There was an acceptance of suffering as necessary. People didn’t know anything else. Technology didn’t promise a “surgical” solution. Planes didn’t go down without pilots in them.
“Teamwork” is the word I hear again and again here. We’re not heading into the Somme, and we know it. But that’s one thing that binds past wars to present ones: everything is about the Team. The aim of fighting now is to restrict casualties. We are being taught how to enter rooms in foreign places, and the most important thing is making sure that anyone in those rooms who is not armed is not hurt.
I’m trying to say something about the difference between a battlefield and a room. And I’m trying to say that a lot has changed, but some things stay the same.
Love,
Jase
“Think about 1916”: that was very David. Ever so gently professorial. Who said things like that. He wants her to feel like she’s there. He wants her to know he’s learning something. And he never complains. She tries not to complain, but she does feel alone, even with Sam in the house. She thinks about this while sifting through the other letters, and then she sees it, right there on the page, and she realizes that she had either completely forgotten about it or—is it possible—printed out this letter without ever having reading it.
Dear M.,
Not much news. More close quarters work. In this phase of the training we use a real house—it’s meant to mimic a real house, but it’s been built for us to train for real-life situations. We use Sims—the Simunitions. The pistols and rifles we use have been re-chambered and re-barreled: they fire, basically, paint pellets.
The exercises make me think about the paintball games at home. Remember those highly orchestrated all-day “wars” we played in the woods out back of the farm in Chadds Ford? Do you remember how scared I was about them right after we moved there? Those kids were fierce. And they took it so seriously. I remember it was such a big deal—who would play with whom, who got what color, who had the best-quality pellets, who had the most of whatever. I remember everybody sitting around discussing their “guns” and their “victories” and their “victims.” We were in sixth grade.
I remember that it was a real point of pride to come to school on Monday mornings after the games with some paint on your shirt. It was always the same guys who showed up with a little bit of paint. Just a little bit. They couldn’t resist. Like they didn’t have another shirt. Or a washing machine. Those paint pellets actually really hurt when they hit you. Just for a minute they really hurt, like a shot at the doctor’s office.
So here I am, about to begin the next phase of what probably seems to you like a never-ending training process. It is a bit like a medical residency, although there is less blood, more physical contact. And there is probably about as much information to be processed and memorized. But I can read a map, and I can staunch a wound, and I can hit a target from three times as far away as I could have done before. I know what you’re thinking: is any of this worth anything?
You’d appreciate the language. For almost every word you can think of in civilian life, there is a military analog, another word, a slang term or nickname or code. Or acronym.
I never thought about certain things before. I never thought about how I stand, how I allocate my weight and how stable—or unstable—that makes me. I never thought about how best to brace myself against a blow. I never thought about how best to make contact with another person, especially if that person is threatening me. And I never thought about what they call our Inner Warrior. The Inner Warrior might not be the most unique name (I know: unique doesn’t need a modifier), but the concept is connected to so many things that you talked to me about through the years.
The Inner Warrior is kind of like the Editor inside us. It is the voice you hear that tells you not just what to do but what not to do, too. The Inner Warrior is always at his desk, checking errors of commission v. omission, etc. We talk a lot about variable force skill, which is exactly what it sounds like: you have to be able to do everything, and then you have to have the ability to refrain from doing anything. That last skill is often the most powerful of all.
For example: if I was entering a room and there was a man there that I knew to be a threat, but there was also a woman standing next to him, what would I do. And what if that woman is holding the hand of a small child. Well, I would handle that situation differently than if I entered a room and there were three men there, military age men (MAMs). I would handle that situation differently, perhaps, depending on the ages of those men, depending on what they were holding in their hands, and depending on what time of day it was, and depending how we were configured for backup assistance.
Each choice—or option—has to be mapped out in your mind so clearly that executing any one of them is like picking ties off a rack to match your shirt. You select on instinct, not emotion: my shirt is blue, so I need the red tie. White shirt, blue tie. And those instincts come from learning the rules, then practicing them. What it means is: internalizing the available patterns of behavior removes—or slims—the margins of error. There should be no margin of error, even as the existence of a margin of error is inherent in making a choice.
Warfare is not like “shoot-’em-ups,” as Dad would say. There is a precision to all of our actions. Having the guns and knowing what to do with them is a little like having access to a new language. And there are lots of challenging environments where saying less is more. Restraint might not be the first thing next to Godliness, but it’s close. Restraint is part of the ethos.
