Talking to Gary Faulkner's friends, the impression you get is that they had become so accustomed to this one unusual fact about good old Garythe pursuit that would eventually bring about his weird, jagged flash of famethat it had come to seem quite commonplace. Routine. Unremarkable. Just one more detail about a man they knew:
Gary was the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back. Gary could eat prodigious amounts of chicken wings. Gary was an inventive contractor and carpenter who excelled at tile countertops. Gary was always joking around. Gary disappeared every now and again to hunt down Osama bin Laden.
When it was reported in June that a 50-year-old from Greeley, Colorado, had been found high in the mountains of Pakistan near the Afghan border carrying a sword, a dagger, a pistol, and night-vision equipment and apparently declaring "I think Osama is responsible for bloodshed in the world, and I want to kill him," the romance of such a solo quest struck a chord around the globe.
There were skeptics, too. No wonderit already seemed such a lunatic and improbable tale. But one kind of skepticism, at least, made no sense at all: the notion that this was an act of publicity-seeking. If that had been all Gary Faulkner had wanted, then he would surely have tried to interest the world in his missions before now. This was, after all, his eleventh attempt.
Gary's youngest brother, Scott, a doctor in Fort Morgan, Colorado, drove him to the Denver airport two weeks earlier, on May 30. "He was in great spirits," says Scott. "He was excited about his trip. I remember he was looking at his crossbow, deciding whether or not he should take it." Outside the airport, Scott used his phone to snap what he feared might be the last photo of his brother, turning and grinning to the camera. Scott recalls his farewell: "Be safe, come back to me alive, and keep your head low."
"You got it!" Gary replied.
Scott began to discover how poorly this last injunctionthat his brother keep his head lowhad worked when his phone rang at four in the morning on June 15. Soon everyone knew, including their mother, who didn't even know Gary was in Pakistan until Fox News called.
"Yeah," she told them. "I know a Gary Faulkner. But he's on dialysis three times a week."
Scott, who became the family's de facto spokesman, gave interviews explaining that this mission wasn't some whim of his brother's but something he had been committed to for a long time, and for which he had planned carefully. Over these first few days the question Scott had to field most often was: Do you think your brother's crazy?
"Well, as a physician I see people with psychological problems all day," he says, "and I could attest that he did not have psychosis, paranoia, schizophrenia, any of those diagnoses. Yes, it's out of the norm, but that's what Gary does. It was his passion, his calling."
It wasn't clear whether Gary had committed, or would be charged with, a crime in Pakistan, but eventually the family was informed through the State Department that he could come home if they sent $683 to pay for his changed airline ticket. At the airport, Gary addressed the media scrum: "What this is about is the American people and the world," he told them. "We can't let people like this scare us. We don't get scared by people like this. We scare them. And that's what this is about."
"I believe that is going to go down in history," his other brother, Todd, tells me, "and kids are going to write essays about that 200 years from now."
We expect our heroes to be exactly how we want them to be. Our idiots, frauds, and madmen, too. But from the first moment that he was allowed to tell his own story, Gary Faulkner made clear that it would often not fit with anyone's expectations, and that furthermore he really wasn't too concerned with whether it did or whether it didn't.
From the start, he wanted to clear up some misconceptions about what he was doing in Pakistan. He told everyone who would listen that he had never planned to kill Osama bin Laden but rather to capture him and deliver him to the Pakistani authorities. It turned out that this information was contained in CNN's original report, but the narrative of Faulkner as the armed solo avenging assassin was so compelling that this was widely ignored. You could almost feel the disappointment when Faulkner kept insisting upon his nonlethal intentions, because it seemed less melodramatically satisfying, and also because it seemed even more impractical. (As did Faulkner's further puzzling suggestion that once he had found bin Laden he had hoped to use his dialysis machine, for if the reports are correct, they share an affliction.)
Faulkner soon flew to New York to appear on The Early Show, The View, Letterman, and Fox News, where he seemed, second by second, to charm, scare, and confuse his hosts. A few of his tropes became familiarhis habit of referring to his target as "Binny Boy," for instance, and, more annoyingly, his insistence on always referring to the former ruler of Iraq as "Saddam who was insane" with a lilt in his voice that suggested he had just said something both potent and witty. And despite protests from both Letterman and the View interviewers, as Faulkner explained his mission from God he persisted in calling the inhabitants of the country he had just visited "Pakis." It became clear that he was dancing to the beat of a very different drum and that, in his insistence on being honest to himself, he might say almost anything. This is one of the final questions he was asked when he was interviewed by his local TV station, on Denver's 9News, and his answer, in which one syllable of their question seems to trigger a quite unexpected series of revelations:
"You have been described as everything from a hero to a crackpot. What are you?"
