“Every profession has its tools,” said LaCamera. “Ours are just more expensive and deadly.”
Worthan quizzed us on these finer points of tactics at every morning meeting. The facts we memorized were dry but critically important, covering everything from the maximum ranges of different weapons to the minimum safe distance you could safely stand without absorbing shrapnel. He had us read and report back on military histories compiled by Russian soldiers writing about their fights with Afghan mujahideen, the generic name for the many bands of rebels fighting the Russians, often with American-supplied weapons. Whenever possible, they “hugged” the Soviets by attacking from distances so close that it negated the Russians’ overwhelming air superiority. We could assume they would know our bombs’ specifications as well. Afghan fighters were masters of their terrain and used the mountain folds to hide their ambushes and retreats. They particularly enjoyed blitzing Soviets when their tanks drove through narrow gorges so steep that the tankers were unable to elevate their barrels. The mujahideen had also displayed impressive creativity, such as mounting decoys on ridges to draw errant fire and planting secondary ambushes to attack reinforcements. More than anything else, the Afghans capitalized on consistent patterns that made the Soviets predictable.
“Habits kill,” warned Worthan.
I called an old professor of mine from West Point to try to get some language materials for Afghanistan. The best he could do was a dozen Visual Language Translators. The name sounded fancier than the product, a laminated card with cartoon figures and phonetically spelled phrases. The idea was that a soldier could point at a cartoon and his interlocutor would understand from the picture to “get down on the ground.” There were two problems. Problem one was that the cards were designed for Iraq, not Afghanistan, and the phrases were in classical Arabic, not Pashto. Problem two was that the cards were great for identifying Iraqi missile launchers but not so great for finding out who the tribal chief was and where his allegiances lay. Try miming that to an angry Afghan.
The last days before we left involved more pencil sharpening than chest bumping. We packed boxes and crates and loaded them on freight cars destined for a port in New Jersey. There were rosters of wives’ phone numbers to compile, computers to back up, and last-minute supplies to distribute. I took a dozen vaccine injections in my arm and signed several legal documents. It didn’t occur to me that it was unusual for a twenty-four-year-old to have a notarized will and a life insurance policy. I checked the box for maximum coverage.
18
Mission Accomplished
When I see your face, the stones start spinning!
You appear; all studying wanders.
I lose my place. . . .
In your presence I don’t want what I thought I wanted.
JELALUDDIN RUMI
DEPLOYING CONDENSED MORE THAN TRAINING SCHEDULES. It also compressed our personal lives. Between Benning and Drum, early that winter, I had taken a couple of weeks of vacation with Meena. In two weeks we attempted to make up for six months of infrequent weekend visits. Returning to Oxford, we had dinner with Katie Larson and her husband at Lincoln. After two years of distance, they had finally made it work. Seeing them together made tangible what Meena and I hoped to achieve with, as Katie had told me in her note, a potion two parts tenacity, one part hope, and three parts courage.
From England we flew to Rome with Marine First Lieutenant Tim Strabbing, his girlfriend Jada, and my sister Bridget. Father Matt gave us all another tour of the Vatican.
“It’s nice to meet you, Meena,” he greeted her. “Craig’s told me a lot about you.”
Meena laughed nervously, as she usually did when being introduced. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”
The three of us sat down for afternoon espressos near the Via Veneto. Meena and Father Matt engaged in a spirited conversation on the common threads of divinity, morality, and mutual respect underlying world religions. Grace, Father Matt said, worked in mysterious ways. I had my own question, though.
“Father Matt, how would a Catholic-Hindu marriage work?”
Meena’s glare told me I had overreached.
“Maybe you two should talk about that first?”
WE TALKED IN CIRCLES. Meena wanted to get married, but she was in no rush. She was entrenched in her own medical training. Yet despite our harried schedules, we continued to make time for each other, driving 334 miles each way to preserve and nurture our relationship. Between five and eight hours after leaving, depending on how bad the snow was, I arrived in Philadelphia. All week I looked forward to those visits with Meena. Together we explored the city, stopped in Little Italy to buy cheese at Di Bruno’s, spent an afternoon in the Philadelphia museum, and ate sushi near Rittenhouse Square. It was a world away from the Army life I lived from 0600 on Monday until 1700 on Friday. Phone calls no longer sufficed. I wanted more than the sound of her voice. I ached to be with Meena, to bury my head in her hair, to smell the chilies frying when she cooked, to see that crooked smile break across her lips.
Every other week I had to submit a request to drive outside the hundred-mile radius surrounding Fort Drum. Under “Reason for Request” I would write “Girlfriend.” At work it was uncomfortable referring to Meena as my girlfriend when my commitment to her was of a different order of magnitude. The upcoming deployment was pressing the issue. It came up during a visit to close friends in New Haven.
