As long war rages on, a soldier’s sacrifice burns in hearts of family
Loss is never far from relatives, but they ask: Was his death in vain?
Clovis Ray was an outstanding athlete with a deeply analytical mind.
To calculate his risk of being killed as a GI in Afghanistan, he learned that an improvised explosive device — typically a roadside bomb — was the No. 1 cause of combat deaths and that 90 percent of all firefights there began when one detonated.
After two engagements — the first an attack on New Year’s Eve 2011 in which bullets bounced off a wall behind him — and getting to know young soldiers who he said “basically wait to get shot every day,” Ray, a San Antonio native and Army platoon leader, developed a survival strategy.
“I figure we have about 70 patrols left. So I’m doing my best to mitigate risk over the next few months,” he wrote his twin brother, Ed, in a Jan. 6, 2012, email. “I don’t want to see one of these guys die due to my poor planning.”
A former banker, Clovis rated his chances of dying in Afghanistan at 14 percent. It was overly optimistic. He was killed by an IED two months after he wrote his brother, and was buried after a service at Live Oak County’s coliseum that brought out much of his hometown of Three Rivers. He was 34. On this Memorial Day, the memories of the young athlete, scholar and mentor still burn in
the hearts of family, old friends and comrades. Their sense of loss never is far from mind, as is the question of whether his sacrifice was in vain.
Ed Ray’s vision of his twin brother remains vivid — a loving, caring and selfless man who could train his gaze on people and show an interest in them.
“He’d come into a room and he was very jovial,” said Ray, a senior finance director for an industrial efficiency company who lives in Katy. “He lifted their spirits, and he was so externally focused on other people that you would just feel great.”
The long war in Afghanistan has had a high cost. So far, 2,411 U.S. troops have been killed there. In Iraq, 4,541 Americans have perished since 2001. For both places, some wonder if there is a strategy, an exit plan or a good reason to stay.
“The effort in Afghanistan certainly has been costly, difficult, frustrating, and full of challenges,” said retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, who led allied troops in Afghanistan from 2010-11. “However, I think the bulk of those who have served there believe, as I do, that the mission was very important to our country and that it remains so.”
In Afghanistan, Americans ousted al-Qaida, which planned the 9/11 attacks, “and we have stayed to ensure that neither (it) or, now, ISIS can re-establish such a sanctuary,” Petraeus said.
Thomas Ricks, author of “Fiasco,” a book chronicling the Iraq War, was less charitable.
“I think the war in Afghanistan was necessary, but that we have handled it badly since the fall of Kabul at the end of 2001,” he said. “I think the war in Iraq was unnecessary and a mistake, and has resulted in greatly empowering Iran.
“Americans don’t seem to want to notice, but the effect of our many, many years of war in the Middle East have been to crown Iran as the dominant power in the region.”
In Afghanistan, U.S. efforts to stabilize insecure areas in the country mostly failed from 2001 to 2017 — by spending too much money, too quickly, in a country unable to absorb it and without sufficient understanding of its people and institutions, according to recent reports by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Today, insurgents control 20 percent of the country and are contesting 20 percent more.
With 14,000 U.S. troops on the ground as of March, the United States still backs a central government headed by Ashraf Ghani against the Taliban, al-Qaida, ISIS and “other insurgents and terrorists,” under an evolving strategy that the inspector general report this month said should “shift from a timebased approach to a conditions-based one.”
Asked if the United States could make Iraq and Afghanistan stable, reasonably democratic countries that would support U.S. goals in the region, Barry McCaffrey, another retired Army four-star general, answered: “Not possible.”
“Iraq will break apart along with much of the Middle East along sectarian lines after 25 years of bloody warfare,” McCaffrey, who shuttled in and out of the region in past years doing assessments, wrote in an email. “They are all unnatural states. Afghanistan is and has been in perpetual tribal war. Never been governed by a central state.”
‘Raised by the village’
As a child, Clovis and Ed Ray had played soldier, pretending to fight in Vietnam and Cambodia, spending their days in the woods with tree limbs as rifles. It wasn’t a surprise they pretended to be GIs. Both were born at Fort Sam Houston.
Their father, Bob Ben Ray Sr., a Vietnam veteran who served as an Army captain, had a dental practice in Three Rivers, Beeville and Corpus Christi.
Ed Ray said their father “was unable to hold a job for a sustainable period due to severe PTSD” and, bankrupt, moved his middle-class family into public housing in Three Rivers when the Ray twins were in second grade.
One compensation for those lean years were supportive parents, coupled with a tight-knit community.
“You were raised by the village,” Ed Ray said.
During summers in the early 1990s, the twins stayed at a friend’s place in the country, waking up at 5 a.m., jumping in a truck and doing field work. Wearing long-sleeved shirts against the 100-degree South Texas sunshine, the Ray boys walked behind a trailer and picked up bales of hay weighing 100 to 150 pounds, keeping pace with the truck for workdays that ran as long as 12 hours.
“You got a quarter a bale,” Ed Ray laughed, recalling that they earned $3 an hour sticking forks into the hay, taking a knee and then bumping the bale into the trailer. “It’s exactly like a clean and jerk.”
By their sophomore year, they were among the biggest, strongest kids on Three Rivers High School’s football varsity squad. The team went deep into the playoffs their junior and senior years.
