by Mike Bogin
“You don’t talk to snakes. You cut off their heads!”
“Captain,” Spencer suggested, “let’s get you dictation software so you can write your ideas down by saying them out loud. Just talk into a microphone like you’re talking to me.”
Captain Sam should have been talking to a microphone. He certainly wasn’t listening.
“They wiped out Occupy in one coordinated night,” he went on. “Swept it out of existence just like the Chinese wiped Tiananmen Square.
But people won’t take getting poorer forever. Hard work either brings the reward of a better life, or things are going to bust loose. We’re right back in the same fights we had in 1789 and 1889 and 1932, only this time the bad guys are winning!”
“Whoa. Cap, bring it down to scale, OK? Look at a regular day. You could cook the girls’ breakfast. I know you could! You could work on the telephone and organize vets. It’s all good, Cap. That’s the smarts I have. The politics is your thing.”
Mission planning and procedure were in his wheelhouse, not politics. Yes, mission success required knowledge. Intelligence-gathering. You keep the enemy on his heels, keep him guessing, make him look over their shoulder because he knows you’re coming but never knows when or from where. But politics? Jesus, shoot me now.
“That’s not OK,” Captain Sam screamed at him. He set the back of his head against the tree trunk, leaned forward, and banged it back hard.
“You have to be into politics!” He was about to smack his skull a second time when Spencer grabbed his feet and pulled him away lengthwise on the grass.
Captain Sam rolled away from the tree trunk onto his side and curled up. “I can’t remember their faces,” he sobbed. “I can’t picture my own girls.” He really wasn’t thinking about politics at all.
Spencer placed his hand on the Captain’s forearm and looked away, past the manicured lawns, toward Wisconsin Avenue. What could he say? At Harmony Church, in sniper training, they said don’t think about faces, you push them down. If they came back in your dreams and you couldn’t stop them, then you stop yourself from sleeping.
One time, in 2004, he rotated back to Benning and then he stayed up for six weeks straight. It can be done. It’s just different. He pushed them down, but it tied his bowels in knots so badly that he didn’t crap that whole time. So he didn’t eat much. You can make yourself do that, too. He stayed hydrated and drank cans of Ensure.
He stopped talking to people. He spent two weeks inside a dark bedroom wanting all the time to be back in Afghanistan, back on familiar ground.
Now, he just wanted the damned PEB squared away and to be back in Afghanistan.
He wasn’t married and he didn’t have kids and the captain had both and the captain didn’t even give them a chance to be together as a family!
*****
“Captain, I am a doer. I get my mission; I get my mission squared away. Men like me; we’re trained to get the job done,” he said. “You, you’ve got a mind and a voice and a lap the girls can sit on and the parts you have all work fine. Step up, Cap. It will be different, but it can be good. Alice wants you home. I can’t say that. Nobody wants me to come home.”
Captain Sam didn’t say anything. Spencer reached out and stroked the captain’s head, once, then let him be. The blind helping the blind. What the hell did he know? Jack, his dad, went through the motions of living but Jack was a harmless zombie. Half the time he ate his dinner out of a can without bothering to heat it.
He thought about being 39 years old and never having a real girlfriend. How different was he from Jack?
“At least when Jack was thirty-nine, he still had Mom,” he said aloud.
He thought about Mercy again. Mercy, who lived next door and helped with the house after Mom went on chemo. After her mom’s boyfriend started “getting weird,” Mercy stayed with him and Jack for a year. She was trying to stay put to finish high school and then she was moved in, just like that.
The mom’s boyfriend came around the first night. Jack walked him back off the porch. Spencer watched out the window. He must have been fifteen then. The guy was wearing an undershirt with no sleeves. He had tattoos and a mustache. He started to point at their house and tried to walk around Jack, but Spencer’s dad got in his way every time. Then he walked away a few steps. He turned around and stared, but then he left and stayed away. That was cool. He liked remembering that. Jack stepping up. He liked remembering Mercy.
Sometimes she cooked. Her food was bad. She wasn’t very good at cleaning, either. But with her there the house came back to life. Mercy was two years older. He liked her smell. Like cheesy sweat and flowers. Patchouli.
She taught him to play the guitar. She always had time for him. They practiced for hours, usually sitting on her bed. Her red-blonde hair was everywhere; she used to brush it away a hundred times until she finally raised her arms and pulled it back into a bushy ponytail. She had thick hair in her armpits and freckles all over her shoulders. He wanted to just reach out to feel the weight of her breasts in both his hands.
Every year, usually around Christmas, she still kept up. He never heard from anyone in his high school, but Mercy always came through even when he didn’t write her back. She’d had enough of cities; she said the last time she wrote to him. She had a farm now, in the southwest corner of West Virginia where the coalmines were all played out. She was raising sheep, or maybe goats, to make her own cheese. No more getting up to wear stupid outfits to go into some office. He tried to picture the place. He tried to picture Mercy twenty years older.
*****
The major stayed off his case. No more telling him about “dissociation” or that his intention to return to Afghanistan as soon as possible was “regressive” and “symptomatic of significant psychological wounds.” She no longer expressed a “profound level of concern” about his “reintegration into civilian life habits.” Jesus.
