Eleven Days

by Lea Carpenter

  Speaking of future and alternative career paths, I got a package from the Hill. Typically, it came by FedEx even though there’s no rush on my side. There was no letter, just a box of tiny little cards, like business cards, but thicker. I knew who they were from given the return address. Instead of my name, they have this quote:

  The soldier above all other people prays for peace, for they must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.

  It’s General MacArthur. I couldn’t tell if his sending me this was a sign of support, or a reminder. I couldn’t tell if he intends for me to distribute them, or maybe he means for me to paste them on the base doors?

  Whatever he means, you can tell him: I pray for peace. I include a lot in my prayers these days, but peace is right up there at the top of the list. We all do. We pray for peace, and we pray for the preservation of our culture. Just like everybody else, we’re into survival.

  Your parents would find it funny: their grandson goes to war only to learn to pray for peace. Consistency, rule, restraint, peace. Peace is a word that has always meant the same thing, hasn’t it? Like rules, definitions that don’t change have something comforting about them. Consistency helps a culture hold. Culture seems like a soft idea, but culture can change a kill ratio. Culture can save a life. This is one of the things I’ve learned, and believe.

  Love,

  J.

  She would find those JAG memos, and she would read all of them, and her son was right. They all say more or less the same thing: Don’t adjust the means to suit an end. Don’t place our tradition at risk. Through her son, she had begun to see another side to military culture. She had begun to understand. The most interesting people are the people you don’t know. The eagle bows his head.

  *

  David had died in December 1992. She had found out only minutes before leaving the house to pick Jason up from school. She was already running late. She was abrupt when she answered the phone—“Yes?”

  It was a death too close to Christmas. Still, in the car, when the local public station reported news of “an American dead in the embassy” in Jeddah, Sara turned it up, not off. A few people she’d never heard of said things she wouldn’t remember about David and his career. In time, David’s friends would all have their say, too, one in an op-ed in a major newspaper. She would clip it and save it for Jason because the author, a federal judge, had written about what she’d always believed was David’s actual talent: telling stories. In that, he’d been gifted and relentless and generous. He would spend hours talking into the night with peers or protégés, deadlines be damned, rest shelved as an unnecessary indulgence. And somehow he made ideas neither novel nor unique to him sound necessary, relevant, and new. He believed the world could be made a better place by conversation and argument—and wit. That was his religion, or had been.

  She remembered spending hours considering Jeddah on a map in an atlas in her office. It’s in Saudi Arabia, a coastal city on the Red Sea. It gets its name from the Arabic word for “grandmother,” after the idea that Eve’s tomb is there. Eve: of course he died somewhere called after Eve, Sara had thought. She had rung a former assistant of his, with whom she’d once been close, and the assistant had said, “Sara, he loved it there. Jeddah is considered the Gate to the Holy City, the gate to Mecca. He died in the right place. He died doing what he loved.” But what did he love? She felt shock and anger: shock that he was gone, and anger that there was so much she didn’t know. She fought hard not to remember the last time she saw him, as she knew the most crucial thing now was to keep calm. She had to protect their son.

  As she drove to collect Jason, the snow was falling, and she was thinking that in three years she would be thirty. When he got into the car, she decided not to tell him anything until she was clear on how to talk about it, on exactly which words to use. And she knew he would try not to cry; already at such a young age his resistance to pain in all forms had become a recurring quirk. When they got home, he went up to his room, and she had called his godfather, in a panic. “Help me, please.” He offered to drive out and take Jason for a walk and talk to him, which he did. On Christmas Eve when she tucked her son into bed, he had said, “Mommy, do you think Daddy decided to die right before Christmas so we would never forget him?”

  And she had said, “Yes, definitely. That’s just like your daddy.”

  There was no formal memorial service. David wouldn’t have wanted one. But a few of his closest friends gathered other friends at a house near the Mall, and Sara went, and took Jason. There were lots of beautiful women, women she’d never met, and several of them seemed mildly drunk and very upset. Sara asked Jason’s godfather, “Are these all the lovers?”

