The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education

by Craig M. Mullaney

  Meanwhile, our battalion had spent nine months on the border. The only women we saw wore burqas. Our muscles were atrophied from months of long patrols, interrupted sleep, and insipid food. We were skeletal, and our loose-fitting uniforms stank with layer upon layer of sweat and dust. It was impossible not to resent the standard of living our counterparts had enjoyed while we were downrange. We expected a level of deference our less bloodied comrades were loath to grant.

  KANDAHAR HADN’T CHANGED, BUT we had. When we had first arrived in the country, we were wide-eyed and eager. Each of us, whether we articulated it or not, was looking for action. We had trained for months and waited for weeks to get to Afghanistan, keen for adventure and a test of our training. We had imagined heroic battles against al-Qaeda. Maybe someone would get hurt, but not us.

  We were more seasoned now. We had paid in the dearest currency for the Combat Infantryman Badges we wore. Twenty thousand Americans in Afghanistan with fewer than a hundred casualties—the odds of death had once seemed remote—until the odds bit us in the ass. In our minds, it won’t be us became it might be us, and, finally, inevitably, it will be us. We wore our weariness on our wrists with silver bracelets engraved with the names of the casualties we had sustained. To us, “Never forget” was a needless admonition. We never would.

  It is possible for war to change nothing except its participants. We had no scoreboard to measure our success on the battlefield. We were never really sure whether we were winning. But we had been transformed. Together we had laughed and screamed, and bled and cried. We found ourselves among the crowds, recognizing one another by the shape of a silhouette, the peculiarity of a gait, the unique contours of an accent.

  In the Catholic catechism, Purgatory is a place sinners go to have their sins purged before entering Heaven. Kandahar was a type of Purgatory for soldiers leaving Afghanistan. We turned in our live ammunition and washed the war off our gear. We began to observe the inane strictures of life in a peacetime garrison. We began saluting one another again, and sergeants taught privates all the things they had forgotten about drill and ceremony.

  Forward, march. Dum-dum-DUM-DUM-DUM.

  The farther you are from the front lines, the better you march.

  III

  Veteran

  I felt like I was doing something wrong, walking along, staring at people who could not stare back.

  DANTE, Purgatorio

  37

  Dislocated

  No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

  HERACLITUS

  WE TOUCHED DOWN ON THE AIRFIELD, AND I OPENED my window shade. Snow melted slowly on the side of the runway. Grass punched through cracks in the pavement. I made my way to the stairs. An overcast sky hung above a drab terminal. Outside there was no marching band and no crowd of waving family members. We filed off the plane and rolled our boots across the asphalt. We were home.

  A bus deposited us at the barracks, and I stood in line with the rest of Alpha Company as a sergeant opened the arms room. One by one each of us turned in his rifle, reading the serial numbers we had memorized months before. I handed over my weapon, and the sergeant carefully returned it to a slot in the metal rack. Within an hour our entire arsenal was placed back under lock and key—shotguns, machine guns, rifles. There they would wait.

  I walked fifteen feet to my office and opened it up. I grabbed the towel hanging in my locker and shuffled to the shower. This was the same routine I had followed after every field problem at Drum. Turn in weapons. Wash off the grime. Change. Go home. The normalcy was disconcerting. I changed into the sneakers, jeans, and T-shirt I had last worn for Worthan’s birthday bonfire. The clothes fit loose on my frame, as if they belonged to someone else.

  I walked over to the battalion headquarters, where my new office was. I found Major Wille. “Sir, I turned in my rifle. What do I do now?”

  “Go home.”

  “Just go home?”

  “Sure. I’ll see you tomorrow morning at formation.”

  I hoisted my rucksack over my left shoulder and walked out the front door. I didn’t get three steps outside before I was ambushed by my mother, my sister Kelsey, and Meena. They smothered me in hugs and kisses. I didn’t want to let go of Meena as we embraced. We walked to the car, and I sat in the backseat with Meena. As my mother drove back to my apartment at sixty miles an hour, it seemed as if we were racing at twice that speed. From habit, I swung my head continually and scanned the darkness at the verge of the road. I held Meena’s hand in mine the entire way.

  Waking up the next morning, I instinctively reached with my legs to where I had always placed my shower shoes next to the cot. Instead, my feet touched the hardwood floor. It was rough and cold. I felt like Rip Van Winkle, as if I were waking up after a nine-month sleep to find that the world had continued to turn on its axis while I had stood still. I rubbed my eyes and opened the shade. A car drove past, its headlights illuminating a street deserted at 5 a.m.

  I had one last military duty before being released for the weekend. The battalion massed in the parking lot in our least wrinkled uniforms. To the drumbeat of the 10th Mountain Division band, we marched into the gym and stood at parade rest before our assembled families. Seats in the front row had been reserved for photographers and reporters. After recitations of the 10th Mountain Division song and the national anthem, we were officially released. The photographers were probably disappointed. Since everyone had already reunited with their families the night before, the staged version in the gym lacked authenticity.

