The Last Patrol By Afghan Civilians.

 

I wrote to former Army First Lieutenant Clint Lorance in early March, four months after he was pardoned by President Donald Trump and released from the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. He had served six years of a 20-year sentence after being convicted of ordering the murders of two Afghan civilians near a small forward operating base outside Kandahar, one of the most violent and kinetic regions of the country.

Lorance, according to news accounts, was an inexperienced lieutenant who’d just taken over the platoon of an admired commander wounded in an IED attack. He had apparently wanted to impress his combat-hardened troops. They reported him hours after the shooting.

His case seemed different from those of Major Matthew Golsteyn and Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, the two other service members accused of war crimes in whose cases the president had also intervened on November 15, 2019. For one thing, Lorance hadn’t committed the murders himself; he had ordered others to shoot. For another, unlike Gallagher and Golsteyn, he had acted, his lawyers claimed, because his platoon faced an imminent threat of attack.

The media still seemed to be litigating his court-martial seven years later, I wrote in my email. Fox News welcomed him home as a war hero. The New York Times editorial pages decried him as a war criminal. I knew that United American Patriots (UAP), the organization that had campaigned for his release, was arguing that Lorance’s rights had been violated at his trial — specifically, that the government had withheld evidence proving that the people he’d ordered his men to shoot were Taliban bomb-makers, not civilians. I hoped to find out where he stood with his own conscience. I asked if he’d be amenable to a phone conversation.

He wrote me back less than an hour later: “Hey brother” — the salutation he would use in almost all of his emails — “I have been advised not to speak with any media with liberal slants…. I only do interviews with conservative media [because] they don’t try to attack President Trump via my tragedy.”

We kept up our correspondence. He told me he’d recently moved to Florida because “it is paradise” and that he was applying to law school, because he wanted to help other unjustly accused people. After a while, I asked if he would reconsider speaking with me. He replied with one sentence: “Let me think about this and pray about this.”

Seven weeks later, on a May morning, he appeared on the screen of my laptop. He was wearing a blue blazer and an American flag pin, as he had done for his homecoming interview on Fox & Friends. He was courteous but impassive at first, the image of a professional soldier. He answered my questions in a soft drawl, without nervousness or inhibition. He’d been released from a maximum-security prison less than six months earlier, and now Florida was on coronavirus lockdown. Sitting in his barely furnished apartment, he seemed glad for an opportunity to socialize. Gradually, he relaxed into the conversation. He laughed a lot, often when he was speaking most revealingly: He’d never want his own child to join the military. You start to love your fellow service members more than you do your own family. He thought about suicide at Fort Leavenworth.

There was a catchphrase he used when he talked about moments that had baffled, astonished, or wounded him: “What the hell?” he would say. In the long story he told me, there were many such moments.

The senior commander of U.S. forces in Kandahar Province, Colonel Brian Mennes, told his men to imagine themselves as beat cops. Walk the streets, talk to the locals, find out what’s up. “Have you seen any strangers around here lately? Has anybody told you to stay clear of a particular area?” This was how you fought an insurgency while also protecting civilians from harm — by getting to know people, showing them you were on the same side, helping them when you could. This was how you found IEDs.

From late May 2012 to early July, IEDs were almost the whole war, as the 40-odd members of First Platoon, C Troop, of the 4-73rd Cavalry of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division knew it. On their daily patrol into the tiny village of Sarenzai, they crept in single file behind the soldier carrying a beeping, warbling Minehound. To cover the 200 meters between the base and Sarenzai could take as long as an hour. If the platoon had to stop — because something broke, or the battery in a piece of equipment died, or the men came under attack — they’d sprinkle baby powder on the dusty ground to mark the farthest point they’d swept.

In 2012, as in 2020, the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan seemed confused, exorbitantly expensive, and unfruitful. It had failed to achieve its goal of building a self-sustaining local government and military. But it’s not the job of infantry soldiers to question their mission. During the spring and summer of 2012, the men of First Platoon fought with valor in one of the war’s fiercest battle zones. They also fought with restraint, because those were their orders: to win the “hearts and minds” of the inhabitants of a remote village by defending them without causing them harm.

First Platoon had begun its deployment in February in Maiwand District in southern Kandahar Province. Under the command of First Lieutenant Dominic Latino, it pushed into Taliban territory that U.S. forces hadn’t touched in a decade. In one operation, a patrol engaged a nest of Taliban snipers. Three times Latino called in air support to bomb the Taliban position. Three times new snipers appeared and replaced the dead ones. Three times Latino led his men across the battlefield to verify that the dead were combatants and not civilians. Twice, they came under such heavy fire that they had to turn back. The operation went on for eight hours without a single American casualty, until all of the Taliban reinforcements had been killed.

