As I walked the streets of New York, there could be no silence. Music found me; color leapt out from the billboards and storefronts. It was a relief to look with open eyes at nature blooming all around me—not only the trees and flower boxes but the young, bright faces of couples, with their snippets of conversation, as they passed.
With its busy sidewalks, great museums, and expansive park, I felt the beauty and energy of the city seeping in and making me smile, despite everything, as I walked. I was looking for an express train out of grief, and New York was home to the fastest track in the world. I knew the news surrounding my life would be forgotten soon enough by the rest of the country, but it was already ancient history in New York, which metabolizes news as fast as the ever-bursting printing presses can fill the newsstands with fresh horrors.
In New York, I could try on a different persona with every new encounter. One day I went to get a haircut at a place down the street from my apartment. My hairdresser was an edgy, tattooed young girl named Claire, with an auburn bob and bluntly cut bangs. She ran her fingers through my long blonde hair, examining the ends and the handiwork of my previous stylist, and we talked for a minute about the cut I wanted. After she shampooed and combed my hair out, the requisite small talk began.
“So do you work in the city?”
“Yes,” I said, and decided to be vague without being impolite. “I work in Midtown.”
“Cool,” she said, and went back to snipping my dead ends. The silence felt a little awkward, so I made a point of turning the page of my magazine so she would think I was engrossed rather than ignoring her. When she saw me flip the page, she must have noticed my wedding ring.
“How about your husband?” she asked, trying again. “What’s he do?”
“Oh,” I said, looking up and meeting her eyes in the mirror for a second, “um, he works in high tech.”
“Cool. You guys are new to the city?”
“We just moved here from Washington State.” I went on about how we had moved a month earlier for a job opportunity, and how we both loved the energy of New York City. I wove an elaborate story of half-truths and lies, unable to stop myself, wanting so badly for the life I was telling her about to be my reality. While I liked my haircut, I realized when I left that I couldn’t go back to see Claire. What if I didn’t remember all my lies correctly? I chastised myself on the walk home, feeling that somehow, because of the charade, I wasn’t being true to Pat. But then I remembered he used to tell harmless lies like that, too. In fact, the tech field had become sort of an inside joke with us. Since we were from Silicon Valley, half the people we knew worked in the amorphous “tech” industry. When Pat first started playing football, he would sometimes tell people he did, too, because he didn’t want to look like a braggart. Since tech is massive, complicated, and, frankly, a bit boring to those who don’t work in it, usually polite inquisitors didn’t bother to follow up. Pat would have laughed at my white lie. If anyone would understand my aversion to being labeled “widow,” it would be him. The widow label was not true to who I was. Kevin in particular hated it, assuring me on occasion that I wasn’t some poisonous black spider.
The only person in New York who knew my whole story was my new boss, Maura. When I’d first moved, I had transferred to the New York office of my Seattle company, but without the camaraderie I’d felt with the Seattle group, the job itself seemed pointless. So I accepted a job with Maura at ESPN. Maura was a producer, and I was her right-hand woman. I’d met her when Pat was alive, as she’d wanted to do a story on him for the network. He’d declined, but Maura kept in touch and I’d become friends with her in the time that followed. I felt a great deal of affection for her. Ten years older than me, she was blonde and rail-thin, smoked like a chimney, and took her toy terrier, Maggie, everywhere with her. Her style was blunt, a bit rough around the edges, but she was also very real. An incredibly intense businesswoman, she was married only to her job. While my role—which consisted largely of catering to celebrities and project-managing events—didn’t hold a great deal of appeal to me in and of itself, it swept me up and filled my days with traveling, soothing people’s egos, extinguishing fires, and generally trying to keep pace with Maura’s high-energy train. There was never silence at work, never time to think. It was ideal.
One day after finishing up some plans for our next event, I plopped down on the small couch in Maura’s office. She was sitting behind her desk, Maggie perched on her lap, and she looked at me head-on and said, “I get it now, Marie.”
