Redeployment (23 page)

I even wrote about Deme in the personal statement I submitted, midway through the deployment, as part of my application to law school.

“Even the best adjutants aren’t saving lives, like Sergeant Deme, or risking their life on daily patrols, like your average grunt. But the best of us make sure those sacrifices are honored by providing them the administrative support they need, whether it be getting them absentee ballots or in assisting them with their wills. There isn’t any glory in this kind of work. The adjutant’s job is generally only noticed when it goes wrong. Both of my deployments have been spent at a desk, relieving Marines of burdens they will never know could have existed. That’s enough for me. It’s more than enough. And it’s what has led me to desire a public interest career in law.”

What I didn’t mention was that the death toll for our battalion by the end of the deployment was five, meaning that alley had been responsible for more than half of our total casualties. I also didn’t mention that that alley was in an area where the previous commander had warned our battalion to avoid aggressive patrolling. “We’re not going to see success here until we develop better relationships with the local population,” he’d said.

The reaction of the unit had been unanimous: “Those guys are idiots! We’re Marine infantry! We don’t avoid the enemy, we close with and destroy the enemy!” Lieutenant Colonel Motes, our CO, had an aggressive style, and the battalion didn’t really get on the COIN train until afterward.

That he’d sent his platoon into a death zone was not lost on Boylan, who had spent every moment since second-guessing
every decision he made, convinced better leadership could have saved those Marines’ lives. His instincts about that were probably right. Boylan came back to the States thirty pounds lighter than when he’d left—skeletal, with bruise-purple skin underlining eyes that looked out from the bottom of an ocean. I’d never had a personal relationship with any of the five fallen Marines, so I tended to think of their deaths with a solemn, patriotic pride rather than the self-loathing and self-doubt so clearly tearing Boylan to shreds.

When we got back from Iraq he was a mess, embarrassing himself at the Marine Ball, blacking out every weekend and probably weekdays, too. I remember him one time walking into the admin office, eight in the morning, hung over, with a huge dip of chewing tobacco in his lip, asking, “Anybody got a dip cup?” Nobody wanted to let him spit into anything they owned, so he shrugged, said, “Ahhhh, fuck it,” and then grabbed the collar of his cammie blouse and spit into his shirt. The Marines talked about it for weeks.

That was one approach. Vockler had another. Pretty much as soon as we got back, he’d started angling to get on a deployment to Afghanistan. Iraq was running down; that much was already clear by the tail end of our deployment. So he stalked a company commander from 1/9 until he got them to reserve a line number for him. Which led him to the admin office, my office, and instead of having my Marines handle his shit, I had them send him in to me. I wanted to see him again, face-to-face.

“So you want to go to Afghanistan?” I said.

“Yes, sir, that’s where the fighting is.”

“1/9,” I said. “The Walking Dead.” As battalion mottos go,
they’ve probably got the best. Thanks to Vietnam, 1/9 boasts the highest killed in action rate in Marine Corps history. Marines, who like to think of themselves as suicidally aggressive rabid dogs and who sometimes even live up to that self-image, consider this “cool.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know,” I said, “they set minimum dwell time for a reason. Just because you think you’re ready to deploy again doesn’t mean you are.”

“There’s a lot of Marines from 1/9 who’ve never deployed, sir.”

“And you’ve got the experience they need?”

“Yes, sir. They’ll need good NCOs.”

Marines often speak to officers in platitudes, so it’s sometimes hard to tell how much of what they’re saying they actually believe.

“1/9’s got a lot of Marines who’ve been over three, four, five times,” I said.

He nodded. “Sir, I know what it’s like to have really bad things happen.”

Impossible to argue with that.

“It’s very hard,” he said, his voice calm, as though he were describing weather patterns. “Chances are, these guys are gonna have to deal with the same thing.”

“Some probably will.”

“I’m good with people,” he said. “I’d be good with that.” He spoke with absolute composure. It made the room around him feel cold and still.

“Good to go,” I said. “I’m glad you’ll be over there. They’ll need good NCOs.”

