Charlie Mike

by Joe Klein

  Soon Clay was organizing his friends to go over to a nearby bayou on turtle-hunting expeditions. He brought his captures home, and Susan set out a washtub on the back patio—within weeks, the washtub was crammed with seventeen red-eared slider turtles, which stank to high heaven. But Susan tolerated it because Clay had taken his obsession to his fourth grade classroom. He read everything he could about turtles and was going to write a report. But he just couldn’t get it out. He had physical trouble writing—he’d had, from birth, a fine-motor-skills deficit. And now it was driving him crazy. “Mom, I know everything there is to know about turtles. Why can’t I write it all down?” So Susan negotiated a deal with the teacher. Clay would tape-record his paper, and Susan would write it out.

  Not all of Clay’s classroom problems were so easily solved, especially as he moved into middle school, where the teachers weren’t as interested in nurturing a rambunctious kid, no matter how intelligent. He would bounce and chatter in the classroom, disturbing the other students. If he was interested in something—anything that involved the natural world, for example—he would be intense to the point of disruption; if he was bored by a subject, he would make that obvious, too. The Hunts were told that their son would have to be medicated. Ritalin helped, and Adderall helped more, but sometimes Clay seemed dulled to the point of witlessness. Stacy had very mixed feelings about this: drugs for a kid so young? It wasn’t until Clay went off to summer camp in central Texas without his medication—the doctor had said Ritalin wasn’t required in the summer—that Stacy was entirely convinced that all this stuff was necessary.

  Four days after Clay left home, the Hunts received a call from his camp counselor. “Listen,” he said, “I’m not sure this is going to work for another three weeks for Clay. He’s bouncing all over the place.”

  Susan said, “Okay, we’ll get his medicine to you as soon as possible,” and she began to cry. Stacy felt terrible, but he didn’t know what to say. There was no way of escaping this thing.

  Life was no easier when Clay returned from camp. His football jersey read “C. Hunt” on the back, and some of the other players made the “H” silent; that would be his nickname. He hated being picked on; he internalized every harsh judgment and was unable to distinguish between good-natured ribbing and serious personal attack. Even when he knew the teasing was benign, he found it hard to come up with the quick riposte. Any sort of jibe was like oil-spill petroleum on a duck’s back.

  He was a good little football player, but again, prone to screw up. In one junior high school game, Clay’s team was leading a local rival 7–6 late in the fourth quarter. Their opponents were driving toward the goal line. Clay, playing defensive back, intercepted a pass in the end zone. If he had just dropped down and taken a knee, the ball game would have been over. But he decided to run the ball out and fumbled it to the other team on the 4-yard line. Clay’s team won, so it wasn’t a total disaster, but Stacy wondered: Why were things like that always happening to Clay? Why couldn’t he make clear decisions? He knew rationally that the ADHD had something to do with it, but he was—and this was hard to admit—worried about his son at times. Susan, watching Clay struggle for his father’s approval, was growing impatient with Stacy, drifting away.

  There was one respite, one thing that not only seemed to calm Clay down but made him feel pretty good: he loved smoking marijuana. Somehow, he had a very good freshman year in high school, but things began to fall apart when he became a sophomore. He got his driver’s license and a certain amount of freedom—but freedom was the last thing he needed. And by spring break that year, Clay told his mom, “I need to get out of here. I’ve got to change schools.” Preempting her Why? he added, “I can’t go back to Stratford and stay away from the things I need to stay away from.”

  Stacy’s reaction, privately, was negative. Why was Clay tossing this monkey wrench into the middle of a school year? Would he lose his credits? All his friends sent their kids to Stratford; it meant something in Houston.

  “At a certain point, with a kid like this, you’ve got to quit worrying about what people think and just do what’s right for your kid,” Susan said.

  In fact, she was proud of Clay. He knew he was in trouble and wanted to save himself. That took real guts. Susan and Clay visited Houston Christian High School, which was smaller and more structured than Stratford. They met with the principal and walked the grounds, and Clay said, “This feels good. This will work.”

