Eleven Days (18 page)

*

Walking from the CO’s office to his own, one he shared with another lieutenant, Jason realizes that one chapter of his training has ended, and a new one—what might be called the political one—has begun. As platoon assistant officer in charge, one aspect of mission planning he oversees now is actions at the objective, or what actually occurs when the guys arrive at their destination. He is skilled in this, as one becomes in anything after practice and after errors. He is increasingly sure of himself across a range of conditions. These skills and this confidence will afford him the chance to play a critical role in an upcoming mission, one for which he will undergo a new kind of training, and one that will require a new level of secrecy and risk.

If his timing works out, he’ll be sitting on a beach next summer and in a Contracts classroom in New Haven next fall. He wouldn’t trade the things he has learned since leaving Annapolis; they have changed him. Even more than the statistics and rituals of battle, he has learned how to compartmentalize his emotions and his thoughts. There is Work; there is The Rest. He enjoys his considerable skill at separating things—necessary in his current line of work but one that is, he believes, transferable. Over time it has simply become second nature.

Jason feels the reason for the new, intense attention from his colleagues is this: increasingly, SOF missions involve Langley, and Jason knows that some of the guys at Langley today knew David and know Sara. And they know that the child born out of that match is now in the Teams. As he’s done well, perhaps he’s being tested. Does he possess a political appetite? Will he stay the course? His godfather’s in line for a prominent position in the sweet spot where politics and intelligence intersect, and Jason
knows his godfather’s dreams for him exceed the county boundaries of Little Creek. His mother, too, has friends and admirers throughout Georgetown and McLean. While she never asks anything of the scholars and congressmen with whom she works, their networks are impressive, and she’s looped in. For those overseeing the shots of upcoming operations, they can mention they know someone whose son serves. It’s an effective inroad in an audience with an admiral, for example. So Jason’s name is known in certain circles.

And he had been told where he is going next. One of the High Value Individuals that intelligence had been tracking had moved, and an SOF platoon would follow. Deserts and snowy mountaintops were increasingly the American warrior’s courts of choice, or where they were in high demand, but this time Jason would return to the port town he’d spent the better part of the last two years in, a place that looks and feels a lot like how he imagines Hell might look and feel. What the platoon chief wanted to know, and what his CO wanted to know, was whether he had the stamina to extend his stay in this world. They both know the lure for extension is increased if the meaning of the work is clarified and reinforced.

*

Kick down enough doors and most guys start thinking about other things. Jason knew two officers who reactivated through the reserves after 9/11, in the interim having taken Harvard MBAs. In their spare time, they’d calculated the procurement and release rates of Iraqi prisoners and saw bad math: the number of detainees cycling through holding facilities exceeded the size of the insurgency itself. The military was placing innocent men in bed,
literally, with criminals, creating an informal recruitment loop. When the guys showed a waterfall chart of these stats to their commander, he asked, “And why is this happening?” “Bad incentive alignment, sir,” they said. Later one of them qualified that: “I mean,
fucking
bad incentive alignment.”

When Jason asked, “What’s incentive alignment?” he got a lecture about the fog of war, and about math, how math made Western Front attrition rates mean something and formed the philosophies of men in Ford C-suites who once ran the world. The lecture ended with an 0–6 saying, “But math can conflate success and activity, you know what I mean?” And while Jason thought about that, the officer said, “Let me put it like this: If history repeats itself a second time, what do you call the thing that follows tragedy and farce?”

VIRGINIA BEACH,
DECEMBER 2010

Just before Christmas, Jason decorates a tree in his house at the beach with the girl he has been seeing. He had called his godfather first to clear his choice not to go home for the holiday (being accustomed to the confidence that comes from gaining clearances). His godfather assured him Sara won’t be alone.