I had first met Bryan Leach at Oxford where we both studied history. A champion debater in high school and a distinguished actor at Harvard, he had since enrolled at Yale Law School. At Oxford our friendship developed through weekly poker games. With a couple of scotches under his belt, Bryan’s profanity quotient tripled, although his bets were always well placed. After twenty weeks of poker against a statistician, an economist, and a physicist, Bryan was the big money winner. He was also training his advocacy skills. I needed his help convincing Meena to bet her chips on me.
As a first-year law student, Bryan developed some experience in arbitration. Sitting Meena and me down at his kitchen table, he broke out a yellow legal pad (a familiar prop for us) and walked us through a mediated negotiation. Each of us took turns making our case while Bryan squiggled notes. When we finished our arguments, Bryan summarized:
“Party A claims that an engagement would secure the necessary leverage for him to request an assignment after Fort Drum someplace closer to Party B. Practically speaking, Party A envisions this engagement happening before a deployment this spring or summer. Is that right?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Party B contends that such a contractual agreement, antecedent to a dangerous deployment, would leave Party B exposed to the risk of said danger. Is this correct?”
“Yes,” Meena replied, laughing at Bryan’s tongue-in-cheek formalism.
“If my analysis is correct, engagement is an eventual certainty for both parties, although the timing is the source of dispute. Do you agree?”
We nodded.
“Party B, would you not also benefit, in terms of support, from elevating your status from girlfriend to fiancée?”
“You have a point,” said Meena.
Bryan tapped the yellow legal pad with the pencil and reached his conclusion. He folded his hands, looked at us, and said, “My recommendation is that you get engaged sooner rather than later. Either way I’d urge you to discuss this with your parents.”
“Party A concurs,” I said.
“Let me think about it,” said Meena.
A month later she agreed that we should talk to her parents. The next Saturday we drove together from Philadelphia to meet with them in New Jersey. Meena’s father led us to the formal sitting room. Her parents sat on one couch. We sat opposite them. Two dozen trophies Meena and her younger sister had earned fifteen years ago were stacked on the adjacent piano.
I desperately wanted them to offer their daughter’s hand. Instead, Meena’s father offered tea.
WHEN I FIRST TOLD Charlie Ho
oker about Meena, six months after we had started dating, he made me sign a cocktail napkin promising I wouldn’t get engaged until after I left Oxford. A year and a half later, I convinced him Meena was “the one.” He took me to his private jeweler, an Indian man occupying a windowless office in Manhattan’s diamond district. I specified exactly what I wanted the ring to look like—a band of Indian 22-karat gold with three pristine diamonds and four rubies. I shook the jeweler’s hand to seal the agreement. The price was left unspoken.
I proposed to Meena a day after the ring arrived. As we walked along a Newport cliff, the sun was brilliant on the Sakonnet River. I stopped to take a photo and reached into my pocket for the ring. I turned to Meena and pointed at the crystal pendant I had given her at Oxford.
“I like your necklace. Do you have a man?”
Before she could respond, I kneeled and asked her to marry me.
The next day I dialed every number in my phone book. When I called Bryan, he insisted on taking credit for the “contractual agreement.”
“Does that mean I need to pay your contingency fee?” I asked.
“This one’s on me.”
19
Line of Departure
A son should never be a judge of his father.
IVAN TURGENEV, Fathers and Sons
I CAN STILL REMEMBER MY SISTER’S VOICE ON THE telephone: stunned, wounded, and flat. It was her twenty-third birthday. Meena and I were about to drive the final leg of our trip from New Haven, where we had visited Bryan and his wife, to Rhode Island when Bridget’s call interrupted dessert.
“Dad’s not coming home for dinner.”
“Working overtime again?” I asked.
“No. He’s just not coming home.”
“Huh? What do you mean he’s not coming home? Is he okay?”
“I don’t know . . .” Her confusion spilled out. She sobbed now in heaving waves. “He said he was moving in with a friend from work.”
“That’s it? That’s all he said?”
“That’s it.”
“I’ll be home as soon as I can.” I handed Meena the keys and sat silently in the passenger seat as we sped home. Meena drove with one hand and held mine with the other.
Back in high school our wrestling coach used to have us form a wide circle at the end of practice. Bull in the Ring, he called it. The exercise was meant to quicken our reactions and to make us tougher. Everyone got a number. When it was my turn, I would step into the circle, the coach would call out a number at random, and I would turn as quickly as possible to defend myself. You got to stay in the ring as long as you could win the point. The hardest challenge was always the one you didn’t see coming.
My parents had been married for twenty-eight years, and yet for reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom, my father suddenly threw all of that away—a beautiful home, four kids, and a loving wife. I couldn’t believe that the father who had always emphasized commitment was walking away from his. There must be some mistake.
