by Ciji Ware
“Wow,” murmured Juliet, “You sound like Brad—only nicer. I can’t believe you were career military.”
“I’m not anymore. And besides, encryption is only one piece of this mess.”
“No kidding,” Juliet said with some heat. “For sure I respect your service, Finn, but I happen to think the U.S. attacks in the Middle East that killed so many civilians are the very events that created this international hornet’s nest in the first place. You’re right. You can’t blame it all on encryption.”
Finn threw another log on the fire with a thud.
“Nope. And what about the lies we were fed that Saddam had yellow-cake uranium and that he was ready to use nuclear weapons? If you can’t trust top officials in your country to tell the truth, we’re in a pretty sorry state.”
Juliet was shocked to hear a former military man agree with her own opinion on the U.S. government’s faulty reasons for the build up to the war in Iraq. She said, “I was certainly persuaded by those fake arguments back then to support the Iraq invasion, more’s the pity.”
Finn threw another log on the pile with another show of force. “Weren’t we all? I went into the military thinking I was one of the good guys.”
“And now?”
Finn rose to his full height and turned around. “As you’ve just pointed out, civilian and military uses of encryption have created issues that aren’t easy to sort out, and anyone who sees the disaster that defines the Middle East simply in black-and-white is a fool. Why, exactly, have we been fighting wars for a decade and a half—and still counting? Was it just about the oil? Was it multi-national corporations only caring about their profits? Was it radical Islam wanting to wipe out all other religions? Was it the revolving door between our military and U.S. weapons makers that kept the merry-go-round spinning? No one has the corner on truth anymore.” He wiped the dust off his hands onto his jeans. “You know how your family tends to produce architects and artists? Scores of men in my family were in the military, back to the dawn of the country. It’s what we Deschanels did for God and country. My dad wrangled me an appointment to the Air Force Academy, and off I went, like the Eagle Scout I’d been in high school. Back then, who knew about drones and targeted killings?”
Finn sounded self-mocking and bitter.
“How long did it take for you to become... aware, I guess you’d call it?” she asked.
“It’s taken me a long time—too long, in fact—to see behind the curtain about a lot of issues and think things through for myself, based on some very first-hand reality checks.” He pulled a box of matches off a nearby table and stepped back to the fireplace. “After I finished flight training, I flew those combat rescue missions, and it was all about the guys in my unit and trying to save lives. I didn’t have time to consider misinformation about Saddam Hussein having yellow cake to build a nuclear bomb. It was all about avenging 9/11 and protecting the homeland.”
He lit a match and leaned down. The flames were soon licking the crumpled paper he’d stuffed under the kindling. He prodded the logs with an iron poker. “When I spent eight months in a VA hospital recuperating after my helicopter was shot out from under me, I had plenty of time to think about how America got into these wars.”
“That was when the four other soldiers died?”
Finn nodded. “When I failed the regular flight physical, but I was fit enough to pilot drones, I figured I owed those guys... something. I accepted the assignment at Creech in Nevada, which I did for three years. So you see, I responded to peer and family pressures just like you. I drank the Kool-Aid. I followed orders. I did as I was told—and as my father and my entire family back to the founding of this country would have expected of me.”
As Finn rose and stood in front of the fire, Juliet slowly shook her head. “So, while my brother was teaching horny teenagers to shoot pretend enemies, you were actually killing real enemies.”
By this time, the fire in the iron stove was burning brightly and throwing off heat. Finn closed the glass doors and sat down on the leather armchair.
“By the time I got to Nevada, our forces had already made many tribal factions in the Middle East into our enemies, so yes... they were my targets.”
“Do you miss it?” Juliet asked, holding his gaze.
“Killing people?”
“No!” Juliet recoiled, absorbing his admission that he’d killed other human beings. “Flying real aircraft. Being an Academy grad and all that goes with that? All the macho, military stuff,” she pressed. “Because that’s what I think has hooked my brother as if he was main-lining heroin. He and his friends are pretend big shot warriors who get a huge rush from all this high-flying hardware.”
