Eleven Days (29 page)

*

She reads the letter with Sam sitting by her side. He shows up one Sunday, and she realizes it’s time. She takes it from its drawer and hands it to Sam. She asks him to read it. It is emblematic in its simplicity, so much her son in its tone:

Enclosed with it is a page from the plays Sara sent during BUD/S, from the one she always referred to thereafter as “The Coronado
Hamlet
.” These lines had been circled in bright blue pen:

And taped to the page is Jason’s Trident. He had always told his mother that he had lost his “first” Trident, after having been forced to “give it back” after assignment to a Team, sometime during his initial eighteen-month predeployment training following SQT. He’d never explained to his mother that this “giving back” was part of a ritual, but he had told his godfather, who had mocked the tradition as typically military and “a bit Princeton.” The thinking behind it is that in giving back what you have just received, you are reminded: the earning is not over.
You were not
born with this
. Traditions surrounding the Tridents were myriad, and Sara only knew of some of them. But Jason had not lost his first Trident; like most guys, he had hidden it and purchased proxies for other use. They all did.

Sam had told Sara about another custom. He said that the one place you can “lose” your first Trident is when you pound it into the lid of a fallen teammate’s coffin. Sam had done that once. He’d explained to Sara that this ritual was the most important one of all—or at least the one through performance of which he had felt most connected to the Teams. Smashing the Trident into a coffin reinforced the thing “we all know—you, me, Buddha,” Sam had said. “Nothing lasts forever.” Sara will turn her son’s Trident in her hand. She knows what she must do with it.

*

“Angel flights” is an apt description. The military transport planes that bring home the dead land at Dover, and Sara has been there before. She’d written speeches one summer for a Delaware legislator who was working to repeal the state’s Rockefeller-era drug laws, the mandatory minimum sentencing policies that kept U.S. prisons packed. The legislator, a newly minted assemblyman, an army brat who had settled in Delaware only after losing his father in another war, was a brilliant idealist, already recognized by the national press as a possible future presidential candidate. His thing was criminal justice reform, and his argument was that the laws, while assisting good officers sent out to police the streets and keep crime down, were creating a permanent underclass. He saw the laws as flawed. He saw them as, almost accidentally, perpetuating a portion of the population who would rotate between sentences without being given the time and chance to psychologically
process their crimes, and without being offered the chance to reform. And he understood that putting a good man in a place with bad men was not a recipe for redemption; it was a recipe for repeated criminal activity. The legislator believed in forgiveness; he was Catholic. He saw the “man-mins,” as they were known, as unnecessarily punitive, and as failing on the counts of both cost benefit and social welfare. Said another way,
fucking bad incentive alignment
. Sara had spent some time with him visiting those prisons and talking to those prisoners.

She had come to believe in the cause, and so when the legislator made his case before the Delaware State Senate, in Dover, she’d gone, too. Jason was away on deployment at the time. She’d stopped by the air base afterward, because it was close but also because—missing her son—she’d wanted to see the planes come in. By chance, on that day, an angel flight was landing, and she’d watched as the coffins were carried down to and across the tarmac as the families lined up on the runway to receive handshakes and hugs from what appeared to be several very young officers. One woman there that day had a priest on either side of her, white-collared and robed. She had started to faint when the officers approached her, and the priests had caught her and carried her inside—one holding her under her arms and the other under her legs. Sara had rushed over, offered to help, and had brought the woman a paper cup of water.

It had never once crossed her mind that she might one day be there herself, in that same situation, with those same emotions. This is the power of the mind to protect us: imagining herself in that woman’s place would have been the most obvious thought to have at the time, but Sara’s well-trained brain would not allow her to have it. She had driven home that day thinking not of priests and caskets but of cops: the officers who had lined the walls of the
state senate that morning, staring down in protest at the legislator while he spoke the words Sara had written for him. Afterward one of them had given her his card. “Know thine enemy,” he’d said, as he pressed it into her hand.

She smiled, remembering it now. It was the first time she’d smiled all day.

*

That same cop, astonishingly, had picked her up at the train when she’d returned home from Bagram, a not uncommon coincidence of living in a small town. He was quiet and deferential, and because she didn’t know what to say, she was quiet and deferential, too. They drove in silence. This was the prettiest time of year in this part of the world; fall and winter were beautiful, too, but the spring just shouted out “life.” Daffodils, a flower she didn’t otherwise care for, bloomed so suddenly and in such vast numbers now that for their few first weeks they defined the main streets; to hate them would be like hating the home team. She could see kids scrimmaging on the school fields that ran along the edge of the highway, the start of summer camp for fall field hockey.
Teamwork
, she thought. As the car turned onto the road that would lead to her street, she prepared for the worst. She smoothed the lines of her skirt. She put the window up. The cop switched his lights on. “Do you mind?” he asked. “No,” she said. She was grateful he didn’t switch the siren on, too.

