Eleven Days

by Lea Carpenter

  Sara walked around the back of the building and stared out over the amphitheater. Looking up, she saw the words on the inside edge of the white half-dome: When we assumed the soldier we did not lay aside the citizen. General George Washington said that. General Washington was awarded a sixth star, posthumously. General of the Armies Pershing had been given six for his work, so someone felt it necessary to afford Washington the same rank. David had taught her that; he’d pointed it out on showing her Pershing’s portrait at the Pentagon. When Washington crossed the Delaware, did he dream that one day we’d cross broken-down doorways of private homes to preserve our freedoms?

  *

  On the plane, finally, she sleeps. When she wakes, Jason’s godfather takes her hand in his. “It will be fine,” he tells her. “You’re such a liar,” she says. The table has bits of mirror inlaid across its top; the mirrored bits form a mosaic, but she cannot tell what the image is. She leans closer, trying to see just how horrible she looks. She rarely looked this closely.

  “What are you doing?” He laughs.

  “Looking at my hair.”

  “Women are so crazy.”

  “Well, we’re capable of holding two opposing ideas in our minds at once, without going mad.”

  “Someone said that.”

  “Yes. It’s a sign of intelligence.”

  “What are your two opposing ideas?”

  “That my hair is a mess. And that I wish David were here right now.”

  “What’s oppositional about that?”

  “Hair, self-preservation. David, self-destruction.”

  “Ah.”

  The godfather stands up, stretches, and goes to talk to the pilot. She can hear murmuring but not what they’re saying. She can hear a phone ring.

  When he comes back, he sits beside her. “Remember the monks and the river?”

  “The monks?”

  “Do you remember the monks and the river—the parable.”

  “Remind me?”

  “Two monks. An older monk and a younger monk. They meet a woman, weeping at the river. A beautiful woman.”

  “Of course.”

  “And the beautiful woman asks them for help crossing to the other side. And so the elder monk, without hesitation, takes her on his back and swims across. And the woman goes on her way, and the monks go on their way.”

  “But the younger monk is angry,” Sara says.

  “You remember.”

  “The younger monk is angry.”

  “And so the elder monk says, after some time has passed, ‘Why are you so angry?’ ”

  “And the younger monk says, ‘Because it is a sin to touch a woman, and you carried that woman on your back across the river, and that is a sin.’ ”

  “And the older monk says—”

  “ ‘But my son, you’ve been carrying her around ever since.’ ”

  “Correct.”

  “And I’m carrying David.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “Well, I’m not a monk.”

  “Excellent point.”

  Out the window, she can see nothing but white. She wonders whether this plane has a hatch that could open, out of which she could parachute in case of emergency.

  “Did he ever talk to you about what he did in the war?” She’s giving him a look that says, No more parables, please.

  “What war?”

  “Vietnam.”

  “Right. I always forget about that one.”

  “Well, he was there.” Sara is picking at her nails, an old habit her son has since inherited. “I know,” she says, “I know he was—wasn’t he doing something for the Times?” She says this carefully, without raising her eyes, as if she doesn’t really care about the answer, as if she knows nothing more specific.

  “Technically, he was there to try and write a story about MAC-V-SOG.”

  “Technically. Mack the what?”

  “MAC-V-SOG. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. Studies and Observations Group.”

  “The Agency is so artful with words.”

  “Yeah, well. The SOG were a black-ops group. Overseen by CIA, yes, but they worked with a lot of the guys over there in that time—Rangers, Team guys.”

  “Team guys?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did they do?”

  “They … they cleaned things up.”

  “Cleaned?”

  “Cleaned. Examined. Interrogated. The blast-out area from one B-52 bomber stretched two blocks by a mile. Two blocks by a mile. David taught me that.”

  “And the SOG teams excavated the—?”

  “The damage.”

  “Cleaned, examined, interrogated. Killed?”

  “They were soldiers, Sara.”

  “And David?”

  “And David knew a guy—one of his close friends then—was a SOG Team one-zero. They called the Team leaders one-zeros. The guy had been at Yale with him, I think. I’m sure. Well, I think David said he was actually kicked out of Yale—”

  “Technically.”

  “Right, technically. But then he ended up over there, in the jungle, in this group. ‘In country,’ as the guys said. That was how David learned about SOG. That was how he was let in a little bit by those guys.”

  “A guy got kicked out of Yale and went to run a black-ops group in the jungle?”

  “Yeah, guess he preferred Fort Benning to Branford.”

  “The snows of yesteryear.” And the godfather doesn’t say anything, so she prompts him, trying another tack. “So he knew some of the guys in the Teams at that time?”

  “Yeah. And you know, that was sort of the birth of the modern-day Teams. It all started in Vietnam.”

  “Right.” She remembers the letters.

  “SOG recon casualties exceeded one hundred percent.”

  “That sounds like a lot.”

  “It’s the highest sustained U.S. loss rate since the Civil War. Casualty, and loss.”