  And he had said, “At Brecht’s funeral, there were many mistresses, but everyone knew who the great love was.”

  “How?”

  “She was the only one who wasn’t crying.”

  “Thank you,” said Sara, as if his anointment meant anything. And then she left, because she wanted to get her son to bed, but also because she felt alone and strange in that room, filled with its walking validations of how little she had known the man who was the father of her child. Still, she missed him. Her anger for his having left was only ever in inverse proportion to her wishing he had stayed.

  Apparently David hadn’t been taking care of himself, which was not surprising. Within six months of the memorial drinks party, as she thought of it, she was sent a very large check in the mail along with several boxes of David’s books and a few smaller odds and ends—lighters, broken early-era cell phones, a belt buckle. David didn’t smoke, and he didn’t wear belts. The phones’ SIM cards had been removed or damaged. Said another way, these were not his prized possessions. If he had any possessions at all, she was not sure where those went. But David didn’t care about things; he cared about people, ideas, and information. Once they went away together for a week when she was pregnant. He had met her at the airport with a briefcase. “Hey,” he’d said, responding to her raised eyebrow and her two suitcases. “I travel light.” Sara refused to be the widow taking up the pose of mourning. It had been too long. It was not her place. Those women at the party probably shared more intimate interactions with him than she had. But could any one of them say that he had been her first love?

  Still, she saved the condolence letters. No one in the government wrote (they preferred to call), but many friends did. Many of them told stories of being with David in places she never realized he’d been to but places that they clearly assumed she knew about, as if David had been keeping their romance alive in theory to others all these years, long after he’d left it in practice. One of the letters was from a Saudi prince. When she mentioned that to a friend, a journalist, her friend had said, “Oh, there are hundreds of those. You don’t need to save it.” But she did, because it was the most beautiful.

  Most of the condolence letters were more about the writer than the subject; most were dashed off with cold formality or uncomfortably excessive in their assumption of knowledge about the experience of loss. Or their knowledge about the one who was lost. David had admirers and detractors, but he had many more people who claimed to have known him well than actually did. Unlike Sara, he enjoyed elevating webs of acquaintance into relationships where words like love and miss were casually applied.

  The prince’s letter was informal, almost rambling. It was handwritten. It opened with a bit about the history of Saudi Arabia and the importance of Jeddah in particular. It talked about David as a man standing somewhere “close to” the center of that historical importance, because the importance hinged on a friendship with America, another country not un-new in the world, and another country at pains to define itself in a hostile world. “The importance hinges on faith, too,” the prince wrote, and that struck Sara as odd, as David was many things but “faith” and “faithful” were not the first words that came to mind. The letter described David’s “good work” as fitting into a larger framework—a “tradition�
�—of diplomatic “visionaries,” and the fact that his death would remain a symbol for all those who knew him because of where he was when he died, and because he had chosen to give so much of his life to a place so few Americans understood. Sara didn’t love these sentiments because they were true or familiar; she loved them because they were so thoughtfully put. She loved the letter for its writing, like she’d love a well-constructed short story.

  But clearly the prince had known David. In the letter he said he knew about Jason, too. He said that David had spoken of his only son often, and with pride, and that he had talked even more about the boy’s mother, who had been “a great love and also like a daughter” to David. There was no awkwardness or apology around this framing, and Sara was not offended. She can imagine how two men of that generation might situate and assess the kind of affair she and David had had. She wished that the reality of how he left had not belied the angelic man described in this letter. She wished she had known that man. Maybe this was a part of him and maybe he had other reasons for disappearing. It’s possible—no, probable—that this prince knew David better than she ever had. He wrote (with sly self-aware irony) about David’s strong heart.

  *

  She checks her watch. It is almost five o’clock.