Lorance had the kind of bearing garrison commanders love: Blond and blue-eyed, he looked, as one soldier in the platoon said, “like Captain America.”  

From February until early June, First Platoon killed at least 20 insurgents without losing a single man, or injuring a civilian. On May 20, it moved to a new, even more treacherous area of operations: the Arghandab Valley of southeastern Afghanistan, the ancestral home of the Taliban and the most fertile region of the country. Farmers grew grapes to sell fresh or dried; others harvested poppies.

Just as the jungle favored the enemy in Vietnam, the labyrinthine agricultural terrain of the Arghandab favors the Taliban. It restricts maneuverability and obscures sightlines. Afghans build walls encroaching on every road in order to claim their land holdings. In the grape fields, they pile berms of earth into parallel rows taller than a man’s head to form trellises for the vines.

Every day, sometimes twice a day, a patrol marched between Strong Point Payenzai, the platoon’s base, and Sarenzai, which consisted of a dozen buildings in several compounds and 30 residents. To reach Sarenzai, the men filed through the irrigation rows of four grape fields, which were fenced in with concertina wire and were, at least in theory, less vulnerable to IED emplacement. The grape rows ran parallel across each field, like lines of text on a page. But at a certain point, the men, led by a minesweeper, would begin to climb over the 7-foot berms to reach the village.

Each time, they would clear the way of IEDs, and the next morning’s patrol would find more. The land was littered with IEDs, some of them a decade old or more. Over time, the wires corroded — or didn’t. One member of the platoon was legendary for stepping on live detonators connected to defunct bombs. Each pop! made for what one soldier recalls as “a butt-clenching moment.”

Colonel Mennes presented these missions as exercises in diplomacy and public relations, but some men described them more darkly as “presence patrols.” They were a show of force, a statement about who controlled the territory. 

The roads could be traversed only by mine-resistant trucks. Foot patrols typically took the most arduous route, because the insurgents booby-trapped the areas of natural movement (“lines of drift” in military parlance), like a hole in a mud-brick wall or a bridge between irrigation canals. Using high-resolution satellite imagery, Lieutenant Latino and his commander would plan out patrols days in advance: We’ll jump this wall; we’ll blow a hole in that; we’ll pause here.

Virtually every time it left the Strong Point, First Platoon took fire. The strategy of the Taliban was simple: Using small arms, they would attempt to maneuver the platoon into triggering buried IEDs, then open fire with machine guns.

For the first month, the Strong Point didn’t even have tents or cots. To cool off in the 100-degree heat, the men would turn on the bulldozer the civil engineers had left behind and duck into its air-conditioned cabin. Amid this extreme stress and discomfort, Lieutenant Latino dispatched with some traditional military practices. To conserve water, which was scarce, he didn’t require the men to shave. He allowed them to call him by his first name. It was so hot, the Minehound batteries sometimes overheated and died. First Platoon was doing two eight-hour patrols every day, plus three eight-hour shifts of guard duty. There wasn’t enough manpower to get it all done, plus allow for sleep and downtime.

On June 6, the platoon suffered its first casualty. Private First Class Samuel Walley stepped on an IED and suffered the loss of his left arm below the elbow and his right leg below the knee, as well as serious soft-tissue damage to his left leg. On June 13, another IED blew off Private First Class Mark Kerner’s buttocks. The same explosion inflicted shrapnel wounds on Lieutenant Latino’s abdomen, limbs, eyes, and face. Latino was medevaced to Germany. On June 23, Specialist Matthew Hanes, a minesweeper, was shot through the neck and paralyzed below the waist.

In late June, the platoon was pulled back from Strong Point Payenzai to the Tactical Operations Center at Ghariban, about 3 kilometers away. The chain of command had approved giving the men a three-day hiatus for rest, counseling if they wanted it, and a “hot wash” — a review of procedures. There were also showers and freshly prepared food.

The men had been wondering who would succeed Lieutenant Latino, and at Ghariban, they learned it would be First Lieutenant Clint Lorance. They had heard Lorance was “squared away” ­— exemplary in both character and ability — even if some were aware that Captain Patrick Swanson, who supervised both First and Second Platoons, had pushed to promote a different lieutenant.

