The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  Stephen will always remember the boys’ bedroom at Cherry Hill, the trees outside, the brothers’ customary whispers and laughter, and the bus journeys to school in the morning after they’d been to the boathouse. But his abiding memory of John might be one of his last, when he visited his brother on the aircraft carrier in Honolulu. ‘I was looking down and looking for his plane,’ said Stephen. ‘And suddenly I saw it taxiing up from the end of the carrier. He’s got the full face mask on and his uniform, but I knew it was him just by his mannerisms. He gave me the thumbs up and then I saw him holding onto the dashboard

  – then, phweeeewo, he was off. He said to me one time, just before that last tour, that he was a little bit disgusted with what was going on with the war. He was getting a little frustrated with the military – I think he didn’t like killing people – and it started to get to him a little bit.’ I was later briefed on a report written up by the Pentagon, and it appears John Spahr probably died instantly. It is unlikely that he ejected at the point of collision, but even if he did it appears that his parachute did not deploy and, falling five miles in a sandstorm, he would not have been conscious. He suffered a severe injury to his head and he was later found in the desert a great distance from the jet fragments, a great distance from the floating city he knew as his temporary home, and a great distance, too, from his daughter in San Diego and from the boys’ room at Cherry Hill, where he once stared into the dark and dreamed of glory in the miles that were said to exist above the trees and beyond the shores.

  On that day in May, two Marines came to the door at Cherry Hill and found that Mrs Spahr was in Florida. The neighbour across the road saw them and called Sabrina, who was already panicking when she saw the television news, which spoke of two pilots assigned to the USS Carl Vinson having gone down. ‘No,’ said Sabrina, ‘please don’t say it’s John.’

  In Florida, Mrs Spahr was staying with a friend and she was in the back of the house when her host shouted that two of her friends were at the door. Mrs Spahr came through and nearly passed out: she knew the meaning of two Marines standing at the door of a house containing the mother of a Marine. ‘I had always planned,’ Mrs Spahr told me, ‘that if I saw those Marines come to the door, I would just go out of the back door and I would just run until I disappeared into the earth. That was my plan. I went to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with John and Chandler one time. He just wanted her to see it, and he loved it there. He was such a peaceful man. That’s what you would say about him. I’ve been there a bunch of times but I’m not going to that place again. I just can’t go there any more. When I was in Florida that time, I took a drive up to the Gulf Coast. I felt so peaceful and everything was so beautiful – for about an hour there was just this exquisite peace.’

  *

  When a soldier was clearing out Anthony Wakefield’s quarters at Camp Abu Naji, he found a collection of posters stuck above his bed and they too were sent home to Newcastle, the Blu Tack still on the back of them. They included posters of John Lennon, the Sex Pistols, Adam Ant and Bruce Lee. Anthony had filled in standard MOD Form 106 – a soldier’s will – saying that the contents of his savings account should be split between the three children and that all his personal belongings should go to his girlfriend Kym. These belongings made for three small boxes, and included a sandwich toaster, a gold ring engraved DAD, various CDs and civilian clothes, and a Gucci money clip, along with personal cash of £27.76. His collection of papers was not voluminous, either: some legal things, vehicle documents, a booklet from the Guild of International Songwriters and Composers and a membership card for Blockbuster Video.

  A letter came to the home of Anthony’s aunt Emily, the woman who had brought him up, from Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Henderson. ‘Such was his, and their professionalism,’ he wrote, ‘they were chosen to look after the most demanding and dangerous part of the city – in order that real progress could be made. They were having a positive effect on the Iraqis, who are desperate for peace and security, and we will continue in the same manner, partly to fulfil our mission here, but also, and most importantly, to honour the memory of Anthony.’

  Anthony Wakefield’s body was flown back to RAF Brize Norton and from there to Newcastle. The funeral took place at St Gabriel’s Church in Heaton. Before the service, the hearse drove past his old house, and his son Scott looked out of the window and wondered what the car and the box inside it had to do with his dad. There was a large crowd on the streets around the church that day, and the coffin was taken up the aisle to ‘Ave Maria’, covered in yellow tulips. Paul put a card in beside his brother, saying all the things he wished he had said before; it went down into the ground with Anthony and Paul feels pleased that nobody will ever know exactly what it said.