“Heroin?” Finn repeated. “Well, I can tell you that what I did sitting in those unmarked trailers in the desert, killing by remote control, never delivered a ‘high’ as far I was concerned. It was soul-destroying, and I couldn’t wait to get away.”
Finn was staring at his hands in his lap, his face now a mask.
“But at least you were getting rid of some very bad guys,” she ventured.
He looked up. “Yeah, that, but we were not just shooting down psychopathic killers. My job included pointing our high-powered eyes in the sky at the aftermath of those Hellfire missiles, right down to the scenes of innocent sheep farmers whose legs we’d blown off.”
Juliet saw the haunted look that invaded his eyes.
“God, Finn,” she murmured, “what an awful thing to have seen.”
“It was worse to be the cause of it. Regular pilots just drop their bombs and fly on. There are always women and children who inadvertently get caught in those explosions. You try ending your duty shift writing up the gory details in the daily reports about the dead six-year-olds whose deaths you witnessed and know you caused.”
He compressed his lips as if willing himself to end this confession.
“God, Almighty,” Juliet said, barely above a whisper.
Finn stared out the large, darkened window on his right that faced the river. “I have no idea why, but you are the only person I’ve ever given that particular detail to.”
“Accounting for the children?”
“Yes.”
Finn had the same look she’d seen earlier, an unseeing, thousand-yard stare.
Juliet murmured almost to herself, “It would be hard to ever erase those kinds of images from my mind. I have trouble trying to forget the grisly, make-believe scenes in the junk we make.”
Finn abruptly rose from his chair and reached toward a standing lamp, flipping the switch. He began prowling the room like a panther, turning on a few other lights with military precision.
“I got to a point where I wanted to put a bullet through my head if I had to drop any more hell on people seven thousand miles away from the God-damned Las Vegas Strip.” He clicked on a wall switch with a vengeance. “When I’d finally fulfilled my obligation, I walked out of those trailers and resigned my commission without a word about it to anyone. When the paperwork was finally processed, I caught the first plane from Vegas to New York, and flew straight on to Paris where I collapsed on my aunt’s couch and didn’t even speak to her for a month.”
“That must have been a terrible time,” Juliet commented quietly.
“Drone pilots are quitting by the scores,” he announced in a flat voice. “Any self-respecting pilot hates these jobs that ‘keep us out of harm’s way,’ as the Pentagon folks are fond of putting it. It got so I could barely drag myself to the antiseptic, air-conditioned control room where we steered our Hellfires toward ‘high value targets’ seven thousand miles away and watched ’em die.”
“It sounds as if your Aunt Claudine understood what you were going through,” Juliet suggested cautiously. “She’s obviously helped you get back on track.”
Finn halted in the middle of the stateroom. “It’ll be quite a while before that happens,” he replied with a warning look, and for a moment, Juliet felt a chill run down her spine.
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br /> “Are you getting... help for...?”
She wondered how to politely ask if a person was a human time bomb?
As if he read her mind, Finn said, “Claudine got me to admit I probably had a full-blown case of PTSD, whether anyone else believed it of drone pilots or not. If you don’t have blood spurting out of your ears, the military thinks you’re fine.”
“What about your father?” Juliet challenged. “Wouldn’t he—”
“No, he wouldn’t,” Finn interrupted her roughly. “He’d never believe a drone pilot who quit wasn’t anything but a weakling, but I’ve seen guys who really flipped out and—” He shook his head. “Never mind what I’ve seen.” Hands defiantly on his hips, he continued to gaze across the stateroom as if he expected her to rise from the sofa and walk off the boat. “So, Ms. California,” he asked with one eyebrow cocked, “are you sure you’re still okay about sleeping on my couch another night?”
