She didn’t care what people thought about her, which made her a revolutionary in small-town life—or at least that was how Jason saw her. She was well known among his friends primarily for being beautiful, cool—and young. She was careful and consistent in her denial of traditional female rituals, adamant about being the girl who would never wear makeup to the movies or profess to care about her clothes. But most other women considered Sara less a threat than a tragedy, a spouseless loner in a socially networked world. She preferred reading to shopping. She loved ideas and grew into a woman who helped edit the ideas of others.
The night before his last day back east, before she would drive him to the airport, and perhaps in some gesture toward the symbols of commencements, Sara wore a white sundress while helping him prepare. Jason knew it was her very best one. She had her hair down that day, too, tied with a white ribbon, a style she rarely chose as she knew it made her look even more like a girl, even less like a mother, perhaps. He was twenty-one and she was forty. As he had moved around his room, finalizing his packing, she must have tucked the tiny wrapped box, his graduation present, under his pillow. It was a simple gold locket, with a St. Christopher on the outside and, on the inside, a picture of the American flag he had brought home from the market that day, the one that now hung outside their house. When he found it he walked down the hall to her bedroom to thank her.
“I can’t believe how corny this is and how much I love it,” he’d said.
“I’m allowed to be corny now.” There were tears streaming down her face.
*
There were very few whose fathers had not been present at Academy graduation. And there were very few whose ideas of their fathers did not factor into their aspirations to be operators. And the father of all the other fathers is the master chief. It’s the master chief who leads the men on their drills and on the long beach runs. Master Chief Jones is tough. He’s witty. He has been in the Teams for thirty years. He tells the men stories from other wars, even as he never talks about his own service. He leads the hardest runs during the third week, the Long Day. Have you ever tried running after three nights of no sleep? It’s a bit like kickboxing in honey.
It is dark. It is three in the morning. It is the fourth night of Hell Week, so by process of deduction, it’s Wednesday. The men are very wet, cold, sandy, and tired. The Hell started on Sunday, with the “breakout.” The thinking behind the breakout is that most battles begin in chaos. Chaos can be accurately simulated. Breakout—and Hell Week, more broadly—attempt to simulate the conditions of battle. These five days and five nights take the stress of extreme physical conditioning, then tack on sleep deprivation and the element of surprise.
Breakout begins with the men being told to wait in one large room. They are told they can talk and read and eat and relax, but they’ve heard the stories. They know exactly how breakout works: by creating chaos—and fear. When the first shots are fired, some are relieved; they’ve been ready. Others are broken. Suddenly they are in the closest thing they’ve been in to a live fight. And even knowing it’s a simulation, and that adequate safety precautions are taken, some of the bravest-seeming among them will ring out within the first hour. The shock is too much. By Wednesday, those who remain think they will make it one more night. They put one foot in front of the other and rely on muscle memory. They are ready for relief. The Master Chief’s songs are a form of relief.
They all know them by heart by now, because he has been singing them since day one—on the beach, on the Grinder, while checking their rooms. He likes to sing. And he likes you to sing, too. Sing softly, and you will drop and push them out. Sing too softly, and you gain the privilege of running once more into the water, and it’s like ice. Then you can drop for a hundred more push-ups, in the process of which sand gets in your nose, your mouth, your eyes. The illusion that sand might lodge in your lungs and slow you on runs—or choke you—is powerful. Once you have that image in your mind it is tough to erase.
As the master chief sings, he will periodically slow his pace, or even run in place, allowing him to observe his men. A month ago, this class started with one hundred sixty trainees. Now they were thirty. He can see how red their eyes are. He can sense how close each one of them might be to the edge of breaking. They have been running in and out of the water on this one night for close to four hours. Running is like breathing here. Run to the O course. Run to eat. Run to rest, briefly. Run to gain the privilege of another, longer run.
Most of them are unaware of what hour or even what day it is. Still, somewhere underneath the exhaustion, the pain of spliced tendons and stress fractures and stomach muscles stretched to unholy lengths, there is a sense of release. This is what the singing does. The song goes like this:
I’ve seen the bright lights of Memphis,
And the Commodore Hotel,
And underneath a streetlamp,
I met a Southern Belle.
Well, she took me to the river
Where she cast her spell
And in that Southern moonlight
She sang her song so well
“If you’ll be my Dixie Chicken
I’ll be your Tennessee lamb
And we can walk together
Down in Dixieland.
Down in Dixieland.”
After Hell Week, the class size shrinks again, to nineteen. After Hell Week, they will have nine weeks of dive training and three weeks of hydrographic reconnaissance work. After that, their class size will stand at seventeen, one guy having injured himself during drown-proofing, another having failed pool competency, the one test Jason never tells his mother about, although she could have found out about it online if she’d wanted. Then the men leave the pool and learn land warfare. In this third and final chapter things become increasingly what might be called fun. The ones who remain will most likely complete the course. The tests they have endured up until this point have been largely psychological. The way their bodies have changed attested to the physical rigors they’ve endured.