  The Benton Road graveyard was empty the day I went there with Paul. It had the look of so many English urban cemeteries, neglected in the evening traffic, more a place of forgetting than a garden of remembrance. Vandals had made their presence felt, gravestones pushed over, lager cans strewn in several areas, the remains of small fires. You coe talented guys can sit back uld see the buses lighting up on the main road as Paul took me first to see his father’s grave, and then past rows of civilians, the local people of Newcastle who had died where they were born and whose arguments had come to rest in the same place as the people they were arguing with. ‘Everybody ends up here,’ said Paul, except he hoped that he would not, and that a job entertaining on a cruise ship would come up before the end of the year. We stood in front of Anthony’s headstone, a simple, grey one paid for by the Coldstream Guards, and I thought of Paul’s letter mouldering in the local soil. There wasn’t much light left at the end of the day, but enough to see other headstones just like Anthony’s further along the line. ‘There was nobody like him,’ said Paul as we turned to go.

  *

  Lieutenant Colonel John Spahr was buried with full military ceremony, the occasion marked by the first fly-past in Washington since the events of 9/11. John’s sister Tracy was involved in the second term of the Reagan–Bush administration, working as an assistant press secretary. She later campaigned for the Vice-President and had several posts in his administration. ‘My friends at the White House had always wanted to know about John,’ she told me. ‘It was awesome to think of him up in that plane. Everybody was impressed with him, but to him it was just his calling. He accepted it and he made the sacrifice. I know that, had he survived, John would have gone on to very great things. The Pentagon was certainly on his list.’ A few days after his death, a letter came to the house from her old boss the President’s father, George Bush. ‘Dear Tracy,’ it said. ‘I am so sorry that your brother was KIA. Perhaps it is of some comfort to know that this truly good man gave his life serving our great country. May God Bless him as he holds John in his loving arms. Please convey to all your family my most sincere condolences. To you I send my love.’ Two hundred family and friends, and his beloved daughter Chandler, accompanied John Spahr’s coffin to Arlington National Cemetery, where he was buried in a low plain made over to the American dead of Iraq.

  John’s sister Kelly picked me up in Baltimore and we drove to Arlington from there. ‘John was timing his retirement to be when Chandler was in high school,’ she said. ‘Just to be with her.’ As we got closer to Washington I began to notice how many of her mannerisms were just like her mother’s. ‘What’s my point?’ she would say if she got lost in talking about John. ‘We went to our boys’ school,’ she said, ‘and there was this sign hanging up and it was a kind of American motto – MEN FOR OTHERS. I just turned to my husband and said, “I think we’ve had enough of Men For Others, don’t you?”’ She told me about their beach house, where one day a few years ago, when they knew John was going to be flying past that way, they went down onto the sand and wrote in big letters, ‘HELLO JOHN’.

  In Arlington Cemetery there were red-ribboned wreaths in front of every grave, stretching in each direction as far as the eye could see, along a vast slope to the h
igher points commemorating the Union dead. When we reached the part where John is buried, Kelly’s voice changed and she lay down on the ground and cried there as if the earth were merely a barrier between her and her brother. I put my hand on her back and thought of the miles, the entire oceans that spanned one human loss and another. In some ways, after searching out these lives in Britain and America, I had arrived at the simplest truth, but I felt that I tasted the complications of the Atlantic that day, as a young woman sobbed into the earth for her dead brother. Kelly stood up and gestured with her arm at the rows of graves. ‘When will all this madness end?’ she said. ‘The last time I was here, John’s row was at the end of the field, and now look.’ She moved her arm over the many new rows of young men and women who had died in the fight for Iraq. Many of the graves were those of servicemen born in the late 1980s.

