These bits especially (though these excerpts don't say so explicitly, Hollingsworth is a Mormon, living in Utah. Which makes some of his statements all the more remarkable:
. . . if Buttigieg was intimidated or felt out of place on the base, Hollingsworth didn’t detect it.
Nor did he ever observe Buttigieg flaunting (or even mentioning) his many “civilian” achievements. This work-a-day modesty, rare in any field, won Hollingsworth over.
“Despite the notoriety of what he had done in the civilian world, and in the academic world,” Hollingsworth observes, “he never — not even once — brought any of that up. I knew what he had accomplished, and if I asked he’d talk about some of it, but he never spoke of it on his own. He never tried to make himself out to be someone special. I admired that about him.” As trust and admiration grew, so did the assignments.
“Candidly, I liked being around him,” Hollingsworth says. The two discussed their respective faiths, though never at length. Sometimes they jawed a bit about football. Hollingsworth’s alma mater, Brigham Young University, happened to have played Buttigieg’s hometown team, Notre Dame, in the lead-up to his deployment (spoiler: Notre Dame won 23-13, but according to Hollingsworth, Buttigieg didn’t rub it in). Most importantly for the kinds of classified counterterrorism intelligence-gathering efforts and target planning work in which they were engaged, the colonel found in Buttigieg not just a good solider but a trusted sounding board and surrogate.
“We started to take him with us when we’d fly a fixed-wing asset to places like Kandahar, Mazār-i-Sharīf or Herat on sensitive assignments,” he says. “I didn’t have a problem saying to Pete ‘I need you to go contact these folks, or these folks,’ and I knew he’d represent us like we needed him to and he could negotiate some of the things we needed from our allies. It was a trust factor as well as the fact that he was really good at it.” During their time together — which concluded in September 2014 — Buttigieg was still in the closet regarding his sexual identity. It wasn’t until almost a year after returning home that Buttigieg would come out publicly. In 2017, Buttigieg married his partner, Chasten Glezman. When asked if this news changed any of his impressions of Buttigieg, Hollingsworth was unequivocal: “not in the least.”
. . .
Perhaps a silver lining for Buttigeg is at this same point in his own presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s future among African American voters was also unsure. As Astead Herndon wrote this week for The New York Times, “black voters were uncertain about Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy until he won the Iowa caucuses, after which they rallied around him over the onetime frontrunner, Hillary Clinton.” . . . Hollingsworth says Buttigieg once gave him a standing offer to attend a Notre Dame football game in South Bend. The retired colonel says the offer goes both ways and that he has BYU tickets available for Buttigieg anytime he plans to visit in Provo. Of course, if Buttigieg gets his way, he’ll need a few extra accommodations for security detail.
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