Now and Again (5 page)

When True came up to her at her going-away party, which was no more than Dr Pepper and a store-bought sheet cake in the lunchroom, and said, “So, you think you're better than us, do you?” Maggie only had to put her hand on True's sharp little shoulder blade and say, “Don't get me wrong,” for True to burst into tears and splutter, “I'm going to miss you, Maggie! Of course I'll still have Misty, but you know how bossy Misty is.”

“I suppose you're going to work at that chicken farm out by the highway,” said Misty, covering up her own dismay with her usual air of superiority.

“Oh, no!” exclaimed Maggie. “I can't take a job that will bring suffering to someone else.”

“Someone! Chickens aren't people!” True and Misty laughed 'til they cried over that, and the story spread like wildfire throughout Red Bud and north to Glorietta that Maggie Rayburn was giving up everything to live a moral life.

T
wo weeks before Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Falwell's Forward Support Battalion was scheduled to go home, Falwell was informed that all tours were being extended. The order had come down “effective immediately,” but whether he did it out of fear or compassion, the colonel put off telling his troops. He had considered writing a letter on official stationery that they could have in their hands as he made the announcement, but he couldn't get the wording right. He liked to write things. He liked the feel of ink from his West Point pen flowing onto a fresh sheet of paper and he liked the crisp credibility of the final word-processed document. Above all, he liked finding the perfect word for a particular sentiment. But what was the perfect word for “fucked”?

As the day of liberation neared, discipline had deteriorated to the point of insubordination, which reflected badly on all of them, but mostly on Falwell himself. All day long, irritation had been squeezing his eyebrows together and forcing itself into the cavity behind his lungs, and now he was being called to brigade headquarters to get their new orders. Which meant he had to tell his troops ASAP.

One leadership lesson he'd learned was to get his ducks in a row before making a pronouncement, but his ducks depended on other people's ducks, all the way up the chain to the president, who had the upcoming election to consider. Meanwhile, did he continue to send supplies to the northern bases? What did he tell the news crew that had come to interview him about the New Way Forward, which was also being called the Surge? And where did he put the incoming troops if nobody was leaving? He was jumpy. The jumpiness, combined with the guilt he was feeling, made him snap at Miller, his Command Sergeant Major, when Miller came in with yet another stack of reports. Lunchtime came and went. By midafternoon he could put it off no longer. He slammed his fist on the desk and told Miller to muster the troops. An hour later, 300 men and women stampeded into the DFAC, tipping over chairs and telling high-spirited jokes because they still believed they were going home.

“One more trip to Tikrit and we're free,” said one of the soldiers.

“Too bad we missed Mardi Gras,” said a second soldier, and a third said, “There's always Burning Man.”

“Haven't you seen enough of those right here in Iraq?” asked the first.

“Yee-haw,” said the third.

“They can celebrate after we win the war,” grumbled the colonel as he followed Miller to the front of the room. Washington promised that a surge in troops would be accompanied by a surge in support for the war, not only among Americans, but among Iraqis. But Falwell thought they should have fucking surged back at the beginning instead of committing to that zip-in-zip-out light-footprint strategy, which had been the only way to sell a war without raising taxes and upsetting the folks at home and which someone or other had described as “just enough troops to lose.” Not that political considerations were any of his concern, but now and then he couldn't help thinking, What the fuck?

Whenever the door opened, a gust of wind puffed the cheeks of the tent in and out according to some unseen geophysical rhythm, and still the colonel stood silently next to Miller, waiting while the men scraped into the chairs, some of them whistling and others laughing and punching each other on the arm. The ones who were sitting were banging their fists on the tables, and the latecomers, who had elbowed their way into the gaps between the tables in order to hear, were now pushing at one another and asking what was up before deciding it didn't matter: just two more days and they'd be gone.