  It did work. Because it was a smaller school, he got to play a lot more football than at Stratford. He stayed on his meds and did well academically. He scored an impressive 1380 on the SAT and, just like Jake Wood, 32 on the ACT. He decided that he was strong enough to go back to Stratford for his senior year and graduate with his class.

  To keep himself disciplined, Clay joined a church drug treatment program in Katy, Texas, which was about an hour west of Houston. The program—which met every Wednesday night and Saturday morning—had a family component, which Stacy found uncomfortable. Clay would go for group counseling, and the parents were expected to go to a group session of their own. Some of the other parents were rough, uneducated. They talked about their demolition-derby lives with an unembarrassed candor that seemed intrusive and undignified. “I can’t do this,” Stacy said after several sessions. His life wasn’t a demolition derby; he had a kid with a learning problem. “I just cannot relate to these people.”

  One evening, around dinnertime, Clay received a phone call from one of his friends in the treatment program. He raced back into the dining room, a man on a mission. “Robbie’s in trouble out in Sealy,” he said. “He needs me to come help.”

  “What about his parents?” Stacy asked. Susan was off at a meeting somewhere; he and Clay were alone.

  “His parents suck. He wants me.”

  “You’ve got school tomorrow,” Stacy said. “Sealy’s fifty miles away. You need to do your homework.”

  “You need to move your car,” Clay said, resolute. Stacy had come in late and parked behind Clay’s pickup.

  “Clay . . .”

  “I need you to move your fucking car.” Clay was angry now, but Stacy wouldn’t budge, and soon they were toe-to-toe, Clay screaming, Stacy telling him to get a handle and do his homework . . . and Clay took a swing at him, hard, a right to Stacy’s left temple.

  Stacy staggered, but he didn’t fall and didn’t swing back. He was stunned, furious, but mostly just shocked by the sudden violence. He wasn’t a violent man; he simply gathered himself and left the house. He took a long walk around the neighborhood, giving Clay time to calm down and himself time to think. This was pretty scary, and the worst thing, he realized, was that this was who Clay really was. He’d been desperate to help a friend, a fine impulse—Susan would be proud—but it was out of all proportion, out of all reason. Stacy now began to understand that all the usual upper-middle-class restraints—the need to study, go to college, control his impulses—were plastic Bubble Wrap to Clay. He would rip through and destroy it all, if it prevented him from doing the things he felt were important. Helping others was very important; loyalty to his friends was sacrosanct. But restlessness, disorganization, avoiding the hard work in subjects that bored him, and—this was now undeniable—lashing out, sometimes violently, when he was frustrated, those were part of the package, too.

  Clay meandered around for the next three years. He went to Blinn Junior College, a Texas A&M feeder school, but he didn’t last there for very long. He went to the University of North Carolina at Asheville but he joined a fraternity, majored in partying, and didn’t last very long there either. He became a snowboarding bum and spent a season working at Winter Park, Colorado.

  His parents separated, divorced, married other people. Susan Hunt was Susan Selke now, living near Lexington, Kentucky, married to a kind man who had ditched real estate to become a minister. And then one day, as she was shopping in Walmart, her phone rang.

  “Hey, Mom, whatcha doin’?” Clay asked.

>   “Buying groceries, getting ready to head home,” she replied. “What’s up?”

  “Well, Mom, I wanted you to know that I just joined the Marines,” Clay said. She was in the kitchen and bath aisle. She sat down on a pile of towels.

  “You know they’ll send you to Iraq,” she told her son.

  “I know,” Clay replied. He sounded calm, he sounded . . . good. There had been enough blood under the bridge by now that Susan knew not to trust that completely.

  She asked him to check in with a trusted psychologist who knew Clay before he did anything drastic, like actually join the Marines—but a part of her also was thinking: maybe the military would be good for Clay, maybe it would help him to organize himself. A few days later, the counselor called her in Kentucky. “I talked to Clay, and he really has thought it through,” he said. “I think Clay was made to do this.”

