The bride was beautiful. Sara envied her dress. Sara envied the whole experience and ritual, one she knew now for certain she would never have. As the bride’s toast went on, the room quieted down. She soon unintentionally stunned the clinking glasses to silence. She was describing an exercise—what they called an “evolution”—known as drown-proofing. In drown-proofing (the bride read this from a printed page), a boy’s hands and feet are tied. He is also blindfolded. Like this, he jumps into a pool. He has to bob, and he has to swim fifty meters under water, without emerging for air. This is meant as much to test the will as it is to test physical stamina. And it is meant to test fear, because the fear that results from anticipation of failure is enough to keep a boy from ever reaching the edge of the pool. The bride had been trying to say something about commitment, and about romance, but all anyone could talk about the entire rest of the night was those boys, bobbing in the water, blindfolded.
Driving north the next morning, Sara remembered thinking about the toast. How noble to enter into something so you can save the lives of others; no one she knew did that. What was she doing that was remotely noble? She’d woken feeling guilty about the sandy-haired seven-year-old at home with a sitter. When she got back, it was dark. She sat on the end of his bed for a long time while he slept. She looked at him and she thought, You are the product of a very poor decision, but you are the most important thing in my life. She thought, I could easily swim fifty meters underwater for you.
*
She checks her watch. She has been gone for nearly two hours. The last stop at the garden must have been longer than she realized. It is time to go home. It is almost all uphill through the neighbor’s yard, and it looks different now. It is wet and dark. Does anyone even live there anymore? When was the last time she had seen those neighbors? Were they the ones who brought the blueberry pies? She can’t remember. The ground evens out. She can see her favorite tree now in her own yard, a tree that once held a swing and that later served as poor protective cover for a target board. This is the lawn where she learned to shoot the little guns. As she reaches the top of the driveway, she can see a new car out front. It is not a police car, but it has government plates. There are two men standing by it. One of them is in uniform. They have come to bring her news.
ATHENS FOR SPARTA
CORONADO, CALIFORNIA,
NOVEMBER 2006
Jason jumps in feet first. As his heels hit the water, he fills his lungs with air one last time. He knows this test well. He read about it before he practiced for it, and he has practiced for it many times before now performing it in front of his peers. Not all the men will pass this test. He knows that the most important thing is to stay calm and not to panic. Panic is the assurance of failure.
If he can maintain his mental equilibrium, the rest is just water games, at least here. This is not a battle. This is a beautiful pool, near a beautiful beach, in one of America’s most idyllic coastal communities. Dinner will be served later, and it will be good. And then he will have a bed to sleep in, a book to read, and rest. Sleep never seemed like a luxury when he was little, but he understands well the price of its absence now.
When he’d searched for information about drown-proofing online, back home, Jason found a chat room where one aspiring operator described how he had trained for drown-proofing by wrestling his brother underwater until one of them passed out. Jason thought that was ridiculous. But then, something about that post stayed in his mind as emblematic of the outlook of so many who wanted to succeed here. Whether or not they had prepared in unwise or sophisticated ways, all of them had prepared. On its own, each element of the training might appear absurd, like a lone tennis player tasked to stand and volley cross-court for forty hours, without a racquet. But for the serious athlete, practice demands breaking down the diverse parts of the body—and of the equipment. Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training is what practice looks like when the game is special operations warfare.
Drown-proofing had earned its celebrity within and beyond the community because its simplicity was emblematic of the fact that an operator’s best weapon is himself. In drown-proofing, there is no gear, no guns, and no camouflage. With your hands and feet tied, you not only swim underwater but also have to balance, bob, and stay afloat.
Jason sneaks in reading when he can, mainly at bedtime. Books had always been his escape growing up as an only child, alone much of the time, a car ride away from any friend. Books were the excuse not to come downstairs when his mother needed him, when he didn’t feel like being needed. And books were his rebellion against the fact that he felt she’d taken him away from what might have been a more exciting place and life, and perhaps she’d also taken him away from his father. What little he has known of David he has known from books: books on topics he knows his father loved, or books written by friends and colleagues of his father’s.
Having exhausted those categories, Jason started reading stories he imagined his father might like, or stories his godfathers would tell him had been meaningful to David. Sometimes his godfathers would lend him things that David had lent to them; within their little group, they had an active system of exchange and borrow. You could tell a lot about a man from his library, perhaps even more than from the story he told about himself. Libraries don’t lie in quite the same way. David’s library seemed to be, like those of most people, aspirational as much as it was honest: it held the things he wanted to have read. But it was also romantic. Arthurian legend was a particular passion.
When Jason read things he thought might be like the man to whom he owed so much, he’d underline a passage. He did know that David loved to travel, and he wanted to be a traveler, too. He knew that David did work he loved, and he hoped to find work he loved, too. And he knew David didn’t need anyone, or at least that was what his mother always said, and he longed not to need anyone either. Most of all, he longed to be far away from the familiar, far away from the kids who teased him about the fact that he had no dad.