I smiled quizzically. Maura would often start conversations this way. I wouldn’t know where she was going, but I would try to be ready for whatever she was going to throw at me.
“I was thinking last night,” she continued, “about how I would feel if I lost this job. I wouldn’t even know who I was. And I get it. I get how you feel.”
Maura’s equating Pat’s death with the loss of a job didn’t strike me as at all insensitive. I knew how much her job meant to her, and understood the spirit of her comment. She was trying to relate and empathize with me, and in many ways, she was right. Not only had I lost Pat, I’d lost the identity of who I’d been as Pat’s wife. The identity piece of my grief was a struggle I was starting to recognize in other people—friends who’d lost jobs or broken up with a partner, or even new moms, like my sister, who’d left one life for a foreign one.
While I had identified myself strongly with my relationship with Pat, his identity was not wrapped around it. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the relationship as much as I did; he just didn’t see identity that way. He wasn’t husband, son, student, football player, soldier. He was all those things, of course, but none of those things. That was part of the reason he wouldn’t talk to the press after he decided to leave the NFL for the military. He knew the press would make him into a symbol, and he didn’t want that when the truth was much more nuanced, when people are much more nuanced. It was one of the reasons he took to studying in college. Because he was a college football player—and a good one—people wanted to identify him as “jock,” but he wanted none of that. So while he hadn’t been much of a student in high school, in college he delighted in defying people’s expectations, earning great grades and graduating early.
I tried to emulate the way Pat saw identity, but sometimes the world seems to offer only boxes—like paperwork asking me to bubble in my marital status, or a hairdresser innocently asking about my husband’s job. One evening, the simple act of getting dressed to go out brought up all kinds of identity issues. I put on my fourth shirt of the hour, but after looking in the mirror, I grimaced and pulled it off. I was twenty-nine, not fifty-nine, but felt like my pre-widow standbys of skinny jeans and a slinky top wouldn’t be appropriate. I didn’t want to wear anything too exposed or revealing, and I didn’t want to draw any male attention. Even talking flirtatiously with another guy—let alone dating—was definitely out of the question.
I was supposed to meet up with Kelly, a friend of a Seattle friend of mine. The Seattle friend, Michelle, had connected us soon after I’d moved to New York. Michelle said Kelly was great and had a cool group of girlfriends that I should get to know. Our meeting was a big deal for me, as I always had to gear myself up for social situations and the energy they required. I glanced at the clock and saw I was already running late. I pulled on a black long-sleeved shirt from the pile on my bed, dabbed on a little lip gloss, and ran out the door. I texted Kelly from the cab to let her know I was running late but would be there shortly. I lied, telling her I was stuck in traffic. The cab pulled up at the downtown restaurant and I saw two girls standing out front, stylishly dressed in short skirts, tights, and knee-high riding boots. I immediately felt old and frumpy. This was a bad idea. I wasn’t even inside yet and already was feeling shaky and insecure. Get it together, I told myself. I brushed it off, paid the driver, and went inside, where I quickly found Kelly and her crew squished around a table upstairs. Kelly introduced me to everyone, and I tried to
relax.
Michelle had been right: They were all great girls. They were young and ambitious, working mostly creative jobs in marketing, publicity, and television. This was what I had come for; this was what I had imagined life would be like in New York. I would move here and be able to join the ranks of young women like this, women who were both working and playing hard and enjoying life. All my friends from home were married by twenty-seven, and a large number of them already had kids. Among my childhood friends, I stood out as a tragic figure, or at least I thought I did. In New York, women wouldn’t necessarily be married at twenty-two, or even thirty-two or forty-two. They wouldn’t talk about husbands and kids all the time, but about politics, books, and current events. They would live independently, travel, work, and drink and eat well.
