Eleven Days

by Lea Carpenter

  “I love it,” he says.

  “You deserve it. You’re the Jesus child.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The only male son? It’s what we used to call my brother, teasing him. The Jesus child is the child on whom excessive and at times undue or unreasonable adoration is showered. The child incapable of error. The child of whom much is expected. The child—”

  “I get it.”

  “Is it you?” she asks, eyeing the accuracy of her twinkly garlands.

  “I think you’d have to take that up with my mother.”

  “Well, I plan to withhold adoration until I know for sure. Adoration and expectation.”

  “Adoration: is that a euphemism?”

  For Christmas Eve supper, she cooks turkey and gives a toast. Her family was big on toasts, especially at holidays, when apparently they all felt the need to restate their affections for one another. It made him uncomfortable; he’d been raised to show less. It flashed through his mind, but only briefly, that perhaps he should say something too, even ask her to marry him, seal the deal right now. Instead, he says nothing. They drift upstairs, leaving his kitchen a happy mess. “Wake me if you see Santa,” she says sleepily, then closes her eyes. She doesn’t need him to tell her how he feels. She knows.

  In the middle of the night, he gets up. He wants to check once more that he has everything he needs, a nervous habit he’s had since well before now, the classic anticipation of failure that inevitably accompanies a history of unbroken success. He is ready to leave again. In fact, he can’t wait to go. “Back to the playground,” one of the guys says each time they head out. And the statement was a mix of gallows humor and confession: they all knew they were headed to a broken place—most of them sure it was too broken for them to fix.

  The lights of the tree are still on and are enough to see by. He lays out everything to take with him under its branches, and sees she’s slipped a few gifts there. He makes a mental note not to forget to write down how he feels at this moment and how grateful he is for her. He wants to be sure that she knows. He doesn’t ever want her—or anyone, for that matter—to think of him as a Jesus child. Christ.

  Pushing the presents aside, he lays down his plate carrier, into which he will fit the following: six ChemLights, readily accessible and used for marking different things—deconfliction points (blue), cleared rooms (green), prisoner marshaling areas inside a house (red); two sets of flex-cuffs; three flashlights; two knives (one Microtech, one Emerson) and one Gerber multitool; an E and E kit with signaling mirror, compass, Clif bar, PowerBar gel, batteries, and a magnesium fire-starter kit; a small Garmin GPS Foretrex 401 for the butt of his rifle and a larger Garmin for backup; his Oakleys, with interchangeable lenses (amber, dark, and clear); a Rapid Rod for punching his bore clear in the event that his rifle gets clogged; a VS-17 panel, just like the one he had used for the baby, bright pink on one side and red on the other, for marking positions in the daytime; his small spiral “write in the rain” notebook, Sharpies, grease pencils, and pens; his medical kit, including gauze, nasal pharyngeal tubes, pressure dressings, quick clot, morphine (removed and regulated when he is not working), and Asherman chest seals; tourniquets, kept separate from the medical kit, attached to the outside of the plate carrier; his Peltor noise-canceling headset, connected to an MBITR for intersquad communications, the same one he’d been wearing when chastised in the kill house. All are encrypted. His cutter wrist coach slips onto his arm; inside of it he’ll slide the “baseball cards” prepared by the intel officers. These are used for identification—not of an operator, but of a bad guy.

  At the armory on base, he has two H&K 416 rifles; two M4s; a SCAR heavy and a SCAR light; and his Sig Sauer 226, safely enclosed in his SERPA holster. Knight’s Armament suppressors can silence all of these. For optics, he uses an EOTech with a detachable magnifier. He has an ATPIAL aiming laser (visible and IR) for his rifles, and a small additional flashlight; these last are all operated by pressure pads. Seatbelts take up too much room on the helos, so the guys each have lanyards linked to their plates for hard-pointing in without belts.

  In case, everyone carries their medical kit on the same place on the same leg, so when a man is down, his own kit can be easily located and used on him. The basic kit has not altered in generations even as the technological advancements in armaments have changed the game irrevocably. Case in point, the CO’s Vietnam example. The guys who fought in that era were fierce in a different way and, correct: they weren’t in it to rise up the ranks at NATO. He had a picture in his room at his mother’s of a guy his father knew in Saigon. In the photo, he’s in his cammies and has several necklaces looped around his neck hung with various charms. He looks a little like a killer, and a little like Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now. He also looks almost like a child, and as Jason grew older, he was increasingly struck by how young this man seemed. That was before Jason had ever seen a child hold a gun. And that was before he had ever seen a child killed. “He would have been your godfather, too,” Sara had told him, as if he needed one more. But Jason never met him because the soldier never got out of Saigon. He remained classified as MIA. His will to stay and serve a place had outlasted that of his own country.

