Eleven Days (6 page)

Detail
and
Team
are two of Jones’s favorite words, and they describe the larger concept: little things matter, and the fabric holding together the little things is the fabric of the Team. When a Team doesn’t coalesce, the entire Team is blamed. There is no room—yet—for entrepreneurial thinking. And there is no room for assholes. Jones drills things into them. For him, training was an almost philosophical experience.

Once the focus of their training moves to the pool, Jason earns a nickname: Priest. Jones starts to call him that because he’s so quiet and because he paces the hallways at night while reading (“prepping the sermons”), but also because all the instructors tease him saying that he must have a direct line to God from the pool. His ability to stay underwater without breathing for so long, and with such ease, was something they had not seen before. The others guys notice this gift and how lightly he wears it. “What do you say in your prayers,” shouts the master chief. “Do you pray we don’t find your third lung?”

*

When he was a baby, Jason and his mother lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment. There was no bathtub. Sara would bathe him in an old plastic crate she’d emptied of books, set on the floor of the shower stall. He was swimming at two. “My little fish,” she’d tell friends as they watched, horrified, as she pushed him out into the pool. “Don’t worry. He can do it.” By six he was swimming lengths underwater, for fun.

*

He isn’t writing novels but sometimes, when he is underwater, when he is swimming as opposed to performing a task, Jason lets his mind wander. He thinks about the moments that have led to this one, and he questions his decision. He will never admit it, but sometimes he does question things. These concentrated thoughts allow him to forget the physical pain. He has made mistakes. On the obstacle course, in the second week, he had slipped and fallen, badly. His ankle had swelled up like a softball, but because he had heard of guys who kept running on broken legs to stay in training, he tried not to let it show. He had always had a system for managing discomfort, and until this point in his life it had worked well: he let his mind wander. He thought about his father. He would imagine meeting him in some exotic place—maybe near the Indian Ocean, maybe in the Middle East, maybe in “Mecca,” a word he’d first heard on the answering machine in one of David’s runic messages. These waking dreams acted like anesthesia. And he needs them now: for the first time in his life, Jason is experiencing true, sharp physical pain.

*

That last day that last summer at home before he’d left for San Diego, his mother had sat on his bed while he packed and begged him to reconsider his future. Again. She had said, “Don’t make me beg.” And then she said, “And I want you to know that if you get hurt, you have to tell someone. You cannot hide it anymore.” He understood. The irony of which they were both aware that day was the fact that Jason’s sense of determination, the same thing that gave rise to his pride, had to have come from somewhere. It had to have come from someone, and it could only have come from her. At least that was what Jason was thinking. Sara was thinking about
the fact that her life was a case study in purposelessness. And here was her son, potential future four-star admiral.

If he survives
. That was the subtext of her fears. And very soon she would learn that every choice and every moment and every thing in the military, and in the lives of family members who waited back home for their fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and sons and daughters and lovers, was infused with the same fear. The threat of imminent, physical danger, something she’d only read about in books, was now going to be a central part of her life. But he wanted it. He was clear-headed and that clarity would serve him well.

Sara’s height belied her strength. She was five foot six to her son’s five foot eleven. He’d surpassed her in fifth grade. When he’d started at Annapolis, she’d taken up running, a form of exercise she’d long mocked as a “transportation sport.” She had been born to dreamers, fallen in love with a dreamer, and then given birth to a dreamer, but she was furiously practical. She saved ribbons. She clipped coupons. She didn’t dye her hair. Everything about her appearance was natural, another aberration for twenty-first-century postfeminists, everything right up to yet excluding the bright streak of white in her otherwise true brunette hair. It was a birthmark. David used to say, “No, it’s my illuminated landing strip, so I can find you from thirty thousand feet at night, when necessary.”

She didn’t care what people thought about her, which made her a revolutionary in small-town life—or at least that was how Jason saw her. She was well known among his friends primarily for being beautiful, cool—and young. She was careful and consistent in her denial of traditional female rituals, adamant about being the girl who would never wear makeup to the movies or
profess to care about her clothes. But most other women considered Sara less a threat than a tragedy, a spouseless loner in a socially networked world. She preferred reading to shopping. She loved ideas and grew into a woman who helped edit the ideas of others.

The night before his last day back east, before she would drive him to the airport, and perhaps in some gesture toward the symbols of commencements, Sara wore a white sundress while helping him prepare. Jason knew it was her very best one. She had her hair down that day, too, tied with a white ribbon, a style she rarely chose as she knew it made her look even more like a girl, even less like a mother, perhaps. He was twenty-one and she was forty. As he had moved around his room, finalizing his packing, she must have tucked the tiny wrapped box, his graduation present, under his pillow. It was a simple gold locket, with a St. Christopher on the outside and, on the inside, a picture of the American flag he had brought home from the market that day, the one that now hung outside their house. When he found it he walked down the hall to her bedroom to thank her.

“I can’t believe how corny this is and how much I love it,” he’d said.

“I’m allowed to be corny now.” There were tears streaming down her face.

*

There were very few whose fathers had not been present at Academy graduation. And there were very few whose ideas of their fathers did not factor into their aspirations to be operators. And the father of all the other fathers is the master chief. It’s the master
chief who leads the men on their drills and on the long beach runs. Master Chief Jones is tough. He’s witty. He has been in the Teams for thirty years. He tells the men stories from other wars, even as he never talks about his own service. He leads the hardest runs during the third week, the Long Day. Have you ever tried running after three nights of no sleep? It’s a bit like kickboxing in honey.

