by Naomi Niles
As I sat there at the foot of my bed holding my hydration bladder in one hand, Carson strode up and slung his backpack down on the floor next to me.
“You never did tell me what you really thought of that girl,” he said softly as he pulled out his hunting knife and turned it over in his hands.
“I told you I thought she was petite,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but that’s just a fact. I still don’t know how you, Zack Savery, feel about this gorgeous woman. You managed to tell me everything but that.”
I shrugged. “I mean, she was a cute woman. I guess I’ve always had a thing for blondes. The woman I was dating while on leave had the prettiest long blonde hair, but she wasn’t all that bright. She was like a walking stereotype.”
“Well, I guess that’s to be expected when you’re dating a public school teacher in a rural town,” said Carson. “They say you only go into teaching if you’ve failed at everything else in life.”
“Fair enough, yeah.” I reached into my bag and pulled out my watch, making sure it was set to the right time. “This woman is bound to be a step up in that respect. Investigative reporting isn’t a job for idiots.”
“I didn’t know a woman’s brains meant so much to you,” said Carson. “The way you went after that bimbo in the airport, I figured one pussy is as good as another.”
“On balance, I think intelligence makes a woman way hotter,” I replied. “There’s something a little bit sexy about a gal who can yell Shakespeare in bed.”
Carson raised his brows in surprise. “Hold on,” he said slowly, “this is really interesting to me. So, and I’mma need your honest opinion here, if you were given the choice between a woman with brains but no boobs, or a woman with boobs but no brains, which one would you pick?”
“Am I ever going to be in a situation where I have to make this choice?” I asked.
“It could very well happen!” cried Carson. “Say you go back to Dallas and there are two girls hanging on you. One of ‘em is a bimbo, but she’s foxy as hell. The other girl, she’s—you know, kinda ugly. But she’ll sit there and talk to you for an hour about, I don’t know, the Great Fire of London.”
I smiled, beginning to feel mischievous. “How ugly are we talking?”
“However you define ugly,” said Carson. “Scrawny, yellow teeth, no boobs, not much of an ass.”
“I think I’d pass on the yellow teeth. If she found her way to a dentist, then we might talk.”
“Oh, so now we see what’s important,” said Carson loudly, addressing the whole room. “Old Zeke here doesn’t care if a girl’s got huge boobs, as long as her teeth are clean.”
“Clean teeth are important.” At this point, I was mostly trolling him. “What, did you think I nailed that chick at the airport because of her boobs?”
Carson goggled at me. “So much to unpack in that statement. Did you really bang her?”
I shrugged, struggling hard not to smile. “We got pretty close. Another ten minutes, and it would have gotten to that point, I’m sure. She was ready.”
Carson shook his head and muttered a word that sounded suspiciously like, “Fucker.”
But at that moment, we were both startled by a tremendous banging in the hallway and a volley of curse words. It sounded like someone was slamming a locker—hard—over and over again.
“What in the hell?” muttered Carson, getting up and walking to the door with his knife in hand. The rest of us set down our bags and followed.
I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when I looked through the door. Bernie stood at the end of the hall, his face strained and sweaty. He was slamming his fists into the lockers, hitting them so hard and with such frequency that the metal was beginning to bend under the onslaught.
Chuck brushed past us and ran down the hall toward him. “Bernie!” he yelled. “What are you doing, man?”
Bernie lowered his fists, having only belatedly realized that the rest of us were gawking at him in fear and surprise. “I can’t do this anymore!” he said angrily, punching the locker one last time for good measure.
“What, you mean the training?” Carson balked. “Are you quitting?”
Chuck raised a hand to silence him. Carson swore under his breath; he had always resented Chuck’s air of being older and smarter than the rest of us.
“No, not the service,” said Bernie, his shoulders slumped in defeat. “Life. I’m no good at it.”
“Well, none of us are great at it,” said Chuck warily. “But that’s no reason to go and do something drastic.”
“You think I enjoy being lectured by you?!” Bernie shouted. He looked insane, and for the first time I began to fear for his safety. “You’ve got a wife and a kid. You’re happily married, and you’re probably the smartest person in our platoon. I’ve seen you take a gun apart and put it back together in less than a minute. You’re the best swimmer, the best climber, the best sniper, the best blah, blah, blah. Whatever. If you wanted the girls, you could have them. I suppose the fact that you don’t want them is another point in your favor.”
“Bernie, man, we all have longings,” said Chuck, raising both hands in the air. “Whatever this is about, however it started—”
“I’ll tell you how it started,” said Bernie. He pointed a finger into the air, and I could see his hands were shaking. “It started when that—woman—showed up this afternoon. God, she’s got to be the prettiest girl I’ve seen in ages. And I just got to thinking, what would it be like to bed someone like her? Just for a single night, even. But of course, when I made the mistake of sharing how I felt at dinner, every single one of you mocked me. ‘That idiot Bernie thinks he has a chance with a lady! Bernie has a crush on a girl, so he’ll probably end up in prison!’ Hilarious!”
Chuck lowered his hands, looking simultaneously confused and full of pity.