  Stacy was surprised, but proud as well. He took Clay back to the recruiter to discuss what his MOS (military occupational specialty) would be. Clay was excellent at taking apart cars and putting them back together—it was one of the things he loved doing—and Stacy hoped that he’d get a billet in a tech specialty like aircraft mechanics. But Clay wanted the infantry.

  “Well, if that’s what you want,” he said, frustrated. Yet again, Clay was going his own way.

  Two months later, Stacy and Clay woke up well before dawn and went down to the central post office in Houston to meet the four thirty a.m. military van that would take Clay to the airport. Clay gave his father a big hug—Stacy was near tears—and said, with utter discipline and clarity, “Dad, this is what I want to do. Thanks for letting me get to this point.”

  And he was an excellent Marine, honored as the second-best recruit in his boot camp class. Both Stacy and Susan attended Clay’s boot camp graduation at Camp Pendleton in California, and they saw a stunning transformation: he had put on some muscle, and Susan was struck by what a physical presence he seemed to be. More than that, he had lost his nervous, desperate edge. He was confident now, quietly confident, and he was calm. He had been selected for recon school—the Marine equivalent of special forces—which was a major achievement. He was very proud of himself, Stacy saw, and in a manly way. Susan had the exact same feeling. “My little boy is now a young man.”

  Except that he was a young man going to war.

  Clay survived his brief time in Iraq, but something about him had definitely changed. Both Jake and Jeff noticed it from the emails Clay sent after he was shot. They came in bunches, scorching the screen, fierce and desperate:

  “I miss you guys so much.”

  “Can’t wait for you to come home, so we can have a beer.”

  “What’s happening? Has anyone been hurt?”

  “I miss you guys so much.”

  “I should be there with you.”

  “I should be there with you.”

  Jeff thought he understood Clay’s frustration. Blake Howey had been killed—and Clay hadn’t been there for him. Howey’s best friend, Nathan Windsor, had been shot by the magic sniper—and Clay had been stuck in his truck. There was real humiliation to that: The Humvee driver’s job was to stay behind the wheel, no matter what was going on outside—which was why drivers, in most cases, tended to be the guys you couldn’t trust to be outside in the fight. Or they were the guys you wanted to punish for mouthing off or generally being uncooperative, which was why Clay was driving. He had a big mouth and took orders reluctantly, if at all, from people he considered jerks.

  And then three days after Windsor’s death, Clay had been shot—and before he came off his morphine high, he was gone: Baghdad, Germany, San Diego in a blur. His war was over, and he had barely fought it. And now he had to sit home—a REMF, a rear echelon motherfucker, doing REMFy crap back on post at 29 Palms—while Jeff and Jake went through all sorts of hairy shit. Jake was the best friend he’d ever had, he told his mom; Jeff was a brother. Nobody else in Third Platoon was killed during the five months that Clay wasn’t there, but plenty had been wounded—the spring of 2007 was the bloodiest period of the war in Iraq—and Clay felt like a slacker. He should have been there for them. And yet, when he’d been there, he’d been trapped, unable to help Howey, unable to help Windsor.

  When Jake and Jeff came home from Iraq, Clay was waiting for them at the airport with their families. The three amigos, reunited, went on a mammoth road trip to Vegas and a Wisconsin football game. Clay seemed great at first, but it gradually became clear that something was off. It was especially clear to Jeff, who roomed with Clay at 29 Palms (Jake had been selected for a scout-sniper course and was being trained at Camp Pendleton). Clay seemed all tangled up in himself. He was trying to fight it, for sure. He had gone for help and been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. The VA gave him its usual cocktail: Lexapro for anxiety, Valium for panic, and Ambien to get to sleep. But the drugs seemed to work at the wrong times or in the wrong ways, or perhaps they weren’t working at all. Clay would be up and hyper-hyper at eleven p.m. and then totally exhausted, unable to get off the couch at midday.

