I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (2 page)

“Then I really researched what was going on in the wars and stuff. We’re in two wars; I didn’t know what these guys were dying for. I wondered, how do I re-create the excitement from that night? How do I become an honorable man like your father and your grandfathers? How do I do my part?

“Our country was in a war, so why not me? I called my lawyer, asked him, ‘Do I have to go into any more arraignments?’ He said, ‘No,’ so I asked him, ‘Can I join the army?’ He goes, ‘If they take you, I don’t see why not.’

“I couldn’t join at first. I hadn’t been acquitted yet, so I had to get a criminal waiver. I had to be interviewed by a lieutenant, a captain, a colonel, and a lieutenant colonel. One of them asked me, ‘So you’re the guy who pulled guns on cops? I’ve never been to jail, that’s one thing I haven’t done in my life. Welcome to the army.’ They were hurtin’ for manpower. They just wanted meat for the grinder.

“I enlisted without telling my dad. I was living at home while the court case was going on. Everything was fucking up. He would’ve never let me go; I would’ve never had his blessing. The day I enlisted, I came home to tell my dad.

“He goes, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ He tried to convince me not to go. He said, ‘These wars are bullshit. Don’t die for their bullshit.’

“He said, ‘I’ll give you five thousand dollars right now if you don’t join.’

“I said, ‘Dad, this is something I have to do.’

“He said, ‘I’ll give you fifteen thousand.’

“I said, ‘Dad.’

“He said, ‘I’ll give you forty thousand dollars to not die for their bullshit.’

“I said, ‘Dad, I don’t care about the money. I need to do this.’

“He said, ‘When you die for them, you’re going to regret it.’

“I went to sleep. The recruiter came to pick me up the next day.”

“That’s why I joined, to go over there and bust heads,” Ryan told me when he got back. “When I was actually over there,
it wasn’t how I thought it’d be. It wasn’t romantic. Not noble or ideological. You weren’t fighting for your country. It was a group of guys in the mountains trying to kill another group of guys in the mountains. You and a group of guys who are like you, fighting against a group of guys who aren’t like you. In the midst of all this, civilians die because of you. People are killing kids. Are these people a threat to the United States of America? Nah, dude, they don’t even have shoes.

“These people don’t know that we want to help them. They see us in their mountains and go, ‘What the fuck?!’ The guys who died didn’t die for America, they died for Afghanistan. Afghanis don’t give a shit about us. They don’t give a shit about their corrupt-ass government. They play both sides of the fence. Guzman got blown up on a mission we weren’t even supposed to go on. I’m sitting there eating an MRE as he’s dying, and I don’t know it.

“I’m the crazy guy? I am. I want to get the bad guys. I still do. The older guys who were in real wars, they’d tell us, ‘You’re in the right division, wrong war.’ Nobody gives a shit you’re doing this except the guys next to you—your friends, your brothers. It’s not a war. It’s a gang war.”

October in Miami is when the heat breaks and the rain stops. Skies are bare, and palmettos wave goodbye to the last bit of bluster coming out of the Caribbean. The afternoon of Tuesday, October 12, 2000, was mild and breezy. I reveled in the weather when I came out of my last class of the day. I’d been a high school freshman for a month, and my father and I had worked out the transportation scheme: I was too close to the school for the bus but too far to walk, so every day he’d drop me off and pick me up in the parking lot of an abandoned bank across the street, thereby avoiding the tangle of cars and moms at the front of the school. After the first two days, the process of coming and
going went quickly and wordlessly; I’d be out of the car before it had come to a complete stop, and I’d see him pull into the bank as I walked out of school. This kind of precision and efficiency quietly thrilled my father.

Ryan and I were attending different schools. I was at the local public one; Ryan’s grandfather was paying his way at an all-male Jesuit academy, for the discipline. Ryan
did
learn discipline there. He would tell me horror stories about the place: how it was a penitentiary atmosphere, how a new kid got sodomized with a blue Bic pen, cap on, in homeroom, and how there were three things a freshman could do to survive: make good with one of the groups of guys who preyed on one another; make yourself a clown or a bitch and offer yourself up that way; do neither and accept that you will be tested every day. The other boys from our Catholic middle school did the first two, Ryan said. He did the third.

And practically every day for four years, someone tried him, said or did something and dared him to fight back. If he didn’t, if he demurred even just once, they’d all smell blood, and it’d be over. He came home with cuts under his eyes from seniors’ class rings, and whenever his mom was conscious, she’d throw a fit because he’d stopped telling her the truth about why he was fighting. When he tried, she wouldn’t believe him. She’d ask how Jesuit priests would allow that to happen. He’d tell her that they knew if they interfered, 1,400 hormonal savages without a skirt to chase would turn on their captors. Then he went into his room and did push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups while waiting for the next day. Everything extra came off of him. After the first month, his knuckles looked like kettle corn.

