by J. F. Smith
“Actually, no,” replied Mope. “This isn’t an aircraft carrier. Aircraft carriers are even bigger than this thing. This is actually what’s called an amphibious assault ship. It can still launch helos and fighters, as you can see. But what this can do that aircraft carriers can’t is open its entire ass up so other boats and hovercraft can be deployed from the well deck.”
Matt wasn’t sure he totally understood the distinction, or really cared. The sight and size of the ship was extremely impressive, though. He felt the breeze against his face, and he inhaled deeply, finally taking a moment to savor the fact that he was outside again, able to breathe fresh air. It was tinged with the smell of aircraft fuel, but fresh nonetheless.
But finally, his mind dragged him back to what he knew was coming up. He turned to Mope and said, “Randall sent you to try and convince me to be bait for you guys, didn’t he?”
Mope continued to look out over the ship and the Mediterranean all around it. “No, he didn’t. He told me about the conversation he had with you, and I know about what they want to do, though. I offered to talk to you about it on my own.”
Matt wasn’t in the mood to be pressured again. “You can save your breath. I’m not doing it. I find it a little unbelievable that you guys would even ask me to risk something like that again.”
“No one’s going to make you do anything, Matt. I promise you that. I saw what you were like in that room when I found you. I saw the pain and fear in you, naked… exposed… crouched in a corner and trying to hide in a room that offered nowhere to hide. I know you’ll do anything to make sure you never go through anything like that again. I don’t blame you at all.”
“But… there would be a fundamental difference this time around, Matt,” continued Mope. “We’d be there with you. We’d be there with the one critical task of making sure you’re kept safe. You saw what happened when we stormed into that apartment with no knowledge of who or what we’d find in it. They barely got one sloppy shot off at us. I don’t like bragging, but we’re really good at what we do, Matt. Fucking good at it. And I don’t know all the details about what they think they may get out of this, and Wickland won’t tell even us just yet, but it smells pretty important.”
Matt frowned. “Randall’s an asshole. And why should I help you guys? You’ve been a bunch of homophobic jerks to me.”
Mope shook his head a little, “Randall’s just not good with people. Hell, I’m not either, but I’m better than him. And as for Petey, he’s not really homophobic.”
Matt looked at Mope, fully insulted. “Are you kidding me? Do you even know what the fucking term means?”
“I know what it means, Matt,” said Mope, patiently. He tried to explain, “Petey’s a good guy. He just plays a little rough. But that’s all it is, Matt… he’s just playing with you.”
Matt cut Mope an angry look. This was getting offensive.
Mope exhaled deeply. “I know it’s hard for you to see it that way, and Petey probably could stand some sensitivity training, but he’s just having some fun. Actually, he’s hoping you’ll give it back to him. Give him some of what he’s dishing out, and he’ll love it.”
Matt continued to look at Mope like he had tapped a special bullshit reserve to feed him.
“None of this matters,” said Matt. “I don’t have the training you guys have. I’ll cause more problems than helping.”
“Nobody is asking you to do anything you’re not trained for. That’s what we’re there for.”
Matt started to get desperate to fend this off.
“I just don’t think I can, Mope. You guys… you’re, like, fearless. I don’t have the courage you guys do. I can’t do something like this.”
As a hasty afterthought, Matt added, “It’s a gay thing. I’m too afraid to get mixed up in something like this.” Matt knew that it was a cheap, pathetic shot if there ever was one, but he was terrified of where this conversation might lead if he didn’t put a hard stop to it.
Mope leaned way over so he could rest his forearms on the railing. He put his head down on his arms and looked out over the sea, thinking. He stayed like this for an eternity before standing back up and leaning against the wall behind him. Matt watched him carefully and saw the firm, fixed look on Mope’s face.
Mope clenched his lips together for a second before looking at Matt and responding. “So, I’m going to have to call bullshit on you for that statement, Matt. And it is - it’s total bullshit.”
Matt was defiant. “You don’t know.”
