by Gregg Braden
“What do you mean, trouble?” Jack asked.
“You’ve never lived out west; it’s different there. People do whatever they want. Anything goes. It’s not like Ohio.”
The boys took this in silently.
“And another thing I want you to remember: education. It’s what will save you. Make sure you keep on studying, that you go to college. When I’m gone, there’ll be money to help you out.”
“You act like we’re not ever going to see you again,” Charlie said.
“Well, you never know. But you won’t be living near me anymore, and letters and phone calls are different.”
Their father walked into the room, and they immediately fell silent. With his long, pale hair, jeans, and laconic, laid-back manner, he hardly seemed fatherly—he was simply the musician he claimed to be.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“We’re talking about California,” Nelly told him.
Tom rolled his eyes. “I’m not looking forward to that move. I’m not even sure I can make it. The band’s auditioning for a gig …”
Elaine reentered and stood with her hands on her hips. “What are you talking about? I haven’t heard a word about this.”
“Well, it just happened.” He lit a cigarette. “We got a call about playing a couple of concerts outside of Pittsburgh. We’ve been trying to get in there for years now, and we finally got a break. You don’t hit it big overnight with my kind of work.”
Elaine rolled her eyes.
“What? You’re saying I’ll never make it, aren’t you?”
She raised her hands, palms out. “I didn’t say a word.”
Listening to their parents, the boys began disassembling their Lego constructions. They had been building a fort, with a reinforced wall and a number of sturdy buildings inside. Now they methodically took them apart. Jack didn’t know how it was possible to feel sorry for both of his parents at the same time, but he did, and he knew Charlie felt the same. They nearly always felt the same. They were identical twins, after all, formed when a single fertilized egg had split in two—as close as two humans could ever be.
Tom finished his cigarette, then left, slamming out of the front door, getting into his car, and pulling away.
The boys gathered their Legos together in a large pile.
Finally, Jack said, “Dad’s not moving with us.”
Charlie said, “I know.”
Nelly studied them. “Just remember what I said.”
The boys put their Legos in the box and then stood and regarded their grandmother, still sitting regally in her big chair.
“Come here,” Nelly said. They both shuffled over and wrapped four arms around her.
Into her silky bodice, Jack murmured, “We’ll remember,” speaking, as he often did, for them both.
Traffic was in fact one of the few things Nelly hadn’t warned them about when they moved here years ago. Since she had practically raised them while their mother was teaching and their father was on the road, she remained appalled that they were “taken” away from her and their relatively staid life in northwestern Ohio.
The move to San Francisco had heralded the end of their parents’ marriage, just as the boys had predicted, but as long as they had each other, they felt certain they’d survive.
Jack stared at the windshield wipers, the rain beating against them. He looked at the clock. He’d been sitting here for 15 minutes. He turned on the radio again and sat through five minutes of sports scores, weather, and finally the traffic rehash. Ten more minutes of delay was the estimate now. Shit. He was stuck. He turned off the radio and looked at his face in the rearview mirror. Something about the light and his state of mind … he looked like an old man. He looked like his father.
He leaned back in the seat as another scene popped into his mind. It was the fateful day after their grandmother’s funeral.
At that point he and Charlie were fresh out of high school, over six feet tall, and wearing suits that they’d outgrown and dark glasses. Even so, they didn’t look perfectly identical anymore.
Since graduating, they’d begun to differentiate themselves in small ways. Charlie had started cutting his hair shorter and dressing in preppier clothes, while Jack let his hair grow to his shoulders, wore beaded necklaces, and got tattoos. Jack had received a scholarship that would pay for several semesters of art school, while Charlie was taking his time, deciding where and when he wanted to go to college. They shared the same opinions, politics, and basic tastes, but Jack hung out with the more avant-garde, arty students in town, while Charlie tended to spend more time with people at his gym.
Losing their grandmother had left them both stunned and sad. They’d traveled back and forth from Ohio in two days—with their morose, silent mother, who took the occasion to let them know that over the years, their father had emptied what had been intended as their college fund.
“Why didn’t someone stop him?”
“No one realized he was doing it. I never looked at that money. We all had access to it—unfortunately.”
Neither of them could quite digest this news coming so soon after the death of Nelly. They couldn’t wait to get back to California. On the plane, both slouched in the cramped coach seats; their faces were a study in dual melancholy.
“I can’t remember being so bummed,” Jack said. “We not only lose Grandma, but now there’s no money.”
“We’ll have to find real work,” Charlie said. Both had worked odd jobs—Charlie in construction, Jack stocking grocery shelves.
“Right. We’ll be old men before we save up enough. Do you know how much school costs now? Art school will be twenty grand a year once my scholarship’s over. And my friend’s paying forty thousand a year for a state college.”
“We’ll do it somehow. We just have to make a plan.”
“Let me know when you figure one out.”
“I’ve already got an idea.”
Two days later, when Jack walked downstairs and saw that Charlie had invited a recruiter to meet him, he was flabbergasted. He looked at the man’s uniform in amazement.
“Who are you?”