Now he reads poetry because if your reading is in ten-to-fifteen-minute intervals, eventually anything longer starts to feel like a waste, or a chore. Poems performed in the right amount of time, and then they left him something to think about. High ROI. He picks up the same poem or collection of poems again and again and again, until they are stuck in his mind. He likes war poems. He has memorized most of Wilfred Owen. He likes Wallace Stevens, too. He likes the poem “Sunday Morning.” It is part of a collection he stole from his journalist godfather’s library, because he had seen that the book was signed and dated by David and that the date was, by coincidence, Jason’s birthday. It had been sent from overseas.
Apparently it was one of the last things anyone received from him. After April, David had stopped calling. After May, he stopped writing. In December, he was dead. David had circled lines from the poem’s first stanza:
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
Sepulchre was underlined, and a definition for it was written in the margin: “burial vault, tomb.”
He knows his mother thinks the navy was the death knell of any academic ambition. The thought wasn’t her fault. She grew up in the seventies; her parents were lapsed hippies, the kind who went to Woodstock too late, in their thirties, and didn’t take drugs. They adopted their era’s popular politics—anti-Nixon, pro-Kennedy, LBJ-agnostic—and raised their daughter for the first ten years of her life on a modified commune. They were against war, but their experience of war was an image in a newspaper. And when their p
arents died, they had no trouble absorbing the houses and cars—and ideas—that went with inheritance. Passionate without the education behind their passions to make them actionable, they sent Sara into the world a kind of rabid anti-romantic. As soon as she was old enough, she ran away, separating herself from them to the extent that she could. She wanted something normal. She wanted order. She took an internship working for the government. She surrounded herself with people who had too much education and discrete wills to practical action.
Sara’s fears about the downside of her son forgoing Cambridge and convention were mainly fears about adverse psychological effects, not safety. Fears for his safety would come later. While he trained, she was mainly afraid of his drifting onto just another kind of commune, one that would set him apart from the majority of his peers and would certainly result in what finance professors call “high opportunity cost.” What would he do after? Would Wall Street or neurosurgery residencies still be available? What were the merits of learning to parachute into the ocean and shoot rocket launchers? She worried that there was an element of play in this that was, well, play qua play. And in some very deep place that she would never admit to him, she worried that the games would be so much fun that they would not permit him to reenter the less rarefied air of real life.
That will to orbit Earth was in his DNA. Starting military training was not the sign she had hoped for. This was not an ordinary boy, interested in ordinary things. Jason felt her fears came from her love, and her ignorance. She was his mother, so he forgave her. She was all he had. He knew that she felt he was all she had, too.
*
There aren’t many poets in the mix at Coronado, and there aren’t many men who talk to their mothers as often as he does. Or maybe there are, but they don’t let on. Some have wives, or girlfriends. Some have children. Family life crowds out intellectual pleasures, to some extent. Yet if Jason is sneaking sonnets, no one knows what else was being read at night, after hours. Epictetus? The New Republic? His experience with these guys so far is that they’re all pretty relaxed, at least on the surface, and yet they’re all inordinately driven. Imagine surfers who hide the summas on their degrees.
Leadership is a word used religiously here; and it is about success in action but also about a will to learn. There is a small shelf of books for borrowing at the base. The titles include classics like Profiles in Courage and The Best and the Brightest. Histories, mainly political or military-based, are stacked up alongside and on top of single volumes left behind by former classes: Clancy, Sledge, Couch, Le Carré, Sun Tzu. Some are signed and dated on the inside; others have annotations that mirror the only-just-post-adolescent enthusiasms of their readers, like “not fucking possible” and “beast.” When he describes the books one night to his mother, she says, “It sounds like you need a librarian.” Two days later a large box of books arrives with a note from her: “For that shelf.” Suddenly the aspiring sailors had Shakespeare. The plays went largely untouched, even Titus, but they provided room for broad mockery of the recipient.
BUD/S was about cultivating trust and about learning to attend to detail. The mission of the instructors was not to break their students but to identify and support the best among them. The program had three parts: First Phase, also known as “Two Weeks and a Long Day,” was two weeks of rigorous conditioning plus ocean and boat training, followed by Hell Week, where sleep deprivation and disorientation were added to the mix. It is a mystery to physicians and military historians why some succeed and others do not, but often the first boy will drop out within days, and Hell Week can cut what remains of any given class in half. As always, everything is about the team: trust in the team, development of the team, not tipping the delicate ecology of the team. “Being an individual is not the same thing as being a leader,” one of their instructors said. He spat out the word “in-di-vi-joo-el” as if it were an expletive.
