Now and Again (39 page)

When the slower of the two men tripped, Penn made the decision to keep after the faster one, sensing weakness there too, and panic. With panic, he knew from experience, came mistakes. The man took to the street where the running was easier, which gave Penn a further advantage because the path was predictable and because he could save a few feet on the curve. When his quarry ducked left, headed across a parking lot and toward a forested hillside that dropped toward the river, Penn knew he had won—because of a chain-link fence that was hidden in the tangle, which meant the man would have to retrace his steps back up between the parked cars to the road, and because he was faltering while Penn stayed strong. Penn hung back. It was better to tackle a spent man than one with some kick left in him. As predicted, the man cut up the embankment toward the highway. Penn turned on one last burst of speed, and in another minute he had the target on the ground.

“Okay, mister, okay.”

When he saw it was only a teenaged kid, the anger drained out of him and he said with more violence in his voice than he felt, “This is my neighborhood. You mess with it, you mess with me.”

“Okay,” the kid said again.

His hat had fallen off. Penn picked it up and held it out in a gesture of conciliation. “Where do you live?” he asked.

The boy waved vaguely at the surrounding streets of ramshackle houses.

“Give me the exact address,” said Penn.

The boy gave it to him.

“I'll tell you what. You bring your friend here tomorrow night at eleven and I won't tell the police about you. I need recruits for my patrol.”

“What patrol?” asked the kid.

“You'll find out tomorrow. You'll start off as grunts, but you can work your way up.”

In February, Colonel Falwell contacted Penn to say he was using his time stateside to check on his wounded troops. “The families said some of them are with you.”

“Yes sir,” said Penn. “Some of them are.”

“I'd like to touch base with them. Do they want to come down here to Washington?”

“We were there in the fall,” said Penn. “It didn't go so well, but I'll ask them.”

“And if that's not possible, you might make the trip yourself. You live in Connecticut if I remember correctly.”

Instinct told Penn to let the misinformation stand, so he said, “Yes sir, I do.”

On the day of the meeting, Penn set off when it was still dark. It was peaceful in the car. He hadn't been alone for weeks, and he liked listening to the whoosh of tires on the damp road and watching the light come up and the scenery change. He liked seeing the small businesses pop up as he approached a town and the neat suburban lawns unspool into farmland as he left it. He liked pulling into a service station and smelling the mix of gasoline and coffee and saying, “Morning” to the station attendants in their neat gray uniforms with their first names stitched in red script on white canvas patches and knowing just that about them, nothing else. He wondered what Falwell would say to him, if he knew about the protest or the website. But something about the closed capsule of the car protected him from the birds of worry, so he fiddled with the radio as he drove and mostly he thought of nothing, just let impressions flow over him: a hill with fruit trees, an abandoned baseball field, a middle-aged woman on a bicycle, a man in a cap and faded jeans who had been pulled over by the police.

But now and then one of the worries would peck through and he would think about Louise and all of the people he had let down and about how, if things kept going the way they had been, they were likely to cover their expenses with donations alone, without tapping into any more of the seed money from Penn's trust fund. And just that week, Kelly had said he had thought of a way for the site to turn a profit.

“I've applied for nonprofit status,” Penn had told him.

“Yeah, sure,” said Kelly. “But what if I could find some advertisers in addition to the donors?”

Penn had been noncommittal, but now the word “profit” rattled around in his head like unexploded rounds. He should be happy the men were pulling in different directions because that meant he had accomplished what he had set out to do, so why was he so bothered by it? He supposed that alongside his desire to help them was an equally strong desire to prove himself as a leader, and what kind of a leader was he if his men weren't following enthusiastically along behind?

Just after the turnoff to Annapolis and Fort Meade, the highway cut through a thick stand of trees. He tried to imagine that he was lost in a primeval forest, that all anybody needed to live was a simple cabin with a rough pine floor and a plot of land with a river running through it and a few tools and some farm animals and of course a rugged inner core, but with cars and semis whizzing by, it was hard to hold on to the vision.

Anyway, he thought as he pulled off at a rest stop for another cup of coffee and a piss, there was no denying the fact that Kelly was developing a knack for business and that Le Roy was a whiz with computers and that Danny could go for an entire day without hitting the deck when the train went through. In that regard, the website was a complete success. It was Penn himself who lacked a real direction, and in the back of his mind he was hoping his meeting with Falwell would help him with that.

F
alwell shuffled through the stack of reports on his desk—the one that said ten of eighteen benchmarks had been met in Iraq and the one that said eleven of the benchmarks hadn't been met and that only three had been completed. He found the report he was working on, and then he picked up a pen and changed “modest” to “significant.” He changed “trained” to “empowered,” and in front of “leadership” he wrote “committed and determined.” Fuck the benchmarks. Was there a benchmark for understanding the enemy? Was there one for unit readiness and self-sacrifice and morale? Was there one for showing that Americans wouldn't put up with crazy fucking shit? “Unmistakable signs of progress,” he wrote. “High levels of local cooperation and trust.” The counterinsurgency was working. They were definitely winning hearts and minds.

Falwell was in Washington to provide input for an operational assessment and, if all went well, to be recommended for a promotion and to see someone about a persistent pain in his gut and a worrisome rattling in his chest. To top it off, now one of his after action reports was being called into question on the Internet. Miller, his old NCO, had brought it to his attention, and if certain other people saw it, it could torpedo his career. He could only surmise he had Captain Sinclair to thank for drawing attention to the inconsistencies. Sinclair was the one who had first written up the IED incident, and he was the one with the guilty conscience. Any report depended on the person writing it, as well as on the freshness of the memories and on biases and agendas the writer might not even know he held. A reasonable man could argue that Sinclair's version of events was less accurate than the more measured official version, but the colonel didn't want to have to make that case. Things were muddied enough without going down some he-said-she-said rabbit hole. Falwell wasn't angry so much as irritated. Mightily irritated. And, to be honest, his feelings were a little hurt. When he'd altered the report, he'd been looking out for Sinclair's interests as much as for his own.

