They were all ambitious, but they learned how to measure and play it, like gifted political rookies. The guy who liked to brag about his Oxford boxing, and his altruistic aspirations, didn’t make it until midnight the first day of Hell Week. When asked about it later, he’d said simply that he could not stand the noise. He said that the noise of the gunshots during “breakout,” the traditional start of the week, had driven him momentarily mad and that he knew then that he was not cut out for that kind of a fight. If pressed, he would go on to say that in fact the very nature of fighting was “inhuman” and in some way “banal”; that the trainee treatment in Coronado was too close to “torture” for his taste. He would tell a newspaper that the NSW culture lacked the nobility of a kind of education he’d thought “would make him a true warrior.” He was ridiculous, but sophisticated in the story he told himself, the same story he would tell others for the rest of his life when they asked, at dinner parties, about the time he almost joined the Teams.
This culture was not about how you prepared before you came here, or where you thought the course would take you later on—or at least, it was not only about that. It was about remembering that after this hour, right now, there will be another hour, and it will be harder. After this day, right now, there will be another day. And it will be harder. And after this night’s sleep, you will wake up and start all over again. And it is your choice, so feel grateful that you have been given the privilege to participate. While Jason had no real idea what he had signed up for, in some small place inside himself he felt sure he could do it. But when he arrived and looked around at the other guys, he realized: They all think they can do it, too. All of them arrived carrying pasts that had driven them to this particular point. Jason’s past was this: having grown up without a man in his life, he was now determined to pass the world’s hardest test for becoming one.
*
When a boy elects to quit, there is also a process. He can approach an instructor and ask to DOR, or Drop On Request. The instructor will often make some attempt to help him change his mind. If he is certain, he knows where to go: there is a bell hanging at the edge of the Grinder, the main courtyard by their rooms, and this is the bell used to “ring out” your DOR. You ring the bell three times, and remove your helmet. The helmets are placed in a line so that all the others can see who has dropped and when. Most say, after ringing the bell, that they regret it. What waits on the other side of that bell—warmth, rest, home—is powerful, especially when you’re processing those thoughts under duress. There would be times in training history when ringing the bell would not be necessary to drop out, considered too dramatic, but in the end a new master chief always brought the bell back, feeling that the public nature of the act made it less likely, and so lowered their attrition rates.
One day one of the twins decides to DOR. At six foot five, he is standing on the beach and begging the instructor to let him quit. He had been at the Academy with Jason. They’d played football together. Of all the people Jason knew, this was the one Jason thought would be chairman of the Joint Chiefs one day.
“Don’t do this,” Jason says. The instructor is shouting something else, something slightly less generous.
The boy’s brother is there and he says the same thing Jason is saying: “Don’t do it.”
And then the older (by three minutes) twin grabs his younger brother, picks him up, and holds him hard until he stops shaking.
“I’m all right,” the younger twin says, finally. The rest of the class is half a mile down the beach, and they’ll have to catch up. The older twin says to Jason, “Don’t you wish you had that on video?” And Jason thinks, Not as much as I wish I had a brother.
When Jason’s class arrived at Annapolis, in the summer of 2002, they were all filled with purpose. The first class coming in after 9/11, most of them knew they would elect to serve, and most thought they’d perhaps spend the better part of their lives in the military. No writer then would compare them to the Greatest Generation, but the parallels were there: they would enter this war by choice, and they would not question it, and they would feel proud of their decision. They would graduate into a time when the global map was shifting, and their country needed them.
In his last week before graduation, Jason’s mother came to take him and a few friends out for dinner. She’d been in Washington for a meeting, and even as she would be returning in a week, she made the drive. She’d picked up his godfather in Georgetown, the one who’d sent the box of spoons all those years ago—he was now chief of staff for the Senate Judiciary Committee. Over dessert, Jason mentioned that he had been given the chance to try for the Teams. His godfather put down his scotch.
“You have got to be kidding me. Why would you want to do that? You’re talented, Jase. I’ll hire you. Or I will find someone to hire you. Do you want to go to Congress? What about the State Department? Do you know how long that training is? It’s like a medical residency. And you can fail! You can fail anytime. It’s like a medical residency with no insurance of becoming a doctor! It’s not for kids like you. If you come work in my office now, before you know it you’ll be participating in drafting policy.”
His godfather had worked in politics for as long as Jason could remember. He clearly thought “drafting policy” was a sexy sell. He’d started out as a Senate page, progressed swiftly to speech-writer, then evolved into a gifted statistician, an accidental policy wonk who rapidly won favors by keeping his head down and his ideas free and apolitical, posing as a scholar among the power- and pleasure-seekers. Everyone thought he would win a Nobel Prize one day—“not a Peace Prize,” he would say, bashful, when pushed on the tease. He was only a few years older than Sara and someone once told Jason that he was also, possibly, a “lost” son of David’s, his mother having been notoriously promiscuous, and David’s type. He rarely talked about where he was from, his family, his roots. He talked about the pressing questions of the present, like housing starts and interest rates; and he talked about his dreams for the country’s future. He was an idealist. He had been to Princeton, Harvard, and Yale (English, business, law: the late twentieth century’s most glittery trifecta). Yet he had the heart—and soul, and superficial cynicism—of a salesman. He knew how to talk in a way that was neither grand nor rhetorical; he knew how to argue and how to charm. He felt proper education was incompatible with military service—or rather, that the former allowed you to bypass the latter and still retain a sense of mission and meaning. He felt that if you had a brain and could train it, you could do anything—an anything underscored by an unspoken, quietly implied non-life-threatening.