I went through some of the steps he’d need to take as he checked out, then sent him on his way. The last thing he asked me was, “Sir, do you think they’ll give Sergeant Deme the Medal of Honor?” It was the only point where a little of his composure seemed to crack to let some emotion through.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.” It hardly seemed a decent answer.

•   •   •

I saw Vockler
only two more times after that day in my office. First was at the ceremony where they awarded Sergeant Deme the Navy Cross, where he and Boylan both tried and failed to avoid crying. That was the week I got my acceptance letter from NYU. I was certain I wouldn’t have gotten in without my Marine Corps résumé. To NYU, I was a veteran. Two deployments. That meant something to them.

The last time was the day Vockler left for Afghanistan. I was doing a three-mile run during my lunch break and his company was staged up off McHugh Boulevard, waiting for the buses. The families had enough U.S. flags that if you’d draped yourself in the Stars and Stripes it’d have constituted camouflage, and it was hot enough that every fat uncle there had pit stains big enough to meet in the middle of their chest.

Vockler was in a circle of Marines, all of them smoking and joking like they were about to go on a camping trip, which from a certain perspective was true.

I stopped my run and dropped by. Vockler saw me and grinned. “Sir!” he said. He didn’t salute, but it didn’t seem disrespectful.

“Corporal,” I said. I put my hand out and he shook it vigorously. “Good luck over there.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’ll do great,” I told him. “Handling your transfer, that’s one of the things in my job I get to feel proud of.”

“Oo-rah, sir.”

I thought about making some sort of joke, like, “Stay off the opium,” but I didn’t want to force anything. So I continued on my run, and three weeks later I was out of the Corps.

•   •   •

There’s a month
after my discharge I can’t really account for. I traveled. I moved to New York, and then I think I spent a lot of time in my underwear, watching TV. My mom says I was “decompressing.”

At the time, most of my college friends were in corporate law or investment banking or were reevaluating life after dropping out of Teach for America.

Strangely, I started feeling more like a Marine out of the Corps than I’d felt while in it. You don’t run into a lot of Marines in New York. All of my friends thought of me as “the Marine,” and to everyone I met, I was “the Marine.” If they didn’t know, I’d make sure to slip it into conversations first chance I got. I kept my hair short and worked out just as hard as before. And when I started at NYU and I met all those kids right out of undergrad, I thought, Hell, yeah, I’m a fucking Marine.

Some of them, highly educated kids at a top five law school, didn’t even know what the Marine Corps did. (“It’s like a stronger Army, right?”) Few of them followed the wars at all, and most subscribed to a “It’s a terrible mess, so let’s not think about
it too much” way of thinking. Then there were the political kids, who had definite opinions and were my least favorite to talk to. A lot of these overlapped with the insufferable public interest crowd, who hated the war, couldn’t see why anybody’d ever do corporate law, didn’t understand why anyone would ever join the military, didn’t understand why anyone would ever want to own a gun, let alone fire one, but who still paid lip service to the idea that I deserved some sort of respect and that I was, in an imprecise way that was clearly related to action movies and recruiting commercials, far more “hard-core” than your average civilian. So sure, I was a Marine. At the very least, I wasn’t them.

•   •   •

NYU prides itself
on sending a high number of law students into public interest, “high” meaning 10 to 15 percent. If an NYU student gets a public interest job that pays under a certain amount, they get partial or full debt forgiveness, saving them more money than the average American makes in three years. Like everybody else without a Root Scholarship or wealthy parents or a fiancée at a hedge fund, I’d sat through NYU’s presentation on the program and thought, Oh, they want me to work my ass off and live in Bed-Stuy for six years. With incentives like that, four out of five NYU students take a good look at public interest jobs, hem and haw, consider the trajectories of all the fire starters they admire, and then go to the same huge law firms as everybody else.

Joe-the-corporate-lawyer told me, “Do Legal Aid. Do the Public Defender’s Office.”

We were having drinks at a rooftop bar with a stunning view of the Chrysler Building. The drink Joe had bought me was
made with a cardamom-infused liquor. I’d never had anything quite like it.

“I’m not really an idealist anymore,” I said.