Falwell thought how easy it would have been only a year before to bark out the facts and turn on his heel, but an unfamiliar wave of indecision washed over him, leaving him unsure of how to proceed. Sometimes he liked to shout out “Terror and ecstasy!” at strategic places in his inspirational speeches. Even though the troops didn't know the words referred to Nietzsche's view that only by joyously affirming suffering could man transcend meaninglessness, and even though the colonel didn't remember anything about Nietzsche but that, it still felt good to say the words. Now he wanted to say something that would penetrate their thick buzz-cut skulls and detonate their centers of understanding, but he didn't know what that something should be.

Falwell appreciated that the male prefrontal cortex didn't mature until the mid- to late-twenties, which was why young, uneducated men made such good soldiers and why college students, like Falwell had once been, admired Nietzsche's early writings and also why, at forty-seven, he couldn't think of anything pertinent to say that would transcend the wide gulf that separated a man with a developed brain from a room full of men without. Men and women, he corrected himself. He didn't know much about women, and what he thought he knew was always turning out to be wrong. Just ask his ex-wife and his daughters how much he knew about women and they would say jack shit.

His mouth was dry. His lips were cracked. His tongue felt like a hairless animal caught in a trap. Not to mention that lately he'd had a persistent, hacking cough that he should probably see a doctor for. “Fucking desert,” he said to Miller, and Miller said, “Yes sir,” in that well-oiled, agreeable way he had.

The noise in the DFAC was deafening. Even though some of the sound was absorbed by the soft canvas ceiling and the plywood floor that had been laid over the shifting desert sand, Miller had to shout to be heard. “At ease the noise!” he bellowed.

One by one the stragglers collapsed into the remaining chairs or shuffled forward from the back of the room or stood against the wall with their legs apart, increasingly alert to the long shadow of silence cast over the room by their commander. After a few seconds more, most of them had stopped pounding on the tables, and when Miller barked, “I said, lock it up!” the last of them stopped talking too, until the only thing Falwell could hear was the flapping of the canvas roof and, somewhere, a loose board banging in the wind. Even the tent seemed to be holding its breath and waiting for him to speak. Still, he gazed a fraction of a minute longer at his men, seeing in them his own youth, his own heedlessness, and also his own desperation to believe in something larger than himself.

Finally, Falwell cleared his throat. He confined himself to pointing out that full participation in life involved disappointment and tragedy and that the troops should enthusiastically embrace their lot, first because they were soldiers and second because there wasn't any other choice. He added a few sentences from his Center of Gravity speech, which was loosely based on the theories of the great Prussian general and strategist Carl von Clausewitz. “Where the U.S. Army tends to conceive of the COG as the thing standing in the way of accomplishing a mission,” he said, “I see it as an individual's source of moral and physical strength. That's something every one of you is going to need.” Then he bluntly announced that the tours were being extended, no exceptions, end of case. “I am headed to Command Headquarters this afternoon to receive new orders. I will brief you again as soon as I return.”

Miller was standing stiffly at the colonel's side, glaring at the troops arrayed before them until one by one the men and occasional woman stood at attention. One by one they stood tall and straight and focused on the middle distance, not looking at their colonel—just as he was not looking at them—but at the nothing the army had taught them to look at in order to avoid distraction, in order to be completely attuned to the form of things, in order to be tensed and settled and ready for whatever might be coming next. Content would follow form, the army had promised them, and for the colonel, it had. He believed in the mission completely and in the soaring American spirit backed up by the taloned might of American power. But sometimes he wondered if anyone knew what they were trying to accomplish. Sometimes he asked himself, What the fuck?

Falwell was nearing the half-century mark, and what lay beyond the middle distance when he dared to look that far was no longer what he had seen there as a young man or what the young men before him would see if they refocused their eyes. What lay beyond the middle distance, for him, was not the terror or ecstasy of youth, but resignation and a belief in partial truths. And beyond those things was the face of Sarah as she had been on the day of their wedding and also as she had been on the day of their divorce. He arranged his features to convey fierce devotion to duty. He straightened his already straight shoulders, and then he barked out, “Dis-missed!”

The men in the front started talking quietly, but the men farther back resumed their jokes and laughter.

“But sir,” said Miller, “I don't think they heard you.”

The wind was blowing again, shrieking, really, and maybe it had never stopped.