Mope looked back out over the water. “Yeah, I do.”
Mope scratched at his chin for a second, then admitted levelly, “I’m gay, Matt. Just like you.”
The words made the anger boil up in Matt again, and overflow him. This was going too far. “You’d fucking lie to me like that just so you guys could use me like bait?! This is worse than being bigoted assholes to my face.” He was livid at Mope at this point. Were they really this low? Matt was astonished at these people.
Mope didn’t respond. He didn’t even look at Matt. He leaned over on the railing and put his head down on his arms again. Matt waited for Mope to give in, to exhibit some sign that it was all bullshit. He wanted to see the lie in Mope’s eyes. But as he watched Mope looking out over the water, he couldn’t find the lie anywhere. All he could see was someone that had taken a step that he had no idea he’d be taking when he woke up that morning. Someone that hoped he wouldn’t regret that step.
As Matt watched the Navy SEAL next to him, the anger ebbed back away.
“Oh my God, you’re serious…” said Matt. “You really are! Holy shit! Do those other guys know?”
Mope stood up suddenly and shot a very stern look at him. “No! They don’t! And it needs to stay that way! I’m trusting you with something very personal, Matt. I’ve got good reason to believe you can be trusted, but I need to know you’ll keep this between you and me.”
Matt was floored. He mind raced around the scene at the apartment. The dead bodies and blood. He thought about how they had gone in there with no direct knowledge of what they would face, and came out without a scratch. This guy standing next to him had done that. Matt wasn’t one to play into stereotypes, but he had to admit that reconciling that image with the fact that Mope was gay took a little effort. All that aside, though, it wasn’t in his nature to betray someone that trusted him with something like that. Matt just wasn’t that kind of person.
He said, sincerely, “You don’t need to worry, Mope. It’ll stay between you and me, I promise. Wait, what did you mean by that, when you said you had reason to believe I could be trusted?”
“Not just me, really. Randall, too. He wouldn’t have explained anything to you without some concrete evidence that you could be trusted. Before he let you call your friends back home, all he did was ask that you not tell them anything. He didn’t threaten you or use any strong arm tactics. They listened to your calls, Matt, just to make sure…”
Matt interrupted angrily, “They what?! Who the hell do they…”
“Sorry, Matt. Navy ship, Navy rules,” said Mope, interrupting.
Matt glared at Mope, still extremely pissed about being eavesdropped on.
“No one’s snooping, Matt,” said Mope. “They wanted to see how well you could be trusted when you’re being led only by your own principles. You didn’t say anything you shouldn’t have. We can trust you, Matt. I can trust you.”
It took a moment, but Matt’s anger melted away enough to where he could move on from it.
Mope said, “And that’s a huge part of it. Trust. Do you know where courage comes from, Matt? The courage you say you don’t have?”
Matt didn’t know how to answer.
“A large part of courage comes from trust. Trust in yourself. But also trust in your brothers that they’re there backing you up. Having faith in knowing that there are those that will do anything, absolutely anything, to support you and help you gives you a courage you could never have otherwise.
Courage is faith and trust, Matt.”
“I couldn’t do what I did to help you out by myself. Not just that it was too much for one person physically, but psychologically, too. But knowing I had three highly trained men, that I trust absolutely, that are practically extensions of myself, there supporting me, gives me a courage I can’t have alone. And I in turn give them that same courage. It’s not just the training and the skills that are important. It’s the bond. Trust and faith in one another makes us more than what we could be without it. The missions we’re assigned - recon, demolition work, sniper missions, rescues, stuff that’s almost always way behind enemy lines - would be pretty much impossible without it. Including going into that apartment where you were held.”
It started to sink into Matt just how fundamentally different these guys’ lives were from his own. The kinds of things they did, what they faced as a part of their profession, wasn’t some artificial movie scene. The body of his captor with the huge hole in his chest, lying in a pool of his own blood, wasn’t fake. These guys willingly put themselves into these situations. Suddenly the words “deadly serious shit” had a slightly different meaning to him.
