Loose Lips

by Claire Berlinski

  “On a mooge hunt, man.”

  After turning that over in my head for a while, I finally understood that Jake had been out looking for mujahideen—although God knows which or where or why.

  After that vigorous workout and heavy breakfast, I could have gone right back to bed, but instead we were marched off for lessons in land navigation. I found myself dressed in full camouflage ensemble and combat boots, shlepping a compass, a protractor, a flashlight, a topographical map, night-vision goggles, a radio, a two-day supply of water, a first-aid kit, a couple of dehydrated meals, a sixty-pound pack, and a plastic-replica M-16 through the humid Virginia woods, skulking under the bushes for cover and pretending to be staging a raid on an enemy arms depot.

  At first I felt pretty slick, in my camouflage gear and mirrored sunglasses, until I realized that those gentle rolling hills I had admired on the bus ride concealed at least ten thousand acres of dense forest, seventy billion mosquitoes, chiggers, gnats, bats, poison ivy, poison oak, thicket, ticks that carried Lyme disease, and strange things that made spooky noises, especially at night. Every tree looked to me like every other tree—every hill looked exactly like every other hill—and I spent the first few days wandering from one clump of thorns to another, scratching my bites, picking off ticks, swatting at flies, bandaging and re-bandaging my blisters, inadvertently hiking in circles, and finding nothing whatsoever.

  Joe, the kindliest member of our team, tried to help me, but Nathan proposed to leave me in the bushes to let me shift for myself. “She needs to learn to do this on her own,” he said, and since Nathan was team leader that week, in the bushes I stayed. Nathan kept yelling at me for smoking, because the flash of the cigarette lighter and the glow of the embers could draw attention from the enemy. I found that a bit rich, and murmured under my breath that if the enemy was already in Virginia, I hoped someone had had the presence of mind to alert the President. I think he may have overheard me; our relations didn’t improve.

  By the end of the week I was covered in bites, scratches, rashes, and bruises, and I had poison ivy of the ass from peeing in the underbrush. That weekend we returned to Headquarters by bus, and when I arrived home, I slept for twenty hours.

  We went back to the Farm on Sunday night. We studied emergency medicine the next week. In the classroom, we learned to perform triage, stabilize the cervical spine, fashion bandages out of our underwear, and tape a sucking chest wound. Then we were sent back into the heat for a practical exercise, a simulated safe-house bombing. The instructors drove us to a house in the woods purpose-built for the lesson. When we broke down the door, we discovered that the interior of the house was pitch-dark. We heard screaming and moaning and smelled smoke. I immediately stepped on the first victim. I stepped on her twice, actually.

  Students from other teams played the victims. When we dragged them outside, we saw that they had made themselves up to look injured, using props and cyanotic-blue makeup. Latex moulage allowed them to create lifelike effects: burns, blisters, amputations, even a convincing avulsed eye. Thick liquid-latex blood covered every surface, collecting in slippery pools on the floor. The casualties pretended to shriek and limp. They were hysterical; they fought the rescuers. Fighting rescuers, the instructors had told us, is a common response to stress, but I reckoned my classmates were enjoying the chance to give one another a few sharp raps to the kneecaps. One of them nearly crippled me. We had no idea how many victims were in the house. The members of the rescue team quickly lost track of one another, and I wondered whether Nan, our team leader that week, had succumbed to smoke inhalation.

  I dragged a screaming two-hundred-pound man whose intestines were bursting from his abdomen down a staircase in the dark—while choking on smoke and tripping over bodies—and hauled him across the lawn to the triage area. Once hauled, he refused to stay still; he lurched up, intestines in hand, insisting that he had to return to the house to find his family, all the while bleeding spectacularly on my clothing and his makeshift bandages. I didn’t know what to do about his wounds: They had told us that intestines should be placed on one side of the abdomen and taped with nonporous material to what remains of the stomach, but the intestines—made of rubber and some kind of slime—wouldn’t hold together. I symbolically cleared his airways and monitored him for shock and scrunched his intestines together as best I could.

  The instructors had said that once we touched the cervical spine, we must immobilize it until the victim reached the helicopter. But how? The guy was writhing and I had nothing with which to immobilize him. “Stay put!” I finally barked in frustration. “It’s for your own good!”

  He stopped moaning long enough to fix me with a look of contempt. “Yeah, that’ll work,” he said.

  We were dripping with sweat in the heat and direct sun, and the sweat and blood together made it nearly impossible to see the wounds and distinguish the serious from the superficial. The bandages wouldn’t stick to the slick of fluids. The victims kept pretending to die.