Love,
J
“Shoot-’em-ups” was another Davidism, one that had trickled down into Sara’s vocabulary and so—she was only mildly shocked to see—into her son’s. David had used it to describe unlinked, diverse things, to describe anything violent—a bloody movie, a bloody battle, a fight between lovers. He would have appreciated life in the presence of these new technologies that allowed you to lie in bed and watch a real war at the same time as you watched a war movie at the same time as you navigated a fight with a lover in texts. He had always claimed to prefer staying home, as most people who rarely stay home tend to do, and she could imagine him managing multiple small screens at once to maximum effect. Life was so quiet before all the technology, and in the months after Jason was born they shared a special stretch of downtime. David was not traveling and almost every night he would come over, even if he didn’t stay. They would watch films in between feedings.
David loved the movies. One of their first dates, in steaming hot D.C. that summer they met, was at the multiplex. She remembered wondering if the ticket taker thought David was her father, and then feeling that she really didn’t care. He made her laugh. And even in the years after she came to be angry with him for leaving her, he could still make her laugh. He would have loved these letters from his son; he would have seen himself in them. One irony of Jason being gone was that, unlike other mothers who perhaps saw their sons more often, these letters were a look into the soul of a boy becoming a man. She knew each time she saw him throughout those years of training he would be changed slightly, yet forever. The letters prepared her. He was slipping away.
There is another picture, loose in the box. It is a close-up of a boy’s shoulder, and on it are tattooed these lines:
But after the fires and the wrath
But after searching and pain,
His mercy opens us a path
To live with ourselves again.
When she saw it for the first time, she could not believe he had a tattoo. But then she saw by the bit of hair in the frame that it was not her son’s shoulder. The hair was too dark. And the shoulder wasn’t shaped the same way. Her son had strong shoulders. She finds the letter accompanying it.
Dear M.,
This is a picture of a tattoo one of the guys here has. He’s a good friend of mine. I asked him what the words meant, and he said they were from a poem. Do you know it? I think the poem is about learning to process and live wi
th the scars of war. I love “His mercy opens us a path.”
I do think God watches over us and over what we do. I do think that there is something else besides just us out there. Don’t you think that there has to be? Aside from stars. It’s curious to some of the guys I’ve met that we don’t go to church. Even on Christmas.
We talk about family. A few guys here are closer to their grandfathers than they are to their fathers. Some of the guys have grandfathers who fought in World War II; they told stories that inspired their grandsons to serve. One guy’s grandfather was in Vietnam; his father’s not much older than you are. Doing the math now, I was thinking it’s possible that Dad’s father was in WWII.
I have a new pistol. When I am home next, I am going to set up a little target in the backyard and show you how to use it.
Love,
Jason
This letter was the first time her son had asked about David’s past or his family. But the truth was she didn’t know. She had never met David’s parents. David was so much a “grown-up” in her eyes when they met that that part of a more normal courtship ritual hadn’t been assumed, nor had its absence been questioned. They didn’t talk about their parents. They didn’t talk about where they grew up or where they went to school or who they’d dated. David didn’t care about her past, and perhaps she was too intimidated to ask about his. He was secretive. As far as she knew, his life began at Yale. Before that, there was nothing but a wide, blank slate. He liked it that way.
They were more interested in the present. They would argue about what was in the paper on any one day, or what someone had said in the hallway at work. David liked to intelligently undermine others’ attempts at Meaning, in case someone started to take life too seriously. He mocked friends who posed questions not unlike the ones she now saw in the letters from their son. He mocked anyone who wanted something more or, worse, who believed that there actually was more than what lay right in front of you. And while she was with him, she’d absorbed some of this, even if it never quite fit her. But it was only when she read Jason’s letters that it occurred to her that underneath his shell, David had probably been someone who had also raised the same kinds of questions, who had tried to follow knowledge like a sinking star, who had believed in something greater than himself.
What do you say to a boy about the fact that you barely knew the man who was his father. She had written back something brief and general, something like “your father loved you and he would be so proud of you.” Which was true. And it was also true that David had done things for her that no one before or since had done. She always knew that other men would step in to assist with the things fathers traditionally did. But most of David’s friends were so much older, with lives that seemed much larger than hers. As Jason grew up, she placed herself outside the center of David’s life story. She didn’t have the perspective then to see his side of things. David would have placed her in the center.
If David were alive and around, he’d be summoning up some classical reference, then immediately undercutting the references with a joke. He loved mythology. He used to tell Sara stories from D’Aulaires or Edith Hamilton on their dates. She was impressed, even when she learned later that he had reread the stories right before picking her up. “Proper planning prevents poor performance,” he would say when caught out. One of the myths she loved best and begged David to tell and retell was the story of Thetis and Achilles. Thetis, the glamorous sea nymph, held her son by his ankle and dipped him in the River of Immortality. How could she not have thought about the fact that the place where she held him the tightest would be the place left uniquely vulnerable? David would argue that the myth is about the fact that behind all great warriors there is a great woman. But Sara felt the story was a parable of motherhood. We must love them, and then let them go. She wishes she’d had a chance to dip her son in that river. She would not have been as careless as Thetis.
