Eleven Days (12 page)

“I’m sorry, sir,” says Jason. He doesn’t know the other guy’s rank but knows enough to show deference when he’s on the wrong side of the barrel. He also knows he fucked up, and it makes him very angry. He shouldn’t have been fooling around. “Situational awareness, JG,” the officer says. He says it quietly, leaning in close to Jason’s ear. “Situational awareness.” And the officer is right. Punishment for this would be physical, and it would be more than a rap on his knuckles.

*

Jason doesn’t like to admit when he makes a mistake. It’s rare. Things were going well; he had distinguished himself throughout ULT, in particular during land warfare. Tactical bars were raised, and he rose to meet them. His platoon chief rarely isolated anyone for praise, but he’d taken Jason aside and made it clear he was pleased. This made the slip-up in the kill house particularly tough. It wouldn’t happen again.

There is so much going on now because the Teams are all on deck for these wars. After 9/11, the Naval Special Warfare org chart underwent the classic institutional revisions begged by shifting circumstances, particularly in the Middle East. What was
needed now was a force whose skill set was deeper, whose logistics were leaner. The new demands ran smack into the absence of a draft and into an enemy harder to understand than any predecessor. Deployment cycles shifted to accommodate demand. An aggressive operator could spend more time downrange than in any prior conflict.

Jason knows this. And he tries to keep focused. But sometimes he feels waves of anxiety, and these can bring on waves of doubt or distraction. He will never mention these episodes to anyone and is careful to keep up a calm front of total commitment and total confidence. Feelings are things to be analyzed and discarded before the load-out. Now, only weeks before leaving for war for the first time, controlling his emotions is his primary goal. It is one he will reach.

Ironically, once he is sent into a real house in a real city with real unknowns, he is absolutely calm. Abroad, on the base, there are no more nightmares. By his second deployment, he rarely has the anxiety pangs anymore, and he rarely experiences doubt. By his third, he is in complete control of his emotions—even, he sometimes thinks, while sleeping, as increasingly his dreams are mission-specific and take place underwater. By his fourth, having seen one too many things he is not sure he can ever forget, he will slowly start to relearn how to access his feelings. He knows he’ll need them in new ways when back home. The emotional arc of an operator is not unlike that of most civilians: born idealistic, cynicism comes with experience and then develops into a cautious optimism—or acceptance—of the tasks at hand. Controlling emotion when op tempo is high isn’t a skill; it is an art.

*

Another young guy, a guy who had joined their BUD/S class near the end, having been rolled back two times prior, was never able to master this art. He had cracked up during the predeployment period, at the end of ULT, and was fired. This is extremely rare. And the effect it had on the others was the opposite of the effect of the bell ringing out for DORs in BUD/S. When someone rang that bell, it soldered the resolve of the ones who stayed. When a person dropped during BUD/S, some of those left behind felt the bell was ringing to applaud their own resistance to it; another bell meant another time that you had not rung it. But for someone sent home at this later stage in the game, almost two years since they had all arrived in Coronado, there was no bell. No one was dropping out now because they were tired or cold or wet—or hungry. “Poor nutrition,” said one of the other guys, by way of rumor. “He wasn’t eating, apparently. He got dehydrated. You’ve got to drink. Lack of water is lack of oxygen to the brain.” Variations on this became the theme of the One Who Left.

It was true that the young E-5 had stopped eating. At first the others thought he was ill. And then they thought he was engaging in some kind of a hunger strike. This platoon would soon find itself at the epicenter of the international political landscape. And most of them didn’t have time to consider the one guy in their midst who was slowly losing himself. His fast went on, and by the time it was time to take action, it was too late. These guys are not callous; most have big hearts. But it never occurred to most of them that someone who had seemed so strong could in fact be slipping away and changing psychological course dramatically. It occurred to Jason; he’d tried to intervene.

