by Atticus Lish
His eye takes in the land, which is in vivid, sharp relief. Plummeting closer by the second, he’s still ten thousand feet above it. The high definition of what he sees dizzies him: the super-clear rooftops and the man-made world of rectangular boxes—houses, hangars, storage sheds, trucks, containers; hoses, tanks, and pipelines; the violin wires of power lines strung for miles by human hands, by men on cranes and ladders in safety glasses, dealing with harnessed lightning, being very careful.
He sees the sectors of the land: the forest where they have trained to protect the country and its wealth, while getting eaten by mosquitoes; the open fields, one of which is the drop zone; and the farms—the entire economy, agriculture and power production, dirt roads leading to well-engineered highways, and trucks moving along them into the sun, shipping tons of frozen meat, oil and broccoli to people who will consume it.
The land is wealth. You can see this truth from the sky. It has been used and tended, divided into squares bounded by straight roads, trimmed, cultivated, watered, rid of pests, tamed and controlled through industry and hard labor. He sees a tractor working across it—from up here a tiny intricate toy that he would have never been able to stop studying if he had owned it as a child.
At the borders of the tended land, he sees more forest, wild areas, marshes and the saltwater curdling up in a scummy estuary inside a hooked finger of brown terrain where it wouldn’t be wise to swim. He understands that when they are deployed this is precisely where they will go, trying to swim and run and maneuver while wearing protective suits, among rusting barrels of rotting sewage and nuclear waste. The muddy earth is going to peel open in his future and he’s going to see rioters tearing buildings apart with their bare hands, ripping out the boards, smashing the windows, hurling the desks down marble stairs, scattering clouds of documents, flinging computers into walls, trailing wires—flinging a screaming woman bodily out into the street. They drag her outside in the stench and heat ripple of burning tires, pour oil on her, make her drink it, bring newspapers and tires and leaves from the underbrush and set her on fire, chanting and clapping, push her down into the ditch, and heap more burning trash on her. She cries and they laugh.
They drag a man out of the building in a tie and a Western dress shirt drenched bright red with blood and kick him in the back, knocking his glasses off, and throw him in the fire, saying, “Here’s a man to keep you warm!”
And the brush crackles, burning. And the shouting boys with rags tied around their heads roll tires down on the man and woman, who suddenly comes alive, slapping at the smoke coming from her hair, before slumping and rolling down into the smoking leaves. The boys hit their victims with sticks, to discourage them from trying to beat the flames out.
He will attend a PowerPoint briefing on board an aircraft carrier. A man’s face appears onscreen—a so-called high-value target, a rebel leader, an insurgent—a man from a different people, not Boston Italian but black and bearded—but hearing what the man has done, he’ll recognize his father and say to the confusion of a colleague, “That’s a Leonard.”
The rebel leader comes from West African bureaucratic parentage and got his degree at Virginia Tech, where he felt alienated. He tells his followers to roast and eat the flesh of their victims.
“I get that,” say the SEALs, because they are warriors too.
The politicals and the advisors come into the briefing room—a genderless group in suits. You distinguish them not by gender but by competence and sympathy, though most of them are somewhat muted, repressed and cold, by dint of corporate culture.
But the warriors are cold too, ice-cold professionals. They don’t indulge in lightheartedness until they have a break in their crushing deployment cycles, most of them dealing with chronic pain, hernias, bad shoulders, stress fractures, tropical infections, STDs, nightmares they don’t admit to, bad backs, lost wives, estranged sons, no cartilage left in the knees—especially the older ones—they don’t laugh that much anymore. And the young ones are all ambition; they have nothing to smile about either.
A helicopter lands on deck, and our president enters the briefing room—our first woman, a woman from South Philadelphia who went to law school—and everyone stands up, and the team salutes their commander in chief. She listens as an admiral with short neat white hair and a wedding ring on his finger lays out the operation and predicts its probable outcome. She asks a question or two, nods, and gives the order to go ahead. She closes a folder, stands up and leaves, followed by an aide carrying a briefcase, and the rest of her core staff. The mission is a go.
Sitting in the briefing, he knows that, according to some, he and his team are there to project American power onto foreign lands and defenseless people. Probably it’s absolutely true—even though it’s complicated, too complicated to say for sure. They also want to help. But the government is enormous—it’s far bigger than a couple of highly motivated guys who can swim for days and do a lot of push-ups—so who knows what it will accomplish in the end. Thousands of people with competing agendas are running it. Whatever he’s a part of—call it war—it’s going to eat up a lot of people—and their homes and land—and money, oh the money!, so much money, so staggeringly much money—and time and energy and paper and ink and electricity and gas and food and marriages and men—before anyone sees the humanitarian payoff. How you see the use of force probably depends on who your father is.
As they unfold, these events will be debated on the Internet. Much later, they’ll be analyzed by a scholar who has studied the Greeks and Moghuls, working fanatically day and night at her laptop while listening to the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man”—believing that her own sex and destiny is to absorb all of history, going back to the Stone Age, the age of cave paintings, and express in clear, forceful language the patterns she sees in human affairs.
My mother could have done that, he thinks. She could have overcome herself.
O Gloria!
And they arrive at MEPS and he goes inside with the Navy man and does what he says. There’s a giant American flag on the wall. After stripping to his underwear and seeing the doctor who measures his arches, Corey lines up with the other young men and, holding his spine straight, swears in.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to my father for financial support I received from him during this project.
To Jordan Pavlin, my editor, for her masterful guidance. She had the ability to compress instructions into a few clear and simple bullet points, which, like the best athletic coaching, could be followed in the heat of the game. She was right about what this story should (and shouldn’t) be.
To Amanda Urban, my agent—steady and shrewd, loyal and patient—and a captain in her industry. On the hardest days of this process, she not only picked up the phone but bought me a beer. I won’t forget.
To Ellen Feldman, my production editor—a prodigious, industrious technician whose clarity and attention to detail have made a vital difference to our final product. It has been a rare privilege—and relief to the author who sees nothing but his own errors—to work with her.
To Paul Webster and Taran O’Leary of Viking Moving Services in Concord, Massachusetts, for your tremendous act of friendship when this book was on the ropes. You are not just experienced movers since 9 A.D., you are patrons of the arts, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
And one more time to she who was there when it all started and walked every mile of this journey on her own bleeding feet—let’s bandage those wounds—to my true friend—my wife. Beth, there’d be no song to sing without you.
Long life to our Kentucky sprites, Pinky, Tux and Nell!
A Note About the Author
Atticus Lish is the author of Preparation for the Next Life, which won the 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the 2016 Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine.
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