  Maybe a walk to the garden and back would feel good. She can cut around the porch to avoid being seen from the driveway—maybe that will calm her down before dinner, which, by the smell, she can tell is some variation on pasta with ham and peas. She loves this dish. He is making it because he knows it is her favorite. Or maybe because the young girl is still there and she likes it, too.

  Her little white clapboard farmhouse was built around 1910. The land it sits on is largely under easement, thanks to visionary conservationists from another era. From her house, Sara can see only two others and just glimpses of their barns through trees. They are also quite small in foundation, made exclusively of stone and wood and glass. In the winter, under snow, you wouldn’t know it was 2011 here. You wouldn’t even guess the centuries had changed. And she likes that. Most of the time, inside her house, there was no cell signal.

  At the edge of the woods there was a small series of flat stones—graves, she was sure, but she did not know for whom. Jason used to guess, and when he was little he imagined they were for animals. Now she thinks, Maybe they’re for unknown soldiers. After David died, Jason started calling the woods the “Holiday Grave” because of the combination of evergreens and those stones. Looking at them now, she thinks maybe they were just an accident of nature. Why couldn’t nature have arranged stones like that? Nature did all sorts of unexpected things, and maybe the stones were there to buck desire for meaning, not the opposite.

  The woods are so quiet. These are the woods where she ran with her son, once he was old enough. They would make up stories on their jogs, stories about secret missions they were tasked with, including specific trees they were meant to tag and identify, special flowers they were meant to collect and bring home for “research.” Jason’s imagination outpaced hers by a mile; he was always dreaming up clever new solutions for fallen branches, new plans for scorched earth where a fox or a deer had torn through what had once been a sprout of a daisy. He was so precise. Everything had its place. She was sure this served him well in his training. It may have been a pose, but he was skilled at pretending to listen, pretending to do what he was told. He was told he had to go on this last mission. She was hoping he would be home for Easter, but then he was called back. “An opportunity” is what he had said. She had taken deep breaths and realized that her role now was to say, “I understand. And I am proud of you.”

  He had sent her an e-mail that night from his place in Virginia Beach, where he stopped, as he put it wryly, to “get some clean shirts.” She knew the purpose of the e-mail: to tell her that he might not write for a while. And he would spell that out, although not much of his correspondence spelled out anything more. He never said things like “I can’t tell you where I am going,” or “I can’t tell you what I am doing.” All that went without saying. Those things were like the Nicene Creed of Team families; you just knew them by heart, and they became a part of the fabric of your days. I don’t know where my son is, and I have no idea what he is doing is not standard-issue mother-think. But in her case it was not a big deal. Then again, it was not ever not a big deal. You placed your trust in the people leading the battle. You placed your trust in the admirals and the West Wing, and you took deep breaths. Once he deployed, there were no more letters. An e-mail would come occasionally, but more often he would reach out by phone. There were no more questions, no more history lessons. There were no more photographs or specific descriptions of friends. There were no more names.

  This was typical:

  Dear M.,

  Here I am, ready to go. House is clean. You’d be proud. It is so hot here now. I wouldn’t mind a run in those cool woods, checking up on our rabbits and squirrels, making sure those deer are minding their place. The guys here can never believe it when I tell them we live among so many deer and that I have never shot one. I told them about the albino. They think I made him up.

  Love,

  J.

  Those runs through the woods had bonded them. They were something that a boy would have done with a father. And she had always ended them in exhaustion, whereas Jason always ended them exhilarated.

  Her phone rings. She picks it up.

  “Yes?”

  “Sara, we have him.”

  “What?”

  “Sara, they have Jason. He is alive. You need to get on a train to Washington. Pack enough for one night or two, and bring your things, and I will take care of the rest. I will pick you up at Union Station, and we will fly the rest of the way together. Okay? You need to get on a flight or train as soon as possible. Can you do that? Is there someone there to help you? Is there someone there to drive you?”

  “Is he all right?”

  “I don’t know any details. But he is alive. You have to come now. I am not sure how long they can keep this quiet, and I want to get you out before this leaks.”