"I'm a little of everything. I've done crack, I've done crank, I've done co*ke, I've done pot, I've done everything in the world out there. You know, I've been to prison, I've been shipwrecked, blown up, shot, stabbed. My story does not just start here; it started when I was 5 years old, the first time I tried to hot-wire a car."
The day after he returns from New York, I meet Faulkner at his local dialysis center in Greeley, where he's happy to talk while connected to a machine for four hours, as he must be three times every week. But when he arrives, he is taken straight to the hospital, the North Colorado Medical Center, with a temperature of 104. It is there, the following afternoon, that we finally begin to talk. Faulkner has various monitors connected to him, and on his chest just below his right shoulder hangs the catheter that is permanently plumbed into his circulatory system. This catheter has become infected. Official diagnosis: bacteremia. Patient's own description: "I'm feeling a little better, but I still feel very loopy. I'm jacked up. It's really getting me on the tizzy up and down and stuff. I've got so many toxins and poisons in my body, it's just like 'wow.' I've been having the shakes and the shivers. It's almost like convulsionsit's a pretty ugly sight. Hey, you know, the champ's down right now, but I'll be back up before the ten count."
Faulkner discovered that his kidneys weren't working last year while he was hiking in the Rockies, checking out some new high-altitude gear he'd gotten for his next trip to Pakistan. People might rush to assume he is somehow paying a rough price for youthful recklessness. He himself says, "I've tormented my body, I've been used and abused, but there's a saying that a very dear friend of mine has: We were not meant to go to the grave in a pristine, well-kept body but to come power-sliding in, totally spent, and say, 'Whoooooo! What a ride!' Well, I'm still on that ride." Even so, it is likely to have happened anyway. Polycystic kidney disease runs in the family; it's what caused Gary's father's fatal heart attack when he was 45.
Faulkner has plenty of colorful stories about the mischief he would get up to in his youth. He talks about transporting co*ke, marijuana, and pills across the border from Mexico, partying while the drugs were loaded or unloaded from wherever they were hidden: "It was just the excitement, the thrillI was an adrenaline junkie." He talks about a bank job. He has endless tales about driving too fast, and liberating vehicles that belonged to othersmost of his convictions involved this. (His longest stretch inside was for four years.) "I boosted everything, it didn't matterdump truck, forklift, cars, boats, whatever." One time he nearly stole a helicopter. He thought better of it when he saw all the gears, but he was tempted. "They should never have left the keys in there."
It's easy to romanticize this kind of thing, and Faulkner is not immune to that temptation. Part of his patter and self-justification is that it is his experiences in this part of his life that offer him a unique advantage in his missions. When you think like a thief, you are free of all those inflexible military rules and habits. The thief has a different style of approach: "Like I say, it's easier for a mouse to get into a castle than a lion." And that is his goalto steal away with a person as his loot. "I'm going in there as a thief, not as a military mind. I'm boosting this guy right out from underneath their noses."
But he can also be stern with himself and characterize those years as wasteful, repetitive, and ultimately fruitless.
"Yeah," he reflects, "high-speed chases are fun, and breaking into a vault is fun, but everyone at some point pays the piper, and when it ends, it normally ends ugly." One day I'll overhear him talking to someone he has just met, explaining something of his life and reflecting on his newfound celebrity: "People say, like, 'You're a wonderful guy.' They don't know the whole story. I was a piece of sh*t. I ruined people's lives, literally. But I'm honest about it."
September 11 took its time to fire Gary up. He remembers reading an article about bin Laden hiding out in the mountains of Pakistan, but he didn't even really know where that was. It was around 2004 that his mission came to him. "He just had a dream about hunting down bin Laden," remembers Jim Sage, who has worked on construction jobs with Faulkner over the past decade. "In his dream he was supposed to get there without his feet touching the ground." At first, Faulkner took this to mean that he had to go by boat. So he bought a twenty-one-foot yellow-and-white yacht called the Pia Colada. He'd never been in a boat before, other than on freshwater lakes and waterskiing, but a friend showed him how to put up the sail. Ignoring the Coast Guard's admonitions that his boat was illegal because he had no life jackets, no flares, and so on, he set sail from San Diego. He figured he'd head west across the Pacific and work it out from there. There is documentary evidence that supports much of what Faulkner says he did on future trips, but one wonders whether it can be true that he was really at sea for twenty-two days without any food to speak of before a hurricane threw his boat against a beach halfway down the Baja Peninsula in Mexico. Either way, it was his first failed attempt.