Three days later it was Easter. My father returned home for the holiday, but he still didn’t speak to me. We sat around the dining room table, and my mother brought in a platter of ham slices and then the twice-baked potatoes (her specialty), glazed carrots, and creamed corn. She sat at the foot of the table, opposite my father. Dinner was quiet, with just the scraping of knives and forks on the nice plates my mother took out three times a year. I had just sunk my fork into a piece of apple pie when my father stood up from the table and walked into the kitchen.
I heard him open the door to the basement. I folded my napkin neatly and placed it on the table.
“Excuse me, please.” I pushed my chair in and left the table.
I opened the door and walked down to the basement. The old wooden stairs creaked under my weight as a hundred thoughts collided in my head. I thought I could say something to repair everything. What that something was, I had no idea. I had counseled soldiers on their broken marriages. How do you do that for your own father?
The basement was my father’s territory—workbenches with vices, a drill press, shelves he had built and stacked with little pull-out bins for screws and nails. Saws hung from nails in the wall, arranged by type and length. Next to the door was a calendar of pinup models holding power tools. February was still up, two months too late. An old black radio lay on the counter with a film of dust on top. I think I was the one who had broken off the antenna years before. I had never bothered to ask my father how to use his tools, and he had never bothered to show me.
“Dad,” I said, standing on the bottom step and blocking the stairs. “What’s wrong?”
My father stood for a minute without saying a word. Under his eyes were heavy red bags. “Craig”—he paused as if he were revealing a profound truth—“people grow apart. Your mother and me . . .” He trailed off and looked down. When he turned his face back to mine, it was as if he had aged a hundred years. “This doesn’t change anything, Craig. I still love you.”
What had I expected to hear—that this was just a short break? That he needed time? That there was someone else? That he wanted my help? People grow apart—that’s what you hear when a girlfriend has figured out that things won’t work out. How do you stay together for twenty-eight years, raise a family, build a home—and then say you’ve grown apart? When, precisely, had that happened? Before or after he had visited me in England? Had he already made this decision while we drank coffee and read the paper together in Maine? Over Christmas while we opened presents? Was it a well-crafted plan to leave on Bridget’s birthday? I wanted answers I could challenge. I wanted a knock-down, drag-out argument. I wanted to take his answers and refute each one. I wanted to pummel him until he surrendered. Then I wanted him to ask me for forgiveness.
My father drew close to give me a hug, but I turned my back to him. As he stepped up the stairs, I stayed with my back to him and leaned on the stair rail. As my father walked past me, his jeans brushed against mine, making the hair stand on the back of my neck. I stood in place, leaning on the stair rail. A minute later the front door closed. I remained on the bottom step and cried.
HE ASKED MY MOTHER for a divorce three weeks later, refusing to go with her to marital counseling. “Mullaneys don’t quit”—that’s what he had always said. What did he think he was doing now? When I was younger and got too cold shoveling snow, he would send me right back out. “You’re not done,” he would say. I was never done. That was what he had beaten into my head every year until I left for West Point. That is what had gone through my head when I thought about quitting after getting cut from the wrestling team, when I had run the last mile of the Boston Marathon to see him watch me from the stands, and when I had wanted to leave Ranger School after dislocating my shoulder.
Visiting my mother later that spring, I couldn’t help but judge my father. Now he was done. My father hadn’t been there after Meena accepted my proposal. He hadn’t been there when Bridget graduated from Providence College, summa cum laude. He wouldn’t be there for Gary’s graduation from high school or to grill burgers for Gary’s cadet friends when he went to West Point. He wouldn’t be there for Kelsey in high school, nickel-and-diming every expense her older siblings took for granted: a calculator, a textbook, a prom dress. And, most important, he wouldn’t be there for my mother. He had walked away, quit, surrendered.
As I sat drinking coffee with my mother, his SUV pulled up in the driveway. My father walked around behind the house and took something out of the pool house. He got back in the SUV and drove away. I was leaving for a combat tour any day, but my father didn’t have the courage to come in the house and say good-bye to me. My mother reached across the table for my hand. I pulled my hand away and stood up. I walked to the living room and grabbed the wooden staff I had topped with a raccoon tail and carved for my father. I slammed it crosswise over my knee and cracked it in half.
That was the last time I saw my father.
I DID A POOR job of stepping into the role he left vacant, and I h
ad almost no opportunity given my imminent deployment. I made one last trip home before I deployed to Afghanistan in order to wish my brother good luck as he began at West Point. The lawn was overgrown and the house was a mess. No one had trimmed the hedges. Gary approached me the morning he was about to leave for West Point.
The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Page 23