  “Wow.”

  “And David, you know—he hated something that looked illogical.”

  “He hated mess,” Sara corrects him.

  “He hated the fact that what he saw over there contradicted what he thought he knew. He hated that we were sending ‘the best and brightest’ not into the Oval Office but into the jungles, to die. He worshipped those guys—the guys he knew then.”

  “He never talked to me about any of that.”

  And the godfather leans forward. “And he worshipped you, too.”

  “He worshipped a sense of his own place in the world. When I fit into that, I absorbed some of the goodwill.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  When the plane hits turbulence, the pilot comes on the audio and assures them, “Just some light rain, folks. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Excuse me,” Sara says, summoning the stewardess, “is there a shower on this plane?”

  “Yes, ma’am, there is.” And Sara is shown to the shower, and she puts the water on as hot as she can stand it, and stays there for as long as she can bear. She changes back into her clothes, brushes her teeth—and her hair. She puts her makeup on. When she dims the lights, she thinks she does not look so horrible. She checks the time. Her hair will dry in time for landing. When she gets back to where the godfather is sitting, she takes a deep breath.

  “All better now?” he says.

  “Yes. Now tell me more about the Mac … trucks. Or whatever. Tell me.”

  He tells her about David’s brief time as one of the “whiz kids” at the Pentagon, and he gives her a little history of the cultural changes that took place in the intelligence field between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, cultural changes that didn’t brook acceptance—or advancement—of the same types of people as in another era. These changes ultimately led to David’s needing to leave. He talked about how the “puzzle pieces” in the Middle East shifted, too, and how the places no one wanted to go then became the places David was increasingly interested in. As t
he Soviets moved out of Afghanistan and as the United States lost—it thought—the necessity of a strategic presence in that part of the world, David saw how our relationships with the Saudis and the Pakistanis would be newly crucial. He wanted to learn about those cultures. He wanted to learn from them. The politics in D.C. became too torturous for him to stay; he knew he lacked the unsullied CV to be in line for DCI (“that’s DNI now”) and lacked the intellectual or cash assets to become a kingmaker, an ambassador, or a businessman.

  “Balance sheets scared him,” he says. And then pauses, indicating his analysis is over.

  “War-torn cities lowered his pulse; debts to pay made it rise,” says Sara.

  “That’s correct. That’s who he was.”

  “He never talked to me about anything,” she says, consciously baiting the hook. “He may have thought I had a brain, but I think once Jason—”

  “Yet you stayed.”

  “I stayed for a while. I would never leave the father of my child. Unless he—unless he was placing us at risk.”

  “I guess it depends on your definition of risk.”

  “But he defined it for me, didn’t he, by leaving first. By leaving, then dying. He was good at dramatic exits.”

  “He would love Jason. He would understand him.”

  “Would he? He would understand how much it costs to train an operator. He would understand the percentage of the annual defense budget allocated to education. He would understand the ratio of blondes to brunettes working at any one time at Foggy Bottom. What would he understand about my son?”

  “Sara.”

  “David always understood the numbers. Facts. He was less skilled at nuance. And emotion.”

  “He understood and valued sacrifice.”

  “He never served his country.”

  “Sara, he did.”

  “He never served his country like my son has done.”

  “His son, too.”

  “David wouldn’t recognize Jason if he saw him today. David only cared that our son didn’t grow up entitled. He was terrified I would spoil him.”

  “And you did not.”

  “I did not.”

  “I never met a kid with less sense of entitlement. He has a lot of his mother in him in that, that’s for sure,” he says. “Not a kid anymore. It’s his time to get out now.”

  “He loves it too much.”

  “You don’t—”

  “I know my son. He loves it too much to ever leave.”

  “How much does it cost to train an operator,” the godfather says after a pause, after motioning to the stewardess to refill his drink, and bring Sara one, too. She hasn’t been counting but however many he’s had, he’s not getting drunk. He must cut the gin with ginger ale, she thinks.

  “Five hundred thousand dollars,” she says.

  “Really?”

  “Yup.”

  “Expensive.”

  “One hundred operators. One hundred operators times five hundred thousand: equal to the cost of this plane.”

  *

  She wants to know where her son has been and to what extent the godfather may or may not have been hiding the truth of what he’s done from her. She wants to know what he knows about the last ten days, and he tells her what he thinks she can handle.

  “Look,” he says, “after ten days the military shifts the status of a missing officer from DUSTWUN to MIA.”

  “DUSTWUN?”

  “Duty status whereabouts unknown.”

  “It’s been ten days today.”

  “It’s been ten days today since the mission.”

  “And what was the mission?”

  “The mission—well, what we know about the mission was that the guys went to find someone.”

  “Find who?”

  “It was a high-level—at the highest level—it was a mission overseen by and sanctioned via a JSOC/Langley Team, so it was—”

  “But why was Jason on it? I thought those missions—”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know any of the details.”

