EXFIL by Anthony Patton (best book reader txt) 📕

the school didn’t exactly fit into my plan of one day heading a Combatant Command as a four-star general.

As much as I nodded, I resisted the idea of returning to West Point.

After graduating many years ago, I had followed the traditional path of an infantry officer, checking all the right boxes and excelling as a company commander while serving in Fort Clayton, Panama. I lived and breathed Army. Many officers and enlisted soldiers were obsessed with qualifying for Special Forces, but I had a long-term plan and understood that, regardless of how much fun kicking down doors might be, there were better paths to the top.

Many officers and enlisted soldiers also acquired a taste for Panamanian women. Week after week, the most ordinary dudes bagged stunning young women, far more physically attractive than they could ever hope to find back home.

Each Friday night, a line of eager dolls waited outside the auxiliary gate near the NCO club of Fort Clayton, a stone’s throw from the Panama Canal. The soldiers had their pick to sign in for the night and the girls never said no, as long as free food and drinks were on the menu.

Between this ritual and the ridiculously low liquor prices at the Class Six stores, I concluded that the Army condoned this behavior, or at least turned a blind eye to it.

As a Southern gentleman raised on more traditional values, I could appreciate the urge to indulge in carnal pleasures, but not as a matter of course and certainly not without restraint or as the basis for assessing a mate. As a company commander, I saw the results of this debauchery, including broken marriages and desperate young women showing up at the front gate with babies or signed marriage documents, only to discover that the loves of their lives had left without reporting anything up the chain of command.

Love is blind, but many soldiers couldn’t distinguish love from lust.

Admittedly, I indulged once myself, with a refined lady of the Panamanian oligarchy. She lived in an affluent yet materialistic and transactional space that didn’t interest me, but also showed me a world of delirious passion that left an indelible mark, even to this day.

As a captain, I was ripe to take a wife, but the American talent in Panama was limited, until I met Beth. After a grueling deployment in the jungle, with more venomous snakes and torrential rain than I hoped to ever see again, I joined the boys for a cold beer at the officers’ club.

There, I made eyes at a table of cute company grade officers from the 470th Military Intelligence Brigade, but they all had boyfriends or husbands or didn’t seem remotely interested in a knuckle-dragger like me. Time slowed, however, when Beth joined them.

Imagine a 1980s teen angst film with a beautiful woman descending the stairs in a prom dress, wind blowing her hair as a rock ballad plays.

She was both beautiful and out of place with her sandy blonde hair, blue eyes, full red lips, and the most darling freckles. She said she was visiting for a conference.

I can only imagine how idiotic I must have looked gawking at her, but much to my surprise, her gaze turned out to have been an invitation. After mustering the courage, I strode over to offer a drink. I don’t recall everything I said, but it was love at first sight, for me at least. As luck would have it, we both had follow-on assignments to San Antonio, home of the Alamo.

At the risk of glossing over important memories, our courtship was brief but passionate.

We were soon living in nuptial bliss with plans to start a family.

I never understood couples opting for long engagements or waiting years to have children, but I soon learned that married life would change everything, especially when husband and wife were both Army officers on different career tracks. Many a military couple imagined that both careers would work out, but the tandem option worked best if one career took a back seat to the other. In the Army, and for a Southern gentleman, that meant the wife.

I challenge any man to say “six of one, half a dozen of the other” whether his or his wife’s career would be the one to bring home the bacon.

Anyway, my sense was that Beth agreed without hesitation, but second-wave feminist norms dictated that we at least give the perception to others of having considered both paths.

The good thing about being a captain was that it gave officers time to spread their wings and explore other career options. In my case, as I transitioned from company command to the repetitive grind of staff work, I was bitten by the Military Intelligence and Foreign Area Officer bugs.

Week after week, we faced the choice of beer-soaked happy hours and war stories with my infantry buddies, or more cerebral evenings with Beth’s MI and FAO friends, which included dinner parties and sophisticated banter. I soon found myself reading The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and other respectable media, both to not embarrass myself and because it opened my eyes to an otherwise unseen world beyond infantry and civil engineering.

The warrior profession was noble, with infantry standing firm on the tip of the spear, but I also reflected on how the Army nested into the National Security Strategy. The more I read, the more I realized I could never be a news junkie. While academic types, Beth included, found satisfaction in splitting hairs over policy issues in the abstract, I was curious about the biases of the publications and the quality of the sources. After all, if I were a general for a Geographic Combatant Command, I wouldn’t consult mainstream media to make important decisions.

And whereas Beth loved sharing ideas with her friends, I preferred to get to know them on a personal level, to discover what made them tick. This was the only way to make sense of their ideas and perspectives. It turned out