Eleven Days (16 page)

He would leave again, but at least for a while he’d be home, and this time she’d be able to take care of him. She thinks if he is injured badly, she can always organize a bedroom on the first floor of the house, off the living room. There is a porch there but she could move out all the furniture and bring his bed downstairs. She could ask someone to install a television for him; he would have a view over the whole yard. It was a very pretty view, a therapeutic view. And if needed, for a while, she could sleep on the couch in the living room, to be near him. She would have to think of a list of new things to cook, things he might not expect but would like. New things, alongside his old favorites: shirred eggs, pepper steaks, BLTs with avocado. Maybe the neighbor would market for her if she sent a list, by e-mail, on the way home. Yes, she would
make a list for the neighbor to send, and perhaps new sheets for his bed, and some extra pillows. And ice. They were forever running out of ice and perhaps she should have a new ice machine installed.

These were the things on her mind as the train pulled into the station.

There was a man on the platform holding a sign with her name; he had a cart to expedite the trip. “I can walk,” she says, but he insists, and so she sits, like an invalid, in the backseat of the little car while he drives her past the shops and restaurants and through the evening crush. At the entrance, looking up, she sees the godfather standing by his car. He looks concerned until he spots her, then his mouth breaks open into a wide smile. The last time she’d seen him in person was just after Christmas. He’d undergone another breakup and, as was his habit, had come north for Sara’s solace and a home-cooked meal. They’d stayed up late talking about life and how odd it was that they had both become such loners, though in different ways. They talked about the musical chairs on the Hill and where he might go next should he leave his current role. They talked about today, and about the future, following the unspoken rule of their bond, which was not to dwell on their strange pasts, the person who bonded them and who—lover to her, mentor to him—had left them both emotionally in the lurch and unmoored.

Of all the godfathers, this was the one who had held on and worked hard to stay involved in Jason’s life after David died. He was closest in age to Sara, so it made sense. And absent a family of his own, he could prioritize hers. He would never forget an occasion and would move heaven and earth as needed not to miss a game or even, in the rare case, a doctor’s visit. He might well be
the reason she’d never married, as he’d fulfilled just enough of the spousal functions. And he filled them with creativity and fun; his default setting was wit. He was handsome but too ambitious to put much stock in something he would consider as superficial as appearance, too consumed with being identified as other things, like wise.

He was always missing a button on his shirt or wearing a stained tie, little wrecks that humanized the maniacal precision he applied to all other aspects of this life. And while he had dipped in and out of a lifelong dalliance with recreational drugs, as drugs waned in popularity he fought harder to control his addictions. Sara periodically offered alternatives (“Have you tried peanut butter? Or bicycling?”), but as any addict knows, substitution is not the solution. Nor, in his case, was prayer. Or abstinence. Failing to kick it was his one flaw, the one thing that kept him away from elected office, and likely the one thing that kept him away from the altar. But it was a flaw that, ironically, he held on to like a great achievement, a flaw he nurtured even as it ran right up against the things he professed to want most in life. Discovered with drugs in the Senate cloakroom once, he’d been told to keep his habits off the Hill.

They had become like siblings. This was a great relief to her, as she’d never had a sibling, and a great novelty to him, the last of seven sons. She felt entirely at ease around him. He was the one person with whom she could make this trip and retain her sanity.

He gave her a long hug and then pulled back and looked at her. Her eyes were red and tired, but her affect was as always: aloof, thoughtful. It was this affect that had always put some people off and drew others in. Those close to her knew: it wasn’t aloofness, it was simply shyness.

“Do you have a raincoat,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, holding it up.

“Sweater?”

“Yes.”

“Pulse?” he said, folding his hands around her wrist.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled.

“On y va,”
he said, and opened the door of the car for her to duck inside.

VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA,
NOVEMBER 2010

Jason walks into his Team CO’s office. The elder officer has a photograph up on the screen of his laptop: a series of fire trucks, ten or twelve of them, parked perpendicularly along a leafy suburban street, their ladders lifted and—hung across and between each pair of facing trucks—an American flag. Looking down the line was like looking into an Escher print; the way the flags were arranged made them seem to go on forever, a neat trick of the eye. The flags that day had been thirty feet by thirty feet each, to give some sense of the scale of the scene.

Jason has seen this picture before. It is from a funeral procession given for an operator KIA in 2005, an operator who risked his life to save the lives of his colleagues (only one of whom would survive), and who went on to receive the Medal of Honor posthumously—the fourth of five MOH recipients from the NSW community, two of whom came from these latest wars, the other three from Vietnam. The medal was created in 1862, when war was more central to the culture’s psyche, and not only because it was occurring on our own ground. Six hundred twenty-five thousand lives were lost in Civil War combat when the U.S. population was at 31.4 million. Those dead were 1.988 percent of the population. For the Global War on Terror, to date,
that same number stood at 0.002 percent. And it was not standing still. Jason remembers Kipling reading out loud one night, “Due to the nature of its criteria, the Medal of Honor is often awarded posthumously.” Its ribbon is blue, like water.

What happened that day in ’05, in Kunar Province, is well known within the community; it’s another celebrated story of heroism, battle, and courage, of how wars are fought now against enemies who don’t always look like threats, in places where you wouldn’t want to honeymoon. It’s also emblematic of how operators don’t leave their men behind. That day was a tragedy that involved a moral lesson. Across Teams, guys would argue and analyze the story of the goat herders and their goats, and how the guys that day—there were only four of them—had to decide whether to slaughter the goats, and the herders, or let them go and risk that they talk and betray the operators’ presence to the Taliban. The vote that day came down on the side of conscience. It came down on the side of the herders, who were civilians. You cannot kill civilians.