  “I’m coming.”

  She turns and runs back to the house. She has no idea where she will be going from Washington, whether it will be someplace hot or cold, whether she will need a rain slicker or hiking boots or an arctic parka.

  She enters the house and closes the door carefully behind her.

  Sam calls out from the kitchen. “Is everything all right?”

  “They’ve found him. Washington. I—”

  And this young United States Special Operations Forces warrior, highly trained alongside her son to practice wise restraint in the presence of threat; to place sophisticated miniature explosive devices secretly on the hulls of enemy ships; to drop into oceans from fast-moving stealth helicopters; and to possess casual expertise in a larger weapons cache than she knows to exist (also trained not to question orders, and to believe in his country)—this young man comes out of her kitchen, wearing an apron, with tears in his eyes. The moisture obscures the outline of the Trident.

  “I will take you to the train,” he says.

  “Please,” she says, before heading up the stairs. “Please go tell the police to clear the driveway. Tell them—tell them we are going for some air. Tell them we are going to the market.”

  In the small bag she elects to take, there isn’t much room for more than a few things, but before closing the top, she takes the letters she was reading and folds them into the side pocket. Something for the plane, she thinks. She knows she won’t be able to read much more than that. She checks her office. She checks the landing. She checks her son’s room for anything that he might like to have. Stop wasting time, she scolds herself. And she hurries downstairs.

  “I’m ready,” she says.

  He has put on a new shirt and a jacket, and he is ready, too.

  The police, miraculously, have already all but cleared the end of the driveway, and the crush she expected to occur ther
e is not what happens at all. For once, for the first time since she watched them as they started to gather there, the day after she had first learned the news, the reporters have put down their microphones and video cameras. They are all standing absolutely still, as her old, beaten-up blue Audi pulls past them. She wonders what the cops told them to get them to heel. Maybe they told them she had an armed escort. Maybe they told them to shut the fuck up. Maybe they told them that she was fragile, and that the sound of clicking cameras might break her in two. It doesn’t matter. My son is coming home.

  GIFTS

  NAVAL SPECIAL WARFARE TRAINING SITE,

  FEBRUARY 2008

  Jason and several of his teammates are gathered outside the entrance to the small house, the one they are using to practice room clearance. This is not their first time, or their tenth. They have done this so many times, they could build this house from sand, in their sleep. They know it well, and their bodies have, to some extent, internalized the kinesthetics of the drill. When you train, you walk a house first, no guns, in daylight. Then you walk with guns, unloaded. Then you walk with guns, loaded. Then you run with guns, loaded. Then you run at night—etc. Each step adds an increment of complexity. And this is before you start incorporating accidents and contingencies.

  They look like warriors now: they are wearing their full kit—the pants, the vests, the helmets, the boots. Many have beards. And they all have their rifles. The only nod to trend is the Oakleys, ballistic eyewear almost all of the guys who don’t opt for goggles use, and which they like for this practice in particular; the lenses are tight, and they have an effect like laying slats of magnifying glass over already perfect eyes. Skiers love them, too. They pop the contours of objects, and in the kill house to be able to see any additional dust or hidden corner exposed is helpful.

  The guys all have tiny mikes inside their helmets. They can talk to each other by MBTIR, the intra-team radio, too. Peltor headsets with boom mikes linked to earpieces: these things facilitate coordination, but on an op they’ll mainly talk with their hands. This not being a combat zone, new tools also occasionally facilitate antics. Especially today, because this newly formed platoon will think they know well how the next minutes will play out, and also because it happens to be a very cold, rainy day, and they’re all keen for distraction. The first time Jason saw the little mikes, he’d made a crack about their being better than what Eminem takes on tour. So that started a running Eminem joke, one that played hard on the fact that Jason was in so many ways wholly un-Eminem-like. The jokes eventually led to playing more Eminem around the base. The Eminem Show, the artist’s fourth album, was the uncontested favorite. It had been released nine months after 9/11.