Men about to end BUD/S are like steeplechase jockeys days before a race, only imagine jockeys who have not yet seen a horse, who are unable to distinguish a foal from a thoroughbred. They will have time to train, to learn more about what it means to fight and about which tools they will use. They will learn more about themselves, too. Self-knowledge makes the real warrior, and self-knowledge coupled with tactical skill allows a guy to say he is an operator. Throughout those early weeks, almost everyone was thinking the same thing: Why did I make it, and why did he fail? They will have years ahead to talk about it, but over time it will become clear.
On the last night, the few guys left gather at the master chief’s house; he’s invited them for beers, but most take Cokes. Master Chief sits at his piano. It is a beautiful instrument, an ebony Steinway grand, a gift from someone at the Department of Defense, or so the story goes. He can really play. The rumor went around that he’d turned down Juilliard for the chance to make the Teams. Another rumor went that he’d been court-martialed after inviting Bobby Seale to speak on counterinsurgency at Quantico, in the 1970s. He played music familiar to most of them, Brahms, Beethoven, and Mozart; he knew the canon. But he knew Bob Dylan, too. He took requests when the class had had a good day. When Jason landed his boat crew on the rocks in a nasty rainstorm, he requested “Queen Jane, Approximately,” a song Sara loved.
This night, their last night, he plays the song that has become theirs, a song that would serve for the rest of their lives as a reminder of what they’d been through these last six months. Phrases from it would stand as code in later years when they would meet classmates in unexpected places, allowing them to recognize one another. Only this night Jones sang a slightly different version, with lyrics they hadn’t heard before. The guys sing along with the chorus once they get a handle on the words. It goes like this:
I’ve seen the bright lights of Beijing
And the Chairman Mao Hotel
And underneath the street
lamp
I met an Asian Belle
Well she took me to the River
Where she cast her spell
And in that Chinese moonlight
She sang her song so well:
“If you’ll free my Dixie Mission
I’ll free your Tokyo lamb;
And we can sleep together
Down in old Ya’nan”
Dixie Mission, more formally called the United States Army Observation Group, was an Allied outpost in China during World War II. Jones tells them the story: how the “missionaries” were actually CBI Theatre experts sent there to observe and report. They were the first post-OSS team to go into China, and the rumor was that their name came from the presence of so many southerners in their midst. Critics keen to flame the fires of Communist fears demonized the Mission’s men; they claimed the real mission was Red sympathy. But when the young envoys’ reputations were shredded and they were individually stripped of roles at State and elsewhere, they took their case all the way to the Supreme Court to prove their innocence and won.
It was a story of uninformed fears, panic, and blame, of how intelligence collection and things in the category of “classified” are inherently controversial. It was also, Jones tells them, a story of wartime intelligence operations in their infancy. That story continued, in some ways, with Vietnam’s Studies and Observations Group, or SOG, America’s first joint unconventional force. The first frogmen were there then, and they were meant to be warriors, but they were also trained as witnesses and as interpreters—not of speech but of actions. They were trained to see things, remember them, and report them back home. Time on target (“at the objective,” as they say) was preceded by time spent studying the opposition. Everything they did then entered the collective memory banks of mission histories, histories later locked up in places with very few keys.
*
Jason’s class has begun the work, but they are not yet warriors. They have proven their ability to do certain things and to withstand others, but they have not yet experienced the hardest parts of the climb. They have not yet been forced to choose whether to take a life. They have not yet been confronted with the delicate task of lying to a loved one in order to protect her. They have not yet held a colleague’s broken body in their arms. “The Strand is only a beginning,” Jones said that last night, referring to San Diego’s Silver Strand State Beach. This was their beach. Its name came from the silver-shelled oysters that washed up on the sand in scores. “The world is yours,” Jones said, flipping one, like a coin, in the air.
CLOSE QUARTERS COMBAT
CHADDS FORD, PENNSYLVANIA,
MAY 11, 2011
Sara stands and waits. She considers the fact that she’s never been dressed properly for any occasion in her life, and here she is, about to receive news of her son, and she’s soaking wet from sweat and rain, her hair in the wrecked ponytail that has become her signature.
When Jason was born, he came one month early. She had arrived at the hospital dressed not unlike how she’s dressed now, a variation on Standard Issue Third Trimester. Learning that “it was time,” she’d meekly left a message on David’s office line and only half-expected him to show. But he was there, at the critical moment, and characteristically wry about the sex appeal of scrubs. It was a cesarean. (“A little Caesar!” David bellowed in the OR, much to the distress of the doctor, who didn’t approve of the grave situation being mocked.) It was a cesarean, and then her baby boy was on her chest, breathing like a tiny puppy, waiting to be fed.