Lorance had the kind of bearing garrison commanders love: Blond and blue-eyed, he looked, as one soldier in the platoon said, “like Captain America.” He seemed affable and motivated. The men noticed that he didn’t have a Ranger tab, which was unusual for a lieutenant. That meant someone had a lot of confidence in him.

The Strong Point was laid out in a triangle. Occupying about half the area of a football field, it had formidable walls constructed from the same building material the Afghans had been using for centuries: earth, packed by the ton into stackable wire-and-fabric modules called Hescos. Within the walls there were three air-conditioned semicircular Alaska tents, two for troops and one for the platoon leader, the platoon sergeant, and the communications technology. At each of the triangle’s three points, a watchtower rose 15 feet. A manned gun truck guarded the Strong Point’s entrance.

On one side of the Strong Point was the village of Payenzai, and on the other, the village of Sarenzai — part of First Platoon’s “beat.” From the moment the men left the base, the Taliban were watching. Although the insurgents had ceded Sarenzai to the Americans, they took firing positions a few hundred meters away, on the far side of the village. It was from there that they had shot Matt Hanes.

On the morning of Monday, July 2, the soldiers of First Platoon woke up at 0500 to begin hydrating. The temperature hit 100 degrees an hour later. Lieutenant Lorance was preparing for an 0700 step-off. It was his second full day in command.

What follows is his version of the events that took place that day.

At the Strong Point, Lorance adhered to his typical work ethic. When the NCOs invited him to play cards, he said no. He “seemed to never sleep,” one of them later told investigators.

Lorance met with the commander of the Afghan National Army patrol that was also participating in this mission. Under a new program, the Afghans now walked at the head of every patrol. The Afghan commander announced that his men would be following new Rules of Engagement: To defend against suicide bombers, they would be shooting oncoming motorcycles on sight. Lorance shared this information with his team, whose own Rules of Engagement — which stipulated soldiers could not open fire unless someone attacked them first or threatened to — remained unchanged.

Two helicopters were circling overhead. Drawing on his connections at headquarters, Lorance had called them in to provide reconnaissance. He wanted maximum protection for his men. He had slept only 45 minutes to an hour each of the previous two nights. He was drinking a lot of coffee. So when a group of locals from the village delayed him at the entry control point with a complaint, he was curt with them.

When the patrol, 17 American and seven Afghan soldiers, left the Strong Point, Lorance noted that it was 0655, five minutes ahead of schedule. The mission, which Lorance had shared with the platoon the night before, was to clear every building in the village and identify the people inside. Were insurgents sheltering in Sarenzai, as he suspected? Private First Class James Skelton carried a portable electronic device called a SEEK that would help answer this question. The SEEK was used to collect photographs, fingerprints, and iris scans from Afghans and was connected to a database of biometric evidence left behind on exploded IEDs. If a match linked an Afghan with bomb-making materials, the SEEK would “pop hot.”

Crossing the road into the first of four grape fields, the platoon entered a separate ecosystem. Muddy, lush, and dark, the rows were irrigated by mountain rivers redirected through a millennia-old network of underground tunnels. The berms on which the vines rested could shrink a soldier’s vision to a narrow rectangle, as if he were inside a World War I trench.

Twelve minutes into the patrol, Private Skelton climbed atop a berm and peered through his binoculars. “Bike!” he called out to Lorance standing below. A motorcycle carrying three riders was heading toward them at a high rate of speed down Route Chilliwack, a road so densely packed with IEDs that no one but insurgents ever used it. The motorcycle was about 160 meters away.

Lorance had written in his notebook that Skelton was a former police officer. As a former military policeman himself, he liked that. So when Skelton asked permission to shoot — that was the key thing: He did ask permission — Lorance trusted there was good reason to. “Yes,” he ordered Skelton. “Engage the motorcycle.” Skelton shot two rounds. Both missed.

At around the same time — maybe before, maybe after; eight years later, it’s difficult to remember exactly — Lorance heard the Afghan soldiers firing. They had eyes on the situation, unlike him, and if they were shooting, they must know something he didn’t. Although there had never been a motorcycle-bomb attack on U.S. forces in this area of operations, he knew that there had been two in recent weeks, including one near Kandahar Airfield that had killed 23 and wounded 25.

All Lorance could see was mud and grapes, but in the mental picture he was forming, the motorcycle had rounded a sharp bend and was speeding toward the Afghan soldiers as they exited the grape rows onto the road. He tried multiple radio channels but couldn’t get through to anyone. The communications technology depended on line of sight.

