Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile Read Free Book Online Page A

U.S. Atlantic fleet and other times with NATO naval units. “We were undisputedly the kings of the world, and everybody knew it. We were arrogant sons of bitches. But they loved us.” He sailed everywhere in those years—to Athens, Marseilles, Naples, Karachi, Beirut—and everywhere he went he felt proud. America was rebuilding Europe through the Marshall Plan, the dollar was powerful, and there was more than a woman in every port for the smiling, open-faced, fun-loving young officer in the starched white uniform.
    There were also long stretches of downtime at sea that Wilson put to good use, reading all of Churchill’s wartime books, consuming each as they came out and moving on to biographies of Roosevelt and George Kennan’s prescription for dealing with Communism.
    From his destroyer on Christmas morning 1956, he wrote to his parents and kid sister, evoking the same spirit that had led the young boy to keep vigil at his bedroom window in Trinity, scanning the sky for enemy Messerschmitts.
 
    Dear Mother, Daddy and Sharon:
    It’s now 5:15 a.m. Christmas morning. I have the 4 to 8 watch so I am up bright and early as always on Christmas. This will be my third duty day in a row as I am standing by for some of the married fellows so they can be with their families.
    This business of being away from home today is certainly not by choice, but neither is it something without reason. I can console myself and I hope you too, by simply realizing that we are doing a job here that must be done. It is only through constant vigilance on the part of the few that a secure, peaceful Christmas can be enjoyed by many.
     
    These read like lines for a Jimmy Stewart character, but the sentiments were very much Wilson’s own. In later life he would usually disguise such nakedly idealistic thoughts. That letter, however, without any hint of self-consciousness, is key to understanding Wilson’s later compulsion to be the lone cowboy sounding the alert, mobilizing “the forces of freedom.”
    Patrolling the seas during those Cold War years, Wilson came personally to feel the menace and reach of Soviet power. His destroyer spent most of its time chasing the Soviet submarines that hounded the fleet. The destroyers purposefully badgered them with mock attacks, forcing them under for days on end. The great triumph would come when, after two or three days of pursuit, a sub would finally be forced to surface. The Americans would snap photos of the disgraced Russians and give them the finger, while the enemy would shake their fists in return. “I always kept my depth charges on total alert,” Wilson recalls with bravado. On more than one occasion, the young gunnery officer appealed to the ship’s captain to permit him to blast one of the subs. “I promised a clean kill,” Wilson recalls. “Nobody would have ever known what happened to the fuckers, but they wouldn’t let me do it.”
    After three years at sea chasing Russian submarines, Wilson was assigned to a top secret post at the Pentagon, where he was part of an intelligence unit that evaluated the Soviet Union’s nuclear forces. Having chased Soviet submarines, he now found himself rehearsing for all-out nuclear war. Back then, the U.S. response time to an incoming Soviet nuclear attack was thirty-five minutes. There were frequent simulated attacks, and Charlie often stood in for the top generals, who had only seven minutes to dive into waiting helicopters to be flown to the “Rock,” the secret underground bunker carved into a Maryland mountain. “I would be sitting there where the button is, and if you’re twenty-seven, it makes you feel very cocky knowing that here’s Moscow, and here’s Kiev, and if they fuck with us I’ll just hit all these buttons.”
    In spite of his bravado, the experience was sobering. Day after day he confronted the reality of an enemy he knew was rehearsing America’s nuclear destruction, and he resented it. It became a lifelong obsession to