We still saw each other a lot after school. Sometimes he’d pick me up, loaded on his mom’s painkillers. Sometimes I’d walk over to his place. One time, I opened the front door, and there he was in his white boxers, both barrels of his grandfather’s shotgun
in his mouth. He took them out, looked me dead in both eyes, and asked, “Is it loaded?” in the same tone he’d ask, “Is it hot outside?” When I tried to answer, he took a step closer and screamed, “But is it loaded?!” He gobbled the barrels, wrapped his big toe around the trigger, Hemingway-style, and squeezed. The chambers clicked. He gargled laughter.

Five more times he’d do this to me. But not once did I try to wrench the gun from his hands. I was always afraid that, this time, it really was loaded.

But on October 12, 2000, I was walking toward our car wondering why my father was in the driver’s seat. The day before, he’d let me drive the short distance home, for practice. I expected him to get out and switch to the passenger side, but he didn’t. He stayed where he was, ball cap and purple aviators and both hands on the wheel. I got in, and he started driving, and then without turning to me he said, “Arabs attacked a destroyer today. The USS
Cole.
Hit them in the galley as sailors lined up for lunch. Cowards.”

He always wore his sunglasses while driving, but on this day, his lenses lent him an especially dizzy watchfulness. His head was swiveling; I couldn’t be sure of what he
wasn’t
looking at. The man knew from vigilance. He came into this world 364 days after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Even casual mention of Japan or the Japanese still prompts my father to mutter things like, “It was a Sunday morning,” or “In their beds,” or “On the toilet.” To him, the bombing of the USS
Cole
was the call to war. September 11 would only ratify how he’d felt a year prior.

What he said next I can’t remember exactly. The words came as such a shock to me. Again, he’d never actively pushed military service on me. It was just part of our lives. Sitting through the Army-Navy football game despite a blizzard in Philadelphia; vacationing next to his old naval base in San Francisco; numbering
our dinners and rotating them (J-5 = steak and potatoes); explaining to me philosophies he’d worked out but couching them first: “In the immortal words of Lieutenant Commander Ralph M. Strainey …”; helping me sew the official seal of the United States Navy on the left side of my backpack and the official seal of the United States Marine Corps on the right.

Yet that day he said,
I don’t want you thinking about the military. It hurts me to say this. I believe in the military as an institution. But I don’t want you fighting their war. You’re too valuable. Let their own sons fight for them.

I tried to rebut him. Tell him how what he was saying went against everything he believed about civic duty. How the military serves a president who’s been democratically elected by fellow citizens. How you can’t make your tax dollars go only to the programs you like, and how it’s just as absurd to serve only for the “good wars.” He answered me by talking politics and Vietnam.

He left the main part unsaid, but it’s something he says implicitly every time he refuses to eat until I’ve finished my own meal, or won’t hand over the keys until he’s filled the tank, or doesn’t leave the house until I wake up. What he’s saying is,
A parent’s duty is to protect his child. A parent is relieved of this duty only in the grave. I could never forgive myself if you were hurt or killed and I could have prevented it.

I said nothing more on the ride home. The car was Papa Lou’s, a white Grand Marquis. He’d left it to my father. The thing was a boat. Its paint had gone fibrous from the elements, same as happens to Plexiglas in a hull. If you ran your hand across it, you’d come away with a half a dozen shards that your body couldn’t dissolve and were painful as hell to remove.

They had e-mail in Afghanistan. Once in a while I’d receive one from Ryan.

“First they try to get you to reenlist in Afghanistan, because the bonus is tax-free. Then back at Bragg, they try to get the dudes who aren’t going to reenlist because they want to have a life, have a family, go to college. They try as hard as they can to get them.

“A few months before my time was up, they’d bring me to meetings even though I’d long since told them I wasn’t going to reenlist. They said, ‘You can get all this money, you get all this great camaraderie. You really gotta make this decision.’ Then, a few weeks before I was out, the meetings went, ‘You’re not going to make it on the outside. You’re going to live with your mother. You’re abandoning all your brothers. What are you, a pussy?’

“They try to alienate you; you’re the guy trying to get out at that point. ‘Oh, he’s not a team player.’ Some guys are so fucking brainwashed when they’re over there—this is all you know. You don’t even know what the civilian world is like anymore. You’re in the zone. The army is all there is.”

I was home from college and Ryan was home, more recently, from the clink. It was two months after the incident with the police in his front yard. He’d gone to court and been acquitted of aggravated assault.

The first thing he did when he came over that night was hold his fist level to my face. “You see this shit?” he asked. There were runnels of blood flowing from his knuckles down the grooves between his fingers. “Fucking, I’m squeegeeing my windshield at the Shell station, and a homeless guy punches me in the back of the head.”

I was sure there was more to the story, but I didn’t press. This was Ryan, after all. Ever since we hit puberty, it seemed to me, my share of bad luck and tough circumstance had been diverted onto him, as though a jetty had sprung up between us, piling it all on his side. I took him into the kitchen, where the house lights were on.

My dad was standing on the far side of the kitchen island, shirtless. I’d told him Ryan was coming over, so he’d arrayed plates of leftovers on the counter. Ryan had been rangy before high school, a starved thing, but now he was threaded with muscle. When he looked upon the food, his receded eyes rippled shallowly within their apron of brown.