“Or maybe just too young.”
“Having to hide a broken ankle teaches you something about yourself,” Sam says.
Sara has an instinct to say something along the lines of you can go you don’t have to stay, but instead she just keeps listening. And Sam says, “You sent the books.”
“It sounded like the pickings were slim.”
“Well, everybody took note of the fact that you sent them to all of us.”
“Thirty-seven plays is a lot for any one person.”
“Those books are still in the little library at the Naval Special Warfare Center.”
“I remember sending them. I remember—”
“Shakespeare.”
“Yeah, Shakespeare. And a few other things.” She notices how careful he is with the food. He never asked if he could use the kitchen; he just saw that no one was cooking, and he moved to fill the void.
“He was into thinking and talking about thinking. And helping.”
“Helping?”
“Yeah. He always helped the other guys.”
“Kind of sounds like a group of guys who don’t need that much help.”
“Not true,” Sam says. “Guys get tired. You’re pushed. One guy was really struggling. It’s due to Jason that he made it to the Teams. On the runs, he would fall behind, and Jason would drop back and run behind him. He would push him—literally push him forward so he could make it. That struck everyone.”
“He’s good at that. Helping.”
“And in the water he was like a fish.”
“He loves the water,” Sara says.
“The guys used to joke that maybe he had a third lung. And he always said these crazy things.”
“Like what crazy,” she says.
“Like ‘follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost realm of human thought.’ ”
“Tennyson,” she says.
At that moment, one of the local cops patroling the property pops his head in the small screen door off the kitchen.
“Hey Sara, we have a little crowd out here building up again,” he says. “I think the local reporters saw that government car and wanted to know—”
“We don’t have any news,” says Sara.
“I’ll just keep ’em out at the end of the driveway, okay? They’re noisy, but don’t worry about it. Guys from the papers, mainly. They shake their pencils, but they don’t like it when they think I might use this,” he says, tapping his handgun, smiling.
“Thank you,” she says. She had seen him remove it and load it the night he had arrived at the house.
And then Sara says, “Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He wrote a poem called ‘Ulysses,’ and that’s a line from that poem. Jason’s father used to quote it, too. ‘Little remains: but every hour is saved from that eternal silence, something more, a bringer of new things; and vile it were for some three suns to store and hoard myself, and this gray spirit yearning in desire—to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.’ The poem is about a warrior in repose. It’s about Ulysses, back from the Odyssey. He misses the war.”
“What does he miss?”
“Have you read the Iliad?”
“I have.”
“That’s what he misses,” she says. And then, “Jason worshipped his father. And his father loved poems.”
“We eventually impressed upon him the importance of training his poetry skills on more popular artists.”
“Like?”
“Like Eminem.” Sam is laughing.
“Eminem?”
“Yeah. It got him into trouble once. We were in the Kill House. Will you eat pesto?”
“Sure,” she says. “What’s a Kill House?”
“He believed the world could be a better place. He was honest.”
“I might call that idealism, not honesty.”
“Sorry, two separate thoughts: he believed the world could be a better place. And I believed he was honest. All the guys did. And that meant something.”
They sit for a while. Sara doesn’t know what to do with herself. She looks out the window, past Sam’s shoulders. She can see movement at the end of the drive through the trees and the rain, like a poorly lit silent film. Signifying nothing, she thinks.
“The Kill House is where we learn how to clear rooms. Close quarters combat.”
“I remember close quarters combat.”
“Jason used to call it ‘The Royal U.S. Navy Performs Swan Lake.’ ”
Hearing her son talked about in this way only reminded her how little she had seen of him through these past nine years, and how desperately she misses him. Sam keeps talking. “He was—”
“Can you say ‘is’ please?”
“Yes, of course. I’m just thinking back to Coronado. It feels like a long time ago. Like we were just kids. It all felt so serious. I remember saying to my mother, ‘I’m not going to USC. I’m joining the navy.’ ”
“After nine eleven.”
“Yeah.”
“What did she say?”
“She thought for sixteen years I’d be a surf rat.”
“So she was happy.”
“She was happy. She saw it as a calling. She’s—she’s very religious. She felt that this was my calling.”
“Did you see it that way?”
“Well, they beat that out of you pretty quickly. Pretense. Any idea that—”
“Nobility?”
“Nobility,” Sam says, laughing. “Nobility doesn’t place a gun in the fight.” And then he says, “On my last leave, I went to the Imperial War Museum in London. I’d never been there.”
“I should go,” says Sara.
“They have a diorama in one room of the World War I trenches. You could see, you know, the ‘front line,’ and you could see all these tiny little toy soldiers stuck in the trenches. And then you could walk through a real life-size trench they had constructed. When you’re in the trench, they have noises playing, like shots ringing out, people screaming. And they’ve got little scenes recreated, guys in anterooms within the trenches doing things like smoking a pipe or writing a letter or sleeping—like little luxury suites set up within the eye of the storm of war. Within that eye, people are still living and talking and laughing. And I remember thinking, well, of course they can do this in trench warfare because it’s all so … orderly. I couldn’t get over how neat—and how brutal—that trench system was. And then I got back to the base, and Jason was there with, of course, his total history of trench warfare on call, at his fingertips—‘abridged for you, dude,’ he would have said. He said the difference between waiting in the trenches and doing what we do is the difference between begging for a bullet and learning how to precision fire. Defense versus offense. He said the statistics for quick death were in our favor, even if the enemy was less prone to play by the rules.”