Just as the jungle favored the enemy in Vietnam, the labyrinthine agricultural terrain of the Arghandab Valley favors the Taliban. 

His men were in danger, and he had to make a split-second decision. He was finally able to make contact with one of the gun trucks that was providing overwatch. He ordered it to deliver precision shots. From the gun truck, Private David Shilo, an experienced marksman, discharged a burst of 7.62 millimeter rounds from the mounted machine gun. “This was effective,” Lorance would later write in his log.

Arriving on the dirt road that led into the village, the patrol discovered two of the three Afghan men lying beside a ditch. They were dead. Their companion had run away. Near them, the motorcycle leaned on its kickstand.

It wasn’t at all the scene Lorance had imagined. “If I would have been up there,” he told me, “and would have known that they were stopped and off their motorcycle, I would never in a million years have said, ‘Fire at them.’ I would want to go talk to them and get intel out of them. I’d be like, ‘Who are you? Where are you from?’ I would want to know everything about them.”

A woman and two children stood near the bodies, weeping.

Holy shit, Lorance thought. Did we just kill good people?

The way to find out was to do a Battle Damage Assessment. Skelton was the intelligence specialist who carried the SEEK. But Lorance wanted Skelton to follow him into the village to carry out the mission and get the biometric enrollments. The engagement with the motorcycle had been necessary and unfortunate, but it wasn’t important. He ordered two of his men to conduct the Battle Damage Assessment while he proceeded into the village. They had the necessary training, even if they didn’t have the SEEK. They knelt by the bodies.

Captain Swanson, who had been alerted to the situation, was radioing Lorance from headquarters. What was happening? he asked. Were the dead men combatants or civilians? Had Lorance done the Battle Damage Assessment?

No, Lieutenant Lorance replied, they hadn’t been able to do the Battle Damage Assessment. The villagers had taken away the bodies.

As he spoke, he knew he had just made a critical mistake. He should have said that his men would get to the Battle Damage Assessment eventually, that they didn’t have time to do that shit right now. Because when you speak over the radio, “you might as well be putting your hand on the Bible,” as one member of the platoon told me.

In the years to come, Lorance’s decision not to use the SEEK device for the Battle Damage Assessment would prove to be crucial and polarizing. It would contribute both to his imprisonment and his pardon.

The weeping woman was screaming now. Lorance told himself that her tears didn’t necessarily mean he’d done anything wrong. The men whose bodies she was crying over could be insurgents. That shocked him — the idea that the Taliban had families, too. It had never occurred to him before.

He wanted to examine the motorcycle, to see if it was packed with explosives, but it was gone. His men had allowed a teenage boy to wheel it away.

Lieutenant Lorance directed the Afghan soldiers to continue the mission, and they began bringing people out of their homes.

At 0830, the platoon’s second gun truck reported that another motorcycle was approaching it. The soldiers in the truck ordered its rider to stop, and he complied. They detained him; his hands later tested positive for residue from the homemade explosives often used in IEDs.

At 1000, Lorance got word of another firefight involving members of the patrol’s weapons squad, which had been providing security from a rooftop outside Sarenzai. It had killed one man and wounded another, whom the patrol detained.

The vibe had turned ominous and jagged. It felt as though the entire village was turning against the patrol. There was no telling where a Taliban attack could come from. “We got to go!” Lorance’s men told him.

“Let ’em come!” Lorance said, but he let his men hurry him off.

That evening, he and several soldiers drove the two detainees to Ghariban for processing. He had just begun writing his report on the day’s patrol when Captain Swanson appeared and led him to the weightlifting tent so they could speak privately.

Swanson said he had received a report of a possible civilian casualty. He had concerns about Lorance’s reporting of the engagement that morning, and he was suspending him temporarily. He told him to wait in the sleeping tent while it was sorted out.

Haning worked at brigade headquarters, where he had known of incidents like this, Lorance was shocked. How could anybody say he had done the wrong thing? He had been protecting his men. Ordering them to shoot was the hardest decision he had ever made. He didn’t know if his lack of sleep had affected his decision-making; he hoped not.

As he walked to the tent with Swanson, he passed by the entrance to the dining facility. There, he glimpsed members of the patrol sitting at tables, bent over sheets of paper. He realized they must be writing statements. They must have reported him.

His parents, Lorance told me, are “like religious extremists in the Middle East.” He was raised in the International Pentecostal Holiness Church, the most literalist and severe of the Pentecostal denominations. Women aren’t allowed to wear makeup, pierce their ears, or cut their hair. Boys and men wear long sleeves and long pants. Once, Lorance came home in a pair of shorts he’d bought at Goodwill, and his grandfather, the person he admired most in the world, wept at the sight of him. Televisions were forbidden.