  Visiting my brother, Gary, was my first priority. I drove south to West Point and met him outside Grant Hall. He stood taller than before. I wasn’t sure whether it was the extra inches he claimed or his posture. Wearing his uniform, Gary looked as though someone had welded steel rebar to his spine. Chest out and shoulders back, he smiled and saluted. His shoulders were broader, but he still had the dimples in his cheeks that undercut any attempt to look tough.

  I saw O’Neill when I looked at Gary. Same age. Same smile. Same blue eyes. I deflected Gary’s questions with one-word answers.

  “What was it like?”

  “Long.”

  “Are you glad to be back?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Tired.”

  Gary stopped asking questions, and we began talking about West Point. As he recounted the travails of Plebe year, I laughed with him. He told me how he would shake so violently when the upper class worked him up that his nickname became “Shakes” Mullaney. While proud of seeing Gary in cadet gray, I was ambivalent about his choice. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to move from the parade field to the battlefield. I didn’t want to lose him as I had lost Evan.

  I next visited Charlie and Lisa Hooker in New Jersey, the family who had provided me an escape from West Point, guided my wardrobe selection for the Rhodes interview, and helped me find an engagement ring for Meena. Charlie had taught me more about leadership over cigars and fine scotch than any other mentor at the academy. Coming back from Afghanistan, I was eager to share stories with him. I began to flip through my photos when Charlie got up and opened a drawer containing a handful of old photographs. The vegetation looked remarkably similar to where we had fought along the border. I asked Charlie where the photos were from. I knew he couldn’t tell me; he never told me any of the places where he had served with his Special Forces team.

  Charlie was more of a father than a mentor, and my real father’s absence only made me more eager to be seen by Charlie as a real warrior. I handed him a tiny bottle of sand from Losano Ridge. He placed it next to his collection of sands from Iwo Jima and Saipan, battlefields where his father had fought—a place of honor. He gave me a bear hug long enough for me to regain my composure, and soon after, we left for dinner.

  I ate an entire chateaubriand steak by myself and washed it down with half a bottle of red wine. As the waitress arrived to clear ou
r plates, Lisa stated proudly that I had just returned from Afghanistan.

  “Is that so?” said the waitress.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, welcome home.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “What was it like?”

  “It’s just good to be home,” I said. I wasn’t ready with a small-talk response to a question that asked so much.

  “Well, at least you weren’t in Iraq.” She paused. “Afghanistan mustn’t be too dangerous these days.”

  I squeezed the leg of the table. It was a good thing she had taken my steak knife. She meant well, I’m sure. There was no reason for her to know much about Afghanistan’s violence. There was scant broadcast coverage of Afghanistan, and Iraq was getting more deadly by the day. I smiled meekly. She had already turned down the hall.

  Over the next year I heard the waitress’s reaction countless times. Most Americans had no idea we were still fighting in Afghanistan. After 9/11, they had been told to “go shopping.” And they did. Apart from the less than 0.5 percent of Americans in uniform, most people continued with their daily commutes, picked up the dry cleaning, and mowed the lawn. What if, instead, Americans had been asked to sacrifice? Would I have patrolled with unarmored pickup trucks? Someone else fought the war “over there.” When the war intruded on the nightly news, it was easy to change the channel.

  But I couldn’t. I scoured the back pages of the newspaper to find anything about Afghanistan. Descriptions of fighting were vague and incomplete; even the journalists had abandoned that front. Yet, as our deployment faded, the units that replaced us faced more and more cross-border attacks and roadside bombs. The casualty rate worsened; Afghanistan was unraveling.

  After visiting Charlie, I drove to see Bryan at Yale Law School. That weekend we went to a cocktail party at another student’s apartment. The apartment was cramped with twentysomethings in business casual elbowing for drinks in the kitchen. Nibbling on canapés, I floated from group to group. They talked about obscure legal doctrines, celebrity romances, and law school gossip. If they talked at all about the war, it was the war in Iraq. “It’s awful, isn’t it?” was the most common banality. I had never felt so acutely conscious of standing apart from my civilian peers. Only two years before, at Oxford, I had gone to dozens of cocktail parties just like this. The scene was the same, but my perspective had changed.

  In one discussion a student commented, “Believe me, I support the troops. I just don’t support the war.” I wondered exactly how he supported the troops. He must have seen the doubt in my eyes because he followed up quickly that he “would sign up to serve.” He paused and then added the caveat, “If I could guarantee a challenging assignment.” Was he serious? At West Point we’d learned that responsibility preceded privilege. I had forgotten how odd that sentiment appeared outside the military.

  AT FORT DRUM I returned to the rhythms and routines of garrison life. The psychologists had told us before we left Orgun that the transition would be difficult for everyone. The shrinks were right. Homecoming wasn’t all smiles. There were still battles to fight.