“Not one of you,” said Bernie, “stood up and said, ‘You know what? Bernie’s not a great guy, and yeah, he’s kind of dorky and awkward-looking, but he could totally bang a girl if he wanted to.’ The thought never even crossed your mind because it’s already a given that our new friend will end up in Carson’s bed, or Jake’s, or Zack’s. Hell, she could end up in Chuck’s bed if he made the effort. But the one thing that will never happen, because it could never, ever happen, is that she might choose to sleep with me. No, not Bernie. Awkward, repulsive, nerdy, woman-repelling, hunchbacked Bernie!”
This was such an astonishing outpouring of resentment and fury that for a long time after it ended, we stood there in silence. No one seemed to know how to respond, not even Chuck. Carson looked completely dumbfounded, while Jake sighed and shook his head, his eyes misting over.
“First, I want to get one thing straight here,” said Chuck, raising his voice slightly. “Not you or me or Jake or Zack or anybody is going to be sleeping with this reporter? Is that clear?”
The rest of us nodded with varying degrees of hesitation.
“Second,” he went on, “you have probably the thinnest skin of any man I’ve ever met. Every day, me and Zack and the rest of the guys rag on each other, and no one complains about it. That’s because we understand that we’re joking. As I recall, you’ve said some pretty demeaning things about me and Carson, but you don’t hear me whining about it. You need to man up and learn how to take a joke.”
“It’s different with y’all,” said Bernie. He was resting his head against the locker with his eyes closed. “When you joke with them, you do it in good fun. You don’t laugh with me, you laugh at me.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” said Chuck coolly. “You can work that out with your therapist. For now, I want you to promise me that you aren’t going to try to hit on this woman.”
“Why, because you think I’m a creep?”
“No,” said Chuck, beginning to sound angry. “Because it’s unprofessional, and we could all get in trouble.”
“I don’t see you asking the rest of the boys not to hit on her.”
Chuc
k wrung his hands in exasperation. The longer this conversation went on, the more it strained his patience. Turning to the six of us gathered in the doorway, he said, “Boys, will each of you promise not to hit on, harass, or bang the hot reporter?”
“Promise,” we said dully. I couldn’t help noticing that Carson had crossed his fingers as he said it.
Chuck turned back to Bernie. “So there you go. Now you have nothing to complain about—and, more importantly, nothing to whine about. Not you or anyone else is gonna be in that woman’s bed. She’s here to do a job, and we’re here to do ours.”
Bernie went on leaning against the locker in silence. It seemed like he was beginning to wish Chuck would just go away. Personally, I thought Chuck had handled the situation about as well as he could have: Bernie had been a drag on the platoon since the day he arrived, and none of us really knew how to deal with it.
“God, I hate that fucker sometimes,” Carson muttered as we returned to our bags looking shaken and exhausted.
“Which one?” asked Jake, rolling up his canvas tent. “Chuck or Bernie?”
“You know which one. One of these days, he’s just going to snap and murder us all in our sleep.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” I said. “Someday after we’ve all gone home, we’ll turn on the news to see him shooting up a Wal-Mart.”
“Or being handcuffed for buying a thousand pounds of fertilizer,” said Carson.
“Yeah, or kidnapping the president’s wife.” Each of us went around the room and offered our own, increasingly lurid suggestions. I think we were all pretty frightened after that performance in the hallway, and it was a relief to be able to joke about it. Although, I thought with an uneasy feeling as I clambered into my bed, I hadn’t really meant it as a joke. And I wasn’t sure the others had, either.
Chapter Six
Kelli
I spent the night in a rundown Cité hotel in downtown Kinshasha. Not my first choice, but it was the cheapest option available. I was given a windowless room on the second story with a single wood-frame mattress and a vase of fading peonies on the nightstand. The sheets smelled musty and looked like they hadn’t been changed in weeks, maybe longer. The tap water in the faucet was a russet brown color that looked faintly like blood.
I spent most of the night lying awake in my bed, listening to the disturbing noises emanating from the halls and behind the walls. At one point, an enormous bug wandered across the ceiling, so large that it couldn’t scuttle, so it just waddled. It seemed to have no fear that I would kill it, which was presumptuous but accurate. I had never seen a bug like that, and I couldn’t tell you what it was called. It was like a water bug, but bigger, roughly the size and shape of a plantain leaf.
The only nice thing about having a giant bug from the prehistoric era waddling across my ceiling was that it distracted me from the shouts and sounds of running feet in the hallway. At any moment, I felt sure a fight was going to break out, or that one of the hotel staff would pound on my door and inform me that the hotel had just been taken over by guerilla bandits and we were all being held hostage. I kept thinking about how Kim Kardashian had been robbed at gunpoint in Paris, and she had even had a bodyguard, which I did not. Perhaps it was selfish of me, but I began to wish the SEALs had sent one of their men to keep watch over my room during the night while I slept.
At around 3:00am, I resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to be getting any sleep that night. It’s the most miserable feeling, knowing you have to be up in an hour but knowing you’re going to spend the rest of the day feeling exhausted and wishing you could just climb back into bed.
About an hour later, there was a loud knock on my door that startled me out of my half-asleep state. I had thought it would be one of the men come to get me, but when I opened the door, it was Azzedine.