This was in rural Oklahoma and Texas. Lorance grew up as the third of four children. His mother took in occasional work as a seamstress, and his father was a welder who traveled to jobs in and out of state. Today, Lorance wonders if his father’s life on the road might have been a way of escaping a wife who was chaotically energetic and colorful but nearly impossible to please, perhaps as a consequence of her own frustrated hopes for herself. She had gotten pregnant at 17.

At friends’ houses, Lorance would secretly watch TV. His favorite show was The Pretender, about a man who instantly masters the tools of any profession, remaking his identity from episode to episode. When Lorance was 12, the family began to come undone. His father and brother left. His stepsister joined her biological father. Lorance and his sister and mother would move, more times than he can remember, from one tiny town to another. For a while, they continued to make the ten-hour round trip back to their church every Sunday.

His mother remarried, to her high school sweetheart, and Lorance, now her confidant and protector, says he called the police when he suspected his stepfather had hit her. Eventually, she reconciled with Lorance’s father. But when the family decided to move again, Lorance stayed behind with his aunt. He was 16, with his own pickup truck, and for once he wanted to finish the year at the same school where he’d begun it.

On their daily patrol into Sarenzai, the men crept in single file. To cover the 200 meters between the base and the village could take as long as an hour.

Up to that point, his mother had been the only constant adult in his life. He loved her, but he had resolved to be her opposite. “Reality seems to be in a state of flux around her,” he says, and he was determined to be “more grounded, more precise, and not to exaggerate.” Once, he remembers, he interrupted her while she was telling his uncle a story. “That’s not the truth,” he said­­ — and she slapped him. “Impulsiveness is something I’ve struggled with my whole life because of my mom,” he says.

He had been a watchful, quiet kid. He listened to his sisters discover boys and his brother discover girls, knowing from an early age he was gay himself — an “abomination” in the eyes of the church and also a threat to his own safety. “In rural Texas,” he says, “you might get hanged from a tree for that.” He had a gay cousin whom his mother talked about as if he were “some kind of demon.” His only other reference point was Will & Grace, but he disliked the show because he couldn’t see himself in its “flamboyant” characters. Always big for his age, he was never bullied, and he changed schools so often that nobody got to know him well enough to suspect anything. He taught himself not to walk or talk “feminine.” But other kids weren’t the enemy. His own parents were. Had they discovered that he was gay, they would have thrown him out. He lived, he says, in a state of panic, hating who he was, pretending to be someone else, praying every night to God to make him different.

On December 13, 2002, his 18th birthday, he enlisted at an Army recruiting station in Greenville, Texas. It might have seemed like an odd choice: Why pursue a career that would force him to hide his sexuality or else be discharged or — in a culture as homophobic as the military — possibly assaulted? “Because I am not somebody who runs from a fight,” he told me. Being a gay soldier was less scary to him than being the gay son of Pentecostal parents, he says, and the latter had prepared him for the former. What he wanted was to be accepted into perhaps the most hypermasculine society in America. “To compartmentalize such a big part of yourself is incredibly difficult and requires an incredible amount of energy,” he says. But the secrecy and fear “propelled” him. “That would be the thesis statement of my life: If I can’t be perfect in that way, I’ll be perfect in every other way.”

He served as a noncommissioned officer in South Korea, where he had his first date with another man (Outback Steakhouse, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, bungee jumping), then Alaska and Iraq. As he tells it, he pushed his men to achieve sometimes lofty goals, and they often did. He had to avoid fraternizing with them, though, particularly at bars; he feared giving himself away. He covertly visited gay clubs but found that other patrons sometimes thought he was straight. He had buried himself so deep that his own people couldn’t find him.

Returning from Iraq in 2007, he was selected for an ROTC program that paid his tuition at the University of North Texas and allowed him to graduate with an officer’s commission. He was the first person in his family to advance beyond high school. He was now in a long-term relationship, but his stress level was through the roof. Did he really want to serve a full 20 years and be paranoid everywhere he and his boyfriend went? Then, in 2010, to Lorance’s amazement, President Barack Obama announced he would end “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Lorance loved the Army, and he was thriving there, and now he could stay.