“Quick death?”
“I’m not sure whether he stayed up all night online, reading about all these things, or whether he learned about them before he arrived, but he knew so much about so much. We should have called him Encyclopedia.”
“What did you call him?” asks Sara.
“We called him Priest.”
“Priest?”
Sara smiles at the irony: here was a boy with a lapsed Jewish father and an agnostic mother who grows up to be called Priest. David really would have loved that.
“I think I’ll go rest for a while,” she says.
“Do you mind the music?”
“I love it. Please don’t ever turn it off.” And she wanted to add, And please don’t leave me, but she didn’t.
*
Upstairs, she goes to the window in the little office space between her room and Jason’s. Looking out, she can see the crowd gathered at the end of the driveway. I should sell lemonade, she thinks darkly. Who are all these people. But she knows many of them are good people, people who only want to help her, or who want to help her to tell the story of her son. There are two news trucks now
, and she can see the blond jailbait on-air reporter circling one of them, adjusting her collar and licking her lips. Perhaps she’s the award-winning war correspondent, just back from Iraq, Sara thinks. She decides that the girl has had a life far more interesting than her own: she has traveled, she has seen the world, she has met with heads of state and warlords, and she has her own show on in prime time, viewed by millions. She’s an “unqualified” success, and she will wait awhile before having children because she can. She can have it all. Sara wonders, briefly, what that woman would think of a woman like her, but she already knows the answer.
She lies down on her bed, then gets up and walks back into the office. In her desk, she’s kept file folders of e-mails from Jason, printed out and carefully arranged according to date. Sometimes when she printed them, she would think, They’ll want these for his biography, and other times she’d simply think it would be fun to share them with him when he gets home. She’d never sat down to reread them but she’s sure when she does, she’ll see a stark chart of his evolution in thinking about himself, and about the military, and about the war. She fusses through a few early sets, and then pulls out one marked “SQT,” her own title for a series of mails that arrived throughout that first tranche of training after Jason left Coronado. Close quarters combat was one thing he would study during that time, but it was also something he would return to even after assignment to a Team. It would become, she imagined, what he would spend much of his time doing abroad—although once he went abroad (abroad is not the word he would have used), the letters became less and less about what he was doing and more and more about what he remembered of being at home. Or, about history. Once he was in the Teams, he never wrote anything too close to his own situation, and she knew that was for a reason.
The first letter starts out like they all do: “Dear M.”
Dear M.,
How are you? Is the house quiet now? Do you prefer it like that? I know the answer.
So Otay Lakes: that’s where we are. Jump school used to be at Ft. Benning, where Buddy Glass recovered from pleurisy. Did you remember that? Buddy was in the army; I bet he got a better bed.
We are here for a kind of recovery, too; recovery from real training. (That’s a joke.) We’re here for Tactical Air Operations. It’s a bit of the best bits and the worst bits about any holiday: a little restful; a little dull; lots of long stretches of waiting broken by moments of discovery.
The moments of discovery come in the air, mostly. Jumping out of a plane is not nearly as terrifying an experience as I imagined it might be. I’d never really thought about heights until that wide-open aircraft door, nothing to halt my fall but sky. We never lived anywhere higher than the second floor, did we. I realized, looking down—rather than up—at the clouds, that I had spent almost my entire life at low altitude.
Once you jump, you really can imagine, for the briefest moment, that that isolation, calm, and sense of freedom can last forever. At the very start of the jump, things move fast. Then once your chute opens they move very slowly. It’s peaceful. It’s exhilarating. Then before you know it, it’s landing time, and there’s the ground rushing up beneath your feet. Fast. And you know you’ll be all right because you have to be all right. And then you are grateful when you are. Very grateful.
Air’s a major source of transportation for us. You once told me that when you look at words on a page, you only notice when they’re not working. So with chutes. Of course, certain death being the outcome of malfunction in this case is a factor that focuses a guy’s mind.
The chutes are beautiful. Sometimes you might open your chute, look around, and see tens of other chutes opening, too, one by one. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. I think of them like ice cream cones—colored ice cream cones in the air. Here is a picture.
What else: yes, I am eating enough. And yes, they let us sleep more now. And no, I am not getting into any trouble. Yet.
Love,
Jason
She had printed out the picture attached to the e-mail: the ice cream cones. He must have taken it from the ground, after landing, and it was truly beautiful. It was strange that something where a group of young men were risking their lives could look so elegant, so effortlessly coordinated. She thinks about the luxury suites in the trenches. She pulls out the next letter.