The herders didn’t keep their secret. The result of that vote of conscience and rule was one of the largest losses of life in the Afghanistan campaign and in Special Operations Forces history. A lieutenant and three petty officers: this was the scope of their brigade. Estimates of the enemy contingent that arrived to take them down: around two hundred. All sixteen men on the quick reaction force copter died; rocket-propelled grenade. The one survivor on the ground was taken in by a Pashtun villager. The villager saved his life.

“I was here for the—one of the—memorial services,” the CO says. “I know you’ve seen your share.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very moving. Very intense.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This community went almost three decades without waves of memorials. Are we any better at processing loss now than we were then?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think about that a lot. Did I ever show you this?”

And explaining that one of the eulogists that day had told the story of King Leonidas of Sparta, and about how the king had selected his troops for their celebrated battle, he pulls a piece of paper from his desk and asks Jason to read it:

And as he places the piece of paper back down on the desk, Jason thinks,
This is his version of an artful segue
.

Was that piece of paper waiting for Jason’s arrival, and for this meeting? Maybe this had all been prepared as neatly as a mission
briefing, because perhaps this was the talk with which the CO would remind Jason why he does what he does. He knows the young officer is at an inflection point in his Team tenure, and he knows he might lose him if he doesn’t make the sale for him to stay. The art of any sale is to make it look like your goods are precious. The art of the sale in the military is to reinforce the mythology of valor and justice and history.

From the CO’s perspective, he simply wants Jason to know he has a future in the Teams. He wants to know how the young officer is doing. And he wants to gauge his taste for change. Like a father gently grilling a daughter’s eligible date, he wants to learn as well as teach. It’s not a lecture. It’s not an ambush. And it’s not quite a confessional. It’s an exchange. Jason obliges.

“Are you happy?” his CO asks.

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you learning?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Happiness plus learning equals growth.” And he thinks about that for a minute before asking, “Is that the right math?”

“Well, what doesn’t kill us certainly makes us stronger.”

“This is true. I know you’ve been in some tough situations.”

“We’ve been busy.”

“Any plans to start a family?”

“One day.”

Jason stays confident (as he knows he should) but vague (as he knows he must), by the latter leaving open the option that his attitude will be interpreted as rational but flexible. He hasn’t mentioned the set of grad school applications he has stacked on his desk—or the girl asleep in his bed.

The CO talks for a while about when he was Jason’s age. He talks about the importance of a stable personal life and about the
importance of choosing the right person to share a life with—any life, but “particularly this one.” He tells Jason how he made it through BUD/S, how it all came down to a vision of his future. He tells him about the moment he almost quit, during Rock Portage. RP is considered one of the tougher evolutions because it is one of the most frightening. It’s the essence of the
S
, for sea; it’s docking on rocks at night.

He tells Jason how he remembered that “right at that moment, right up on those rocks, with my life passing before my eyes, all I could think was, well, my father had five daughters, and my brother
has
five daughters, and one day I’ll marry and I’ll quite likely have daughters. And one day those daughters will bring home boys. And they can bring those boys home either to a father who was almost a Team guy or to a father who
is
a Team guy. And that was it. After that, quitting never crossed my mind.”

“Have they brought home any boys yet?” Jason asks. He knows the CO has daughters.

“They have.”

“And?”

“And exactly what you think ‘and.’ What was your moment, lieutenant?”

“My moment?”

“You ever think about quitting?”

“No. I guess I never had that moment.”

“Impressive.”

“I was probably too cold to think straight. Definitely too cold to think about …”

“Think about?”

“Think about … goals.”

Check
.

The CO leans forward.

“And what are your goals?”

“Sir, my only goal is to make it to tomorrow.”

“In the Teams?”

Checkmate
.

And Jason says, “As of today, yes.”

And the CO closes his eyes, opens them, and raises an eyebrow. “Is that a new tattoo?”

“It is,” Jason says. Even he concedes it’s extreme, and he’s not quite sure why he got it, but now it’s part of who he is—the quite literally indelible inkings of war. He knows the older guys don’t understand. They think his generation is too competitive, too ambitious, too needy for immediate success. The ink’s emblematic of that. The ink’s a proxy for emotion, maybe. Or a proxy for stars on one’s shoulders. It says,
I was there. I was in it
. He’d thought about Kipling when he got it; he’d thought about getting it on his back but had opted for his forearm instead, a decision he’s deeply regretting in this moment.

“Also impressive,” says the CO.

Jason rolls down his sleeve, a rare moment of self-consciousness. “A bit silly, I guess.”

“Sign of the times. Things change.”

“When you—”

“When I came through, there were two billets to BUD/S, Jason.
Two
. No Mini-BUD/S, no pretraining courses. Guys worth their weight wanted to be pilots, not frogmen. What they told us about special warfare was that the guys had to take daily breaks for sun tanning. They had to take breaks to tan so they wouldn’t burn in the middle of a mission. Sailors sunning themselves on the Strand: that was the rumor about life in the Teams. No one had a clue what this community was capable of.”

“Now they have one,” Jason says quietly.

“They do,” the CO says loudly, and laughs, spinning his chair to consider a map on his wall. The map had tiny pins placed in areas of interest. “We’re at the crest of a wave here. You know what the crest of a wave feels like?”