“You don’t have to be,” he said. “You just have to be a guy who doesn’t want their life crushed doing shit that isn’t even mentally challenging. Sometimes I hate my clients and want them to lose, but that’s actually a rare improvement over most cases, which involve huge corporations where I can’t even bring myself to care. Aside from bonuses, which get smaller every year, I’m on a set salary. But I bill by the hour, which means the equity partners make more money the more I work. And nobody works their ass off for ten years to become partner because they’ve got a burning ambition to improve the lifestyles of first-year associates. They do it for money. And so do I.”

“You’re paying off law school and college debt,” I said.

“Which you won’t be,” he said, “thanks to the G.I. Bill and the Yellow Ribbon Program and your savings from the Corps. If you go my route, you’ll be stuck doing doc review every day and every night and every goddamn weekend and you’ll want to blow your brains out.”

Joe was right about the debt, but I already had some experience as a true believer, and if the Marine Corps was any indication, idealism-based jobs didn’t save you from wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

•   •   •

Paul-the-Teach-for-America-dropout told me,
“If you go public interest, be careful where you go.”

We’d met up in Morningside Heights at the railroad apartment he shared with his two roommates. The place was
schizophrenically decorated with old “Rage Against the Machine” posters, framed
New Yorker
covers, and Tibetan prayer flags.

“America is broken, man.” Paul took a swig of beer. “Trust me, you don’t want to be the guy bailing water out of a sinking ship.”

“Iraq vet,” I said, pointing at my chest. “Been there, done that.”

“Me too,” he said. “I’ll throw my middle school tour against your deployment any day.”

“They shoot at you?”

“One day a student stabbed another kid.”

That wouldn’t have trumped Vockler or Boylan, and it sure as hell didn’t trump dead, heroic Deme, but it trumped the shit out of me. Closest I ever came to violence was watching the injured and dying come into the base hospital.

“Saddest thing in that school,” he said, “was the kids who gave a shit. Because, honestly, that school was so fucked the smart option would have been to check the fuck out.”

“So what’s the solution? Charter schools? No Child Left Behind? Standardized testing?”

“Yo, I got no idea. Why you think I went to get a master’s in education leadership?” He laughed. “So if you go public interest—”

“I need to make sure I’m not the Band-Aid on a giant sucking chest wound.”

•   •   •

“You’re not doing public interest,”
Ed-the-investment-banker told me while the two of us smoked cigars at a James Bond–themed bar that required khakis and nice shoes to get in.

“But I think—”

“How long have I known you? You’re going to a firm. It’s the easy option. Let me break it down for you.”

“Joe says—”

“Joe’s a lawyer. I hire lawyers.” Not strictly true. His bank hired lawyers, though I suppose it doesn’t really make a difference, because a guy like him can make a guy like Joe work until five
A.M
. if he wants.

“Listen to me,” he said, spreading his hands. “There are fourteen top law schools. Not thirteen. Not fifteen. There’s fourteen that matter. And guess what, congrats, you’re in one of them.”

“NYU is top five.”

“Top six, but who’s counting,” he said. “The top firms, they hire pretty much from those schools. Maybe a handful from schools a bit lower down, a few kids from Fordham or someplace who did amazing and are so shit-hot they learned to shoot fireworks out of their dicks. But for the most part, if you’re not from one of those schools, it’s a hard life trying to get a job in this city.”

“You mean getting a job like Joe’s. And Joe hates his job.”

“Of course he does. He’s at a law firm, not a brewery. He works longer hours than you did in the Corps, and I guarantee that at no point in his life will a complete stranger walk up to him and say, ‘Thank you for your service.’ But here’s how it works. All the top firms pay the same, except for one, which is the top, which you’re not getting into unless you too learn to shoot fireworks out your dick—”

“I didn’t know that was an important legal skill.”

“In this city, it is. There’s a million lawyers and only so many really good jobs. Even the top public interest jobs, like the U.S. Attorney’s Office or Federal Defender, tend to hire people from top firms. So everything matters. What school you go to determines what clerkship you get, what firm you work at. If you don’t have the right credentials from the right sorts of places, you’re fucked.”