It is dark. It is three in the morning. It is the fourth night of Hell Week, so by process of deduction, it’s Wednesday. The men are very wet, cold, sandy, and tired. The Hell started on Sunday, with the “breakout.” The thinking behind the breakout is that most battles begin in chaos. Chaos can be accurately simulated. Breakout—and Hell Week, more broadly—attempt to simulate the conditions of battle. These five days and five nights take the stress of extreme physical conditioning, then tack on sleep deprivation and the element of surprise.

Breakout begins with the men being told to wait in one large room. They are told they can talk and read and eat and relax, but they’ve heard the stories. They know exactly how breakout works: by creating chaos—and fear. When the first shots are fired, some are relieved; they’ve been ready. Others are broken. Suddenly they are in the closest thing they’ve been in to a live fight. And even knowing it’s a simulation, and that adequate safety precautions are taken, some of the bravest-seeming among them will ring out within the first hour. The shock is too much. By Wednesday, those who remain think they will make it one more night. They put one foot in front of the other and rely on muscle memory. They are ready for relief. The Master Chief’s songs are a form of relief.

They all know them by heart by now, because he has been singing them since day one—on the beach, on the Grinder, while
checking their rooms. He likes to sing. And he likes you to sing, too. Sing softly, and you will drop and push them out. Sing too softly, and you gain the privilege of running once more into the water, and it’s like ice. Then you can drop for a hundred more push-ups, in the process of which sand gets in your nose, your mouth, your eyes. The illusion that sand might lodge in your lungs and slow you on runs—or choke you—is powerful. Once you have that image in your mind it is tough to erase.

As the master chief sings, he will periodically slow his pace, or even run in place, allowing him to observe his men. A month ago, this class started with one hundred sixty trainees. Now they were thirty. He can see how red their eyes are. He can sense how close each one of them might be to the edge of breaking. They have been running in and out of the water on this one night for close to four hours. Running is like breathing here. Run to the O course. Run to eat. Run to rest, briefly. Run to gain the privilege of another, longer run.

Most of them are unaware of what hour or even what day it is. Still, somewhere underneath the exhaustion, the pain of spliced tendons and stress fractures and stomach muscles stretched to unholy lengths, there is a sense of release. This is what the singing does. The song goes like this:

After Hell Week, the class size shrinks again, to nineteen. After Hell Week, they will have nine weeks of dive training and three weeks of hydrographic reconnaissance work. After that, their class size will stand at seventeen, one guy having injured himself during drown-proofing, another having failed pool competency, the one test Jason never tells his mother about, although she could have found out about it online if she’d wanted. Then the men leave the pool and learn land warfare. In this third and final chapter things become increasingly what might be called fun. The ones who remain will most likely complete the course. The tests they have endured up until this point have been largely psychological. The way their bodies have changed attested to the physical rigors they’ve endured.

Men about to end BUD/S are like steeplechase jockeys days before a race, only imagine jockeys who have not yet seen a horse, who are unable to distinguish a foal from a thoroughbred. They will have time to train, to learn more about what it means to fight and about which tools they will use. They will learn more about themselves, too. Self-knowledge makes the real warrior, and self-knowledge coupled with tactical skill allows a guy to say he is an operator. Throughout those early weeks, almost everyone was thinking the same thing:
Why did I make it, and why did he fail?
They will have years ahead to talk about it, but over time it will become clear.

On the last night, the few guys left gather at the master chief’s house; he’s invited them for beers, but most take Cokes. Master
Chief sits at his piano. It is a beautiful instrument, an ebony Steinway grand, a gift from someone at the Department of Defense, or so the story goes. He can really play. The rumor went around that he’d turned down Juilliard for the chance to make the Teams. Another rumor went that he’d been court-martialed after inviting Bobby Seale to speak on counterinsurgency at Quantico, in the 1970s. He played music familiar to most of them, Brahms, Beethoven, and Mozart; he knew the canon. But he knew Bob Dylan, too. He took requests when the class had had a good day. When Jason landed his boat crew on the rocks in a nasty rainstorm, he requested “Queen Jane, Approximately,” a song Sara loved.

This night, their last night, he plays the song that has become theirs, a song that would serve for the rest of their lives as a reminder of what they’d been through these last six months. Phrases from it would stand as code in later years when they would meet classmates in unexpected places, allowing them to recognize one another. Only this night Jones sang a slightly different version, with lyrics they hadn’t heard before. The guys sing along with the chorus once they get a handle on the words. It goes like this:

Dixie Mission, more formally called the United States Army Observation Group, was an Allied outpost in China during World War II. Jones tells them the story: how the “missionaries” were actually CBI Theatre experts sent there to observe and report. They were the first post-OSS team to go into China, and the rumor was that their name came from the presence of so many southerners in their midst. Critics keen to flame the fires of Communist fears demonized the Mission’s men; they claimed the real mission was Red sympathy. But when the young envoys’ reputations were shredded and they were individually stripped of roles at State and elsewhere, they took their case all the way to the Supreme Court to prove their innocence and won.