Eleven Days (7 page)

It was a story of uninformed fears, panic, and blame, of how intelligence collection and things in the category of “classified” are inherently controversial. It was also, Jones tells them, a story of wartime intelligence operations in their infancy. That story continued, in some ways, with Vietnam’s Studies and Observations Group, or SOG, America’s first joint unconventional force. The first frogmen were there then, and they were meant to be warriors, but they were also trained as witnesses and as interpreters—not of speech but of actions. They were trained to see things, remember them, and report them back home. Time on target (“at the objective,” as they say) was preceded by time spent studying the opposition. Everything they did then entered the collective memory banks of mission histories, histories later locked up in places with very few keys.

*

Jason’s class has begun the work, but they are not yet warriors. They have proven their ability to do certain things and to withstand others, but they have not yet experienced the hardest parts of the climb. They have not yet been forced to choose whether to take a life. They have not yet been confronted with the delicate task of lying to a loved one in order to protect her. They have not yet held a colleague’s broken body in their arms. “The Strand is only a beginning,” Jones said that last night, referring to San Diego’s Silver Strand State Beach. This was their beach. Its name came from the silver-shelled oysters that washed up on the sand in scores. “The world is yours,” Jones said, flipping one, like a coin, in the air.

CHADDS FORD, PENNSYLVANIA,
MAY 11, 2011

Sara stands and waits. She considers the fact that she’s never been dressed properly for any occasion in her life, and here she is, about to receive news of her son, and she’s soaking wet from sweat and rain, her hair in the wrecked ponytail that has become her signature.

When Jason was born, he came one month early. She had arrived at the hospital dressed not unlike how she’s dressed now, a variation on Standard Issue Third Trimester. Learning that “it was time,” she’d meekly left a message on David’s office line and only half-expected him to show. But he was there, at the critical moment, and characteristically wry about the sex appeal of scrubs. It was a cesarean. (“A little Caesar!” David bellowed in the OR, much to the distress of the doctor, who didn’t approve of the grave situation being mocked.) It was a cesarean, and then her baby boy was on her chest, breathing like a tiny puppy, waiting to be fed.

As she walks closer to the house the men just stand waiting, perhaps out of a sense of respect or perhaps in shock at the manner of her appearance. She can hear music coming from the house—Sam’s music. Almost immediately after arriving to stay, he’d put his CDs in her kitchen, and while she never knows what
album is about to be played, she was always pleasantly surprised. She likes reggae, and he knows it very well. He grew up in California, not far from Coronado; he loves to surf and spends hours talking about waves and wave patterns, about wind and the thermodynamics of kite boarding. She doesn’t really care deeply about any of these things, but having him, and his music and his stories, helps. She remembers it is time to sleep, because he sleeps. She is cued to eat by his careful preparation of meals. And though there is no need for cooking given the amount of food brought as gifts, he can really cook. He cooks guy food: steaks and potatoes and fish pies. And she welcomes it, because these are foods she rarely eats on her own, foods that are not served in fancy D.C. restaurants, so they remind her of nothing.

One of the men puts his hand out and says, “Ma’am, good afternoon. I’m Captain Smith, and this is Master Chief Jones.” She can feel her eyes flooding with tears, so she bites her lip.

“Ma’am,” the chief says, and he reaches out a hand and holds—gently—on to her forearm, an awkward but powerful gesture. “We still don’t know where your son is.” Sara can’t help the tears on her face. She doesn’t care anymore. She is simply trying to keep breathing.

“We are here to see how you are,” says the captain. She guesses he’s about her age. Younger, perhaps. He has a lot of ribbons on his chest.

“I’m all right,” Sara says.

“We want to help,” says Smith.

“Thank you,” she says.

Jones does not say anything. He looks like he could eat a small child for breakfast. She remembers his name. And possibly having met him. Was it Coronado? He’s older, definitely older. He has
the start of a beard and very cold eyes. Or maybe he’s just tired. She is quite sure her eyes might be assessed as cold at this time.

