After the Niger Ambush, I Trusted the Army to Find Answers. Instead, I Was Punished.
Alan Van Saun
It was the best week ever. It was the worst week ever. I welcomed new life, and saw how quickly life can be taken.
On Oct. 2, 2017, my wife, Brooke, gave birth to our second daughter, Eva. During the final months of Brooke’s pregnancy, I was deployed to the West African country of Niger with Third Special Forces Group. I was lucky; my chain of command decided earlier in the year that I would be allowed to fly home for the birth, a decision that reinforced my trust in them. In hindsight, that decision left me grappling with how things could have been different if I had stayed.
While flying out of Niger was logistically very simple, especially compared with my previous deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, the timing was challenging because I was still getting familiar with the demands from recently deploying as a new company commander in charge of teams of Green Berets. Brooke was experiencing early contractions back at home in Fort Bragg, N.C., and there were constant phone calls and deliberations about when I should jump on a plane to be there on time and to maximize my 10 days of paternity leave.
Read more at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/magazine/niger-ambush-army-accountability.html
And the story continues from there, he went back to the US because his wife had a baby..... he was out of Niger and there was that ambush that killed 4 US soldiers and 5 partner Nigerien soldiers... so worth reading, if one runs into the NYT paywall, on firefox the page icon still allows one to read it. The page icon in the URL box looks something like this:
Also, sometimes, when the NYT page is loading, press the icon when you first see it. Also, I get an icon like that per the phone.
