I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (3 page)

This was the first my dad had seen of Ryan since he’d gotten out of jail. (He was the person Ryan used his one phone call on.) My dad kept his arms crossed so his biceps would look more parabolic. He beheld Ryan, grimaced, and cocked his head to the right. His tendril of hair slipped loose and dangled next to his ear. “Come on, Ryan. You can’t be getting into more fights, not now.” He handed him a clean plate. When we were in elementary school, my dad used to pack my lunchbox with an extra carton of two percent and a second sandwich—processed turkey, American cheese, yellow mustard on white bread—for Ryan. A sweating glass of milk was waiting for him now on the
kitchen table. Next to it was a baseball cap embroidered with
VIETNAM
:
I WON MY HALF
.

“Kent doesn’t eat leftovers. He’s too good for them,” my dad teased. “Survival school, Kent. You pluck a pigeon, boil it, and share it with fourteen guys—you’ll eat anything after that.”

Ryan sat down with a heap of arroz con pollo, aka C-3. My dad brought out a bag of tortilla chips and put it on the table, too, just in case. “How you been for real, though?” he asked.

“I got kicked out of community college the other day, for fighting,” Ryan said, and dug in.

My dad fingered the hat. “You ever seriously thought about the military? I think it might do you some good.”

“No, sir, not in a while I haven’t.”

“Armed forces teach you discipline. Which rules out people like this shitbird here,” he said, thumbing in my direction. “What with the running and the waking up before noon. Plus, you’re given responsibilities no one gives young people in the civilian world anymore.” He glanced at me quickly, then back to Ryan.

“I tried to get Charlie, Kent’s old babysitter’s son, to think about the navy when he was your age. All the women in his family went apeshit. They thought I was trying to get their baby killed. He’s in prison now.”

I’d never heard my dad talk like this. His arms were still crossed, but he sauntered to the head of the island.

“When I was in the navy, the armed forces were the only places that were integrated. It’s a meritocracy. Nobody cares that you didn’t go to college or had to spend a few weeks in jail.

“When you come back, it’s not like that in the civilian world. But, I’ll tell you, you’ll have things they don’t. One’s the discipline. When I got back, I went to the University of Florida’s law school and did the six semesters one after the other, boom boom boom, no summer breaks, because I had that discipline.

“The other’s that you’ll own this country. The draft dodgers, the guys who can sing ‘O Canada’ by heart—they can’t tell me shit. When you come back, you own this country more than they do. You’re a shareholder.”

Ryan bobbed his head, chewing.

“You’ll know what duty means. That’s for sure. Have the guy next to you trust you with his life, okay, and you’ll learn to embrace him more than you do yourself.”

Ryan swallowed, said, “I’ll think it over, sir,” and then bent back over his plate.

My dad turned to me, uncrossed his arms, and daubed his hair into place. I picked up some dishes and took them over to the sink, but my old man pushed me out of the way and said he’d do it.

“Eighty-second Airborne is the most elite conventional unit in the army, not counting Special Operations or Special Forces,” Ryan told me when he got back. “So every year that he can, the president comes and reviews us. This was in 2008. Twenty thousand guys standing in formation at Pike Field in Fort Bragg. We’re talking guys doing two, three, four, five tours already.

“George Bush is up on a podium, giving a speech. A couple guys start booing, then dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. Command sergeants and first sergeant majors are screaming, ‘SHUT THE FUCK UP!’ and punching guys in the back.

“Everybody knew these wars were bullshit. All those dudes over there saw their friends die. They had to murder noncombatants. For what? Going fifteen months at war, eleven months back, stop-loss, violated contracts. One of my higher-ups lied to my face; he told me I was being stop-lossed. I had to go to the civilian bureaucracy to hear I wasn’t. I mean—I had my ace in the hole, the doctor’s note about my mom and how I needed to
care for her. But, still, I was disappointed. I’m a sergeant now. I would never lie to my soldiers like that.”

After six months in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Ryan shipped off to Afghanistan. I was in my junior year of college. He’d given me the address of his forward-operating base, a bit of reconditioned Soviet concrete still stained with blood. I decided I’d write him a letter.