The women around me proved I had imagined it correctly. They talked about problems at work, and I tried to commiserate. This wasn’t so bad, I thought. Why had I been so nervous about this? As the evening wore on, though, the conversation turned to troubles with men. “He sent a nice text after our dinner, then went AWOL,” said the woman on my left, perplexed. “What do you think that means?” As the other women weighed in with their analysis, I stayed silent. Everyone had a story to tell about a guy who fell off the face of the earth and stopped communication after several seemingly good dates. I had nothing to add. I hadn’t dated in over ten years, and things had been much different back then. Somehow, I didn’t think the game of capture the flag was similar to any recent experiences these women might have had. The longer I listened to them compare stories of heartache, the more I withdrew.
I should have told the taxi to keep going; I wasn’t ready for this, not even close. How could I have a normal conversation with this nice, engaging group when I’d spent the day doing something so foreign to their world? For while they had spent their afternoon navigating office politics and analyzing text messages, I’d spent my afternoon trying to keep Pat’s autopsy photos off the Internet.
* * *
My relationship with the military over the past several years had gotten complex, to say the least. It started just a few days after Pat died, when members of the Casualty Assistance team came to the cottage. They had piles of paperwork for me to fill out and I just blindly signed page after page, as long as they kept feeding me information about when Pat would be flown out of Afghanistan and returned home. One member of the team was going through a list of things that were going to happen, but I barely paid attention until I heard “…and there’s going to be his military funeral.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “That’s not right. That’s not what he wanted.”
“No,” the casualty guy said, correcting me, “it is; it’s the way it’s done.”
A couple of months before Pat was deployed to Afghanistan, he’d brought home all this paperwork he’d had to sign indicating his wishes in case he was killed. He wasn’t supposed to photocopy it, but he did, and he gave it to me. “I just have a feeling,” he’d said. “I just have a feeling they might try to go against what I’ve signed, so you should hold on to these.” I’d taken them and filed them away in the bedroom; then we’d gone back to eating dinner or doing whatever we’d been doing—because when you are a military family, you can’t function if you dwell too much on things like why those forms might be needed.
As the Casualty Assistance Officer stood before me, I remembered that conversation and retrieved the paperwork. “Clearly,” I said, shoving it in front of him, “you can see that a military funeral is not what he wanted.” I was furious. “So why don’t you leave?” He looked surprised. No doubt he didn’t expect me to have any sort of documentation. He did as I asked and left.
Well over a year had passed since then, and my interaction with the military had only increased as Pat’s family and I continued to seek resolution about how Pat had died and why we hadn’t been told the truth from the beginning. Dannie in particular was persistent, and spent hours meticulously combing through investigations to make some sense of what had happened. She made lists; she asked questions; she made it clear that she would not rest until the whole story was out. I marveled at my mother-in-law’s strength. She seemed to have never-ending reserves of fearlessness and determination. If it hadn’t been for her, I don’t know how far we would have taken a search for the truth.
All we’d learned for certain was that an ill-advised and much-contested decision to split Pat’s platoon led to a confusing firefight in a canyon, where a Humvee of Rangers led by Greg Baker fired on Pat and several others in his group, killing an Afghan military forces soldier and Pat. While this was the basic story, there were a lot of inconsistencies, and we couldn’t get answers to key questions, such as why no one saw the smoke flare Pat threw out—which he had on hand expressly to identify himself as a “friendly”—why rules of engagement weren’t followed, and why his uniform and protective vest were burned, when they provided evidence as to how he had been killed.
Dannie and I were in near-constant contact, as the Freedom of Information Act required me—as Pat’s next of kin—to submit excessive amounts of paperwork to get Pat’s records released. After what seemed a ridiculous series of steps, I received his autopsy report.