  *

  When the time comes to head out on a mission, Jason knows, as always, they will be told: whether the environment they’ll be operating in is “nonpermissive”; the timeline of their pre-mission training; the timeline of the mission; who, if anyone, will accompany them/act as backup on the mission; what will constitute the multiple platforms of air support within the Restricted Operations Zone—the pilot, the craft, the coordinates of the helicopter’s landing zone. Determining the conditions for the ROZ was important—the platoon’s joint terminal attack Controller would work with the pilots on that. Selecting HLZ coordinates was important. Like building a ship, building a mission meant every piece of the puzzle had to fit. And in case, contingencies had to be mapped out for scenarios in which one piece might malfunction.

  *

  Jason fights a strong will to open the presents and goes back upstairs, but he still cannot sleep. Looking at the girl beside him, he thinks how different they are. He has the constant sense that she could leave him at any moment and never look back. She’s not reckless, but she’s broken in that one way someone truly conditioned against expectations is broken: she can never be happy. In the morning he oversleeps, and she’s made breakfast. She invites him to her parents’ house for supper that night, and he accepts.

  After dinner, a dinner where her father treated him like he was already family, knuckle bumping and hugging and teasing, they go back to his place and unwrap presents. His from her is a tiny wooden box filled with what appear to be rocks. “It’s myrrh,” she says. “For my Jesus child. Now you’ll know it when you see it.” And she points out that on the box’s back she’s carved his initials, and the date: CHRISTMAS 2010. She carved them herself with his knife. His to her is something she’d requested repeatedly, and he’d finally hunted down: a photograph from his Academy graduation. He is in his whites. He looks many years younger than he looks and feels now. “You used to brush your hair,” she observes.

  Later, Jason and her brother go out the two of them alone. Her brother is in his late thirties. At six two, he’s tall. Yet he’s somehow physically quiet and unassuming. Jason is sure that if he met this guy in line at the bank, he might mistake him for one of his mother’s eggy friends, the ones who didn’t like Maine oceans because they were too cold, the ones who played squash at city clubs. Yet he knew exactly who this was: one of the most highly respected operators in the Teams. There was nothing “eggy” about him. He was a guy who did the right thing, and did it quietly, and did it well. Capable of deep thoughts, he rarely shared them to prove himself. He was just the kind of guy Jason wanted to grow up to be. He was just the kind of guy whose future could explode in myriad provocative directions, if he wanted that. And if he survived.

  “Your little sis
ter’s strong,” Jason says.

  “Yeah, we’re sending her to anhedonia camp for the summer,” he laughs.

  “Strong, and smart.”

  “Yes, the women in our family all like to teach, particularly when the pupils are men. Particularly men who serve in the military.”

  He tells Jason about his own decision to join the Teams, his own time at the Academy, and then at BUD/S, about his “no bell Hell” and the particularly ruthless pre–Hell Week evolution that ensured it. They talk about the meaning of the Teams. And then the older officer says, “How are you doing on sanity?”

  “Sanity?” Jason is not sure what he means.

  “How are you doing on keeping it all together. Keeping balanced.”

  “I think all right.”

  “It’s a skill. It can be honed.”

  “I think I’m—I’m good on that.”

  “The transitions didn’t used to be like they are now—muddy. When I started out, and I’d deploy? I wouldn’t even talk to home. There was no e-mail. No cell phones. It wasn’t like I knew what I was missing or what was changing out of my control. The media was different, too. Expectations—the relationship expectations—must have been more like they were in other wars. You leave, you come home, you’re a hero, you pick up where you left off. It’s different now.”

  “It is.”

  “Now everyone knows so much about what everybody else is doing. It can be hard to focus. To refocus.”

  “It can.”

  “It’s important to talk about things when you need to. I mean, not to me. You can talk to my sister. You can talk to anybody you like. But it’s not a bad idea to talk about things. To someone you trust.”

  The older operator explains to Jason how he will have to decide why he does what he does and whether he is willing to stay on or whether he’s ready to retire. He confesses that speaking to almost any younger guy, his advice would be, without qualification, to consider staying the course, staying active. The American military system—and the Naval Special Warfare system in particular—is undergoing changes, and that’s the best time to be at the center of a system. And yet talking to someone who might one day be not only his brother-in-law but also the father of his nieces and nephews? In this case he might even recommend looking into work on Wall Street.

  “Yeah, I’ve had Goldman Sachs beating down my door,” Jason says. They laugh.

  “Well, send them over to my door, and I’ll kick their ass.”

  They drink without talking for a while. And then Jason says, “Women have more emotional … resilience.” He’s thinking about the girl not caring that he never made a toast. And he’s thinking about his mother.

  “Free-surface effect.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Free-surface effect. Did you fail your naval architecture class?”

  “Free-surface effect is what places the ship in danger.”

  “Well, it’s the accident of architecture that allows water into her hull. And that accident results in destabilization. But it’s only when a ship’s destabilized that you can identify her weaknesses.”

  “Like—”

  “A little free-surface effect’s good for the soul. And women—women tend to let the water in. They’re more psychologically porous.”

  “I don’t envy them that.”

  “You wouldn’t, but they don’t envy you your effortless tricks of repression, do they? It’s Darwinian, right? They need that—that emotional littoral zone—especially in the presence of children, in the presence of the chaos of motherhood. But before that they need it in processing their emotions. What they manage—it’s a different chaos than what we see every day. They need easier access to a wider bank of emotional memories. We need the art of clean, immediate forgetting and of easy access to a shallow pool of information.”

