Eleven Days

by Lea Carpenter

  Jason isn’t sure if the guys actually like the music or if they simply enjoy the irony of the predictability of liking it. They are all smart enough to know this. They don’t care. They just like the songs. And the more he listens, the more lyrics he remembers and respects. “ ‘Where’s my snare? I have no snare in my headphones,’ ” says Jason softly into his mike. They are all standing and waiting. Jason will be the one to kick open the door. “ ‘A-chick, a-chick, a-chick, a-chick,’ ” he sings softly. As he moves through the door, he’s thinking of the first lines of one song in particular; they go like this:

  Have you ever been hated or discriminated against? I have;

  I’ve been protested and demonstrated against, picket signs for my wicked crimes.

  When he sings it, he changes rhymes to crimes. He thinks that this makes the lines more applicable to the young guys’ situation. They don’t think of themselves as criminals, of course; they’re not criminals. But even at this stage of their development, the guys are aware that many people think of them like that, that many people don’t believe that these wars are the right thing or that the warriors’ roles in them are justified. Most people wouldn’t know a Team guy from a Ranger or which side we fought on in Vietnam. Most people might concede the merits of World War I or Korea but be unable to identify the details. And most people, in the abstract, prefer butter to guns, but most mostly prefer not to think about it all. Has it always been that way? Does a public’s opinion rise and fall like a stock on the occasion of new information and new numbers—of dead, of days fighting, of the change in the price of gas? More likely it fluctuates with something more banal and abstract: the length of their attention span. But the kids who are fighting are not tracking MSNBC polls. They are aware that what they do and the choice to do it will never make sense to most people.

  *

  Room clearance is stressful because there is a lot happening in a very small space, at high speed. Navigating a room is an elegant contrast to being underwater. Underwater, in a wide and completely silent environment, there is the illusion of calm. The stress of those old diving drills seems quaint now, as the men work through their final months of predeployment training. After qualification training, the platoon forms up at a Team (even-numbered Teams on the East Coast, at Virginia Beach; odd-numbered Teams on the West Coast, at Coronado). For the next eighteen months, the new guys will work with “old” guys, learning—and, critically, developing the platoon’s standard operating procedures. They are prepared to follow, and most will be ready to lead when given that opportunity. Yet despite over a full year of work, they have not spent one night in a fight.

  Keep your teammates close, and your weapon even closer. An operator holds his gun with extreme care and doesn’t drop his sights. It sounds simple, but try holding a seven-pound piece of complex machinery straight, at shoulder height, while leaning low over it to maintain your aim. Having to hold the gun like that, ironically, limits your field of vision, but the trade-off is possessing the readiness to fire. When Jason mentioned the words room clearing once to his mother on the phone, she heard room cleaning. Forever after that she was constantly teasing him about the Defense Department’s budgetary allocations for soaps and brooms. Jason told the guys, and they loved it. “Clean-up time!” someone would yell invariably as they headed out to the house. Jokes help cut tension. Room clearing is serious business, and close quarters fighting is a case study in team interplay. You can watch six different sets of guys clear the same room, and the subtle differences belie the leaders—and the flaws.

  *

  And this moment in their training is serious, too. It is not all physical drills and fully loaded extractions. The men feel a certain pride in having come this far, at having achieved a reasonable level of expertise with things they had never heard of before, and in subjects many of them had never studied, from physics to ballistics to triage to weather. It’s school. The classroom time prepares them in the most essential way for the trickiest physical tasks, like leading a sixteen-man team through a warren of rooms in a cave, or dropping a twenty-four-man team from a moving helo into a fortified compound. Getting in is only prelude: then you have to identify the bad guys (“threats”), isolate the other guys (“unknowns”), and emerge unharmed. Anyone unarmed is “unknown,” even a female hostage or a child. A hostage might be suffering from Stockholm syndrome, and a six-year-old can press a button. The opposite of being underwater, clearing a room—or a house, or a building—is also the opposite of dropping a precision bomb from a plane onto a place you’ve never been, to hit a target whose hand you’ve never shaken. Violence at a distance is an entirely different art and requires different skills.

  “ ‘His gift is his curse,’ ” says/sings Jason, again into the mike. There must be some technical glitch due to snow. They usually don’t have to wait like this, and it’s making them antsy. “Just be patient, guys,” one of the instructors says. “It’s the ice. One of our terrorists slipped on the ice.” They all laugh a little until someone shuts them up and says, It’s time.

  Clearing a house means understanding what is in it. It also means removing anything from it, dead or alive, that is dangerous. You want to move as quickly as possible, but too much rush can have an adverse effect. Ten minutes can feel like an hour for the men involved; it is powerful, because you are not aware that your body and your mind are being tapped at their maximum capacity. It’s a little like runner’s high, plus weapons and threat of death. When done at night, even with the finest new NVGs, an operator’s visibility is compromised, adding another layer to the confusion.