“He’s a marine,” Charlie said. “His name’s William.” He turned slightly. “This is my brother.”
“A marine?” Jack looked William up and down as if sizing him up for a fight. He was in his late 30s, with a buzz cut, ramrod-straight posture, and a smooth face. He looked like a former football player.
“Nice to meet you, son,” William said coolly, extending his hand and quickly placing it in his pocket when Jack didn’t move.
“Don’t tell me you’re considering enlisting,” Jack said. “Are you serious?”
“Yes, he’s serious,” William said, as if he were Charlie’s twin and privy to his deepest thoughts.
“Man, you’ve got to be kidding.”
William winked at Charlie, infuriating Jack even more.
“Jack, it’s not the worst thing in the world.”
“Oh, really?” Jack ignored William and continued speaking to his brother. “I’m sure he’s told you all kinds of great stuff about the adventure and high pay, but wait until you find yourself in the middle of some broiling desert, aiming Patriot missiles at civilians.”
William smiled, as if he had heard such false information before. He said, “The Marines are trained, equipped, and organized to maintain a state of constant global readiness. We offer benefits that rival Fortune 500 companies, especially in this kind of economic climate.”
“That sounds right out of an advertising brochure,” Jack said.
Charlie said to his brother, “Listen, I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I can get my entire college paid for by joining up—no student loans at all. And with Iraq winding down, there’s a good chance I’ll end up in the States anyway.”
Jack snorted. “Oh, sure. That’s what they tell you. But what if they send your ass straight over to Afghanistan? You hate these wars. You’re not equipped for fighting and
killing people.”
Charlie looked away from him. “Speak for yourself, Jack. I know what I’m capable of.”
Jack turned his gaze to the recruiter, who seemed to be emanating a smug certitude. Probably Charlie had already signed some contract or other. Weren’t they desperate for smart soldiers? And Charlie would be among the smartest and fittest. Jack felt a surge of possessiveness as he looked again at his twin. How could this stranger take him away?
“Did you think I would sign up, too? Is that why you brought him here?”
Charlie smiled. “I didn’t think so. But William said that, being twins and all, it’d be kind of cool if we enlisted together.”
“Yeah, real cool … they could ship us home together in the same box.” Jack ran his hands through his hair. He couldn’t believe this was happening. “Did you tell Mom yet?”
“Yeah. She freaked out, as you can imagine. Said she couldn’t bear to lose me. That we were all she had. Etcetera. She pulled out every stop. I ended up comforting her, and I’m the one who’s leaving.”
“Can’t you take some time to think this over? I mean, this is your life we’re talking about.”
But even as Jack said this, he saw it was too late. Whatever the recruiter had promised, it must have been very beguiling. Charlie was lost.
Jack couldn’t help blaming his father for this disaster. If he’d kept his mitts off the money their grandmother had set aside for them, none of this would have happened.
Jack said to the recruiter, “Can my brother and I talk alone for a few minutes?”
William walked down the hall and got on his cell phone.
“You’re too smart to do this, bro.”
“Jack, I’m not going to walk around owing a hundred-thousand-dollar college loan for the rest of my life.”
“I’m not going to do that either.”
“You don’t have any other choice—you’ll be in debt if you finish art school. You just told me that tuition’s twenty grand. Where will you ever get that?”
“So we’ll learn a trade or something. Remember how Grandma always told us that being an electrician or plumber was honorable work? And the pay is good.”
Charlie looked at his brother’s long hair, pierced ear, and elaborate sleeves of tattoos. “I just can’t see you doing that. There are long hours of apprenticeship; you have to get into a union—it’s hard work.”
“What, you’re saying I’m lazy?”
“No, but you’re artistic—you’ve always been more artistic than I am. That’s what you’re suited for. Doing something with video or computers.”
“You always liked that stuff, too.”
“Not as much as you. We do have differences.”
Jack turned away. He didn’t like it when Charlie reminded him of this.
That was the last time Jack had seen him face-to-face, in what he considered the Before Time—before the war. Charlie was gone within the week, departing for a base in San Diego for boot camp. Jack looked up the basic training program and saw that, within 21 days, Charlie would have to be able to do 3 pull-ups and 40 sit-ups in 2 minutes, and run 3 miles in 28 minutes. This seemed laughingly impossible, at least to him, and yet Charlie didn’t change his mind, as Jack had privately hoped and prayed.
“You didn’t even say good-bye,” he said when Charlie eventually called him from San Diego.
“They didn’t give me much time to get ready. I called, but you weren’t there.”
And you didn’t leave a message? Jack thought but didn’t say.
These were new times, separate times. He would not have the access to his twin that he’d always known and mostly taken for granted.
When they hung up, Jack checked his incoming cell calls and saw that Charlie had indeed tried to call him, not once, but nine times, on a day when Jack’s cell had been dead in his jacket pocket. At least this made him feel better. Because, otherwise, Charlie was gone, gone, as far away as he’d ever been.
He came home after training for one short and exasperating visit, when he seemed like an automaton, his head shaved, his eyes cool and as if they contained points of steel. Then he was swiftly deployed to Afghanistan, just as Jack had feared.