Once, back when he himself had been a captain, he'd led a tank company in the wrong direction. Visibility had been next to impossible due to hundreds of burning oil fields. He'd had to make a split-second decision, and he had called it wrong. The lessons learned were many: to listen to his subordinates, to take a moment even when all hell was breaking loose, to realize that mistakes came with the territory in any pressured situation. Most important of all, he had learned that the reaction of a superior could foster learning and renew confidence, which is exactly what his commanding officer had done when he had called Falwell into his office and said, “You'll get 'em next time.” That was what had been done for him and what he had tried to do in saving Sinclair from the consequences of his overly emotional report.

The very next day, Falwell's tank company had led the charge into occupied territory, and he had earned a Bronze Star for decisive leadership and superlative courage in the face of enemy fire. “Superlative” was a good word, one he liked to use whenever he could.

W
hat the fuck? asked the expression on Falwell's face when he opened the door of his Arlington hotel room. Falwell was up for full-bird colonel, and he was quick to make sure Penn knew it. “What the fuck?” he asked when the formalities were over and they were sitting down.

“I'm sorry, sir, but I'm not sure what you mean,” said Penn, who had decided to listen and say as little as possible until he found out why he was there.

“You told me you deleted your statement.”

“What statement?”

“Now someone has posted it on a website right next to my official AAR, and I'm guessing it was you.”

“What if it was?” asked Penn, worried that the colonel knew more about the website than he was letting on.

“What the fuck for?”

“I'm just telling the truth,” said Penn, grateful now for the fist that gripped his insides because it kept him from letting his guard down. And grateful for the guilt that was his constant companion because it kept him from backing off his commitment to his men. “I'm hoping it will even save some lives.”

“Truth,” said the colonel. “How exactly will your version of the truth save lives?”

“Only by acknowledging a mistake can we learn from it,”
said Penn.

“Who said that?” asked Falwell.

“You did, sir. You said I could quote you.”

Falwell picked up a sheaf of papers and put them down again. “Do you see this report?” he asked. “Sectarian violence is down; local law enforcement is up; a constitutional review committee has been formed. Ten of eighteen benchmarks met or exceeded.”

Penn looked out the window to where a glossy bird sat on a railing and pecked at the glass.

“Damn bird is trying to get in,” said the colonel.

“Why in God's name would it want to get in?” asked Penn. “We can't even understand ourselves, so how can we expect to understand birds?”

“I think we can understand birds,” said Falwell. “At least a little bit. Otherwise why would we care about them? Why would we create bird sanctuaries and set out birdseed in the winter? Why would we give a crap about the spotted owl?”

“We're so good at understanding that we barge right on in without realizing that we don't have a clue what we're hoping to accomplish. Nobody had a handle on the big picture, but they were too stubborn to admit it.”

“But that's changing. That's what the surge was all about.”

“Oh,
now
we understand. We didn't then, but now we do. There's nothing different about this time. That's the real lesson learned.”

“Who really knows anything?” asked the colonel. “You do your best with what you have.”

“And our best wasn't anywhere near good enough. The war has harmed countless soldiers and families, and it's made the world more dangerous.”

“The world has always been dangerous,” said the colonel. “We in America have an illusion of safety, but it's only an illusion. The war might have opened a few eyes—it might have opened your eyes—but it didn't change anything fundamental about the world. You want to see a dangerous world, just dismantle the American army and bring all of our soldiers home.”

Penn remembered what he had learned from the man in the library, and he couldn't disagree. “Man is warlike,” he said, but the heat had gone out of his anger. All he felt now was tired.

“What would our place in a peaceful world be, Sinclair? Do you think a peaceful world would be one where everyone agreed and justice magically prevailed? No, it would just be one where people didn't give a shit. No one standing up for anything. Everybody neutered and complacent.” He laughed without smiling. “In a peaceful world, my daughters would be in charge of things, and much as I love my daughters, that isn't something I'd like to see.”

Penn thought about what the world would be like if Louise and her friends were calling the shots. Everything would be attractive and well planned, with peonies and parsley garnishes and sparkling beverages served in champagne flutes.

“Everything becalmed and stagnant—is that the kind of world you want?”

“No sir.”

“If there's nothing worth fighting for, there's nothing worth living for either.”

“Yes sir,” said Penn.

“
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

“Theodore Roosevelt,” said Penn.

“My point is that you take your best shot. That's all any person can do.”

It was something Penn had said himself, most recently to Danny. He had not only said it, he had believed it. Now a tiny particle of hope started expanding in his breast. Maybe people could know, or if they couldn't, maybe partial knowledge was good enough.

“What do you want to do with your life, Sinclair? What are your plans?”

It was the question Penn had been asking himself. “I want to see my men back on their feet. I think that's happening—at least I'm hopeful. And after that, I haven't decided.”

“I called you down here for two reasons,” said Falwell.

“Sir?” The bird was back. Penn wondered if it had choices or only instinct and if he was more, or less, like the bird.

“One was to ask you if you are the one who posted the two versions of the IED incident on the Internet. And if you did, to ask you to take them down.” Falwell drummed his fingers on a pile of papers, and when Penn didn't reply, he said, “And the other is to ask if you are interested in this.” He took a sheaf of papers from the pile and passed it to Penn. The top page showed a group of soldiers standing at a safe distance while a robot dismantled an IED. “When I saw it, I thought of you.”