The next year, he bought another boat, which he was readying in his friend's driveway in Northern California when, in an accident involving the mast, he badly dislocated his shoulder. He decided that there had to be a better way. He sold the boat, bought a plane ticket, and within a week he was in Pakistan for the first time. It was the spring of 2005.
He had no idea about anything: "I didn't know how hot it was. I didn't know anything about the people, the language. I didn't know diddly-squat." But he had faith that what he needed to know would be revealed to him. He traveled from Islamabad to Lahore to Sialkot, where he stayed on a military base and was finally directed to a town in a northern tribal area called Gilgit. There he began to explore the remote mountainous hinterland.
It is hard to know how to judge Faulkner's accounts of what he discovered on each Pakistan trip. My hunch is that everything that he says happenedin terms of his own experience and of where he went and what he diddid actually happen. What might be more questionable is the significance of what was happening to others he came across, and their relevance to his stated quest. On his first trip, for instance, he says that he found himself more or less running for his life coming down from the mountains and that he lost his pack and his money and his blade. That evening, at the Madina Hotel Guest House in Gilgit, where he was staying, he says that the military guard who was posted outside was shot dead through the head, and that he was told that this was done by the same peopleAl Qaeda, he assumedwho had been chasing him down from the mountains. He also says that he found something encouraging in this turn of events: "I thought it was pretty cool, myself, because I shook the tree and at least I got a response."
He made four other similar visits before his most recent trip to Pakistan. (These were attempts numbers 4, 5, 9, and 10.) He describes them to me in some detail. Recently, he'd moved his attention to the mountains west and southwest of Chitral, toward the Afghan border. (When pressed on the reasons for such decisions, he generally alludes to an unspecified combination of inside information, local help, and divine guidance.) During the first of these Chitral trips, he believes he met a very high-ranking Al Qaeda official when he inadvertently shared a car with a man who had a particularly unwelcoming demeanor. That was also when Faulkner says he wandered for four days among Al Qaeda workers up near a cave mouth, in disguise and unidentified. "There were a lot of people running around with axes and all kinds of stuff," he says, "working on cutting down trees and making the new cave." On his second trip to Chitral, he says that he would sleep up there in the mountains on a bed of pine needles covered in a rug for days at a time. Watching that cave. Waiting for Binny Boy.
I visit him again in the hospital the next morning. When I walk in he is lying on his back with his eyes closed, headphones on. He is listening to Nickelback on the pink iPod Shuffle he had with him in Pakistan. (Also on the playlist of the dedicated Osama-hunter: Bon Jovi, the Eagles, the Zac Brown Band, Creedence.) He says that there's another song he likes a lot, "Voice of Truth," by the Christian rock group Casting Crowns, about having the faith to step out of a boat on top of the waves. "It's not like I'm in it for the money," he says. "I'm in it because of my faithand that's where he's at, too, so it's the two titans of their faith. He stood up on a world platform and made his announcement, I stood up on a world platform and made my announcement, and we're getting ready to go toe-to-toe."
Do you think Osama is fundamentally evil?
"Absolutely, yeah. There's no doubt. His god is actually Satan. Mine's the Living God."
Did God choose you for this?
"Oh yeah, absolutely. I'm always wondering: Why did you pick me instead of somebody else?"
And why do you think he did?
"Because I'm the only one crazy enough to do it."
Faulkner is feeling better today, though he says, "I can still smell the toxinsI've been sweating it out of my body." He rhapsodizes about the shower he had the previous night—his first since last December. "I flooded that thing! I didn't care. It felt soooooo good."
Today he'll be discharged. A nurse comes in and takes him through a medical summary prior to his release. "Primary diagnosis: bacteremia, dialysis catheter-related. Secondary diagnosis: CRF, chronic renal failure. Or ESRD, end-stage renal disease"
"Okay, cool," he says.
"PKD, polycystic kidney disease, hypertension anemia"
She says that aside from dialysis, the recommendation is for "normal activity." She pauses. "Whatever normal is."
Before he leaves the hospital, he orders lunch and eats it in his beda cheeseburger with olives, mustard, and Thousand Island dressing, with some cottage cheese and fresh fruit on the side.