It took me two weeks to draw up a rough draft. I had no idea what to tell him. I couldn’t imagine that he’d want to hear about things like parking tickets and football games. But then, maybe that was exactly what he wanted to hear. I didn’t know whether I should handwrite it or not—we’d never been sentimental about anything, but I thought handwriting it might show that I was really taking time out. I didn’t know how to word the thing. Should I speak in the language and memories of our best times, middle and high school? Or would he prefer I be the college junior I was? I had no idea how to talk to him anymore.

After several drafts, I decided to just type the thing casually and in one go. I wrote about what was happening with the family, and how I was doing in classes, and what our friends were up to now. I told him that when I saw him over Christmas, I’d take him to a hockey game. I closed by telling him that I loved him, because I did, and I’d never said it before. I didn’t want to miss what could be my last chance to say it.

The day I mailed the letter, I went to the very house where Ryan was living when he got arrested. His roommate was out of jail and having a party. A dozen-plus of my childhood friends were crowded around a keg in the backyard.

Someone had parked a car back there and was blasting bad hip-hop out of it. Dudes shouted over a beer pong table that splayed on four uncertain legs like a newborn giraffe. The
spread boughs of a big live oak hid the sky, but a lattice of white Christmas lights stood in for stars. Wet, dead leaves stuck to everything. A kid who used to be my partner in Spanish class was trying and failing to light a fire in the fire pit. Two guys raced around the outside of the house in some kind of beat-the-clock drinking game. One of them tripped, fell, and vomited.

I’d thought of my nonservice as my individual decision. The men in my family who’d served before Ryan had done so in either the draft era or a time of national muster. It was what boys did. But now, with a volunteer military, my decision not to serve was simply another choice I was free to make, like choosing not to go to church. It was the sum of my conscience, my ambitions, and my own best interests.

As for Ryan—I thought he’d made the best choice available to him. Service would straighten him out and give him money for school. It was a way of getting his life together. He hadn’t told me why he enlisted, but it wasn’t exactly hard to figure out, either. He’d failed his way into rank, another poor college dropout in trouble with the law.

But that night I went up to my friend Dennis, who knew Ryan, who’d had Ryan over for parties and had invited him to play football every Saturday for ten years, and I told him that right now, as we spoke, Ryan was huddled somewhere in the thawing Hindu Kush waiting for the Taliban to regroup and attack.

Dennis’s eyes glazed in an instant. They seemed to sheathe themselves with a membrane. “Man, I’m sorry to hear that. That’s too bad.” That was everyone’s reaction when I went around, proud but scared, talking about Ryan: “That sucks, but he’ll bounce back.” As though this was an appendectomy, something to get out of his system.

I was disgusted by these people. But, I thought, this is what he’s defending, right?

I proposed a toast to Ryan, to his survival. Dennis countered, “We should probably be praying for the Taliban. They’re gonna need it. Ryan was born for that shit.”

I thought: He’s right. I once was riding shotgun in Ryan’s car when some teens going the other way over a two-lane bridge threw a hamburger that splocked onto his windshield. A whole, unbitten McDonald’s twenty-nine-cent hamburger. I laughed at the absurdity. But Ryan pulled an eight-point turn and chased after them. He drew a machete from under his seat. In my head I begged the teens,
Keep going, oh God,
because I knew Ryan might kill them. They escaped by running a red light.

If anyone should fight the Taliban, I thought, it was that man. If it’s between him and me, he should go every time.

We settled on
L’chaim
and kept drinking.

Ryan was in Afghanistan for fifteen months between 2007 and 2008. He was stationed a thousand meters from the Pakistani border, his objective to kill or capture any noncoalition forces crossing the Durand Line in either direction. Days, he patrolled mountains. At night, he went on raids and ambushes. Sometimes, he gathered intel on suspect villagers before kicking down doors, his finger on the trigger.

He carried the biggest gun, the SAW, squad automatic weapon. When a group of guys shot at his group of guys, or when he thought they had, he got up and raked their position with hundreds of 5.56-millimeter rounds. His job was to lay down covering fire, lick things with a lead tongue. Later, he’d tell me that combat happened subconsciously. No thoughts, only effervescence. This feeling of a million fizzes rising one on another. I’ve since wondered: Is that what unconditional love feels like?