“Please come in,” she says. “And please excuse me a moment.”

The men move into the kitchen. She can hear them talking with Sam. She walks back through the foyer to the stairs of the house—old, broken pre-Colonial wood steps she has promised herself to repair since moving there, but whose charm over time became so much a part of the house that she has left them. She looks at the envelope on the landing table, the letter Sam handed her the night he arrived, after convincing her to let him stay over. The letter was formally addressed to her in her full name. But inside the outer envelope, she knew, having opened it last night, is another envelope, and on this one is written one word in her son’s handwriting: “Mommy.” She was not ready for that. So she placed the letter on the small desk on the landing, right outside her bedroom, next to the phone forever blinking with too many messages.

She goes to the shower and undresses. She stands for a moment wondering what the rule is now, whether these men will expect a meal. Or worse: expect her to sit with them and talk. Who are they anyway? Do they really know her son? She showers, and after she showers, she puts on a pretty dress, something she knows that her son would like, something he would be proud to see her wear when doing the right thing for these men who are, in any event, only here to do something kind for her, something that is right, while being sad and uncomfortable. She finds them in the kitchen, stooped awkwardly on her little lacquer stools; they are laughing when she enters—so they stop.

“Please,” she says. “I love having people in the house, and I want you to feel at home. I know that Jason is fine, and I know it is only a matter of time before he is here again, standing in this
kitchen and doing exactly what you are doing. Please, will you stay for supper?”

But they demur, and after several glasses each of iced tea, they are on their way. She walks them to the car, and Jones makes an awkward motion to give her a hug. He takes off his sunglasses, and she can see he is emotional; maybe this is why he said so little at first. “Your boy is extraordinary,” he says.

“Yes, I know that.”

“Excuse me for saying this, but I simply didn’t expect you to be so young. You look—you look about twenty-five years old.”

“I’m older than that,” she says, and can’t help a smile. Seeing someone so powerful disarmed charms her.

“We will find him,” the captain says. “We will find him.”

“I know,” she says. “I have a birthday cake for him.”

The men drive away. Now here she is in the house at her least favorite part of the day, with an afternoon of hours to fill and that letter on the landing. She doesn’t want to read and she doesn’t want to sleep and she doesn’t want to talk to anyone who is going to say anything sentimental or maudlin. So she goes and finds Sam. He is in the kitchen, cooking. She gets a glass of water and lingers, waiting for him to say something, but he doesn’t, so she starts.

“What is he like?” she asks.

“What is who like?” he says.

“My son. What is he like? What is he like to work with?”

And she sits down at the little “eating square,” as Jason had called it, the one someone who clearly didn’t know her, or her taste, had given her—with the matching stools. And she listens.

“To work with? He’s an artist.”

“Artist?”

“He’s talented. Quiet, talented. He taught me a lot.”

“Taught?”

“He taught me about how to dial it down.”

“Dial what down.”

“Temperament. Emotion. Stress. One of my first memories of him is standing by the side of the pool, in California, that first week. He was referencing some obscure book.”

“Do you remember what it was?”

“I don’t. But what was cool was that he did it in a way that was not about proving anything; he wasn’t arrogant.”

“No, but he used to love to read,” she says.

“He was quiet.”

“He’s shy,” Sara says.

“Shy?”

“Reserved. The book talk: that’s a default setting. He gets that from—”

“Default setting?”

“Yeah. Our default settings are rarely our best selves.”

“I think my default setting then was fear.”

“The training was tough.”

“Yes. Everyone was terrified. Even the guys too proud—or possibly, too stupid—to show it.”

“Or maybe just too young.”

“Having to hide a broken ankle teaches you something about yourself,” Sam says.

Sara has an instinct to say something along the lines of
you can go you don’t have to stay
, but instead she just keeps listening. And Sam says, “You sent the books.”

“It sounded like the pickings were slim.”

“Well, everybody took note of the fact that you sent them to all of us.”

“Thirty-seven plays is a lot for any one person.”

“Those books are still in the little library at the Naval Special Warfare Center.”