During their mandatory five minutes of “social behavior measurement” she explained how “You’re beginning to relearn the basics for communication between people and not ranks.” Apparently people can talk, just banter. “It isn’t wasteful or weak, Sergeant. It’s another way to bond. Combat isn’t the norm,” she said.
“Between people, the norm is day-to-day conversation, which leads to fitting into a social unit and to forging healthy relationships.”
That was how he was going to fit in with the world “we hope to live in” rather than an environment dictated by threat and terror and hurt. “Afghanistan,” she said, “the war,” was “an artificial context.” He needed to get to know his real self. She urged him to remember the kid who used to lie down on the grass and watch the clouds go by. That unstructured joy was what they were are fighting for. (He never knew that one.) The war was going to be over. He was going to have to learn to fill his days himself, no more orders, to find out what he was good at doing and what he liked to do and then go do it.
Spencer nodded agreeably. That came easily now. He was squatting four hundred pounds in twenty-rep sets. Free curls, too, ten legitimate reps at fifty pounds each arm. He was clocking his run east across Bethesda, around Congressional Country Club, south to the river, then back to Walter Reed north through Little Falls Park, eleven miles, in seventy-four minutes. He could zip through twenty chin-ups and one-arm twenty push-ups. Going on for thirty-nine years old, but he was ready to go head-to-head with any Navy Seal. One kidney? No problem. He was getting faster, too. Not as fast as Captain Sam on those giraffe legs of his, but measurably ahead of where he expected to be.
“Race you,” he challenged the captain. They could sprint now without needing to tie themselves together. Captain Sam could feel the painted lines on the running track. If he missed and moved across lanes, Spencer shouted “left one” or “right two” and Captain Sam adjusted to keep himself in a center lane.
“Four lap
s. First to a mile.”
The captain won by thirty meters, but Spencer was still smiling.
“Three times a day, more,” Captain Sam admitted to Spencer afterward, “I just want to annihilate the world. But you, Jonathan, you’re always cool. Like, nothing ever gets a rise out of you. It’s amazing. God, I hate that about you!”
“You think too much.”
“How many people did you shoot? 131? You didn’t hate them, but you looked down a scope and blew their heads off. How do you do that?”
“It wasn’t all head shots,” he responded. “Seventy percent were center torso.”
He wouldn’t say so, but Spencer had nightmares sometimes. Other times, when he felt the rumble of helicopter rotors, he got this weird shiver that ran from his neck down to his ankles and just for a second he didn’t always know where he was. He always manned up, but it stayed inside his guts, poking.
“One time a couple years ago, in Khost, there was just one squad of us in this little outpost set up in the middle of a big open square,” Spencer told Captain Sam. “We had concrete anti-vehicle barriers set up a hundred meters out, but except for those were pretty lean, sandbags and razor-wire. We had a tripod-mounted .50-caliber machine gun and a Bradley on our backside with the 25mm cannon, but the chain gun on the Bradley was the main thing covering our butts. Anyhow, I remember that it was hotter than hell. I was inside this one sandbag room that was our quarters, our mess, supplies, everything, sacking out, sweating mainly, no way anybody was sleeping. All of a sudden there’s this noise, like a roar, getting louder. I don’t remember if somebody called me or I just came outside to see and there must have been thousands of people moving out of the covered market and stampeding right at us. They were packed in so tight that all they could do was just pour forward like a churning wave.
“From behind six feet of sandbags this one specialist, good guy, from Iowa I think, he had the fifty, he just didn’t know what to do. Nobody looked like they even had guns, but if he didn’t fire, there was nothing to stop them from douching all of us. Vehicle barriers, sandbags, and razor wire were never going to stop that mob. They were way inside 100 meters. There was zero time to call in help. We couldn’t even move to radio HQ. We’re talking close,” he said.
“People were screaming. I scanned through my scope and there were these flashing reflections. I kept looking there until I could see a clear picture. It was one man, long beard, sandy turban, faded black jacket. He had two swords and he was killing everything, men and women, dogs, goats, donkeys, slashing into the crowd, stabbing and driving them forward as they tried to get away. They were too packed together to avoid him; I don’t think they even knew exactly where he was.
“The lieutenant and Iowa kept looking at all those people and at one another, not knowing what to do. I sighted down and his red eyes were bugging out while he kept slicing with those swords. So I set to fire and blew his head up like a melon. He still moved forward two or three more steps, still swinging, before he dropped.”
Captain Sam couldn’t quite figure out why Spencer told him about that. Was he proud? Was he proving that something he did served a purpose?
“What happened after that?” the captain asked him.
“The crowd tore and kicked at his corpse until some men took the swords and hacked him into pieces. We got evacked out of there before dark to diffuse the situ before anybody decided to turn on us.”
“Why did he do it?”
“We heard later on that his son set out to blow up some Afghan government official. He never made it past the outer compound. Detonated his vest. The father watched the martyr video and he just lost it, started killing people, animals, everything. Went through the souk leaving hacked bodies and blood trailing behind him. I don’t know that he was thinking about the outpost or us at all.”
