Body of Lies by David Ignatius Page A

private room at Walter Reed. Most of the soldiers in the nearby ward hadn't been as fortunate. They had lost arms, legs, parts of their faces, pieces of their skulls. Ferris was embarrassed by his good luck. He had come out of Iraq on a C-130 with the remains of a dead soldier--Private Morales, someone said--who had died from a mortar round at a forward operating base south of Baghdad. The box that contained what was left of him wasn't really a coffin; more like a metal locker, but it had an American flag draped around it. They received the body in Kuwait with a solemn ceremony, they called it the "Patriot Drill," but after they had saluted the dead soldier's remains, the honor guard hoisted the metal locker and shoved it into what looked like a meat truck. The soldiers fell out and the truck drove it away.
    The director himself paid a call at Walter Reed soon after Ferris was airlifted home. He looked as sleek and sly as a Venetian aristocrat. Accompanying him was Ed Hoffman, big stomach and spiky crew cut, walking with a stiff-legged strut like a football coach from the 1950s. Ferris was still heavily sedated, and when he awoke, he realized that the director was holding his hand.
    "How are you, son?" asked the director.
    Ferris groaned, and the director squeezed his hand.
    "We're proud of you. You hear me?" There was no response from Ferris, so the director continued. "I brought you something. It's a medal for bravery in action. Rarely given. Precious." Ferris felt something heavy land on his chest. He tried to say thank you, but the words didn't come out very clearly. The director was speaking again. He was talking about silent warriors. Ferris was trying to compose a reply when the director said perhaps he should be going so the patient could get some rest. He said the last bit in a jaunty voice: Get some rest, old boy. Ferris managed to say, "Thank you," and then closed his eyes. Before he fell back into his drugged sleep, he saw in his mind the faces of the two dead agents he had left behind in Iraq.
    Hoffman came back a few days later. Ferris was feeling better now. The sedatives were wearing off, which meant his leg hurt more but his mind wasn't so dull.
    "You did good," the Near East Division chief said. "Your father would be proud of you."
    Ferris pulled himself up in bed so that he could see Hoffman better. "My dad hated the CIA," he answered.
    "I know. That's why he would have been proud of you. You got some dignity back."
    And it was true. Tom Ferris had worked in the agency's Science & Technology Division, laboring on the communications links for several generations of spy satellites--and he had disliked almost every minute of it. After he got fired in the Stan Turner housecleaning of the late 1970s, he had worked for the Washington office of an aerospace company, but he was drinking heavily and screaming at Ferris's mother late at night. Ferris knew that his father regarded himself as a failure, a once-talented engineer who had wasted his life in the agency's deadening secret bureaucracy. He would mutter about the CIA when he was drinking. "Mediocrity," he would say. "Mendacity." His words would slur. He was spared by an early heart attack from the knowledge that his only son had joined the enemy. Maybe Ferris's father would be happy to know his boy had gotten a medal out of the people who had tormented him, but he doubted it.
    "I want to go back to Iraq," said Ferris.
    "No way," answered Hoffman quickly. "Out of the question. You're burned. The bad guys know who you are. So forget it."
    "Then I quit. Send me back in or I'm looking for another job."
    "Don't be an asshole, Roger. And don't threaten me. It won't work. Anyway, I have another idea for you. How would you like to do something for me here that is a little, shall we say, unconventional?"
    "At Headquarters? Absolutely not. If you try to make me, I won't just quit. I'll defect."
    "It's not Headquarters, exactly. It's not even on the organization chart.