It was on Ryan’s tour of duty that the Taliban turned to
improvised explosive devices. IED incidents and deaths in Afghanistan increased 400 percent during his deployment. One such incident involved his friend and squadmate Juan Guzman, who was killed while patrolling a small Afghan town in a Humvee. Ryan at the time was back at base.

“As shit was winding down, random people started sending me stupid e-mails asking me stupid shit. I was disgusted with them. I didn’t want to talk to them. I had this sense that I was different than everybody. I was like,
You don’t understand, so don’t talk.

“But I also thought that I had
less
entitlement to this country than everyone else. I feel like America’s this big circle, and I’m outside the big circle looking in on it. I’ve been away for so long doing weird shit in a weird country. I see everybody and how they act and I don’t understand. People treat me different if I tell them I was in the army. I like to sink back and be in the crowd, so I don’t tell anyone I served.”

Before moving back to Florida, Ryan did a semester at DePaul University in Illinois.

“I was in my German class, and the girl sitting next to me pointed to my KIA band for Guzman and said, ‘What’s that?’

“ ‘Nothing.’

“ ‘Is it a bracelet?’

“ ‘No, it’s something else.’

“ ‘Seriously, what is it?’

“ ‘It’s for my buddy, he got killed by Taliban.’

“ ‘I didn’t know you were in Afghanistan.’

“ ‘You never asked.’

“She thought it was such a big deal I didn’t tell her. Her name’s Emily. We used to be German partners. I used to walk her to the subway and shit. After that she sat away from me and found a new partner. Maybe she thought we had nothing in common, or she disagreed with me going over there. Whatever.

“I can’t study in the library because every person who walks by, I have to raise my head from the textbook and evaluate them as potential threats. I can’t sit in the middle of the library. I sit in the corner with my back to the wall, with good lines of sight and proximity to an exit. I’m completely paranoid now. I don’t carry a firearm here only because it’s illegal to do so in Illinois. I know that’s not normal. But I’ve seen so many lives snatched from seemingly nowhere. I learned from that. I’m not going to be a victim.”

We carry two cases of Corona to a condo pool, Ryan wearing his boxers, his unlaced army boots, and his dog tags. His high-and-tight is growing out. His show muscles have receded into the lean, predatory symmetry of the rest of him.

We recline against the ledge in the shallow end, grandstanding our empties on the steps out. Our conversation is stilted and awkward; we need three beers to limber up. “Fucking Afghani Bedouins, man. Those guys are badasses,” he tells me. “They kill anyone who messes with them, us or Taliban.”

Story goes: His patrolling squad approaches a small tribe of Bedouin in a valley in eastern Afghanistan. Things are tense. There’s mutual mistrust, and everybody’s slung with guns. A baby cries out, and Ryan’s squad goes on alert. They search the tribe for the baby but see none. The baby screams again, this time joined by a few others. Then a soldier screams, because he’s found a baby. “In the fucking hair, dude. They strap the babies to camels under all the hair, to keep the sun off them. They had, like, eight fucking babies strapped on that camel.”

Ryan kneels in the water, only his head above it, and looks to the sky. His tags are ringed with black rubber, and they float in front of him like an ineffectual tug. He tells me how his squadmate from Texas talked the Bedouin into letting him ride one of
their horses, and how the Texan rode it hard into the distance, dust trail kicking up, into a no-shit sunset. For once, the whole squad was at ease, watching the cowboy do what he would’ve done back home.

I ask Ryan a question I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: “Why was it you and not me?”

“Why would you waste a rich life full of potential? Jesus, Kent. Don’t waste the best of America on this bullshit war. Let the guys with criminal records go. Jesus.”

Ryan has blood bruises on his face from a bar fight he got into the other day. They’re globular and asymmetrical, as if even his skin’s fatigued. It happened while he was playing pool with a guy from his platoon. When we were little, we used to split a pair of Everlast boxing gloves and whale on each other in the front yard, the righty exchanged every other round.

“What about your kid, when you have one?”

“Absolutely not. Never. Fuck that.”

“What if your lawn’s under attack?”

“Then I’ll be his fucking squad leader. If that’s the case, I’ll sacrifice him.”