by Dana Canedy
It was unusual for Captain McFarland to lead a prayer vigil, but he had no choice. The person to whom he had always delegated that task, Charles, was no longer among them.
Three of his men had told me that Charles had survived the initial blast. Now I called Dr. Steven Taylor, an army major who was on duty at a hospital in Baghdad the day your father died. Perhaps he could tell me whether Charles had been alive when his men brought him in. Taylor’s response was chilling. “Ma’am, I’m sorry. I honestly don’t remember him.” Taylor explained that he worked in the largest combat support hospital in Iraq, and that he and two other doctors had treated about fifteen thousand American soldiers during their yearlong tour of duty. Nothing about my soldier stood out.
Not remember my Charles? I could not imagine it, just as I still did not know why a soldier as senior as afirst sergeant had been out on a resupply mission in the first place. This is where Charlie Company’s culture gets complicated. Mohammed thinks Charles had an unusual view of his responsibilities, which I believe McFarland strongly encouraged.
“A first sergeant’s job is not to go out there and go up and down on dangerous routes every day,” said Mohammed. “It doesn’t require you to go outside the compound of safety as much. But First Sergeant King was not only willing, he went outside the compound every day.”
I asked a military official with command experience for his view. Was Charles’s determination commendable or reckless? Would an officer with more experience than McFarland have used his first sergeant more strategically?
The official was dismayed. He likened the approach to sending a pilot out of the cockpit to serve drinks. “You have your Top out there in the red zone and you’re encouraging it?” the officer said, incredulous. “If you’re a commander, that’s your lifeline, and you’ve got him out there playing in traffic.”
Was he suggesting that the value of a soldier’s life was somehow related to his rank?
Yes, he said. He was speaking of losses in terms of military needs, not personal suffering. That was the harsh reality of war.
“Forgive me if it sounds cruel, but we can get another soldier to replace the driver,” the officer said. “But we can’t replace your leadership. That takes years and experience to build. When you take down a first sergeant, you leave a big void in the operation. It’s a big kill. A first sergeant leads everyone. They took nineteen years of experience away from us that day.”
Charles had promised me, when we parted last, that he wouldn’t take unnecessary chances. Was there something I did not know? Some specific reason for going out that day?
Charles’s battle buddy, Tony, had noticed that Charles was morose the week he died.
“It started Tuesday or Wednesday night,” Tony told me. “I was like ‘King, what’s wrong, man?’ He said ‘Man, my commander pissed me off King heard that his commander had called people back on the FOB ‘FOBettes,’ meaning you didn’t bust the wire or go outside the gate.”
He might just as well have called them majorettes or cheerleaders— sissies. Charles told Tony that McFarland had taunted him. “Are you coming off the wire or are you going to stay back with all the other FOBettes?” he said his commander had asked.
Tony tried to bolster Charles’s spirits over the next two days. He also reminded him of their agreement: “When we returned from leave we had made a pact that we didn’t need to go outside the gate anymore,” Tony said. “We had a lot of things to do on the inside to prepare the soldiers for redeployment back to the continental United States. That was our mission.
“I said, ‘To hell with that guy, man. You don’t need to go out that wire. We already talked about it, King. You’ve been out that wire more than anyone around here.’ But it weighed heavily on his mind. And he talked about going out again on Friday.”
Tony reiterated that Charles had nothing to prove. He offered to accompany him on the mission planned for the following morning if Charles still insisted on going.
“He just said, ‘All right,’“ Tony recalled.
I believe that by going on that final mission Charles was not only trying to earn his soldiers’ respect, but also to impress his commander one more time. Before he retired, he wanted to be promoted to sergeant major, the highest rank an enlisted soldier can attain. It was Captain McFarland who would evaluate him for the position.
I am convinced that Charles had made up his mind to join the convoy by the time he placed the call to my office a few days earlier, and certainly by the time Tony made a final plea to him to stay behind. Sometime in the predawn hours that followed their last conversation, only one month short of the end of his tour, Charles slipped quietly out of his room, careful not to wake his roommate.
“I didn’t hear nothing from him that morning/’ Tony said. “That wasn’t like him. He’d usually say, T’m going here,’ and I’d say, ‘Let me get my stuffand I’ll roll with you.’ “
Tony said that Charles knew he would not have let him break the pact without a fight. “I would have gone with him and he would not have wanted me out there,” Tony said. “Or if he had told me he was going, he knew I would have stopped him.”
No one could stop Charles, though. This was a solitary mission to defend his honor. It is clear from his journal that Charles would do whatever he thought he had to do to preserve his dignity.
By order of Colonel John Tully, brigade commander, Route Patty and the Island were abandoned within days of your father’s death. The road had been an issue for months, I discovered. Tully’s superior, division commander General James Thurman, did not think the army had adequate route-clearing equipment to make Route Patty safe for soldiers to travel to the Island. But the general had deferred to his officers.