  The first night I spent alone in my apartment was the hardest. I cooked pasta and sat down at my table. My fork and knife scratched unnervingly across the plate. I got up and turned on the stereo. Afterward, I sat on the couch and stared at a blank television. I had never bothered to attach the antenna. Bored, I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and called Meena in Philadelphia. She didn’t pick up; she was probably working late at the hospital. I called Story. He was playing with his kids and couldn’t talk. I called a few of the other sergeants and got the same response. I got up and made myself a vodka tonic. I drank it quickly and made another. In Afghanistan, I had yearned for privacy. Now it was suffocating me.

  The nights alone started to include stronger drinks. As I flipped through photos, I relived both the highlights and the tragedies, but especially the tragedies. Eventually, as the night got long and I thought about Evan and Chris, I drank faster. One night, while speaking on the telephone with my mother, she told me that my father had been having an affair.

  “Before he left?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long?”

  “Maybe a couple of years.”

  If that was the case, the father who visited me in Oxford had already abandoned us. The dishonesty removed whatever remaining respect I had for him. I drank half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and passed out on the couch. I woke up to Meena’s bedtime call. She knew I wasn’t well but was helpless to do anything from three hundred miles away in Philadelphia. Every night she would ask what was wrong, but I wouldn’t respond. I was uncommunicative and half drunk most of the time. Part of me worried about the genes I shared with my father. How would this bode for our marriage? Was infidelity in my DNA? What would her parents say about my parents’ divorce? In the middle of the night I woke up in a cold sweat and stared into the black. I didn’t know what was wrong. I wasn’t the me I was before.

  I TOOK LEAVE IN June to spend a week with Meena in Italy. I needed to get away, and we needed time together. It was taking longer than I had hoped for our relationship to thaw out. Our embraces were awkward, and the rhythms of our conversations were out of sync. I was distant even when we were close.

  We stayed on a farm near Orvieto, a hilltop city near Rome. Over quiet dinners and long drives through the hills, Meena and I began to reconnect. One day we went for a long walk in the Sibylline Mountains. We sat on a grassy slope in the sunshine. Below us, a carpet of wildflowers bloomed in purple, red, and yellow. One road crossed the valley in a ribbon of black. On either side of the road, the lentil fields were just coming to life. Above us, faint traces of snow trickled down the ridges like white frosting. Meena reached for my hand, and my fingers slid into hers like familiar grooves. I told her everything. When I stopped, she held me in her arms as I sobbed.

  Over the course of the week, I began to smile. I laughed with Meena as I related my camel-riding adventure and my soldiers’ antics. I had been wrong about our relationship. It wasn’t us that had to thaw out; it was me.

  WHILE WE WERE IN Italy, I received an email from the battalion commander. My request for a reassignment closer to Meena had been approved.

  “Meena, come read this.”

  She peered over my shoulder at the screen. “What’s the ‘Old Guard’? Is this good news?”

  “Meena, this means I’m moving to Washington.”

  She nearly strangled me in my seat she was so happy. The Old Guard was the Army’s elite ceremonial unit, stationed outside Arlington Cemetery in Washington. More important for us, the Old Guard was close to Baltimore, where Meena hoped to continue her training as a surgeon. Marching in parades wasn’t what I had imagined doing after Afghanistan, but it was the one way I could continue to serve in the Army and be with Meena. Soon after receiving the news of my assignment, we set a wedding date for the following May, just four years after I had first told Meena I loved her.

  EVERY WEEK AT THE Old Guard offered something exciting—from the arrival of a foreign head of state to planning the evacuation of important bureaucrats in the event of a terrorist attack. When I suited up in my uniform and unsheathed my saber, it was always electrifying. What an incredible honor to represent the Army to the world. Unfortunately, many of the missions were more somber. Every week, and sometimes more often, we sent a detachment of soldiers to Dover, Delaware, to recover dead soldiers. Inevitably, we buried our own: soldiers from the Old Guard who had returned to the line. The first thing I did every morning at the office was to scan the Washington Post’s list of American casualties. It was the part of the day I hated the most, but I had a strange compulsion to look. When would I see a West Point classmate or one of my soldiers? I both wanted and didn’t want to know at the same time. Scanning those pages was a form of penance, the only connection I had to the war. I was desperate not to forget them, and I was desperate not to forget my own experiences. I willed myself to record every sh
ard of memory I could recall from the deployment. It helped me close the distance.

  While I struggled to remember certain meaningful details, other memories ambushed me with disturbing frequency. A police helicopter buzzing overhead triggered thoughts of the fight on Losano Ridge. Cannon fire from the salute battery during ceremonies made me jump every time, because they reminded me of incoming rockets. Another veteran got into the practice of yelling “Outgoing!” to calm my nerves. “Don’t worry, Mullaney,” he said, “you’ll get used to it. We were all like that when we got back.” Lunch conversation with the other junior officers inevitably worked its way toward Iraq and Afghanistan. We would swap tales of near misses, unbelievable heroics, and botched missions. In retrospect, those bull sessions were an important mechanism for processing our experiences—of turning fear, tragedy, and insecurity into stories, just as every band of warriors has done, from the Greeks at Troy to the Americans at Normandy.