Clovis Ray also was a star student, joining math competitions. He kept spreadsheets that tracked the hours he studied, the miles he ran and books he read. He graduated fourth in his class and made the National Honor Society. Ed was in the top quarter of his class.
The Ray twins were football starters at Macalester College in Minnesota for all four years, gym rats who became famous as “wedge” specialists. They’d run downfield on kickoffs, often the first ones on the team to make contact, and throw themselves into the receiving team’s blocking backs. As Macalester’s leading tacklers, they often took the ball carrier down on their own.
Clovis Ray entered the Army at 32. He had wanted to join right after graduating college and nearly signed up a few years later. But he had remained a civilian in San Antonio, an investment banker who ran 13 marathons. There was something about soldiering, though, that fired his imagination and moved him to quit the bank.
He signed an Army contract without saying a word to his brother.
“He didn’t ask or talk about it,” Ed Ray said. “He just signed up. He wanted to go. As a brother, you just don’t want to see that — him get into harm’s way. It’s a natural tendency of a twin brother.”
Those who knew him say there was an aura around Clovis Ray.
“Clovis and Ed, they were a unique pair of human beings. The words that come to mind to me are loyalty, courage, kindness, family and generosity,” said Andrew Borene, a college teammate who later served on Marine Gen. James Mattis’ staff during the Iraq invasion of 2003. “Neither of them were the kind of guys that would back down from danger.”
‘A generation more’
Most Americans know little of the truly dangerous jobs of blue-collar workers, the oil field roughnecks, loggers, commercial fishermen and soldiers in distant wars, said writer and documentarian Sebastian Junger, whose book “War” chronicled fighting a few years earlier and not far from where Clovis Ray’s platoon was based.
“There are not enough troops over there for them to notice, and it doesn’t cost enough to force a conversation,” Junger said.
So far this year, two U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan, 11 in Iraq.
McCaffrey, who led a division in the first Gulf War, said the United States can’t leave either country. Washington has permanent interests in both, he said, and he echoed the new Afghanistan policy that decisions on those conflicts “should be conditions based.”
Retired Army Col. Joseph Collins, who led a National Defense University study on the strategic lessons of both wars, said the new Afghanistan strategy features more advisers at lower levels, more air support and focused diplomacy with Pakistan, something he hasn’t seen before.
Asked how much longer U.S. involvement would last, he replied, “Hard to say.”
Jacqueline Hazelton, a scholar of military interventions and counterinsurgency at the Naval War College, said U.S. involvement in “endless, costly, no-gain wars” will last “as long as there are no greater threats on the horizon, domestic or international.”
“That means at least a generation more of this,” she said. “I also think the United States is going to keep fighting these wars as long as politicians consider it easier to keep them going than to end them.”
Scholarship in his honor
Clovis Ray took over a platoon of 20 soldiers at Forward Operating Base Joyce in eastern Afghanistan. He was known for running 10 or more miles around the base’s guarded interior perimeter. Outside the wire, his “Gundog” Delta Company quickly got into firefights.
Ray expressed frustration, but no concerns about his safety, in his emails.
“We have a lot of weapons to use on the insurgents. We just have a heck of a hard time seeing where they are at,” he wrote Ed. “They fire and then put a blanket over themselves so the helicopters and planes can’t use their thermals to pick up their heat signature. They also fire behind civilian homes, put their rifles down, and then walk away. Without us seeing a rifle in their hand shooting at us we can’t engage in a town. It sucks.”
“I’m setting things up to transfer risk to the” Afghan National Army, he wrote in the Jan. 6 email. “They are the ones that have to secure the country when the U.S. is gone. The plan is working. They are leading a lot of the planning, scheduling, patrolling, basically everything.”
A veteran of the platoon described Ray as “a motivated, energetic, and altogether inspiring leader. He insisted on leading his guys from the front.”
On his last mission, at night, Ray led them up the Waygal Valley, a center of stiff insurgent resistance. On foot, he was clearing routes the platoon’s armored vehicles would use when an explosion rang out and he crumpled.
“The platoon immediately retrieved Clovis and drove back to base, treating his wounds en route, but the loss of blood proved too great to save him,” said the soldier, who asked not to be identified.
A week later, Ray was back in Three Rivers, a long line of mourners walking gingerly to his open casket.
“When the Taliban detonated the IED, he had his troops stay in the tank — there was a tank and an armored Humvee, and they were on patrol at night. He had them stay in as he was sweeping around,” Ed Ray said.
He said he attended a memorial with his brother’s unit in Hawaii, “got to know each and every one of them, and what they would tell me was, ‘Hey, we wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for Lt. Ray.’ ”
In death, Clovis Ray brought people together. A scholarship established in his name has awarded $60,000 to around a dozen student athletes who’ve demonstrated excellence in sports and academics.
Ed Ray believes the war in Afghanistan can’t go on forever, that there must be an end. He thinks of the families thrust in turmoil when soldiers come to the front door. Families are left behind, like Clovis Ray’s wife, Shannon, and his son, Dean, now 11.
But whatever else, both he and Borene, the Iraq veteran, say Clovis Ray’s life as a soldier transcends the trajectory of the war.
“I don’t think anyone dies for a policy. Our service members who get killed in action, they’re not dying for a policy, they’re not actually choosing to die,” Borene said. “I think most of us sign up knowing that we might be asked to do things that we don’t have the full strategic picture of and it doesn’t cheapen the value of the job or the sacrifice if the policy fails.”