“She has more invitations at holidays than the first lady, J.,” he says, into a speakerphone. Jason can picture his English partners’ desk, covered with dark green felt. Sara always called it “the pool table,” as it was almost as large. He’s had the same series of little things on it since he moved to that office. Jason remembers every one, and closing his eyes he can see where each is set, like a snapshot, another side effect of his training: the Davidoff humidor, the photograph with the last six SECDEFs, the Lucite box with Lincoln’s inaugural engraved on it, the Ivy Club ashtray, the cigarettes in a silver julep cup. He also had pictures of Sara and David and Jason. One of them was taken the day Jason was born; he suspected his godfather slipped it in a drawer when his mother dropped by.

“She’ll never accept them,” Jason says.

“Well, that’s her own fault. I can ask her down to D.C.—”

“She won’t go.”

“She won’t go. You’re exactly right.”

“She won’t leave the house. Or doesn’t seem to. When I call, she’s always there. I don’t know what she thinks is going to happen if she leaves.”

“Maybe she thinks she’ll miss one of your phone calls. Look, she leaves the house. She doesn’t tell you everything. She has her life. She’s your mother; stop worrying. You know, just as you don’t tell her everything, perhaps she doesn’t share everything with you. She’s strong. Live your life. She checks in with me to check in on you, and I know my script.”

“ ‘He sits at Starbucks on the base drinking lattes’?”

“Something like that, yeah. She doesn’t know enough about what you do to be too worried. She doesn’t
want
to know.”

“She suspects.”

“She’s suspected too much since before you were born. You have to understand that. And respect it—how she handles it. She elects to think you swim around scoping container ships, or escorting Iraqi diplomats to breakfast meetings. She will believe what she wants to believe, which is how she survived all those years with your dad. She can do it. She’s a storyteller at heart. She respects you, and she’s been brave through this time. And this time is almost up, right?
Right?
”

“What does ‘scoping container ships’ mean?” He’s teasing.

“It means you’ve served your country. Time to come back and work for the home team.”

“Are you the home team?”

“Happy Christmas. Call me before you head out again.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Jesus Christ, don’t call me ‘sir.’ ”

“Yes, sir.”

“Happy Christmas.”

*

The girl is an associate professor of history at the University of Richmond, the daughter of one Team guy and the sister of another one. She’s three years his senior. She is quiet and reserved and brilliant and fierce, and she asks nothing of him—at least, “nothing” on a relative basis compared to other girls he’s known. She loves to be around his house and around him. They’re good at not talking together for long stretches of time, and not much fazes—or impresses—her. She’ll break his heart ultimately, because when he finally says goodbye before leaving later that spring, he expects her to ask for something—to ask him to stay, to ask him to commit, to ask him for more emotion. But she won’t ask for anything, and the absence of her expectations upsets his sense of how things should be. But the absence of her expectation is a trick she’s been trained to perform. Her relative sophistication and his relative optimism ran headlong into one another, like opposable magnetic fields.

They have been together, whatever that means, since his last stretch of time spent in Virginia Beach, almost one year ago, but they met years before that, just after his move back east. She speaks four languages: English, French, Hebrew, and Arabic. But despite such lofty credentials, she’s adamantly down to earth. She knows all of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s lyrics by heart; “Watergate does not bother me; does your conscience bother you?” was one of her preferred come-ons, in fact the one she’d used on Jason. They can discuss cooking as easily as kill chains because she grew up around guns and gun ranges and gun talk and didn’t think gear was “cool”—or frightening. Jason thinks her studied calm comes not from the men in her life but rather from having been raised by a woman married to an officer, as well as having been raised alongside
a half-brother who had put his life on the line many times and was highly respected throughout the Teams.

Her brother was at Dam Neck, a member of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU, or Six, the one Team whose line on the NSW org chart skipped Coronado and went straight up to JSOC. Her father was a DEVGRU plank owner, a member of the very first Team. So she was connected. And as is true of deep knowledge of any topic passed down through generations (rather than absorbed through headlines), she understood the DNA of Team culture. She knew the risks because she had lived with them, and yet she believed that the fact that her father and her brother were alive was not a trick of statistics or chance. It was how things were meant to be. She expected character in a man, and depth; on these things she would be strict. And even better for the preservation of peace at home, she had the right mix of reverence for and cynicism about what Jason did for a living to keep him interested, while keeping his ego in check. It was a balance that mirrored his mother’s, in a way, one that girls learn from growing up in close proximity to power.