*
Sara hears Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing” downstairs and realizes it must be getting on in the afternoon. She had promised Sam she would come to the table tonight and eat a proper meal. She wonders what might take her mind off things because she has been unable to focus on anything for more than ten minutes these last days. The nights are worse because she can’t sleep, and she has read too many newspapers and too many books not to imagine where her son is and what might be happening to him. One thing she cannot imagine: that a faraway war, one to which she has felt connected in an extremely peripheral way but connected to nonetheless—is now one in which she has become a well-known name, a headline, a new nexus for fresh analysis.
She goes to the window. The trucks remain. The cops corral them. She can see a young girl who lives in the town coming up the driveway with some packages, escorted by another cop. She thinks that she is more likely coming to see Sam. Maybe they will cook dinner together, allowing her to remain upstairs without seeming rude. Maybe he’ll throw over his fiancée, fall in love here, and get married, in her garden. Maybe they will ask Sara to speak at the wedding, and she will give a talk about glass eyes and glass hearts—the former impenetrable, the latter quick to shatter. Maybe they will have a child who will be born into a world of newly smart wars, where there are no longer even weapons, just rows of video screens where we touch and swipe the places we want to destroy, or make circles around the places we want to protect. The individual operator will be less necessary, but the concept of service will remain.
She looks at the box of letters and remembers one about a series of congressional hearings following 9/11, and thinks she will take it out and fold it up and send it to Jason’s godfather. She knows that others miss Jason almost as much as she does, and she knows his godfather feels uniquely at fault—that somehow he was the one who was meant, and failed, to steer her son away from this path. But no one could have steered him away. Still, she’ll look at the letters and send them to the different people who have been meaningful in her son’s life. This will give them something personal. And she doesn’t want them anymore. They’re reminders of a different time, when there was more hope on all sides. Looking for that one letter, she finds another one she had entirely forgotten about.
Dear M.,
Did you know how President Kennedy supported the idea of America having dedicated “special” operators? Kennedy commissioned the first two Teams; these were the guys who went into Vietnam. After Cuba, the president realized that one thing we needed was a force fit for unconventional warfare.
The president knew keeping kill ratios in one’s favor was the way you won wars then; statistics were the tool for communicating how a fight was faring. Were there fewer bombs, more bodies? No, there were lots of bombs, lots of bodies. And now we have “smarter bombs,” fewer bodies. It’s a better equation. Did Dad ever talk about the war, his war? Vietnam. Did he ever mention the Teams. The guys in that war had it rough. And then they came home, and they had it even rougher.
After the Second World War, our men came home on boats. Those crossings allowed the soldiers time to connect to others who had fought. They had time to talk about what they had been through, where they had been, what they had seen. I bet they sat on those boats and they told stories. And then they came home, and most of them didn’t say a thing. Maybe it was that time talking with one another that meant they didn’t need to talk as much when they came home. Or maybe they had a code, like we do. They were coming home heroes. They were coming home to a time when America felt a lot of pride. But I bet they saw some things they weren’t proud of.
After Vietnam, we airlifted our guys out; they came home on planes. A few hours, and they went from a jungle to a Dairy Queen. They didn’t have the chance to talk. They didn’t have a chance to share their stories. Maybe we have not looked closely enough at the importance of how you exit a war, at the importance—the risk—of keeping civilian life’s rituals in such close proximity to the realities of war.
What happens after our wars? I think about you saying that the three mo
nths after having the baby is the “fourth trimester.” Maybe something comes after the end of a war that’s like that: a fourth trimester. You said the fourth trimester is the hardest. You said, once you give birth, the baby has a mind of his own.
Love,
Jason
He is so naïve, she thinks—with a great deal of love. And envy. She wonders if her own mind ever worked that way, with that clarity, and she thinks that what’s really ironic is the contrast between what he’s doing and what he’s thinking. The letters grew shorter. She was embarrassed to be relieved when she saw a shorter letter, but she was. It meant fewer questions. And that meant fewer things for which she lacked answers.
Dear M.,
The guys are passing around these memos. They were submitted to the Congressional Record during hearings over “enhanced interrogation techniques”—after 9/11. They were written by judge advocates general serving overseas. Have you read them? Have you heard about them? They’re amazing. What’s amazing is that the JAGs are the ones defending the existing rules. It’s the JAGs who are saying, “Give our guys wise boundaries.” What they are defending is the preservation of a culture. They argue that to change the military culture is to place that culture at risk, and that it’s the culture that holds the diverse communities in the military together. The culture, and the history. They are saying, If you change the culture, you risk breaking down the entire system. Remember my letter about the use of wise restraint? Rules are comforting; it’s not a fine officer’s instinct to break rules. We’re highly trained to hew to rule.
(I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking that I should go to law school when I get out of here.)
Eleven Days Page 7