“The decision to close the Island patrol base was a decision that I made after Charles and Kane and Lauer died,” Tully said. “I just reached a point in my mind where the cost was just outweighing the benefits of being out on that patrol base.”
If only he had acted sooner. If only McFarland—and Charles—had not argued for months prior in favor of keeping the Island operating despite the dangers.
General Thurman flew to Cleveland from Washington to attend your father’s funeral and shook my hand after the service. He patted your back and said he was sorry for our loss. I believed him and appreciated him being there. I still do, even though he declined months later through a spokesman to talk to me. He also declined to respond to written questions I offered to submit about why the army had ever used the Island and similar small, isolated bases that left the soldiers largely unprotected.
I also had questions for Captain McFarland, but it took me the better part of a year to find the strength to phone him. I was afraid of what he might say, and of what I might say to him. When I finally made the call, in the winter of 2007, my hands were shaking.
By then he had a desk job: assistant professor of military science at the University of Texas. He was still on active duty, but as an instructor, he was ineligible for redeployment. He said he had put off calling me, too. So we had that in common.
The conversation was awkward. To me, he had come to stand for the military itself, for an impersonal system that had stolen the father of my child. But I was afraid that if he knew how bitter I felt toward him, he would not open up. So I interviewed him with the same dispassionate demeanor I had shown as a cub reporter on the police beat when an officer initiated me by making me interview him with a dead body lying at our feet.
I asked McFarland how he understood the job of first sergeant.
“It’s where the rubber meets the road at the company level,” he told me. “He’s the top dog. He enforces all the standards, he’s the disciplinarian, he’s the subject matter expert. He makes sure the soldiers get fed, that they get their bullets, that they’ve been trained.”
He said that Charles had been unlike any other first sergeant he had ever seen. “We were both fighters,” he said. “That’s why we both had such good reputations in the company. He
used to go load on the tank. We had guys who had gone on leave and if we were shorthanded he’d get out there and help. That’s why he left the FOB that day. The soldiers had been out there, slugging it out, for two weeks. He wanted to make sure they had hot food for the first time in a few days and all the fuel and bullets they needed.”
I wanted to know if he thought, in retrospect, that Charles had stepped outside the traditional role of first sergeant.
“Being the kind of leader he was, he felt like it was his responsibility, and I felt rightly so,” McFarland said. “Other first sergeants spent one-tenth of the time outside the wire. He gave everything, and people said that before this ever happened.”
What was the relationship between a commander and a first sergeant? I asked.
“Like husband and wife.”
Had there been tension between them?
“We worked so well hand-in-hand together,” he said. “We had our differences. So many nights we stayed in the office and talked, figuring out what was going right and what was going wrong. He and I were very alike. When we were at work, we were fully committed to work. I’ve got two kids and a third on the way, but when I walked into the office in the morning, I had 109 children to take care of, love, and nurture, and they were in a heck of a lot worse situation than our kids back home. But whenever I walked in the door at home—and he was the same way—my full priority was my family.”
Instinct told me that McFarland was not a man prone to displays of emotion, but he became more emotional as we talked. He told me that he and his wife were expecting a son and that they planned to name him Charles. I was touched and jealous. I couldn’t help but think that Charles and I would never have another baby of our own.
“He was one of the greatest men I have ever known,” the captain said. “He gave everything. I love that man. Oh, I had the ultimate man-love forthat man. That’s the biggest compliment I could give him.”
I am not going to write everything that McFarland told me about the scene of the explosion because some of it is simply too gruesome. At times, he was unbearably frank, as though he were unburdening himself, as though he had forgotten that Charles had been my fiance.
“My first impression was holy crap, I’d never seen a Humvee that damaged before,” McFarland said. “I talked to Doc, our medic. Doc ran up to Top and tried to do chest compressions and saw blood coming out of his ears, mouth, and all of his extremities. The concussion had killed him instantly.”
I asked what he made of the conflicting reports about Charles being conscious and speaking after the blast. He offered a grim theory.
“The only thing I can imagine is that his eyes were open, so people probably thought that he was alive. And they probably thought it was a nice thing to say that he asked about his soldiers. In any of these situations you have three or four different stories.
“He died a soldier’s death and I will take that any day over rotting from cancer or anything else. He died a glorious soldier’s death out doing great things for God and country. Jordan has got to be so proud and just live that pride.”
I wanted to scream at him to look you in the eye, Jordan, and speak those words about your father’s “glorious” death. I needed him to keep talking, though, so I said nothing. In fact, I waited more than an hour to ask about what mattered most to me. As a reporter I knew it was often best to save your toughest question for last, when you have gained your subject’s trust.
“Now I’m going to ask you something difficult,” I said, my voice calm but my whole body tense. “I’ve been told that there was some tension between you and Charles, and that he might have gone out on that mission because you taunted him. I was told that you called him a FOBette. I just want to know what you can tell me about that.”
His answer was swift. “No, I didn’t say that. I would never have called him a FOBette. I had too much respect for him to do that.”
“All right, if you say it’s not true, that’s good enough for me,” I said.