But when they get to her driveway the reporters are gone. Had some Samaritan cleared them away—or had they lost interest? They are gone, yet the last stretch of street leading to the pretty white gate now installed isn’t empty; it’s lined with people. On either side they are gathered at least three or four deep, and in
most places parents have pushed the children to the front. Some of them hold cameras, some hold signs. She can see that one of them reads “We Love You, Sara.” As the squad car turns onto the driveway, she can also see that the entire length of it leading to the house has been lined with flowers. Lilies and roses and broad bunches of peonies are laid carefully in rows, or tied to the fence.

The cop offers to stay but she resists. There are six officers stationed at the end of the drive, and two squad cars.

“Someone covered the bill, ma’am,” he says.

“Thank you,” she says.

“These guys will be here as long as you need.”

“That’s—very kind of you,” Sara says, but her voice feels disconnected from her body. Her ability to call on language feels limited. Because she does not know what else to do, she shakes his hand. She lets him carry her things inside, and she waits and watches as he moves his car around with a precise, three-cornered turn. Then she closes the door behind her and locks it. She is entirely alone for the first time in eleven days.

*

The house is clean, and when she looks into the icebox, someone has been to the market; it’s full. The strawberries were almost the size of small limes; that’s what happened at this time of year. “If you don’t mind your garden, you’ll have melons as big as missiles,” the neighbor told her when they first moved in, eyeing her unused hoe. And that was true. It took years for her to learn that lesson well enough to gain the patience, and discipline, required for proper vegetable tending. But the rewards made the price a small one to pay: everything that came up in this season was the
symbol of summer, and health, and blessing. Everything was delicious. She felt like she had been gone a lifetime.

Before she lies down and closes her eyes, she lays out clothes on the bed for her next trip, on Sunday, to Washington. She will drive herself to the train downtown, and Sam has promised to pick her up at Union. She’d briefly considered a burial at Strawberry Hill, at the Naval Academy, an admiral having offered his own plot, but opted for Arlington for various reasons, primary among them the thought that she would visit more often. She might even move to D.C., to be closer by. Sam is there. The godfather is there. She should reach out to people; she should reach out and tell her story—her version of her son’s story. She can start again. She is still young. This is what people are saying now constantly: “You are still so young, Sara.”

Her last trip to Arlington had been bitter cold, but what she most vividly remembers now is how slowly she moved then. She wanted to walk carefully, in order not to slip, in order to protect the little life growing inside of her. She simply wanted to get to the top of that hill, and then see just enough to allow her to ace her class paper. She hadn’t known how struck she would be by the cemetery’s beauty and by an urge to wander its grounds. She couldn’t believe that this place had been, it seemed, hidden from her, kept secret, erased off of classic must-see cultural maps that always included places like the Met or the Getty or Monticello—the places that defined America.
This is the first place people should come if they want to understand us
, she had thought at the time, proud of her uninvited surge of patriotism.

In the abstract, all those years ago, the graves seemed so noble in their anonymity. She possessed no connection to them—no parent or grandparent, as far as she knew, was buried there. In
fact, no one she knew then was in service or had ever served, though she knew people who knew people who had. Everything then that crossed her mind concerning wars was political or theoretical. It was inconceivable to her that one day she would return to this place to bury her child, a war hero. It was inconceivable to her that one day she would be presented with the flag, folded neatly, stars on top. Everything before now was inconceivable.

But all those years ago she had left Arlington with one clear thought: that it would be good to return, perhaps on a day when the weather was not quite so biting, and when she was in a physical condition that allowed her to walk more, and faster. Then, it had snowed so much over the previous weeks that the trees were bowed with white weight, the headstones all capped in thick hats of ice. She knows when she goes back this time it will be green, like a garden. Jason would like that. He preferred spring.

I’m not sure how to acknowledge a group of people who by nature prefer to go unacknowledged: the many active, reserve, and retired Team guys who met with me. My instinct is simply to mention “the many who met with me” and hope that doesn’t fall short of the mark. In his 1995 book,
Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice
, Admiral William H. McRaven wrote:

Exceptionally modest
is an understatement. Even the officer who spoke so eloquently on Leonidas, and let me use his words, preferred to go unnamed here, as did the guy who knows more about Plato and Pynchon than many English—or philosophy—professors I’ve
met. The three men who made time to review an early draft of this book when they had far more important things to do, thank you. And the officers who explained free surface effect, and waterfall charts, and didn’t mind my making them into metaphors: thank you two, in particular.

A certain classmate and friend of LCDR Erik S. Kristensen, and Sam Kristensen: for flight paths, and lessons on loss.

Discretion, valor: no operational details, classified tactics, techniques, or information pertaining to real world missions were disclosed to me at any time by anyone affiliated with the Naval Special Warfare community. Errors are my own.

Ed Victor, who started it all. Adrienne Brodeur. Chris Heinz. Lex Sant. Ken Wilson. Ambassador Frank Wisner. At Knopf, Sonny Mehta, especially Shelley Wanger, and Peter Mendelsund. Beau Biden, Judge Louis Freeh, Judge Eugene Sullivan. My mother, Carroll Carpenter; my husband, Cliff Brokaw. And finally, my little ones, Vail and Alexis. Everything is for you.