NEW: From intelligence analyst to a military 'Uber': Inside Mayor Pete Buttigieg's Afghanistan deployment.
Pete Buttigieg was driving in one of his regular military convoys in Kabul, Afghanistan, when, he said, things looked like they could get"really, really spicy."
Buttigieg's journey to Afghanistan started before he was born, in what he called a"family tradition" of military service. Buttigieg said his grandfather was a career military physician, and his grandfather's brother died in a plane crash in World War II. Family lore on his mother's side goes back further, to a distant relative who supposedly served in the Revolutionary War.
"The fact that I had been to an Ivy League school," he said,"made me, statistically, extremely unlikely to serve in the same way it made these kids I kept running into in south central Iowa extremely likely to serve." The direct commission program is somewhat controversial because many see it as a fast track to military credentials for the politically ambitious, and Buttigieg acknowledged that he felt"pressure" to earn the rank he'd already been awarded.
In 2010, Buttigieg ran for mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and won in 2011 at age 29. The military didn't care much that their reservist was a mayor, and in 2014 Buttigieg got a call he had been expecting since he enlisted: He was told to pack for Afghanistan.Buttigieg told ABC News he sought out an Afghanistan deployment because he wanted to be"where the heart of the action was" in the"area of greatest challenge.
"We dealt with things like bank fraud, money laundering, extortion, kidnapping, human trafficking and the opium-heroin trade," said Guy Hollingsworth, the military commander of the task force when Buttigieg arrived."And we would partner with folks as needed to try and root out some of that from a terrorist perspective."
Both Hollingsworth and Paul Karweik, Buttigieg's commanding officer after Hollingsworth, said Buttigieg was an astute intelligence analyst. While living and working on base, Buttigieg said that he eventually grew accustomed to the all-too-common nearby explosions. He'd first experienced rocket attacks in Bagram, as blaring alarms urged everyone on base to seek shelter.
"So a typical scenario, there might be that the boss needed to get across town to an Afghan police unit that we were interacting with," Buttigieg told ABC News."Or, for more of an adventure, once in a while we'd have a vehicle movement all the way up to Bagram" about 40 miles away. Stevens, who met Buttigieg in a Kabul cigar club and later drafted him into a fantasy football league, said he was with him on several convoys where improvised explosive devices or ambushes were a constant concern.
Buttigieg said they ran to the nearest bunker and hunkered down for a couple hours until it was all clear. Buttigieg said he was never totally clear on what happened but thought someone had made an attempt to get through the base's gate.By nightfall, Buttigieg said they always tried to be back on base because"you really didn't want to be driving at night."
Before he was called to deploy, Buttigieg worked out a contingency plan with his staff so the city wouldn't be left leaderless. Still, he said he tried to keep up as much as he could with his hometown.
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