lied.
He did these things, he says, not "for pleasure" or "without
motive." He did these things, he says, to save the lives of his men. He
did these things because he decided that if Genei Nasir Khudair al-Janabi lived,
his men would die. He did these things because Khudair al-Janabi "was
making too much fucking noise." He did these things because Khudair
al-Janabi "had no right to be there, he was a bad guy, he deserved to
die." He did these things because he'd been deputized as the battalion's
"hired gun." He did these things because he acted as the
"buffer between what needed to be done and what the battalion needed to
know about." He did these things so that all his men would come home,
and the terrible irony he lives with is his knowledge that because he did
these things, one of his men did not. Balcavage says it. Knight
says it. Whiteside says it. So does Levine and so does Butler. They all talk
about the American soldier. The American soldier kills. The American soldier
sometimes kills innocents - "It's war," as Balcavage says,
"and things happen." The American soldier sometimes kills a lot of
innocents. But the American soldier never murders them. What's the
difference? The difference is what makes us different. The difference is what
allows Whiteside to avow, "We're Americans. We're still the good
guys." The difference, says Balcavage, "is what allows us to walk
away from chaotic conflict and still live with ourselves." The
difference, says Butler, is that the Army, despite its lethal capacities,
"tries to live by Judeo-Christian values." And that difference, all
these officers say, is what Michael Hensley - with his difference - tried to
erase. It is one thing to kill an Iraqi. It's another to resort to what
Balcavage calls "deliberate, well-thought-out murder." It is
another still to lie about it and then, in Levine's words, "twist the
minds of a bunch of young American soldiers" in an effort to justify it. Levine, then, had several
interests to protect when he preferred murder charges against Sergeant
Michael Hensley (three counts premeditated, related to the killings of April
14, April 27, and May 11, 2007), Sergeant Evan Vela (one count premeditated,
related to the close kill of May 11), and Specialist Jorge Sandoval (two counts
premeditated, related to the close kill of May 11 - when he gave Evan Vela
the 9 mil - and also to his April 27 killing of the man in the field with the
sickle). For one, he had to protect
the surge. He had to demonstrate to the Iraqis that the Army was willing to
do the right thing. Indeed, when the May 11 close kill was just starting to
be investigated, the engineer who was the go-between for Balcavage and Sheik
Sabah went to Balcavage and told him that he had to go talk with the sheik
and other local leaders about how the Army was handling the matter. "So
I met with them," Balcavage says. "And I told them the truth. I
told them we were investigating the accusations. What I was surprised at was
how well just telling them that we were investigating stymied the negative
impact. I thought the impact was going to be retributional attacks on our
guys because of perceived injustice - perceived injustice in a war of
injustice over there. Little did we know that the Sunni awakening in our area
was just around the corner." Little did he know that in a month he would
be paying Sheik Sabah and his tribe for every IED they removed from the roads
his soldiers traveled. Ultimately, though, the
charge sheets that Levine signed were not about Iraqis. They were about
Americans. They were about Hensley and his effect on what's known in the Army
as "good order and discipline." They were about what Balcavage
calls Hensley's "cult of personality." They were about the
near-mutiny that Hensley inspired - some of the charges preferred against him
had to do with his disobedience and disrespect of Lieutenant Matthew Didier -
and the fact that the entire scout platoon, after being investigated, was
then disbanded, and all but five of its thirty men scattered all over the battalion.
The Army had unleashed Hensley. It unleashed a soldier who told me,
"Hey, it was a business. I had a quality product, and I was selling
cheaper than the competition. I don't think anybody was disappointed."
It unleashed Hensley as it unleashed death itself, and in its prosecution of
Hensley and Vela and Sandoval it was trying to undo what it had done. It
failed utterly. Not only because the Army made the mistake of underestimating
him and his influence when it did put him on trial; but rather because I have
spoken with many enlisted American soldiers - hell, many Americans - in the
course of reporting this story, and I have yet to meet a single one who says
that Michael Hensley did anything wrong. The first trial was
Sandoval's. It was held in September 2007. Evan Vela was given testimonial
immunity and forced to take the stand. He recounted the killing of Khudair
al-Janabi in graphic detail and came apart emotionally while doing so. He
made it clear that Hensley had given the order. He made it clear that he had
pulled the trigger - or at least that the 9 mil was in his hand while the
trigger was pulled. Sandoval was acquitted of murder but convicted of
planting command wire in the April 27 kill. The second trial was
Hensley's. It was held in November. Hensley was aware of how Vela had
testified in the Sandoval trial. He was looking at life without parole, and
he figured he'd have to take the stand to save himself. But he says that
while he and Vela were in pretrial confinement in Kuwait, they managed to do
what they were forbidden to do, and communicate. He says that before the
trial, Evan got him a note, saying it was going to be all right. And it was.