The boy was one of the youngest. He had grown up in West
Texas, near Marfa, with a father who mistreated him and a mother, a painter, who left when he was two. He was whip-smart; he’d gone to Austin on full scholarship and studied astrophysics. Stars and poetry were his passions. He’d had four lines from a Kipling poem tattooed on the back of his left shoulder in a bar near Fort Hood. And he was one of the finest guns on the range, the one all the others envied, the one they were all sure would end up acing sniper school with the chance to take the shot at UBL. Jason and he had bonded over books and had spent hours talking about their hopes of becoming wise warriors. They’d obsess over various historical scenarios of the perfect shot—in Team lore, these were legion. The perfect shot followed by the perfect silence: snipers prefer their big kills to go unremarked. Jason hoped they would end up somewhere together, in a position to do some serious damage—which is to say, some serious good.

So when Kipling started slipping, Jason noticed right away. At first he’d chalked it up to nerves. When you see someone daily, sometimes you never notice the most shocking changes, but Jason’s watch on his guys was close. He knew about their lives; he knew the names of their sisters and brothers, the makes of their dream cars, the reasons they came to serve. Jason tried to draw them out, source any problems. But in Kipling’s case, he’d failed. The night before Kipling left the Teams, Jason had sat in his room with him, as if on watch.

“Do you ever get scared?” Kip asked.

“Nah,” said Jason. “Not anymore.”

“Really?”

“Nope.” Here was the art in high gear: controlling any appearance of emotion was crucial.

“How do you shut it off?”

“Shut what off?” Jason asked.

“How do you shut off your mind?”

“You don’t shut it off. You just think about—you just think about what’s right in front of you. You concentrate.”

“My mind is starting to wander more and more,” Kipling said. “I see things.”

“Like what kinds of things?”

“I see the house where I grew up. When I was little. I see the windows in the house, and I worry that the windows need repairing. I see the girl I lost my virginity to. I see, like, myself sitting in an office somewhere.”

“What do you think that’s about?”

“I think I am afraid to go back.”

“But, buddy, you’re right here.” Jason grabbed Kipling’s wrist. “We haven’t even started yet.”

“I know. And I feel like each day I move forward is another day I will be less able to go back.”

“Back to what?”

“Right. I don’t know back to what. And that’s what’s driving me silly.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not so sure going back is so great. But what can we know? Let’s be logical. The only thing that matters is now.”

“Suffering—” said Kipling.

“ ‘Suffering does exist. Suffering arises from attachment to desire. Suffering ceases when attachment to desire ceases. Freedom—’ ”

“ ‘Freedom from suffering is possible by practicing the path,’ ” said Kipling, and laughed. “Not so sure about that bit.”

“You taught me,” said Jason.

“I did,” Kipling said. And then he said, “I’m not free.”

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Jason said. “You’re
fine
.”

“I don’t like the dreams.”

“Focus on the girl.”

“You mean—”

“Focus on the girl, and forget about the window.”

“I will try.”

They sat for a while. Jason was reading Al Jazeera online, and Kipling was playing solitaire on his phone. And then Kipling said, “I know this sounds crazy, but sometimes I think that child soldiers are not an entirely insane idea. You send young kids to do these things, and they have no idea what they are doing. And they are not leaving children and lovers behind. They have never been in love. They are just fresh enough to face battle without either preconceived notions or hesitations. In fact, they still possess the sense of fantasy to approach it like a game.”

“That’s fucked up,” said Jason. “Children leave behind their mothers.”

And then he remembered that Kipling hadn’t had a mother. That made the things he said make more sense, even if it did not make them rational or acceptable. Kipling could end up like Kurtz in a cave, Jason thought, if this continued. Something has broken in him. And Jason resolved not to leave him that night; he’d stay up all night if he had to, and he did. They talked more broadly about a few things—the last several American presidents, and which ones they’d liked; the games they’d watched the week before, which they hadn’t liked at all; the other guys in the Teams, and which ones they most hoped would be by their side if things ever got complicated. Finally Jason closed his eyes. Maybe if he fell asleep, or pretended to, Kipling would, too. Maybe if he fell asleep, he would wake up, and all this would have been a dream. He didn’t want to lose this guy. He didn’t know what else to say.
He was almost asleep when Kipling poked him awake. It had been over an hour.

“I’d definitely want you,” Kipling said.