*
Jason soon starts thinking he might choose to spend the rest of his life with most of the men he has met here so far over most of the men he has met at home or in school the last twenty-one years. The men who had moved in and out of Sara’s life, who wrote articles about ideas and who positioned and repositioned themselves for increasingly powerful civilian jobs, seemed less intimidating to him now. Was he growing up? Or was he changing. The anger he held against so many of those men was not complicated: he was protecting her. Even after thirteen years, he believed that his father would return. He would return, and they would be a family. And while she would never say as much, he felt that Sara believed this, too, as she carefully deflected each suitor’s increasingly serious invitations (dinner, a trip, marriage) by stating that she wasn’t over David, and that David was Jason’s father. After years of that, they finally left her alone, Penelope unraveling her looms. As far as her son knew, she had not had one real romance in almost ten years, but the admirers remained, lurking around the house like stray cats. She lived a very spare life, and his leaving home had been very difficult but he knew it was time, and he knew leaving would help strengthen her, too.
Training hard with a group brings out emotion. Jason has always prided himself on not showing too much, but cool becomes elusive when you’re tired, cold, and wet. He doesn’t love running, although he’s not bad at it. Sometimes the instructors drive alongside the guys during nighttime runs. If you walk to the beach you can see them, lit by the car’s lights. One night the jeep rolls up and when the window rolls down, Jason can hear someone inside reciting the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. “We happy few,” etc. It’s a message: You have support, and you will get through this.
He is not yet sure whom he can trust, although slowly the personalities of his classmates emerge. They are all fiercely independent. They have all been overachievers. Many come from families who understand and value the sacrifices that go along with this training; they understand and value it as necessary—or at least, not abnormal. Most of the men arrive in Coronado quite confident that they will succeed, especially those who are back for the second or third time. Each class is never entirely new; a small percentage is always made up of guys who were “rolled back” from previous classes due to injury. One night Jason asks one of those guys, back for his third—and final—try, “How do you do it all over again?”
And the guy thinks about it and says, “Amnesia?” And then, after a long pause, “I just know it’s what I want.”
“Can you still make it if you’re not sure what you want?”
“Well, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that question.”
Expectations management is only second to pain management in the process of making it through each day. And then, a distant third, comes anger management. Pain management allows you to move through the moment; expectations management allows you to move through the day; and anger management allows you to move through being denied not only any privacy but any acknowledgment of being you. When an instructor tips your drawers upside down during room inspection, then fails you for having clothes spilled on the floor? That is a test of the extent to which you can control your anger, and your desire for praise. A rigged room inspection might break a boy who could run the beach in three-minute miles, but it might tell a teacher something about that boy’s character that no O-course can.
The quiet nights now give him time to think through his accumulated emotions and all those years in which he’d tried not to express them. He doesn’t like to spend too much time thinking about them; it’s one reason he’s chosen a far less cerebral path than so many of his self-appointed mentors in Washington. They still casually question his choice, not to him but to Sara and to one another. He knows and he doesn’t care. Do they question it because they worry it is a waste of time, that it is not going to gain him the kind of access they have? They might question it because for many in their generation a choice to join the navy meant something explicitly different.
Jason will be making decisions that affect people’s lives at an age when the ones
who judge him most harshly were working as interns at newspapers or as junior legislative aides on the Hill. What kinds of decisions are they making now? Then again, whatever choice one makes when one is young is easy to romanticize. He knows that. There is nothing romantic about the experience he is having, but it was one thing: it was better than all the options. Of this he was certain. He tells his mother one night on the phone, “It’s pretty intense. You feel a little sick, so they push you harder. Then once they break you, you’re really bonded.”
“Now that does sound like love,” Sara said, and laughed.
*
His classmates came from all over. That year, in addition to Jason, there were two sets of twins, a BUD/S first. One set was blond, one set brunette. They were the four tallest guys in the class, just over six feet, and heavier than the others. Their boat crew is quickly christened “The Knicks” for its NBA-esque height average. Most of the guys arrived here in shape; they’d played ball, or wrestled, or captained local water polo teams. They’d raised cattle on family ranches. They’d had preternaturally physical brothers, or brothers already in the SOF community. In most cases, you might not notice them on the street. You wouldn’t pick them out of a lineup and say, That’s the one who can kill me with his bare hands. The average shape of a Naval Special Warfare operator, in this way, was its own covert operation. They looked less like Patroclus than like European soccer stars: lean, compact. They were diplomatic—at least the ones who would make it far in the game. Only in NSW do enlisted men and officers train together; there was not a lot of room for attitude when the guy who lacks your academic pedigree is the guy who leaves you begging for breath at the water’s edge, or six minutes behind him on a timed run. Yet there was never a clear-cut formula: it was not having been all-American plus tall. It was not your education plus your accent. It was not prior service in an overseas war, even one in which you had proven your valor.
Eleven Days Page 3