“Not now,” said the colonel. “It's already past fifteen hundred hours. I've got a chopper to catch. I'll get my gear. Have the driver bring my vehicle out to the yard.”

C
aptain Penn Sinclair's outlook had changed since joining the army. For one thing, he no longer heard his father's voice in his head saying, “You're a Sinclair, son, and the Sinclairs have never been Keynesians.” He led a logistics unit, tasked with making sure supplies got to the soldiers who needed them, and it was more likely that the voice in his head would say, “You name it, we'll get it for you or die trying.” He no longer needed to decide if existence preceded essence or if the universe was a grand illusion perpetrated by an unseen force or if there was a foolproof way to distinguish right from wrong or if numbers were real or constructed. “I no longer wonder if you and I see the same thing when we look at the color red,” he had told his girlfriend of four years over the telephone only the day before. “But I could build a school for you in less than six weeks.”

“I like you better this way,” Louise had replied.

“So do I,” said Penn.

“I've changed too,” she told him. “The old me would have tried to convince you that red is only good as an accent color. Of course, I still believe a little red goes a long, long way, but now we're meeting somewhere in the middle—conversationally, I mean. What's halfway between macro and micro?”

“Six to eight trucks,” said Penn, because at just that moment his NCO, a steady man who was known as Velcro, came over to remind him he was late for a briefing.

“You see?” cried Louise triumphantly. “I was thinking the exact same thing, except about bridesmaids. The optimal number is six, seven including the maid of honor.”

“Big enough to cover each other, but small enough to move quickly,” said Penn.

“Exactly right,” replied Louise.

And it no longer made him angry when his father said, “What do you say you put those government-issue leadership skills to work for me?” He could reply, “I'm not cut out for finance, Dad,” without feeling he had to scrape the glue off of his feet or ace his serve to win the set.

Immediately after the meeting in the DFAC, the colonel sought the captain out for a quiet word. “Hold tomorrow morning's convoy for a couple of hours,” he said. “Just in case something changes and the supplies are needed somewhere else. I'll let you know by eight hundred thirty hours.”

Sinclair followed the colonel toward a vehicle that was waiting for him near a row of containerized housing units. “Where might they be needed?” he asked.

“I'm guessing Anbar Province, but I'll know more after my meeting at HQ.”

“Al Anbar Province? We're abandoning our projects in Tikrit?”

“We're not abandoning anything yet, Sinclair. Did I say I'd have more information after my meeting at HQ?”

“Yes sir, you did. It's just that we've collected some books and other supplies for that school we're building on the outskirts of Samarra. I thought the men could drop them off on their way north.”

Some months before, Sinclair had joined forces with a construction unit that was building a school in its spare time. He saw it as a way not only to make a lasting contribution, but also to foster cohesiveness in his cobbled-together logistics unit, which increasingly seemed to be made up of misfits transferred out of units where they had gotten into trouble or failed to fit in. And the unit had gelled—at least it was gelling. Now Velcro only had to say, “Look sharp!” for whomever he was addressing to jump away from the computer where he was playing solitaire or trying to discover what his girlfriend was doing behind his back and say, “Yes sir! What can I do for you, sir?”

Now and then he or Velcro laughed and said, “Don't forget that we were transferred in from other units too. What does that say about us?”

“Good,” said the colonel as he got into the waiting Humvee. “Building infrastructure is an important benchmark. But the strategy is changing, which means the kinetics will have to change as well. This isn't just about winning hearts and minds, Sinclair. This is about searching out the bad apples before the rot spreads. This is about clearing neighborhoods and safeguarding residents from violence and intimidation. We'll have to wait to see if and how your school fits in.”

“Finishing what we started is important to the men.”

“No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy,”
said the colonel. “Do you know who said that?”

“Yes sir.” It was Moltke the Elder, but it could have been Penn's father, who never tired of stressing the Darwinian need to adapt.

“What we started is a war,” said the colonel. “Not that we started it.”

“Yes sir.”

“Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult,”
said the colonel.

“Clausewitz,” said Penn.

“The little things are the big things.”

“I don't know who said that, sir, but the school nicely illustrates the point.”