“What?” Jason said.

“I’d definitely want you in a fight.”

And even though he knew the answer, Jason asked, “Is there anything I can do?”

“Nope,” Kipling said.

“You sure?”

“Yup.”

“Keep in touch. We can talk about your girls and my absence of girls.”

“That sounds good, man.”

“Good night,” said Jason.

“Good night. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

Three hours later Kipling was gone. Jason arrived at breakfast to find the others were all talking about it. Jason would continue to quiet any talk on the topic as the weeks went on. It didn’t look good, someone leaving at that time. The types of guys who would leave should have been well screened out by this point in time. Discovering someone who had been so unhappy was like discovering a bomb had been ticking inside an Academy classroom. Jason understood that dispassion toward Kipling would turn into distrust and then, eventually, disdain. There was nothing he could do about that. There was not a lot of acceptance—yet—of this kind of behavior, even as variations on this behavior would be something the guys would see more of during future deployments and, increasingly, on leaves. Jason would have to watch more closely. Would a closer watch keep them all sane?

Jason did not hear about his friend again for a long time. Then, following his fourth deployment, while home for a brief leave
before returning for what would become the mission where he would go missing, he heard something. He heard it casually, sitting in a jeep going from the airport to where he would be renting a new little house in Virginia Beach. The young enlisted guy driving him, a newly minted Team member just starting PRO-DEV, or “professional development,” the first six months of three final predeployment training phases, asked Jason if he’d known someone the guys all called Kipling. The kid had done the math and figured out that Jason and Kip would have been the same class. He told Jason he had heard the facts back home (he was also from Texas) when he was first starting to think about trying to sign up for the navy. Special operations stories inevitably traveled local veterans networks like AP feeds, so it wasn’t surprising. The story had not deterred him, but he was not sure how much of it was myth.

What he had heard was that Kipling had requested dismissal for medical reasons and that, following an evaluation in which he was pronounced clinically depressed, suicidal, and at serious risk to himself and his peers (an evaluation, Jason realized, that must have taken place before that night they’d stayed up so late), discharge was granted. He had gone back to Texas. Not long after arriving home to no family and no job, he’d attempted suicide and failed. He’d used an M4 rifle. The failure was a fact that didn’t sound right to Jason. A highly trained operator failing to shoot himself? Unlikely. But perhaps the attempt was a cry for help. Or perhaps it was the signal to the world outside that he had been sick enough that he had had to leave.

“Did he marry?” Jason asked the young boy that day.

“Yes, sir. He was married not far from Waco. There was a piece about it in the paper. And a picture. He married a really pretty girl, and he teaches at a local public school—a really good
school, I know some people there. I know a guy who went there and said it was really tough, really disciplined. I thought about driving over and trying to meet him.”

“Was he—was he wearing his uniform in the wedding picture?”

“Yes, sir, I remember that.”

“Do you know what subject he teaches?” Jason asked.

“History. I know that because they talked about it in the article. He is very popular. He teaches military history. And he has a blog, too.”

All of this made Jason feel slightly sick. The uniform—the blog. But he resolved not to judge. He resolved to visit Kipling once his service was complete. Despite their differences, he’d liked him. And he’d tried, and failed, to fully understand him. He had taken a photograph of his tattoo once and sent it to his mother.

“Sir, what was he like?”

“He was—he was a big thinker,” Jason said.

“And sir, why did he leave?”

“I don’t know. Could have been the girl.”

*

Throughout the Teams, the guy with the magical lungs is increasingly well known, but not for his swimming. And following his first two deployments, he is increasingly well respected as an operator. Jason approaches his work with dispassionate, methodical precision; he loves what he does, and he knows he does it well. As the cycle of deployments begins, most of the missions he’s called on to assist with have not even involved water. If he’s holding his breath, he’s holding it in houses.
So much pool comp, so few pools
, he thinks. His Draeger LAR V, the underwater breathing device that became a fifth limb through certain chapters of training, sits in the
corner of a safe on base like a big black bug, unused and acting more as an amortization input for U.S. Defense as a percentage of GDP than as a conduit for better breathing.