  This is what war looks like, and we’re in it: this goes through some of the men’s minds in the last weeks before their first deployment, especially for these men at this time in history, when the kind of fighting they are being trained to do is in unprecedented demand. Jason wonders whether and how that thrill will change once the drills become real. The point of drilling is to eliminate surprise or shock. But all drills can become tiresome. The guys are starting to want to make good on all the training they have done. They are anxious to know where they are going, and what the range of their missions will be.

  As Jason moves into the last room in the house, he lets his mind wander—just for a second. He can’t help it, he was thinking about something else just before they started, and some echo of that thought just came into his mind when his eye caught something about the light through the window. It looked like a fold of bright fabric, like a dress, but that would mean a girl, and that would be impossible, so did that mean he was dreaming? When was the last time he saw a girl? When was the last time he thought about it? And in that half of a quarter of a second of stray, click: a pistol is cocked at his left ear.

  “Put the gun down.” It is one of their guys pretending to be a hostile. He is wearing a black balaclava with a Steal Your Face embroidered on it. Jason cannot see who he is but he knows they know one another; the voice is familiar. “Whisky Tango Foxtrot, Eminem,” he says. “Here’s your ‘Fuck you for Christmas.’ ” He laughs. He puts his weapon down, and Jason does the same. The other guy turns to stretch, and when he does, Jason sees a patch he recognizes on the back of the guy’s jacket. The patch was made by an NSW platoon in Iraq, and only guys who have served there are merited to wear it. It’s a skull wearing a pirate’s hat, foregrounded by crossed swords. The skull’s eyes are red. It’s a nice counterpart to the Steal Your Face, Jason thinks. And then he thinks that the Venn diagram of guys who have that particular patch as well as an appreciation of Bob Weir is quite small. It occurs to him that the other guy has much more experience than he does. Even the way he held on to and then lowered his gun, shifting it from hand to hand—that was something Jason has not seen yet. Finesse, ease, confidence: these were things Jason had not yet acquired. These were things that only came from time spent downrange.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” says Jason. He doesn’t know the other guy’s rank but knows enough to show deference when he’s on the wro
ng side of the barrel. He also knows he fucked up, and it makes him very angry. He shouldn’t have been fooling around. “Situational awareness, JG,” the officer says. He says it quietly, leaning in close to Jason’s ear. “Situational awareness.” And the officer is right. Punishment for this would be physical, and it would be more than a rap on his knuckles.

  *

  Jason doesn’t like to admit when he makes a mistake. It’s rare. Things were going well; he had distinguished himself throughout ULT, in particular during land warfare. Tactical bars were raised, and he rose to meet them. His platoon chief rarely isolated anyone for praise, but he’d taken Jason aside and made it clear he was pleased. This made the slip-up in the kill house particularly tough. It wouldn’t happen again.

  There is so much going on now because the Teams are all on deck for these wars. After 9/11, the Naval Special Warfare org chart underwent the classic institutional revisions begged by shifting circumstances, particularly in the Middle East. What was needed now was a force whose skill set was deeper, whose logistics were leaner. The new demands ran smack into the absence of a draft and into an enemy harder to understand than any predecessor. Deployment cycles shifted to accommodate demand. An aggressive operator could spend more time downrange than in any prior conflict.

  Jason knows this. And he tries to keep focused. But sometimes he feels waves of anxiety, and these can bring on waves of doubt or distraction. He will never mention these episodes to anyone and is careful to keep up a calm front of total commitment and total confidence. Feelings are things to be analyzed and discarded before the load-out. Now, only weeks before leaving for war for the first time, controlling his emotions is his primary goal. It is one he will reach.

  Ironically, once he is sent into a real house in a real city with real unknowns, he is absolutely calm. Abroad, on the base, there are no more nightmares. By his second deployment, he rarely has the anxiety pangs anymore, and he rarely experiences doubt. By his third, he is in complete control of his emotions—even, he sometimes thinks, while sleeping, as increasingly his dreams are mission-specific and take place underwater. By his fourth, having seen one too many things he is not sure he can ever forget, he will slowly start to relearn how to access his feelings. He knows he’ll need them in new ways when back home. The emotional arc of an operator is not unlike that of most civilians: born idealistic, cynicism comes with experience and then develops into a cautious optimism—or acceptance—of the tasks at hand. Controlling emotion when op tempo is high isn’t a skill; it is an art.

  *

  Another young guy, a guy who had joined their BUD/S class near the end, having been rolled back two times prior, was never able to master this art. He had cracked up during the predeployment period, at the end of ULT, and was fired. This is extremely rare. And the effect it had on the others was the opposite of the effect of the bell ringing out for DORs in BUD/S. When someone rang that bell, it soldered the resolve of the ones who stayed. When a person dropped during BUD/S, some of those left behind felt the bell was ringing to applaud their own resistance to it; another bell meant another time that you had not rung it. But for someone sent home at this later stage in the game, almost two years since they had all arrived in Coronado, there was no bell. No one was dropping out now because they were tired or cold or wet—or hungry. “Poor nutrition,” said one of the other guys, by way of rumor. “He wasn’t eating, apparently. He got dehydrated. You’ve got to drink. Lack of water is lack of oxygen to the brain.” Variations on this became the theme of the One Who Left.