I read through the document once, not understanding all the medical terminology but knowing the final outcome. CAUSE OF DEATH: Gunshot Wounds to the Head. Certain details seemed off: His height was wrong; they noted a gold-colored wedding ring, whereas his ring was platinum; a 3¾ x 3½–inch area on his left upper chest suggested there’d been an attempt at defibrillation, but why would anyone have tried to resuscitate him when, according to what we’d been told, it was gruesomely clear he was gone? I began to wonder if they’d given us the wrong autopsy. Dannie had received the report as well and had the same funny feeling. She called me at work, and in hushed tones we discussed that something was not right. Why weren’t we being given accurate information and straight answers? I did not want to have this conversation at work, but it never would have occurred to me not to pick up the phone when Dannie was on the other end of the line.
When Pat and Kevin had enlisted, we had felt unified as a family but also felt we were part of a much bigger, military family. We were all in this together. That’s why our treatment after his death felt like such a betrayal. And the thing is once you’ve been lied to, you start to think no one’s telling the truth. Conspiracy theories about Pat’s death had started to circulate almost from the beginning—some from credible newspapers. One journalist claimed to have gotten access to top secret forensic evidence that proved Pat had been shot in the head at close range—from not more than thirty feet away. If that was the case, no mistaken-identity claim would hold. Pat was high profile, Pat was outspoken, and Pat was a critic of the Iraq War—a critic who would soon be out of the military. Was it possible that all the fog and lies and confusion were about something much more sinister than fratricide? While the frame of mind I was in caused me to consider that possibility, I really didn’t think Pat’s death was a murder. If the government had wanted Pat out of the way, there were surely cleaner ways to do it than the confusing firefight that had transpired.
The most extreme conspiracy theorists faded away, and it became clear to me that gross negligence was behind the accident. Soldiers are supposed to identify their target before firing, and among other horrible mistakes, that hadn’t happened. One soldier involved even admitted that he hadn’t identified his target because he wanted to stay in the firefight. It also became clear that if the military hadn’t felt it impossible to cover up, we never would have learned that Pat’s death was a fratricide. The war was going badly when he died—very badly. And whether he’d wanted to or not, Pat had been the military’s highest-profile enlistee. The motivation was not hard to understand: Surely if the blunders and misconduct behind Pat’s death hit the press, it would only draw attention to the war’s problems. Whereas if he’d died in the pursuit of a noble goal—saving his fellow servicemen, as his friend Steve Wh
ite had been told and had repeated to the thousands watching Pat’s memorial—well, it would serve the public relations arm of the war effort very nicely. It made me sick that people had tried to twist Pat’s virtue to fit a moral narrative of their choosing. But even as I sent in request after request for information, looking for who those people were, I understood that getting stuck in those thoughts wouldn’t help my healing.
Shortly after Pat was killed, while I was still living near Fort Lewis, I decided I needed to meet with Greg Baker, the soldier who had issued the “fire” order that day in the canyon. The press had zoomed in on him from the beginning, and I felt compelled to reach out to him, to see him in person, although why, exactly, I couldn’t determine. Maybe it was because his life had changed so much that day, too. I really wasn’t sure. “Hi, Greg, it’s Marie Tillman,” I said when he picked up my call.
“Oh. Hello,” he answered, clearly caught off guard.
“I was just wondering if you’d be free for coffee—maybe Saturday at ten? I’d just like to talk to you for a minute.”
“Um, sure,” he finally said.
I suggested a place, and we hung up.
I had met Greg a couple of times before Pat died, at various barbecues and social functions at Fort Lewis. I remembered him as a normal guy, nice enough, who had wanted a long career in the military. Kevin and Pat had considered him a good person and a smart soldier. But I wasn’t sure what to expect now.
The coffee shop was filled with people chatting happily, making the purpose of my presence feel a little surreal. I skipped the drink line, sat down at a table, and waited. When Greg walked in, the first thing that struck me was how young he looked. He looked like any of the other college kids in the coffee shop with their open books, studying for exams. He glanced at me quickly, then looked down, then looked at me again. He sat down at the table I’d selected in the back corner and we talked for several minutes. “How are you doing?” he asked.
The Letter Page 9