Following leadership and air-assault training at Fort Benning, he proceeded to Ranger School, the Army’s most physically intense training program. A Ranger tab, the badge signifying completion of the course, is considered a prerequisite for career advancement. Lorance had competed in numerous Ironman-style competitions in the Army, but several days into the program, he woke up in a hospital, having collapsed from heat exhaustion during a five-hour orienteering course. Ranger School is about teamwork; Lorance, though, disliked delegating authority to people he believed to be less capable. During the training, he barely slept or ate. Trying to silence the interior voice that told him he was weak, he ignored another one that warned him he had reached his limits.

In March 2012, he shipped to Forward Operating Base Pasab in Kandahar, Afghanistan. He found himself in a furiously competitive environment populated by ambitious young lieutenants, all of them vying to be made platoon leader. That was how the Army worked — the constant pressure to get promoted, because it was always training your replacement. A deployment lasted nine months, with no guarantee a platoon would become available.

He worked as a liaison officer in the 4-73rd Cavalry of the 82nd Airborne. His job was to brief the brigade commander on operations and to audit radio chatter — listening in on situations in flux and anticipating the need for resources like air assets. Although two people were supposed to do this job, Lorance ended up working both the day and night shifts, sleeping the four hours in between. He was taking on too much, but he was regarded by commanders and peers as extremely capable. He was recommended for a Bronze Star.

Private Skelton peered through his binoculars. “Bike!” he called out to Lorance: A motorcycle carrying three riders was heading toward them at a high rate of speed.

He fantasized about taking out the number-two Taliban target in the region, and he also fantasized about dying in combat. His brother had wept when Lorance told him he was gay. (“I would have protected you,” his brother said, as if Lorance couldn’t have done that himself.) His mother told him, “I did not raise a girl. I raised a boy.” To his parents, his being gay canceled out all his other accomplishments. He thought falling in battle might redeem him in their eyes.

Some of his co-workers would later tell Army investigators that Lorance was a jovial presence at Pasab. Others remarked that he struck them as immature and occasionally inappropriate, often with women. He would blow kisses. He once stood up in the middle of a meeting to announce that a female officer “smelled good.” A lieutenant later told investigators that Lorance had no filter and would say whatever came into his mind.

For Memorial Day, Lorance’s boyfriend in the States posted a supportive message on the brigade’s Facebook page. Lorance was furious about this indiscretion — it was, he says, “unforgivable” — and broke up with the boyfriend immediately. Not long afterward, he says, he was auditing a combat situation when he noticed a lieutenant colonel standing awkwardly by his desk. “How are those hemorrhoids?” the man asked. More instances of harassment followed, he says: a lieutenant colonel who told his subordinates, “Are you going to let the gay guy outdo you?”; a colonel, an officer with no reason ever to address a lieutenant directly, who called him “La-La Lorance.” Did everyone on the base know he was gay? Would other soldiers have his back on the battlefield? Lorance had been terrified since his childhood of exactly this. (“None of us had any idea Clint was gay,” says Swanson, “but it’s totally plausible that he was experiencing these things.“)

In mid-June, the battalion commander approached Lorance at his desk and made an odd remark: “You need to get some new boots.” Lorance said, “Yes, sir,” and nodded vaguely. Then he understood. Even if he didn’t have a Ranger tab, even if everyone knew he was gay, his bosses were giving him his own platoon. He was being rewarded for his hard work.

Captain Swanson, now Lorance’s immediate supervisor, took charge of his training. Over the next several days, as they reviewed the plan and the battlespace around Strong Point Payenzai, Lorance says that Swanson confided to him that the platoon had become undisciplined. Lieutenant Latino had been too permissive. The men weren’t shaving; the NCOs — noncommissioned officers, essentially the day-to-day managers of the platoon — weren’t leading. That was why First Platoon had suffered so many casualties in such a short time. Lorance understood. They were hurting, and he had to come in strong and be the leader they needed. (Swanson denies making these statements, and others also say they are inaccurate. No one from Pasab, Ghariban, or First Platoon has corroborated Lorance’s characterization of the platoon and its leadership.) 

The war was now in its 11th year. In Washington, D.C., as confidential documents later published by The Washington Post revealed, its planners were realizing that they could no longer articulate the mission or identify the enemy. From his desk at brigade headquarters, Lorance was convinced that the hearts-and-minds strategy Colonel Mennes promoted wasn’t working, just as it hadn’t worked in Vietnam. He scrawled a note on the dry-erase board near his desk about the First Platoon minesweeper who days earlier had been shot in the neck. Deny enemy sanctuary, he wrote, and get payback for Hanes.