Before Evan Vela took the stand in the trial of Michael Hensley, he ripped
all the patches off his uniform except the American flag; in what his lawyer
calls "a PTSD episode," he went blank. He testified that he had no
memory of Hensley ordering him to shoot Khudair al-Janabi and doesn't know if
he did. Hensley's lawyer argued that Evan Vela shot and killed the man for
reasons only Evan Vela knows. Hensley was acquitted of all three counts of
premeditated murder and convicted instead on charges of planting the AK-47
and disrespecting a commanding officer. He was sentenced to time served. The final trial was Vela's.
It was held in February 2008. Hensley testified. He had nothing to lose. He
had been acquitted. So he was, as he says, "willing to play the
monster" for Vela's military jury. He admitted giving Vela the order to
shoot Khudair al-Janabi. He also spoke, for the first time, of seeing armed
Iraqis approaching the hide site and refined his argument that the close kill
was a legitimate act of self-defense. It is not only the one argument he
offers; it is also the only one he accepts. Everything else he rejects,
including the gist of Vela's defense. Extreme sleep deprivation? Dehydration?
PTSD? The pressure to get more kills? No. They're excuses. They're apologies.
They're explanations. They make it seem like he and Vela and the rest of them
did something wrong. They didn't. Vela followed an order. How could he have
possibly known it was an unlawful order when the person giving it was Michael
Hensley? How could he have known it might be murder when the person asking
him to kill had been given the power of life and death? He has no regrets, other
than his "regret that some of my men might think they did something
wrong," and another one he voiced at the trial, after Vela was convicted
of unpremeditated murder and sentenced to ten years in Leavenworth. Hensley
was angry. And when he saw the boy he'd let go at the hide site on May 11, he
said, "Hey, kid, how's your father?" Then he said: "I should
have dumped him in the river, along with you and the rest of your
family." Not quite a month after Evan
Vela's conviction for murder, his wife, Alyssa Carnahan, with her baby Blair
in the car seat, picks up Michael Hensley at his apartment, and they drive
together to Fort Richardson. She picks him up because he doesn't have a car
that works, and because he's been helping her out. He has been helping her
out, particularly, with the Army. Alyssa does not like the Army. The Army
asked her husband to kill and then sent him to jail for murder. She has asked
the Army to keep paying Evan and to keep providing her family with benefits
pending the outcome of Evan's appeal. The Army turned her down. She has no
money. She is moving, however, to Leavenworth, to be closer to Evan, and the
Army owes her moving expenses. Hensley is escorting her to the base because he
knows how to talk to these fucking people. It seems like a bad idea - the
wife of a convicted murderer enlisting as an ally a notoriously unconvicted
one - but Hensley knows how the Army works. He knows how to get things done.
He makes the Army uncomfortable, and he knows that if there's anything the
Army doesn't like, it's being uncomfortable. Sure enough, once he shows up
with Alyssa, in his black leather jacket and his sideburns and his boots,
it's a situation, and the Army has to stop it. Alyssa gets paid. Hensley
wins. He always does. That's why,
later that night, he's sitting in a hotel bar with Alyssa Carnahan and Josh
Michaud, drinking White Russians in his black leather jacket. Alyssa has
every reason in the world to hate him; it's because of Hensley that her
husband is in jail. She doesn't. She trusts him. Joshua Michaud, one of the
youngest of Hensley's snipers, has every reason to hate him; it's because of
Hens-ley that he and the rest of the snipers were investigated and called
murderers. He doesn't. He idolizes him. And it's like this with everybody:
Evan Vela's father; Evan Vela's lawyer; Sergeant Anthony Murphy; Sergeant
Richard Hand; even the informer, the whistle-blower, David Petta. Everybody
likes Mike. More to the point, everybody likes Mike, so nobody thinks that
killing an Iraqi in a hide site was a crime worth prosecuting American
soldiers for. Everybody likes Mike, and to like Mike is to like him past a
certain point of conscience. It's almost a continuation of Iraq: He has them
all on his side, against the Army. There is only one of his men he's worried
about, and that's Evan Vela. He's worried about him because he can't get to
him; he's worried about him because someone else can. It's what haunts him,
and now, as he switches from White Russians to Long Island iced teas, he
tells Alyssa, tells us, his silent and rapt audience, what he told her
husband before he went to jail. Hensley was in Iraq to testify, but he stayed
in Iraq - he missed his plane home - to have this moment with Evan as he was
being led away to serve his time. And what he told him was: "They're
going to try to change your mind in prison. They're going to try to make you
say you did something wrong. They might even make you say it in order to get
parole. So say it. Don't ever worry about what I think. It doesn't matter
what you say, because I know what you really think. You'll never have to
apologize to me." External link: http://www.esquire.com/features/michael-hensley-0708 |