I was not sure I meant it, but I felt sorry for McFarland. He was grieving for Charles, too.
We had begun to talk about something else when the captain interrupted me.
“Well, wait a minute,” McFarland said. “Honestly, as I think about it, there is probably some truth to that. I don’t remember that discussion, but that’s entirely possible, it really is. He may have started to feel as if I was wondering where he was at. That’s entirely possible. I have to think about that for a while. A lot of people at the end didn’t want to go out. There was light at the end of the tunnel, and the light was very bright.”
I did not sleep for days after that. Images of Charles’s death flooded my mind. Over and over I heard McFarland admitting it was “possible” that he had said something that had goaded Charles into going back outside of the wire.
In time I would come to see that my resentment was misplaced. What I was most angry about was that you would never have a father and that I would never again have my wonderful man. That was ultimately neither McFarland’s nor Charles’s fault—although there are days when I am still gripped with anger toward them.
Perhaps it was my grief that had made me second-guess the decisions your father and his commander made. I wondered whether I would have had the same questions if I were reporting about any other first sergeant who had died in similar circumstances. As a civilian with no experience in war, did I even have the right to question the decisions they made?
Perhaps under the pressure of war, what begins as a kind of machismo ribbing becomes more serious and, in your father’s case, prompted him to join the doomed convoy. In any case, Charles, who had served four combat tours, who had received more than fifty commendations for his dedication and bravery, who had missed your birth because of his devotion to duty, set out to prove himself one last time.
I do not believe McFarland’s claim that Charles died instantly, but he was truthful when he said that in these circumstances there are usually “three or four different stories.” In the case of your father’s death, not all the discrepancies are lies. Soldiers who arrived at the scene after he had been evacuated recounted secondhand information. Others sought to bolster their beloved Top’s heroism. And some of the men did a kind of scrubbing of their own, not wanting to add to my grief by disclosing grim details of the carnage.
Digging down to the truth of a story is what I do. This was no different. Here is what I now believe about how my soldier—your father—died:
I believe Charles was alive after the bomb exploded that October day, and that he may have lived for ten to twenty minutes after the blast, bleeding internally. I believe he tried to speak but could not. I believe he was in shock and did not suffer much. I believe those angel wings he drew carried his spirit to a place with no bombs and no unfriendly borders.
Sixteen
Dear Jordan,
I am not sure whether I am more grateful that you were too young to remember the day we buried your father or sorry that you did not have the chance to say good-bye.
We flewto Cleveland on a gray, chilly afternoon in October. As the plane descended, I watched the landscape come into view. The dogwoods and apple trees still held on to their gold, yellow, and rust leaves—yet all I could think was that the branches would soon be bare.
I held tight to you as we landed: you were my protector, my reminder that life, even at its cruelest, is a miracle. I would hold you that way for most of the two days ahead.
When we arrived at our hotel, your grandmothers gently coaxed me into letting go of you long enough for me to spend time alone at the funeral home with my Charles. He would not have wanted you there, I knew.
I walked slowly into the large parlor where his cold, steel casket sat closed under an American flag. The staff had tried to warm the room with soft music, low lighting, and bright floral arrangements, but still I shivered. I placed my hand on the steel where I imagined his head and chest rested, patted those places, and then lay my head down on them. It wa
s the last time we would be alone. I briefly thought of asking the funeral director to open the casket so I could kiss his face, but I knew it would be cold and stiff, nothing like my Charles.
I sat with him a long while, told him that I loved him, that you were doing fine, that I was holding up as well as I could without my best friend. I considered staying all night next to him, but I knew he would not want me to spend my first night away from you in a funeral home. So I stood up and talked to him one last time.
Sweetie, I want you to rest now. Your work here is done: let me finish what we started.
I want to thank you for our son. I will raise him to be the kind of man you were. The journal will help me, and I am so grateful fior that.
I will be okay, in time, but I don’t want you to think that means that I’ll ever stop loving you. I never will. And I promise that jordan will know you. You will never be replaced.
Thank you fior showing me what real love looks like and feels like. You rest now, baby. I love you.
I kissed the casket lightly and let my tears fall on it.
The funeral director was outside, and I asked him to put a package inside the casket: a blue and white pacifier that said “I love daddy;” a camouflage-patterned onesie you had worn; a photo of the three of us smiling with a note fromme to Charles on the back.
“I’ll place it next to his heart,” the man said.
The thought of that made me smile, but the reporter in me wondered how many times this man in the grief business had made that same promise to a mourning mother or lover. I told myself that Charles’s heart was with me now, not in that box. Still, it gave me solace to think of the package resting on his chest, which I suppose was the point.
One more month, I thought He would have been home in one more month.
Mourners were arriving at our hotel from all over the country, and as we received them in a banquet room, I knew that Charles would have loved introducing his son to so many friends and relatives. Another of the many things he would never do with you. Just the hope of watching you struggle with wrapping paper on your first Christmas had kept him going as those bombs were exploding around him.