  At the other end of the field the stones were more weathered, the beginning of the past: Vietnam, Korea, the Second World War, and on to Fredericksburg, Bull Run, Antietam. Then we left John Spahr and went to look for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Anthony Wakefield and John Spahr were as different as land and air. One saw his life in epic terms, the other was more pragmatic, but their ends were the same, and they each served as part of a special relationship between their two countries, a relationship that, in its dreams and in its undoing, may be seen to mark the end of a period that started not with Churchill and Roosevelt, but with Thatcher and Reagan. As I climbed up over the manicured lawns in company with John’s sister Kelly, I remembered a letter Margaret Thatcher once wrote to her dear American friend. ‘Your achievements in restoring America’s pride and confidence and in giving the West the leadership it needs are far too substantial to suffer any lasting damage. The message I give to everyone is that anything which weakens you, weakens America; and anything that weakens America weakens the whole free world.’

  Before us at Arlington, a uniformed soldier marched up and down and we looked beyond the tombs and the urban parks to see the Washington Monument, stark as a compass needle in the distance. It seemed that summer must exist in a place behind the sky. It wouldn’t be long before the smell of cut grass was back in the air, the smell of John’s childhood returning, as fresh-seeming as the taste of Anthony’s Murray Mint, to show the world that something was truly lost in all this human struggle for gain.

  Acknowledgements

  Most of the pieces in this collection were originally published in the London Review of Books, and I want to say thanks to the paper’s editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, who had many of the ideas and guided me through the stages to publication. She is that rare thing once described rather nicely by J. D. Salinger, ‘lover of the long shot, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors’, and with that she is also a great friend and I couldn’t have done half of it without her. I also owe a debt of thanks to the paper’s publisher, Nicholas Spice, who encouraged me in a hundred different ways, and to my other friends among the staff, past and present, who succeeded in persuading me that literary journalism is worth everything you’ve got.

  I am also grateful to Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, and to his late colleague Barbara Epstein. Also to Deborah Orr, once editor of the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, as well as the editors of Granta, the Daily Telegraph and the Paris Review. I am grateful for help down the years from Jane Swan and my agent Derek Johns, and also from Jon Riley, Lidija Hass and Colm Toíbín, who gave me especially good advice about this collection. At Faber and Faber, I want to thank my editor Lee Brackstone – the backbone of this book – and my publisher Stephen Page. They each have shown enormous, spirited support for this work as well as my others. If there are any mistakes it is certainly their fault, but don’t tell anybody.

  Andrew O’Hagan

  February 2008

  About the Author

  Andrew O’Hagan was born in Glasgow in 1968. His first book, The Missing, was published in 1995 and shortlisted for the Esquire/Waterstone’s/Apple Non-Fiction Award. Our Fathers, his debut novel, was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. His second novel, Personality, was published in 2003 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. In January of that year Granta named him one of the ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ and in April he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He lives in London.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition published in 2010

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Andrew O’Hagan, 2008

  The right of Andrew O’Hagan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All the following pieces are copyright of the author, but he wishes to thank the editors of the publications where they first appeared:

  ‘Scotland’s Old Injury’, ‘The American Dream of Lee Harvey Oswald’, ‘The Killing of James Bulger’, ‘Saint Marilyn’, ‘Tony and the Queen’, ‘7/7’, ‘On the End of British Farming’, ‘Cowboy George’, ‘Four Funerals and a Wedding’, ‘Celebrity Memoirs’, ‘On Lad Magazines’, ‘On Hating Football’, ‘Poetry as Self-Help’, ‘My Grandfather’s Ship’, ‘After Hurricane Katrina’, ‘The Faces of Michael Jackson’, ‘The American Way of Sorrow’, ‘On Begging’, and ‘The Garbage of England’ first appeared in the London Review of Books, ‘England’s Flowers’ first appeared in the Guardian Weekend Magazine. ‘The Glasgow Sludge Boat’ first appeared in Granta. ‘Tony and the Queen’ and ‘England and the Beatles’ first appeared in the New York Review of Books.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–26612–8