As she walks closer to the house the men just stand waiting, perhaps out of a sense of respect or perhaps in shock at the manner of her appearance. She can hear music coming from the house—Sam’s music. Almost immediately after arriving to stay, he’d put his CDs in her kitchen, and while she never knows what album is about to be played, she was always pleasantly surprised. She likes reggae, and he knows it very well. He grew up in California, not far from Coronado; he loves to surf and spends hours talking about waves and wave patterns, about wind and the thermodynamics of kite boarding. She doesn’t really care deeply about any of these things, but having him, and his music and his stories, helps. She remembers it is time to sleep, because he sleeps. She is cued to eat by his careful preparation of meals. And though there is no need for cooking given the amount of food brought as gifts, he can really cook. He cooks guy food: steaks and potatoes and fish pies. And she welcomes it, because these are foods she rarely eats on her own, foods that are not served in fancy D.C. restaurants, so they remind her of nothing.
One of the men puts his hand out and says, “Ma’am, good afternoon. I’m Captain Smith, and this is Master Chief Jones.” She can feel her eyes flooding with tears, so she bites her lip.
“Ma’am,” the chief says, and he reaches out a hand and holds—gently—on to her forearm, an awkward but powerful gesture. “We still don’t know where your son is.” Sara can’t help the tears on her face. She doesn’t care anymore. She is simply trying to keep breathing.
“We are here to see how you are,” says the captain. She guesses he’s about her age. Younger, perhaps. He has a lot of ribbons on his chest.
“I’m all right,” Sara says.
“We want to help,” says Smith.
“Thank you,” she says.
Jones does not say anything. He looks like he could eat a small child for breakfast. She remembers his name. And possibly having met him. Was it Coronado? He’s older, definitely older. He has the start of a beard and very cold eyes. Or maybe he’s just tired. She is quite sure her eyes might be assessed as cold at this time.
“Please come in,” she says. “And please excuse me a moment.”
The men move into the kitchen. She can hear them talking with Sam. She walks back through the foyer to the stairs of the house—old, broken pre-Colonial wood steps she has promised herself to repair since moving there, but whose charm over time became so much a part of the house that she has left them. She looks at the envelope on the landing table, the letter Sam handed her the night he arrived, after convincing her to let him stay over. The letter was formally addressed to her in her full name. But inside the outer envelope, she knew, having opened it last night, is another envelope, and on this one is written one word in her son’s handwriting: “Mommy.” She was not ready for that. So she placed the letter on the small desk on the landing, right outside her bedroom, next to the phone forever blinking with too many messages.
She goes to the shower and undresses. She stands for a moment wondering what the rule is now, whether these men will expect a meal. Or worse: expect her to sit with them and talk. Who are they anyway? Do they really know her son? She showers, and after she showers, she puts on a pretty dress, something she knows that her son would like, something he would be proud to see her wear when doing the right thing for these men who are, in any event, only here to do something kind for her, something that is right, while being sad and uncomfortable. She finds them in the kitchen, stooped awkwardly on her little lacquer stools; they are laughing when she enters—so they stop.
“Please,” she says. “I love having people in the house, and I want you to feel at home. I know that Jason is fine, and I know it is only a matter of time before he is here again, standing in this kitchen and doing exactly what you are doing. Please, will you stay for supper?”
But they demur, and after several glasses each of iced tea, they are on their way. She walks them to the car, and Jones makes an awkward motion to give her a hug. He takes off his sunglasses, and she can see he is emotional; maybe this is why he said so little at first. “Your boy is extraordinary,” he says.
“Yes, I know that.”
“Excuse me for saying this, but I simply didn’t expect you to be so young. You look—you look about twenty-five years old.”
“I’m older than that,” she says, and can’t help a smile. Seeing someone so powerful disarmed charms her.
“We will find him,” the captain says. “We will find him.”
“I know,” she says. “I have a birthday cake for him.”
The men drive away. Now here she is in the house at her least favorite part of the day, with an afternoon of hours to fill and that letter on the landing. She doesn’t want to read and she doesn’t want to sleep and she doesn’t want to talk to anyone who is going to say anything sentimental or maudlin. So she goes and finds Sam. He is in the kitchen, cooking. She gets a glass of water and lingers, waiting for him to say something, but he doesn’t, so she starts.
“What is he like?” she asks.
“What is who like?” he says.
“My son. What is he like? What is he like to work with?”
And she sits down at the little “eating square,” as Jason had called it, the one someone who clearly didn’t know her, or her taste, had given her—with the matching stools. And she listens.
“To work with? He’s an artist.”
“Artist?”
“He’s talented. Quiet, talented. He taught me a lot.”
“Taught?”
“He taught me about how to dial it down.”
“Dial what down.”
“Temperament. Emotion. Stress. One of my first memories of him is standing by the side of the pool, in California, that first week. He was referencing some obscure book.”
“Do you remember what it was?”
“I don’t. But what was cool was that he did it in a way that was not about proving anything; he wasn’t arrogant.”
“No, but he used to love to read,” she says.
“He was quiet.”
“He’s shy,” Sara says.
“Shy?”
“Reserved. The book talk: that’s a default setting. He gets that from—”
“Default setting?”
“Yeah. Our default settings are rarely our best selves.”
“I think my default setting then was fear.”
“The training was tough.”
“Yes. Everyone was terrified. Even the guys too proud—or possibly, too stupid—to show it.”
Eleven Days Page 5