Her mother was also a teacher and had taken on her brother when he was a toddler. Married to one warrior and having helped raise another, she was tough. But for her daughter she reserved—and fiercely guarded—“a life of the mind,” pushing the young girl away from the bars on Shore Drive during high school, holding up an education, or even an advanced degree, as the way to find a meaning in her life equal to what her brother and father had found, and as worthy of respect in another world as the men’s accomplishments were in their own.

She was wary of her daughter’s choice of Jason as a beau. She knew too much and had a sense of what lay ahead if it lasted: regrets to dinner parties and skipped sports games, forgotten critical
milestones and the unexpected choice between appearing in the ER for a child’s broken arm and answering an urgent SIPR alert. If the girl married Jason, and if he went back out west, their children would grow up playing on the O course, just as she had done.

And yet there was no pressure to plan: even at her age, she seemed uninterested in ever settling down. In this, too, she was unlike most of the girls he’d met since high school, most of whom made it easy to feel good while doing very little, most of whom wanted rings by spring or double their tuition back. She had held his interest longer than any predecessor, but he was as capable of coyness as she was and, like cats, it would take them a long time to trade pride for something as dubious as love.

On this night, he’s cleaning his gear, and she’s completing the tree and talking about Christmas. She has the key degrees to know its history.

“Did you know myrrh is a common resin in the Horn of Africa?” she asks.

“Nope.”

“Really? You’ve never stumbled on a patch of myrrh trees?” She’s ribbing. And prying—gently.

“Nope.”

“
Really?
”

“Well, seeing as I’ve never been to that part of the world, I’m not sure where I would’ve stumbled on a set of—”

“
Patch
of.”

“Patch of myrrh trees.”

“Well, myrrh is very healing. If you ever stumble upon some, you should snap it up.”

“What’s it heal?”

“Well, I’m not the medical specialist here, you are. Look it up.”

“Broken hearts?”

“Broken
arms
, more likely. Wounds. I think of it as something to be rubbed on an open wound.”

“Why would you bring something to rub on an open wound as a gift to a new baby?”

“An excellent question. I have no idea. Maybe that was a metaphor. Well, the Wise Men knew what they were doing. They were scholars. I’d consider the presentation of healing power from a scholar—a rather regal scholar, they were kings, too—I’d consider that an extraordinary gift. Actually, the gathering of myrrh is quite … bloody.”

“Bloody?”

“Bloody. I’m sure the Wise Men didn’t gather it themselves.”

“How is it—”

“I think they do something like strangle the myrrh trees until they bleed.”

“The trees bleed?”

“They bleed the myrrh gum.” She’s laughing.

“You are completely insane.”

“Look it up!”

“I’m busy.”

“As am I. What do you think?”

She’s meticulous with the tree, which amuses him. She went out and bought tiny white lights. She went out and bought a hundred—at least—sparkly ornaments: balls, obelisks, sugared fake fruits. She brought a wheel of red satin ribbon, too, that she stayed up half the last night cutting into pieces to bow at the ends of branches. And she even brought an angel for the top—a tiny, golden angel, wearing a white caftan rimmed in gold thread, with a tiny halo made of gold wire set above its head. She had found
a toy gun that she’s fastened to the angel’s hands with string. She had guessed that would make Jason smile, and she’s right.

“I love it,” he says.

“You deserve it. You’re the Jesus child.”

“What does
that
mean?”

“The only male son? It’s what we used to call my brother, teasing him. The Jesus child is the child on whom excessive and at times undue or unreasonable adoration is showered. The child incapable of error. The child of whom much is expected. The child—”

“I get it.”