“Hey,” I said groggily. “Where are the boys?”
Azzedine laughed lightly. “As they need to be up and training in an hour, none of them could make it. Luckily when they phoned me, I was already up and awake. Are you ready?”
On our way to the plane through the misty half-darkness, I told him about the enormous bug and the unnerving noises that had kept me awake all night. “This doesn’t seem like the safest place to be staying,” I said. “Should I be worried?”
“This hotel is one of the safer places in Kinshasha,” Azzedine said. “And the city itself is a much safer place to live than it was during the sixties. When there are terrorist acts and political upheavals, we deal with them. We are not a fearful people.”
This was hardly reassuring, but I held my tongue. “What about natural dangers? What is the risk of me, say, contracting Ebola during the two weeks I’m here and accidentally becoming patient zero for an epidemic?”
Azzedine laughed a great big belly laugh. “Are you this afraid all the time?” he asked. “Do all Americans live in fear like this?”
When I thought about it, I had to concede that we mostly did. A good percentage of my fellow countrymen spent most of their lives online freaking out about health care, terrorist attacks, and climate change. Azzedine’s jovial imperturbability was simultaneously infuriating and refreshing—all the more so given the volatile political situation in his own country.
We arrived at base just as the sun was rising over the scrim of trees to the east, bathing the morning in hues of buttery yellow. I was beginning to regret that I hadn’t eaten breakfast before we left the hotel. Sergeant Armstrong had said nothing of food in our first meeting, and while I assumed I would be eating lunch with the boys at around noon, that was still hours away.
Now in the murky half-light, he stood over them as they bent low to the ground, doing push-ups in unison. “Keep your eyes to the ground,” he warned when one of the men seemed to raise his head for a moment at my approach, his eyes lit with a cold hunger. “Remember: the more you sweat in peacetime, the less you sweat in war.”
At his command, the men lowered themselves into push-up positions and began doing belly lift walks. Perhaps it was the light or perhaps I was just tired, but there was something both ominous and thrilling at the sight of these men in formation. Ominous because their exercises represented everything that scared me about the military: the unflinching obedience to authority, the emphasis on brawns over brain, the reversion to animal instincts.
I was filled with a sense of quiet foreboding at the thought that any one of these men could overpower me within seconds, at which point I would be powerless to stop them. They could easily kill me and leave my body to be eaten by predators and devoured by worms. In a sense, I was placing my life in their hands anytime I flew out here, trusting that their sense of decency would overrule their animal longings. They were men, too, I kept having to remind myself: men with families and social obligations; men who played baseball and ran marathons and went to church or synagogue or mosque.
I spent the morning watching them train together: running laps; doing jingle jangles; swimming in the large pool at the back of the warehouse; climbing a large obelisk-like structure with steel bars on the side. By the time we broke for lunch, I was exhausted just from watching them train. I couldn’t imagine how tired they must be, how it must feel to get up and do this every day before dawn, day after day, how it must have worn them down.
Although I didn’t get the chance to interview any of the SEALs, I did spend a good portion of the day talking to Sergeant Armstrong, who proved to be as genial and effervescent as Evan had said he would be.
“This seems like a lot to have to go through,” I said to him as the men did prisoner squats in the steadily mounting heat. “Do you ever have recruits who quit because they just can’t make it?”
Armstrong laughed. “We do, actually,” he said. “Luckily none of our recruits have died yet, at least not in this platoon, but it could very well happen.”
I froze with my pen in hand. “There are recruits who have died?”
He nodded grimly with an eye on my notepad, perhaps wishin
g he hadn’t brought it up. “There’s been a death every year for three out of the last four years of SEAL training. But I mean, what do you expect when they’re basically thrown into a lake with weights tied to their feet, forced to dismantle them and swim to the surface? It’s amazing there have only been three deaths.”
He smiled at the stunned look on my face. Probably he was thinking I lived a sheltered existence in my Manhattan apartment, immured from the dangers of the world. I could have easily disabused him of that notion, but I held my tongue.
No, what really unsettled me was that the government and military could place such a low value on life, that they would let this happen again and again.
“You must have scores of people who never make it past recruitment,” I said.
“Way more than that,” said Armstrong. “Every year, thousands of men sign up for this program under the mistaken impression that they’ve got what it takes. Most of them drop out when the real training begins. We have what’s called ‘Hell Week,’ which is easily the most grueling training regimen in the entire United States military. The entire week, the boys are out running, and climbing, and carrying boats, in extreme cold and heat.”
“How many of them make it?”
“Not very many,” said Armstrong with a grim smile, “and that’s by design. However many recruits we start out with, by the end of the week we’ll have lost about three-quarters. The whole time they’re training, we’re standing over them with bullhorns urging them to quit, to just give up and stop suffering needlessly. Which they can do at any time—all they have to do is ring the bell, and they’re done.”
“There’s a bell?”
“There is a bell. At any moment they can ring that bell, come in out of the water or wherever and enjoy coffee and doughnuts. But they’ll never be a SEAL, and they’ll never have the satisfaction of being able to say they made it through the toughest training regimen on earth.”