CHAPTER 7
Finn’s fists were clenched against his thighs. The length of his entire frame was as stiff as the poker he’d been using to stir the embers into flames in the iron fireplace. Despite his defensive stance, Juliet’s mind flashed on the many kindnesses he’d extended to her, her friend Avery, his aunt, and the Grenelles during these first tumultuous days of their acquaintance.
No, she considered, she had no fear of being an onboard guest of Major Patrick Finley “Finn” Deschanel. It was plain to see that the man was grappling with some very tough issues in his life, but he was clearly a stand-up guy—and when had she last experienced that?
“I’m fine with sleeping on your couch,” she declared, “that is, if you can give me a glass of wine tonight to settle my nerves. Do you happen to have any?”
Finn’s shoulders relaxed. He cocked his head, as if correctly interpreting the message she’d sent him that she didn’t consider him a particularly dangerous character. He shrugged and said, “I know I’ve got some Scotch and... let me see what else.” He crossed to the bookcase to survey the collection of liquor he had on the bottom shelf. “Yes! An unopened bottle of Arbouse, a nice French Rhone.”
“A red. Perfect!” She slipped off her boots and tucked her feet under her legs on the couch. “I need a little self-medication after the last couple days. Join me, will you?”
“Not for me, but how about a slice of brie and some grapes?” he suggested, and their world had returned to spinning in a normal orbit.
“You know,” she said, hoping her words sounded as if she were just making polite conversation, “I actually read a bit about drone operators and PTSD when we were preparing to release our first video war game.”
Finn looked up from the bottle he was in the process of opening. “You mean the interview with that pilot who wrote the piece in GQ magazine a while back? He was the first one publicly to break silence about what it’s like to pilot unmanned missions remotely.”
“That’s the one,” she nodded, “and wasn’t there also a government report that drone pilots had higher rates of PTSD than regular pilots because they were exposed to seeing and assessing in detail the carnage their explosives created, like you just told me?”
“That, and working twelve hours at a clip in front of those glowing screens under high stress at a base in the middle of nowhere—followed by going home every night, forbidden to talk about anything that happened while we were on duty.”
“God, it sounds absolutely awful,” Juliet sympathized, accepting a stemmed glass of wine the color of garnets.
“Cheese, et cetera coming right up.” Finn strode to a cupboard and rummaged within its shelves. With his back to her, he said, “I was lucky that Claudine marched me over to the American Hospital soon after I got here and threatened to kick me out of her apartment if I didn’t sign up for help... which I did.”
“Has it made a difference?”
Finn set a plate with offerings on his coffee table.
“Some. I got diagnosed ‘PTSD,’ all right. I’m totally off the meds and the booze, as you can see.” He waved a glass filled with carbonated water. “I see a shrink two times a week who’s trying to retrain my brain not to ‘go there’ when there are trigger events that throw me back to that trailer or... some of the things I experienced in the Middle East. Believe it or not, I even do a special kind of yoga designed for PTSD folks. I still have nightmares, which I hope I won’t subject you to while you’re here, but after seven months hiding out, as you called it... yes, I think I am better. Not cured. Better.”
Juliet could sense that Finn was waiting for her reaction to his candid disclosures. He wonders if I now think he’s a crazy person... or a wuss... or a coward. She sank back on the couch while Finn remained standing, looking down at her. She met his gaze, murmuring, “How can life get so friggin’ complicated, Major Deschanel?”
“It sure is a bitch, at times, ain’t it, Ms. Thayer?”
Juliet closed her eyes, her head cushioned by the back of Finn’s couch. No one at GatherGames would believe that she was sharing a barge on the River Seine, however temporarily, with a Major in the Air Force who’d flown drones—real ones—and admitted to having actually killed people and suffered anguish in the aftermath of his military service. Did Finn now hate the video war games industry as much as she did? The handsome man standing two feet away from her with a look, at times, of such desolation in his eyes had been an integral player in a real war with its real devastation. He also just confessed that being party to it had nearly destroyed him.
“Juliet? Have I scared you?”