  It was true that the young E-5 had stopped eating. At first the others thought he was ill. And then they thought he was engaging in some kind of a hunger strike. This platoon would soon find itself at the epicenter of the international political landscape. And most of them didn’t have time to consider the one guy in their midst who was slowly losing himself. His fast went on, and by the time it was time to take action, it was too late. These guys are not callous; most have big hearts. But it never occurred to most of them that someone who had seemed so strong could in fact be slipping away and changing psychological course dramatically. It occurred to Jason; he’d tried to intervene.

  The boy was one of the youngest. He had grown up in West Texas, near Marfa, with a father who mistreated him and a mother, a painter, who left when he was two. He was whip-smart; he’d gone to Austin on full scholarship and studied astrophysics. Stars and poetry were his passions. He’d had four lines from a Kipling poem tattooed on the back of his left shoulder in a bar near Fort Hood. And he was one of the finest guns on the range, the one all the others envied, the one they were all sure would end up acing sniper school with the chance to take the shot at UBL. Jason and he had bonded over books and had spent hours talking about their hopes of becoming wise warriors. They’d obsess over various historical scenarios of the perfect shot—in Team lore, these were legion. The perfect shot followed by the perfect silence: snipers prefer their big kills to go unremarked. Jason hoped they would end up somewhere together, in a position to do some serious damage—which is to say, some serious good.

  So when Kipling started slipping, Jason noticed right away. At first he’d chalked it up to nerves. When you see someone daily, sometimes you never notice the most shocking changes, but Jason’s watch on his guys was close. He knew about their lives; he knew the names of their sisters and brothers, the makes of their dream cars, the reasons they came to serve. Jason tried to draw them out, source any problems. But in Kipling’s case, he’d failed. The night before Kipling left the Teams, Jason had sat in his room with him, as if on watch.

  “Do you ever get scared?” Kip asked.

  “Nah,” said Jason. “Not anymore.”

  “Really?”

  “Nope.” Here was the art in high gear: controlling any appearance of emotion was crucial.

  “How do you shut it off?”

  “Shut what off?” Jason asked.

  “How do you shut off your mind?”

  “You don’t shut it off. You just think about—you just think about what’s right in front of you. You concentrate.”

  “My mind is starting to wander more and more,” Kipling said. “I see things.”

  “Like what kinds of things?”

  “I see the house where I grew up. When I was little. I see the windows in the house, and I worry that the windows need repairing. I see the girl I lost my virginity to. I see, like, myself sitting in an office somewhere.”

  “What do you think that’s about?”

  “I think I am afraid to go back.”

  “But, buddy, you’re right here.” Jason grabbed Kipling’s wrist. “We haven’t even started yet.”

  “I know. And I feel like each day I move forward is another day I will be less able to go back.”

  “Back to what?”

  “Right. I don’t know back to what. And that’s what’s driving me silly.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not so sure going back is so great. But what can we know? Let’s be logical. The only thing that matters is now.”

  “Suffering—” said Kipling.

  “ ‘Suffering does exist. Suffering arises from attachment to desire. Suffering ceases when attachment to desire ceases. Freedom—’ ”

  “ ‘Freedom from suffering is possible by practicing the path,’ ” said Kipling, and laughed. “Not so sure about that bit.”

  “You taught me,” said Jason.

  “I did,” Kipling said. And then he said, “I’m not free.”

  “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Jason said. “You’re fine.”

  “I don’t like the dreams.”

  “Focus on the girl.”

  “You mean—”

  “Focus on the girl, and forget about the window.”

  “I will try.”

  They sat for a while. Jason was reading Al Jazeera online, and Kipling was playing solitaire on his phone. And then Kipling said, “I know this sounds crazy, but sometimes I think that child soldiers are not an entirely
insane idea. You send young kids to do these things, and they have no idea what they are doing. And they are not leaving children and lovers behind. They have never been in love. They are just fresh enough to face battle without either preconceived notions or hesitations. In fact, they still possess the sense of fantasy to approach it like a game.”

  “That’s fucked up,” said Jason. “Children leave behind their mothers.”

  And then he remembered that Kipling hadn’t had a mother. That made the things he said make more sense, even if it did not make them rational or acceptable. Kipling could end up like Kurtz in a cave, Jason thought, if this continued. Something has broken in him. And Jason resolved not to leave him that night; he’d stay up all night if he had to, and he did. They talked more broadly about a few things—the last several American presidents, and which ones they’d liked; the games they’d watched the week before, which they hadn’t liked at all; the other guys in the Teams, and which ones they most hoped would be by their side if things ever got complicated. Finally Jason closed his eyes. Maybe if he fell asleep, or pretended to, Kipling would, too. Maybe if he fell asleep, he would wake up, and all this would have been a dream. He didn’t want to lose this guy. He didn’t know what else to say. He was almost asleep when Kipling poked him awake. It had been over an hour.