Listening to Mope made Matt start to feel something. Words like ‘courage’, ‘faith’, and ‘trust’ didn’t form much of his own day to day life, certainly not in the sense that Mope was using them. But for these men, he began to understand, these concepts were a crucial, elemental part of their life. They literally lived and died by these words.
“You say you don’t have any courage, Matt. That’s probably true right now. You don’t have faith and trust in yourself in a situation like this, and you definitely don’t really have faith or trust in us. Yet.”
Matt listened closely to Mope, and the truth of what Mope was saying surfaced. Mope was right.
Mope said, “I see what you came through, Matt, and I think you have it in you to help us. But it’s understandable that you don’t see it for yourself. That’s ok. And as for us, I’ll make a deal with you. But don’t decide one way or the other yet.”
Matt looked over at Mope. “Instead,” continued Mope, “come have dinner with us tonight. Spend some time with us. Get to know us a little bit better. See if you think you can have some faith in us and can trust us to back you up. That we would support you just like we would each other. That we won’t let you fail.”
Matt found that the conversation had gone exactly where he had originally had no intention of letting it go. He found himself responding to the things that Mope had said. He didn’t know about faith and trust just yet, but he now found he respected Mope. His words dug deeply into Matt, beyond just trying to convince him to help them. Mope had him thinking about deep things that he had spent precious little time in his life thinking about.
Matt looked out over the water. Somewhere out there was the port city of Latakia. Somewhere out there was an empty room.
He looked over at Mope, whose dark eyes were pinned expectantly on Matt. Matt nodded and said, “Ok.” He pushed the hair out of his forehead and repeated, “Yeah, ok.”
Mope added, “One other thing, and this will be critically important for you to remember. If, and I understand this is still an ‘if’ for you… if you wind up doing this with us… you’re the mission, Matt. You.”
Chapter 13 – Any Of Us Would Have
The closer Matt got to the mess hall for dinner, the colder his feet got. He may have promised Mope earlier to meet them for dinner, but now that the time had come, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go through with it. The other two guys that he hadn’t really even spoken to, he didn’t know about. It would have been easy to assume they were jerks like that Petey guy, but honestly, Matt hadn’t had much chance to interact with them at all. What it really came down to was that guy, Petey. Despite Mope’s assurances otherwise, Petey still seemed like a queer-hating bigot to Matt.
And on top of that, there were now the troubling doubts about Mope. Matt’s conversation with Mope earlier had made him feel much better, and finding out that Mope was gay made him see him in a different light. He wasn’t sure why it would make a difference. Shouldn’t a gay guy be capable of doing what these guys did? Maybe it was really just learning a little more about the person behind the guns, goggles and face mask. Mope became a little more humanized in Matt’s mind and Matt could relate to him some now. Maybe that was it.
But when he had gone back to his rack, and reflected on it, a doubt snuck up on him. What if Mope was lying after all? What if he had just said he was gay to try and gain some kind of “affinity” from Matt? What if Randall Wickland had put him up to it just to try and convince Matt to be their bait? He hated having that thought. He fucking hated it. Deep down in his heart, he wanted to believe that Mope was a really good, gay guy, but his head was still mistrustful of Randall and scared of being turned into a lure, and it was messing with him.
As he reached the top of the steps to the deck where the chow hall was, Matt decided this wasn’t going to work. His head was too all over the place for him to deal with these guys at dinner. He stopped, briefly blocking a couple of Marines also trying to get to the chow hall for dinner. But just as he was about to go back down and go to the berth where his rack was, he heard Mope’s voice calling him from the passage behind him. He knew he was stuck with them now.
He turned and saw Mope walking towards him with the Hispanic-looking SEAL. Petey and the other SEAL weren’t with them. Matt thought that maybe, at least, he’d get lucky and Petey wasn’t coming. And just seeing Mope again made Matt want to believe him. He wanted to believe that the face he saw, with the dark eyes, misaligned nose, sloppy ears and smile lines was the face of a fundamentally sincere person and he wanted to believe in the things that Mope had said to him. Why did he always seem to have to have these creeping doubts?