Jason knew all this. It had come up before. This was Jason’s favorite godfather, a man in his eyes almost infinitely infallible, and a man always watchful of ones he loved. Yet Jason felt sorry for him. He felt that for all his degrees, he had no model for an exception to his elegant rules. His friends had never really lived through a war and had certainly never served in one. His friends believed in diplomacy and tradecraft. They believed in ideas. They believed in progress measured in cups of tea sipped by men who’d never held guns. They were the soon-to-be smartest guys in the room in the smartest room in the world. And they believed that the smartest guys in the room were always right.
Sara cut off an argument by clinking her glass and making a toast. She ended by saying she’d never known what love of country meant until she’d observed her son, and seen him develop his own instinct for it. She described the time four years earlier when she’d given him extra money to buy something special at the market, something to boost his spirits. “I recommended champagne,” she said, “or steaks. But my son came home with a flag.” She toasted his godfather, too (“ ‘age cannot wither you, nor custom stale your infinite variety’ ”—words that reminded everyone of their ongoing casual, platonic flirtation), and recalled the spoons of her son’s youth.
The very next day Sara again sat her son down and pressed him on whether he was sure about his choices. She asked
if he would not consider waiting a year or two, maybe taking a master’s degree or working at home, just doing something to engage him in another, less stressful environment, to pique potential other interests, to have some fun. She wanted him to understand the implications of doing something that seemed, well, so narrow. She expressed her Libran preference for options and for keeping roads open. She felt that the navy was the opposite of that, and that he had done so much “in service” already by spending those four years at the Academy. She saw things so differently. He barely said anything. And because he wanted to please her, he said he would take a day and think about it. And he did.
He didn’t really know, even then, what it meant to belong to a culture of warriors or to be affiliated with “special” operations, but he knew he wanted more of a challenge, and the chance to try for the Teams was the best challenge he could get. It was because he felt confident that the military was one place he could excel. He felt sure that it might be the place where he might make an impact and that was something he desperately wanted to do. His skills were physical. But still, he thought about it for a day.
And then, just like that, his mind was made up. And though his mother always said that he had never been indecisive—he had been. But he would never let it show. That was another reason the military’s culture suited him: its ethos of invisibility matched his. Somewhere he had developed a deep belief that a man was someone who acted, not someone who spoke, and that honor was about discretion and progress. Honor wasn’t about discussing a political decision you hadn’t been a part of over vodka tonics. He was not yet nineteen when he began to form these ideas. They were aspirational, and they were naïve. But as he held on to them they deepened, and soon the ideas began to form him.
CORONADO
Jason looks at the long stretch of swimming pool and thinks, You and I are going to be close friends. It was ten times the size of even the biggest pools he’d seen as a kid. It is the first morning of the first week in California.
“Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary while swimming laps,” Jason says. As soon as he says it he wishes he hadn’t, but the joke was one frequently repeated in his house, meant to underscore the artist’s dislike of exercise.
“That water’s fucking cold,” says Sam, to another boy in his class. He’d dipped a toe in.
“It’s not as cold as the ocean.”
“Admirable optimism.”
“Survival.”
It is the first week, otherwise called INDOC, for Indoctrination Course. INDOC was the crucial first step, five weeks in which, among other things, the guys get to know one another—and get to know the water: the pool, and the surf. It’s about about getting acquainted with the cold, with being wet, and with a culture of self-preservation and endurance. BUD/S is the base camp of an aspiring operator’s Everest, and it is here that they begin to learn the language, draw the boundaries, and fall even more for the lure of what could lie ahead if they are allowed to progress.
In just days, Jason loses several pounds. He is not quite sure why. He is almost certain that the opposite should have happened. Even with all this running and rolling and pushing and lifting, his muscle mass should be increasing, and so should his base weight. Still, when he looks in the mirror, he can see his ribs. He is covered in sand, but he can still see his bones poking through.
Calories: the concept of counting them is ridiculous, something for silly girls on diets, not for warriors. But calories provide key data points, and calories give you what you needed to survive. Survival means making it successfully from one evolution to the next without dropping out. The only easy day was yesterday. This is one of many mantras they will learn and then internalize. There is no second place in a gunfight is another one. That one is easy to tease about in the early days of training; it will be only about eighteen months from now when their proximity to the reality of those words will make them much more serious. “Attention to detail, men. Attention to detail is what is going to get you through this. Attention to detail and commitment to team.”
The instructors yell variations of the same seemingly simple ideas and words over and over, until they become oddly foreign, and then newly familiar as particular to this time and place. Team. Detail. Drop. Push. Hoo-yah. Master Chief Jones is the instructors’ instructor, and he is very precise in how he talked to his class. Jason thinks that in another life and another time, the master chief and his mother would have made a great match. He can see them fighting about language and politics—about everything, really. But he can also see them caring deeply about the simple things. Jones, not unlike Sara, despised pretension.
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 father
s 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.”
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