  There were times, many times, when he was good old Clay—he had a girlfriend named Robin Becker, and they spent most weekends together—but he was kerblooey often enough to worry Jeff a lot.

  Clay was intent on going back for another deployment, and he wanted to be with Jake. “That’s crazy,” Jeff told Jake. “I love Clay, but there’s something wrong with him. Believe me, I’m living with the dude. He can’t get to sleep. He can’t stay awake. Do you really think he can make it through sniper school?”

  Jake wasn’t sure. Sniper school required fabulous discipline; the physical requirements were much tougher than boot camp had been—Jake was worried about his own ability to make it through, given the amount of running involved. The sand hills surrounding Camp Pendleton were brutal, especially without the benefit of combat adrenaline. There were days when Jake wanted to cut his foot off; the pain was constant, withering. But he also felt responsible for Clay. He had a choice: he could go back to Golf Company and be a squad leader in Third Platoon, or he could bring Clay along to snipers.

  “You can’t bring him along,” Jeff said. “He has P-T-S-fucking-D.”

  “But he’s a good Marine,” Jake said. “You know that. He’s fit, he can run and swim, and you know he’s a PT nut. For Christ-fucking-sake, he would have made it through recon school, if he hadn’t screwed up.” This was a good argument: recon school was the toughest training there was.

  “I don’t know, Jake,” Jeff said. “Do you really need this burden?”

  No, he didn’t. But he had no choice: cutting off Clay would be like cutting off his arm—and a lot worse than amputating his foot.

  “Will you vouch for him?” his scout-sniper platoon Sergeant had asked.

  “Yes,” Jake said. “Absolutely.”

  “Then he’s your responsibility. If he doesn’t make it, you don’t either.”

  And Clay did, indeed, make it. He handled all the physical parts easily; he’d always been an excellent shot. He had some tough moments—especially when he was being hazed, which was part of the drill—but everyone had their moments in sniper school. Jake had nearly gotten kicked out when his superiors found that he was still blogging; Jake’s Life had to be stowed for the next seven months. But this was Clay’s proudest time as a Marine; he was finally one of the elite.

  Shawn Beidler, the Sergeant who had recruited Jake into snipers, thought this six-man sniper team was the best he’d ever had. Shawn was older, like Jake and Clay, and had been to college. He had worked with Jake in Iraq and loved the guy. He’d been skeptical about Clay—but found, as the training progressed, that he loved him, too. Shawn fell in easily with the three amigos when it came to partying in Manhattan Beach. He and Clay would have long, deep political conversations. They’d disagree at times, but that was okay. Clay knew stuff; he read a lot. He had real doubts about Iraq, but Afghanistan was supposed to be the good war—and they were all happy to learn i
n February 2008 that they were not going back to the sandbox, but heading to Afghanistan.

  Their sniper team would be attached to Echo, Fox, and Golf companies of the 2/7 Marines, and that felt good, too. Golf had been their old company; as scout-snipers, they’d be out protecting their guys. They were ticketed for Helmand province, a dreadful, empty place in the far southwest of the country on the Pakistan border. The area would have been a complete wasteland if the Americans hadn’t built an elaborate irrigation system off the Helmand River in the 1950s. Wheat had been grown there in the past, but now the cash crop was poppies. It was the source of 90 percent of the world’s opium.

  There were those who believed the Marines should never have gone to Helmand. They were needed elsewhere, especially in the mountainous east, where there was some tough fighting against the Taliban—or perhaps in Kandahar province, a major population center just east of Helmand, which was Taliban central, Mullah Omar’s home turf. But the Marine brass wanted their own area of operations—and the Brits, who’d been holding the fort in Helmand, needed help. Afghanistan was heating up; the Taliban had become a serious fighting force again after being nearly wiped out in 2001. The “good war” was becoming an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, and those poppies were funding the Taliban insurgency (as well as the corruption of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s regime). So in the spring of 2008, Jake and Clay’s sniper platoon was deployed to Helmand province.