Mope greeted Matt and said, “And I don’t know if you’ve really had a chance to meet Tony yet, or Desantos as we pretty much always call him.”
Matt said “hi” and shook Tony’s hand. Tony Desantos was about Matt’s height, maybe a hair shorter, but was built like a tank and had huge arms, broad chest, and a broad, round face to go with the chest. Desantos didn’t really smile and had the same serious look that he had seen on Mope.
To Matt’s disappointment, Mope said, “Let’s go before the line gets too long. Petey and Baya are going to have to wait in line once they catch up.”
They got into the mess hall and Matt made the mistake of treating it more like a buffet, with choices. He stood out of the line to look the selections over before he realized the two lines had exactly the same items, none of it well-presented.
Mope called to Matt and said, “Yeah, it’s not going to look any better from a distance, I promise you!” Matt got back in line a few people behind where Mope and Desantos were.
Just as he got back in line, he heard the voice immediately behind him that he was dreading.
“Hey, Pink Petunia!” called Petey, plenty loud enough for every Marine and sailor in the immediate area to hear him. “I heard you’re eatin’ with the men tonight! Did you finally get your panties all out of a twist?”
Matt gritted his teeth, his face turned as red as Petey’s hair, and he closed his eyes for a moment without looking back. How could Mope make any kind of a believable claim that this guy wasn’t an asshole? And if he was full of shit about this, what else was he full of shit regarding?
Before he knew it, he had turned around and said, “No, not with men. I’m eating with you guys tonight.”
Shit, thought Matt. He hadn’t intended to say something like that. It just came out before he realized his mouth was moving. He wondered if he was going to get belted clear across the chow line even as he heard the sailor in line in front of him chuckle at his comment.
Matt turned back to look at Petey behind him, and Petey looked pissed. Jesus, the guy was big, and downright frightening when he was pissed. Matt thought to himself, here it comes.
Petey said, “The fuck are you laugh
ing at, squid? Huh? You got somethin’ to say to me?” For a second, Matt thought Petey was talking to him, but then realized his comment was directed at the sailor in front of Matt that had laughed.
The sailor stopped laughing immediately and didn’t even look back. Instead, he just stepped out of line and took what food he had on his tray over to the table where his buddies were as fast as his feet would carry him.
Petey looked back down at Matt and nodded at him to keep the line moving. He asked Matt, “Is it really true?”
“Is what true?” asked Matt, dreading wherever Petey was about to take this.
Petey started laughing and asked, “Is it true that your last name is Goodend? Are you really a gay guy with the last name Goodend? Because if it is, man, that’s like, totally fucking awesome!”
Matt put the mashed potatoes on his plate and smacked his hand against his forehead. He wondered what fucker had told Petey his last name. Dear God, he’d never hear the end of this. He tried to wiggle out of it. He started to rush off over to where Desantos and Mope were sitting, saying “No. Not me. Don’t know where you got that from!” This was going to be the most miserable dinner ever.
Matt sat down, but Petey and Baya were right behind him. Before Petey had a chance to push any further on the subject of Matt’s last name, Mope interjected and said, “Colorado, shut up for one minute, man. Matt, you know Petey there. You see what we have to deal with on a daily basis, so… welcome to our world.” Mope nodded over to the remaining person Matt had not met. “And this guy’s Skander Baya.”
Baya shoveled a forkful of food into his mouth and reached over to shake Matt’s hand. Baya was also about Matt’s height, but much more slender than Desantos. His black hair was grown out just barely enough to where Matt could see the natural wave in it.
Petey couldn’t hold back any more, though. He said, “Careful shaking that hand, Baya, he’s been digging around in his back door trying to adjust that buttplug all day!”
Matt flushed red, yet again, and said, “I have not!”