But this time Charlie made sure he actually spoke to his brother before he left.
“I told you, man—I knew that’s where they’d send you,” Jack said.
Charlie was silent for a minute. “I thought so, too.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want a desk job in the States. If I’m doing this, I want to really do it.”
Jack still found it amazing that his brother would willingly leave home and engage in becoming a soldier—something so antithetical to what he thought they both believed.
Since Charlie was going to be stationed so far away, Jack began studying possible regions where he might be deployed. The Internet wasn’t enough now.
He traveled downtown to the ancient brick library and dragged down volumes of maps and spread them out before him. His brother was in Asia, another continent, even farther away than Africa, near the Red Sea, which Jack vaguely remembered from the Bible. He read aloud the exotic and foreign place names: the Tropic of Cancer, Turkmenistan, the Dardanelles Strait. On the map, the pink-colored Islamic Republic of Afghanistan itself looked unreal, like a puzzle piece. He read how the population was mostly Pashtun; how the average citizen made the equivalent of $1,000 a year; that Kabul, the capital, was also the largest city; and that there were ongoing threats to assassinate U.S. citizens. He could imagine the risk to marines. The time difference between Kabul and San Francisco was 12.5 hours, with San Francisco behind. His brother might as well be on the moon; Jack would have preferred it.
Driving home, he found a brochure that William the recruiter had left behind that had been underlined and annotated in what he realized was Charlie’s hand. He read the first paragraph:
“The Middle East is in the vanguard of the War on Terror, and the Marines support this effort with a number of operations. Those deployed in the region regularly provide security services or go into combat, but they may also work as instructors, trainers, protectors, and mentors. In Afghanistan, troops are involved in mentoring and training the country’s national army. They may also be involved in combat with insurgent forces.”
Charlie had underlined the words instructors, trainers, protectors, and mentors. That’s me, he wrote. But Jack focused on the word combat.
Each morning he studied the casualty list in the newspaper with his heart in his throat. Yet even as he exhaled with relief after scanning the list of names, he knew that for someone, somewhere, a name on this list would become the heartache of a lifetime, signifying the loss of a precious someone—father or daughter, son or wife—who could never be replaced.
CHAPTER 4
* * *
Charlie sat on patrol duty at five o’clock on a broiling Saturday evening, the sun still beating down on his back like a white-hot hand. He was cradling a heavy, futuristic rifle that had radio-controlled “smart” bullets designed to explode on contact with targets far out of conventional range. There weren’t enough of these to go around, and all the soldiers wanted one, but Charlie was half afraid to use it, anxious that it might go off in his face. He was also smoking a cigarette—a habit that he’d picked up within days of deployment.
After basic training, he’d been transported to Wardak province, near Kabul—one of the most dangerous regions in the country. Rumor had it that this was where most newcomers were sent, after the area had taken its toll on more seasoned veterans. Lately there’d been an increase in convoys being ambushed and government officials being killed.
Charlie had witnessed one weary platoon pulling out as his moved in. He’d never beheld such grizzled faces on young men before. Sunburned, their beards sprinkled with what looked like salt, their eyes beyond weary.
“That’ll be us,” said his new friend Ernesto, smoking beside him.
“We’ll be lucky if that is
us.”
“What do you mean?”
The answer was so obvious that he didn’t bother to say it.
Ernesto was the kind of friend he probably wouldn’t have had back in the States. Hispanic, a staunch Catholic, and already a father of two at 25, Ernesto worked at a chicken plant in southern Missouri and was the most important person in Charlie’s immediate world. Ernesto already knew the ropes, so he kept an eye on Charlie as they scrambled up the mountainous terrain together. His new friend had even given Charlie a Saint Christopher medal. Charlie didn’t know what it signified exactly, but he was grateful for it and wore it always.
At night, on patrols like this one, Ernesto talked about his family, especially his wife.
“I don’t know if she’ll wait for me if I’m gone much longer,” he told Charlie, who was shocked, though he tried to hide it.
“But why not? And what about the kids?”
“She’s hot, man. You saw her picture. She could find someone else to look after the kids. She probably don’t think I’ll be making it back anyhow.”
Charlie contemplated this as Ernesto studied him. “What about you? Don’t you have a girl?”
“Yeah, her name’s Hannah. I don’t know how she’s feeling about me right now. We had a big fight about my enlisting.”
“She didn’t want you to go?”
“Nope. Basically she found my papers before I told her, and she took it like a betrayal or something.”
Ernesto shook his head.
“And my mother was just as bad—she teaches history, so I had to listen to her talk all about U.S. involvement in the Middle East and the corruption of the military and how the war was a travesty and I was an obvious dupe, and on and on.”
“What about your dad?”
“Don’t remind me—he squandered the money my grandmother set aside for college for me and my brother. Then he had the nerve to be upset when I enlisted. No one in our family’s ever been in the service, except for an uncle who went to Italy during World War II. That I would actually enlist, of my own free will, wasn’t even believable to my family.”