  “I thought his Team was—”

  “What—”

  “I thought his Team was somewhere else. When—”

  “I got a call telling me the Team number, and I was able to find out who was on the copter. They had to enlist extra guys for backup. And it’s possible that Jason was one of those extra guys.”

  “Extra?”

  “Sara.”

  “When were you going to tell me this?”

  “You were notified the minute we knew anything. The navy notified you as soon as they knew.”

  “To make something simple is a thousand times harder than to make something complicated. Did you know that?”

  “You were notified the minute they knew.”

  Although she had never imagined this moment, if she had, she certainly would have imagined herself better prepared for it. She wanted to present the face of someone strong. That is what her son would have wanted. That is what she would show him when she saw him.

  “Sara, it’s very unconventional, this—” And he waves his hand around.

  “What?”

  “It’s very unusual that we’re sitting on this plane and that you are being brought to your son. This is not protocol.”

  “Really? You don’t give a fifty-million-dollar plane to every primary next of kin?”

  “Sara.”

  “Then what are we doing here?”

  “Someone made arrangements for you, and you will be told all of that, but all I can tell you is that you should appreciate the fact that a lot has been done to try and get you—”

  “I appreciate the fact that my son risked his life for something that means nothing.”

  “It means something to him.”

  “Really? What does it mean? What does it mean?” She pours half her drink into his glass, which he has already half-emptied.

  “He didn’t risk his life—he doesn’t risk his life for the politics, Sara. He risks his life for his Team.”

  “Is that what he says?”

  “I know that’s what he feels.”

  And he knows that soon enough she’ll know everything. For the time being, he is trying to manage his own anxiety about what they will find when they reach their destination. Because he does not know. He misses the little line of coke he used to do to relax in these moments, but has decided that for this trip a ratio of two espressos to each drink will keep him stable until they touch down.

  Sara asks him to tell her the story of how he met David, a story she has heard many times. He tells her about his days as a young aide for the chief of staff of the air force. He tells her how David used to stop by their rooms regularly for meetings with one or another of the joint chiefs. “He brought a skateboard with him. He used to board down the ramps there on the weekends, and all the girls in the front offices adored him. He hadn’t gotten overweight yet; he was still smoking.” He describes the series of oil portraits of historical joint chiefs lining the long corridor, and the scandal that resulted when David once skated there, too. “He’d hand painted it. He’d painted LITERALLY EYES ONLY in red, across its top.”

  “He took me my first time,” Sara says, softening.

  “When was that?”

  “I was pregnant. I told him I’d never been inside the Pentagon, and he was appalled. It was as if I’d told him I’d never read the Declaration of Independence. He said, ‘Oh, let’s fix that immediately.’ He’d picked me up at Healy Hall, and we drove over there. And he drove right up to the VIP parking and a guard came out.”

  “And David charmed him.”

  “David charmed him, and the guard waved us through.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “And then we had this situation at the second security desk because I didn’t want them screening me—”

  “God, did they have screeners in those days?”

  “They had something, maybe more like a crude metal detector, but I was paranoid about the baby—
”

  “Right.”

  “And so the guard was hassling David, and he asked him, you know, ‘What is the purpose of her visit?’ looking at me. And David sort of laughed, and he looked at me and looked at the guard and said—loudly—I remember how loudly it was, he said—no, he announced: ‘Orientation!’ ”

  “Orientation?”

  “Orientation. ‘The purpose of her visit is orientation.’ And that was that. They waved us in. And he was really proud to take me around, I think. He was so much more interested in, and reverent about, the history of the place—the military history—than I was.”

  “So Jason walked the halls of the Pentagon even before he was born.”

  “He did. God’s great plan.”

  “David’s great plan, perhaps.”

  “I was so in love with him.”

  “I remember being in the hospital.”

  “Yeah, Château d’Yquem and ice cream—in the recovery room. We were—”

  “Reckless?”

  “We were young.”

  “He was proud. He didn’t know how to be a father, but he was very proud of you, Sara.”

  They’re offered hot coffee. It’s very bitter, but she knows she won’t sleep again, and drinking it makes her feel like she’s participating in the ritual of being present, so she drinks it and asks for another cup.

  *

  “Do you think he’s ever killed someone?” Sara asks a little later, having given him a grace period to relax and nap.

  “David?”

  “Jason.”

  “What would be the appropriate answer to that, Sara?”

  He’s arranging a small mountain of reading materials poured onto his lap from his Hermès briefcase—a gift from a network news bureau chief: The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time. She can see small pink Post-it Notes, probably from his assistant, placed on the top of each, indicating pages or titles of articles to be read. How efficient, she thinks.

  “Pink?” He ignores the observation, so she continues. “The appropriate answer would be the truth.”

  “Well, if you cared to read the papers and perhaps the history of what your son’s been engaged in, you might find you could learn quite a lot about what he does.”