At the sound of his voice, low and vibrating with intensity, she opened her eyes. “Absolutely not.” She sat up straight and took a sip of her wine in order to think through a more complete answer. “It’s just that I’m trying to take it all in, you know? How I got here. How you did. What happened in Paris last Friday. How scared I feel whenever I hear the helicopters overhead or I’m on the street by myself. What the last years have brought about for everyone. The fact you flew drones. Killed some people. The fact that, even though I hated what I’ve been part of, and knew it couldn’t be good for kids, I kept doing it—not just because I was I worried about my parents’ getting their investment back—but because I also earned a very good salary, plus stock options, using my artistic skills to make drone kills look real... ‘cool’—”
“Hey! Whoa, there!” Finn interrupted. “Before you feel too guilt-ridden that the junk your company produced is polluting the youth of America—”
“It is!” Juliet interrupted, slapping the palm of one hand against the sofa cushion.
“Maybe so,” he said, taking a seat on top of her closed suitcase standing next to the couch, “but you should probably know that I spent most of my teenage boyhood playing video war games and stuff like Grand Theft Auto given to me at Christmas by my father.”
He pointed to a picture on a nearby shelf showing a group surrounding a young man in uniform with the Colorado Rocky Mountains serving as a backdrop.
“That’s you and your family, right?” she asked.
“Yep, at graduation.” He pointed to an officer in a uniform with a chest covered with five square inches of colorful service ribbons. “Your dad owns a hotel?” he commented with a grim smile. “My dad, Andrew Deschanel, is a three-star general.”
Juliet stared at the framed picture of the Deschanel family gathered in Finn’s honor at the Air Force Academy. “Your dad has three stars? Wow. In the Air Force?”
“Army. And, incidentally, I was really good at video war games. I loved them because I beat my father all the time.”
“So were you two addicted to them, the way my brother and his buddies are?”
Finn paused, giving her question some thought. “Yeah. Probably. I played nonstop all through high school. But let me hasten to add, I soon discovered that the real deal is no game. Too bad your brother hasn’t experienced sitting in one of those innocuous-looking trailers parked in the middle of nowhere. Maybe he wouldn’t want to spend his life m
aking money off bending the minds of oversexed boys like I was, training us to think killing other humans, long-distance, is a kick-ass occupation—and a substitute for getting laid when you’re fourteen.”
Finn remained perched on her upended suitcase. Maybe he thought she didn’t want him to sit that close to her on the couch? He returned his gaze to the plate glass window just as the Eiffel Tower was suddenly illuminated with blinding brightness in shades of blue, white, and red.
“Oh, look!” Juliet exclaimed, swiveling in her seat on the sofa. “How beautiful! They’ve turned the lights back on in the colors of the French flag! Isn’t that a good sign?”
The enormous structure’s colorful outline was reflected in the water below it.
“It’ll never look the same to me.”
“No... not to you, it probably won’t,” she agreed. “Just like the space where the Twin Towers once stood in Manhattan has never looked the same to New Yorkers.” She reached out and placed a hand lightly on his sleeve. “Finn, I’ve been living in a glass house atop Nob Hill, so... just so you know... please don’t think I’d ever throw stones at you because you fought in the Middle East or flew drones.”
Finn pulled his gaze from the shining beacon across the water to observe her sitting on his couch. His blue eyes crinkled faintly at the corners. He gently chucked her chin with the fingers of one hand. “And I’d never throw them at you, either, Ms. Design Director. Maybe at your brother, but not at you.”
Juliet grew very still. The sensation of this brief encounter between his flesh and her face sent an electric current buzzing in her jaw. She almost leaned against him like the barge cat, Truffles, wanting to be petted again. An unexpected wave of relief washed through her that he didn’t judge her as she didn’t judge him. It felt like the same reprieve Finn had granted her when he insisted she not spend a night shivering in a frigid flat in a strange city where terrorists were still on the loose.