“And you’re OK? It doesn’t get to you?”
Spencer shrugged. “It’s what I do. What I was trained for. That time I know I saved lives.”
Captain Sam thought he knew about heroes and warriors. No soldier thinking about offing himself was ever going to wait for a rich guy to come along so he could take a billionaire out with him. It didn’t work that way, not in real life. Guys killing themselves weren’t thinking about jihad against the rich or anybody else. They were like the guys on the ward, so scared that there was nothing else out there for them that they pulled the plug just to stop being scared and useless and chugging back pills and liquor. Veterans were never going to rise up. Soldiers get orders and follow them. That’s what you do. Why would soldiers trained to obey orders suddenly start to question the social order?
“Well, you’re starting to question, Mr. Tower of Power,” Cap said. “You’re never going back to working for anybody like Miller.”
“We’re just talking, Sir. I get my Physical Evaluation Board then I’m going back into combat. Maybe not working for Miller, only doing what I’m trained to do.”
“Jesus, Jonathan. I told you. You can’t be some empty vessel and leave it to the army to fill you. Man up! The military doesn’t make you into a person. Life does! Have you ever been in love? Have you ever made love to somebody you love?”
Spencer understood the army. Understood what was expected. Exceeded expectations. These other things were a foreign language and he didn’t have the words.
“I don’t know if I could be good at that,” he finally replied.
“So you fail!” Captain Sam shouted. “Hell. Experiment! Make mistakes. Fail! You get up, dust yourself off, and you try again. That’s how we figure it out. Haven’t you ever wanted to get yourself a deep-throated Harley and just take off for the open road? Try something different?”
“The army always has a place for me. I perform.”
“You perform. They can depend on you. Tell me something. What if the army ordered you to fire on Americans?” Captain Sam challenged him. “Are you going to do it?”
“That’s stupid.”
“Really? Stupid? Add it up.”
Captain Sam rattled off statistics. Two million, three-hundred-thousand men in prisons and growing. Did Spencer know when the numbers started shooting up? Exactly when incomes stopped growing for regular people and all the increases started flowing to the rich.
“Coincidence?” Sam asked.
Police stopped carrying revolvers and moved to semi-automatics (MSJS pictured S&W 38s and 9mm Glocks). SWAT teams got started and kept growing at the exact same time prisons added more and more solitary confinement cells. Every major police department has armored vehicles, helicopter assault training, tactical weaponry, and commando squads. There were drones over U.S. cities.
“Coincidence? Captain Sam pressed.
“Jonathan, crime is going down. Pretty soon 9/11 will be a generation behind us. But those things don’t seem to matter. The government still listens to our phone calls and reads our email. You think that’s a coincidence? Really?
“This government isn’t America. Not the Democrats and not the Republicans, either. Jonathan, this was a great country once and we can be great again. We’re great when regular people thrive, when next year is better than this year and when our kids do better than we do ourselves. That’s when we believe again. It’s never going to happen with a government doing what the rich want and putting blinders on everyone else. We let them corrupt everything and turn us into a nation of greedy parasites. We’re heading toward a police state and you can’t wait to go right back to fighting bullshit wars for bullshit reasons. Wars on the other side of the planet that we can’t ever win!”
The veins stood out along his neck and across his forehead when the captain got all worked up. Spencer liked him too much to tell Captain Sam how crazy he sometimes sounded. Like he was talking about Pakistan or something, not America. Besides that, the captain didn’t know the first thing about recon, mission proc
edures, tactics, or anything else that goes into turning words into actions. All the planning and training and discipline in the world wouldn’t help sight-down on a billionaire who is smart enough to lay low and hire disciplined security.
“The banks brought down this economy and nobody went to prison, Jonathan. Nobody,” the captain said. “That’s fact, that’s not opinion. If we don’t start going in different direction, if we don’t let regular people have a real chance to live better lives, to educate kids, to get ahead, then it all falls apart, the whole apparatus we fought for. How many people die then, when we sit back and wait for that to happen? You know how you shot that guy with the swords? You saved lives by killing that one guy. Would you kill a hundred people to save this country?”
“Captain, it doesn’t work like that. Once people know they are targets, you might get to one or two and then the others run for deep cover. You sound a little wacky. For real.”
“So what, you wouldn’t even try to rattle them, to put up some resistance? As long as we keep thinking as individuals, they keep winning,” Captain Sam explained. “It’s the ‘you’ thing, exactly what Davies does in Group, telling us to think about our individual futures. None of it is about supporting one another. The only reason it’s Group is they won’t pay the money for one-to-one counseling! You make an Oklahoma City-size truck bomb; drive it outside their next billionaire’s club meeting. You do that and this country starts working again.” Then he went off on the Koch brothers.
Then Spencer smiled. “Captain, you and I both know we were just shooting the shit, right? Nobody is going postal.”
Captain Sam was deadly serious. “We can’t stop them in the courts. We can’t do it in Congress or in the media. So stop them with fear.”