Dear M.,
Remember that little baby turtle? I kept him in that dish. And then he escaped. He had a lot of courage to climb out of that dish, didn’t he—and out of our house. They call it “turtle-backing” when we swim on the surface. Turtle backing helps conserve energy, which perhaps explains our little prisoner’s strength for his solo expedition back to the pond.
Conservation is key. In the water, with your weapons—you’re always conserving something. I know you like stories of swimming or soaring through the air, but the learning of what we do on the ground has felt less a curve than a hockey stick: quick panic and first failure followed by a steady upward trajectory. Some things require less physical endurance but more mental precision. Most of the guys here are not entirely new to guns.
Whatever happened to the guns in the basement in Virginia? If there is anything left in our basement now, I promise I can identify each piece. I could also put a price tag on each piece. Who knows: you might have a very valuable collection. More valuable than melons.
I can now use the following: an M4 rifle, and Mk46 machine gun; an Mk48 machine gun; an AK-47; a hand grenade; a Carl Gustaf rocket; a LAAW; a Claymore mine. (“LAAW” stands for Light Anti Armor Weapon, by the way.) Before this the only weapon I had any skill with was my electric toothbrush.
I’ve been thinking about Dad a lot. I wish I had had the chance to talk with him again. There are so many questions I was never able to ask.
I know he had his reasons for leaving. I can remember certain things he said. I remember him saying: where your skills intersect with your interests is where you should try and spend the majority of your time, or the man who finds the work he loves, the gods have smiled on him, or carpe diem. I think my skills intersect with my interests in the navy. I know you probably don’t want to hear that. It’s true. You can tell my godfather. Please tell him I bet they don’t teach land warfare to legislative aides.
How is that garden? I know the neighbors invite you over every night, and I know you never go. You should go.
Love,
Jason
She had called his godfather after receiving that letter and gone insane about the weapons.
He was laughing on the other end of the line.
“He’s enjoying himself.”
“He’s not meant to be enjoying himself!”
“Sara.”
“It sounds dangerous.”
“Sara.”
“It sounds unsupervised.”
“Sara.”
“Rocket?”
“What did you expect, Sara? That he’d be baking apple pies? War requires weapons, and someone has to shoot them. This is what war means. Remember: Naval Special War fare?”
“I thought—”
“But don’t worry: the training’s all a bunch of simulations. He’s at no risk.”
“None?”
“None. You think they want to soak up that liability? They just shake them up and scare them.”
“No risk?”
“Risk comes later.”
“That’s comforting.”
“I was the one who tried to talk him out of it.” And there was a long pause on the line, and she could hear him wishing he hadn’t just said that.
“I don’t think I can handle this,” she said, eventually.
“It gets easier,” he said gently. “And statistically, I can assure you that he will be fine.”
“Statistically. And emotionally?”
“That’s why I’m waiting to have children until I no longer feel anything.”
She had gone and methodically looked up each one of those guns online. The only one she’d ever heard of before was the AK-47, and
that was from some movie about the Soviets in Afghanistan. Google gave up the facts: Kalashnikov was twenty-seven when he designed the AK; he attributed its simplicity to ideas he’d learned reading Russian novels. And he said, she read, “to make something simple is a thousand times harder than to make something complicated.” When she looked at the pictures of it, she imagined her son holding one. She had to let go of that thought. It was too foreign.
Most of the letters were not about guns or weapons. Only when she prodded him with questions would he answer with an ordnance lesson. She looks through the letters for the one about close quarters training. She wants to see whether there was ever any reference to a Kill House. She is sure there wasn’t; she would have remembered that phrase. But her interest is piqued from Sam’s mentioning it. She wants to imagine what it looks like, and she wants to believe that the skills her son learned training in that house are the same skills keeping him alive now, wherever he is. She wants to learn that the nature of his training was so specific—and so rigorous—that it will see him through this, whatever “this” is. He loved history.
Dear M.,
I had an e-mail from my history professor at the Naval Academy. He sends me articles, things he thinks I might not otherwise see. He always believed in me. He always listened. He understood why I wanted to do this; he didn’t think it was weak or wrong or easy. Or romantic. He never pushed us into it, but he understood. He was a pilot; did you know that? He was the first one who told us that the way people would fight now would be very different from the way they fought in past wars.
He was right. What we are learning now is that so much of warfare is fought at close quarters, and the essence of fighting in close quarters is restraint. Restraint, intelligence, conservation. This emphasis changes the calculus of war. Think about 1916: in forty-eight hours, something like four thousand men were wounded. Four thousand men. And by the end of the Battle of the Somme there were another half million casualties. One of the guys here showed me a book where the authors excerpt memoirs written by the medics who helped the wounded in the Great War. The medics all said the same thing: the young men they encountered on their rounds possessed a remarkable selflessness. And many of them, mortally wounded, would say to the medics, “Hey, help the next guy.” Or they would say, “My friend over there needs water.” Most of those soldiers were younger than I am now.
Eleven Days Page 6