  “Shallow?”

  “Shallow. Well, said another way, factual. Tactical. We worship at the altar of the tactical. And they understand the essential requirements of … of strategy. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Tactics are shallow; strategy’s deep?”

  “What I’m saying is that what attracts us is what puts us at odds, and that’s why we stay in it.”

  “All part of God’s plan?”

  “You can look at it that way, sure. It certainly keeps the game interesting.”

  “Shallow pools competing with wide banks?”

  “Shallow pools competing with wide banks.” He had been married and had two children, now teenagers. The kids had barely seen their father over the last decade. Jason saw at Christmas dinner how the son, in particular, interacted with his dad, and saw through this example that it was possible: he could continue to live this life and continue to have a life. Jason knew he wanted to be a father, and he knew this guy was a good father. Jason knew he wanted to be a husband, and knew this guy was a good husband. And Jason knew enough to know that that wasn’t easy.

  When they pull into Jason’s driveway, the girl’s brother puts the car in park. He turns to Jason and says, “In all seriousness now: two things. Are you listening?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “First, if you get an opportunity to do something different—to go to a new place, or to work with some new guys, and you think this opportunity will stretch you? Say yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you understand what I mean by ‘stretch’?”

  “I do.”

  “I don’t care what your future plans are. I don’t want to know if you have them. What matters is where you’ve been. You know that. It doesn’t matter to me whether you end up waiting tables or running special warfare; what matters now is what you do and where you’ve been and how you treat your guys. Character. The gear does not make the operator.”

  “Understood.”

  “And the second thing. If you break her heart, I have no qualms about killing you.”

  “Also understood.”

  And they sit for a minute, Jason feeling almost as if he needs a formal dismissal. The car doors are still locked. “And, wait: there’s a third thing. No more fucking tattoos.” And with that, the man Jason suspects will one day be his brother-in-law, the godfather to his children, and—perhaps—his Teammate, leans over and gives him a big bear hug just as his mother would have done had she been there. Maybe law school can wait.

  *

  In bed the night before leaving the base, Jason thinks about what the chief had asked him that fall day and decides he does have a favorite weapon: his Sig Sauer. This is the gun he had practiced shooting (illegally) in the backyard in Pennsylvania for days during his first leave. He was determined to get better. He was determined to perfect his shot. This is also the gun he taught his mother to shoot, much to her amusement. “Mommy, it comes in pink.” And, “You hit a target not by aiming but by thinking about aiming.” He had just learned that line from an instructor at XE, and he loved it. He remembers when he wrote to her about how he would teach her to use it because he thought it was easy when he first learned to shoot. And because he worried constantly in those days about Sara being home alone, unprotected. The more he saw of the evil people were capable of, the more he felt conflict about the forum in which he was working to protect the people he loved. Was this really the front line? Or was the front line closer to home? And the more he thought, the more he wondered where this work—this service—would lead, whether his godfather hadn’t been right all those years ago. But he wouldn’t be Hamlet. Or Kipling. There was no room for indecision in his life now.

  He wishes he could go and see Sara once more but decides that a phone call before he heads back out is enough. On New Year’s Day they talk. He assures her he is not alone and that he did not have to cook the turkey. He apologizes for not coming home this one time but tells her he is sure this next deployment will be the last. They discuss graduate schools (law versus business, Yale versus UVA). They discuss what she’s reading (a new Anna Karenina, the last president’s memoir).

  “Uplifti
ng stuff.”

  “Preferable to the papers.”

  “Why don’t you work in something lighter to the cycle, Ma?”

  “What do you suggest? Goldfinger? I’m fine,” she says.

  “Fucking Insecure Nervous and Emotional?” he says, and they laugh.

  “No, really. I’m good. I’m—busy.”

  “Did you go by the neighbors’?”

  “They came here.”

  “They came there?”

  “Yeah, can you believe it? It was really sweet. You know—you know, I don’t think you ever saw it—well, we never did it, but there’s a bit of a tradition here or, well, in their family. A Christmas tradition where the women, all the cousins you know, the women and children dress up and visit houses in the area bringing gifts—”

  “Like elves?”

  “Like elves, but not, you know, dressed like elves. Well, not dressed entirely like elves. Each woman provides a different gift for one of the twelve days of Christmas, so each—”

  “Twelve gifts for each house?”

  “Yes. They’re little things, silly little things, like fruitcakes. Fondue pots.”

  “Homemade fruitcake?”

  “Yes, of course it’s homemade.”

  “And what else?”

  “They might bring … chocolates. Chocolates stamped with Thomas Jefferson—that was one thing. A pack of postcards from the museum: Old Pew. A set of little candles carved at Williamsburg. Americana.”

  “Edible Americana.”

  “Right. Anyhow, they came here. They’ve never come before. It was very sweet. Thank God I was dressed and had the fire on. They all came in, made a fuss.”