The Interrogators
Chapter One
TRAINING
Most students slipped quite naturally out of their school uniforms
at Immaculate High School in Danbury, Connecticut, and into the
country's better universities. I slipped out of my uniform and into
army fatigues. I was seventeen when I enlisted in 1989, and it came
as a surprise to all of my friends but one, Sean McGinty, who
enlisted with me. We suffered from a debilitating condition: too
many siblings. Our working-class parents-my father was a telephone
line repairman, McGinty's an accountant-had made it clear some time
earlier that we were going to have to pay our own way through
college. And so we decided to enlist together, jokingly trying to be
the first to complete the army oath so as to be "senior" to the
other in our new military lives. McGinty skipped a phrase or two,
arriving at the "so help me God" line first. I would argue for years
that he had invalidated his oath by jumping ahead, but that was a
debate I would never win.
Originally we thought the infantry would be good. The army brochures
made it all look fairly glamorou ... read full excerpt from The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against al Qaeda ebook