“I remember sending them. I remember—”

“Shakespeare.”

“Yeah, Shakespeare. And a few other things.” She notices how careful he is with the food. He never asked if he could use the kitchen; he just saw that no one was cooking, and he moved to fill the void.

“He was into thinking and talking about thinking. And helping.”

“Helping?”

“Yeah. He always helped the other guys.”

“Kind of sounds like a group of guys who don’t need that much help.”

“Not true,” Sam says. “Guys get tired. You’re pushed. One guy was really struggling. It’s due to Jason that he made it to the Teams. On the runs, he would fall behind, and Jason would drop back and run behind him. He would push him—literally push him forward so he could make it. That struck everyone.”

“He’s good at that. Helping.”

“And in the water he was like a fish.”

“He loves the water,” Sara says.

“The guys used to joke that maybe he had a third lung. And he always said these crazy things.”

“Like what crazy,” she says.

“Like ‘follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost realm of human thought.’ ”

“Tennyson,” she says.

At that moment, one of the local cops patroling the property pops his head in the small screen door off the kitchen.

“Hey Sara, we have a little crowd out here building up again,” he says. “I think the local reporters saw that government car and wanted to know—”

“We don’t have any news,” says Sara.

“I’ll just keep ’em out at the end of the driveway, okay? They’re noisy, but don’t worry about it. Guys from the papers, mainly. They shake their pencils, but they don’t like it when they think I might use this,” he says, tapping his handgun, smiling.

“Thank you,” she says. She had seen him remove it and load it the night he had arrived at the house.

And then Sara says, “Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He wrote a poem called ‘Ulysses,’ and that’s a line from that poem. Jason’s father used to quote it, too. ‘Little remains: but every hour is saved from that eternal silence, something more, a bringer of new things; and vile it were for some three suns to store and hoard myself, and this gray spirit yearning in desire—to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.’ The poem is about a warrior in repose. It’s about Ulysses, back from the
Odyssey
. He misses the war.”

“What does he miss?”

“Have you read the
Iliad
?”

“I have.”

“That’s what he misses,” she says. And then, “Jason worshipped his father. And his father loved poems.”

“We eventually impressed upon him the importance of training his poetry skills on more popular artists.”

“Like?”

“Like Eminem.” Sam is laughing.

“Eminem?”

“Yeah. It got him into trouble once. We were in the Kill House. Will you eat pesto?”

“Sure,” she says. “What’s a Kill House?”

“He believed the world could be a better place. He was honest.”

“I might call that idealism, not honesty.”

“Sorry, two separate thoughts: he believed the world could be a better place. And I believed he was honest. All the guys did. And that meant something.”

They sit for a while. Sara doesn’t know what to do with herself. She looks out the window, past Sam’s shoulders. She can see movement at the end of the drive through the trees and the rain, like a poorly lit silent film.
Signifying nothing
, she thinks.

“The Kill House is where we learn how to clear rooms. Close quarters combat.”

“I remember close quarters combat.”

“Jason used to call it ‘The Royal U.S. Navy Performs
Swan Lake
.’ ”

Hearing her son talked about in this way only reminded her how little she had seen of him through these past nine years, and how desperately she misses him. Sam keeps talking. “He was—”

“Can you say ‘is’ please?”

“Yes, of course. I’m just thinking back to Coronado. It feels like a long time ago. Like we were just kids. It all felt so serious. I remember saying to my mother, ‘I’m not going to USC. I’m joining the navy.’ ”

“After nine eleven.”

“Yeah.”

“What did she say?”

“She thought for sixteen years I’d be a surf rat.”

“So she was happy.”

“She was happy. She saw it as a calling. She’s—she’s very religious. She felt that this was my calling.”

“Did you see it that way?”

“Well, they beat that out of you pretty quickly. Pretense. Any idea that—”

“Nobility?”

“Nobility,” Sam says, laughing. “Nobility doesn’t place a gun in the fight.” And then he says, “On my last leave, I went to the Imperial War Museum in London. I’d never been there.”