  I’d never before had such a keen appreciation of what emergency medical technicians and firefighters do for a living. By the end of the exercise, I was exhausted. We were allowed to shower. As I was scrubbing the blood off myself—it was made of something viscous that stained—I remembered that after the Oklahoma City bombing, a warning of a second bomb was received immediately. The firemen rushed into the Murrah Building anyway, and had they not, many more would have perished. Whether I would have been brave enough to do that, I didn’t know. Later, when we were preparing to jump out of a plane, the instructors often spoke of “conquering our fear.” I could never accept that it was anything but plumb stupid and pointless to jump out of a plane. But rushing into a burning building to save a stranger—that’s something else.

  The following week saw lessons in hand-to-hand combat. The instructor was a former inner-city street cop. God forbid, I thought, looking at his brute face, you should ever find yourself on the business end of his nightstick. He called himself the Bulldog, and his eyes lit up demonically every time he described the satisfying sound of a miscreant crumpling in agony to the ground. He told us to line up against the wall. “How many of y’all have studied martial arts?” he asked. “Ju-doo, Achy-doo, that sorta stuff?” About a third of my classmates raised their hands. “Well, you get into a real fight, that stuff ain’t gonna be no use to you.”

  He explained: “Someone’s comin’ at you with a broken-off beer bottle, you better believe me, you’ll forget everything you ever learned about acting like a crouching crane or a hidden lizard.” He raised his arms like wings, wrists limp, in an absurd parody of a crane, and snorted. “Tunnel vision. They call it that for a reason. You see that mother comin’ at you and you’ll lose yer fine-motor skills and yer depth perception. Everything’ll look like a tunnel. And the only thing you’ll see in that tunnel’s a broken-off beer bottle. Biggest damn beer bottle in history. I promise it.”

  The reptilian brain takes over and the panic reflex kicks in, he said. People with no experience of violence can no more remember how to administer a roundhouse kick or precision jab than invoke Jedi mind control. The advantage will always be to the opponent who is accustomed to violence. Looking at the Bulldog as he lazily masticated his gum and slapped his fist against his palm, I knew he spoke the truth.

  That day, we learned one crude tactic and practiced it a thousand times—a single blow to the brachial plexus. The advantage of this move was precisely that it was crude; there was nothing to remember by way of proper form or technique. It was just a good, solid club to the complex of nerves at the base of the neck and, if you could remember it, a thumping kick to the nerve bundle between the foot and the shins. The Bulldog insisted on demonstrating the power of these blows to each of us—“just a little one so as y’all can understand how it works”—and then supervised as we practiced on one another. The men quickly overcame their scruples about hitting women. The best part of the day was giving Jade a good thump to the brachial plexus, th
en sneaking off to the bathroom before she could find me to return the favor.

  By the fourth week, I had ripped off the blisters I’d developed on my palms, exposing the flesh underneath. I had shin splints and a persistent rash. My classmates were going down one by one to sprained ankles and torn ligaments. That was the week we received instruction in surviving interrogation. Since they couldn’t really beat us, they settled for annoying us. We were blindfolded and chained to trees until we got hungry and were bored out of our wits. After some time—I’m not really sure how long—I was hauled into a small room. A guard took off my blindfold. Dazzling klieg lights poured into my blinking eyes; a rat-faced woman whom I didn’t recognize called me an arrogant imperialist running dog. She told me to tell her the names of my classmates or I would be shot. I gamely assured her that I would be killed before giving up my comrades. It was easy enough to be heroic, since I knew no one was really going to be shot—if nothing else, that would violate about seventeen thousand OSHA regulations. But oddly enough, I later heard that when it came Nathan’s turn, he gave us all up anyway. We were a little dismayed to hear that.

  We were scheduled for rappelling and maritime exercises the next week, then firearms training, then something the schedule listed as the “fundamentals of drowning.” Following that, we were to be trained in building explosives from household materials. I was tired. We all were, but we were too competitive to admit it to one another. The lack of privacy had the predictable effect, and we began sniping at each other. It was curious to see who retained a sunny disposition under those conditions and who turned into a whining pain in the ass or a minor-league tyrant. The results weren’t what I would have predicted. Those who had been in the military thrived, and rarely lost their tempers. I admired that and I admired them. I wished I were more like them. Competent and cool.

  Joe, a Green Beret who had fought in the gulf war and taken a bullet—in the ass, from friendly fire, alas—always had time to gently explain things to me, and then to encourage me, even when I was slow to catch on. During firearms training, I was unable to remember how to disassemble and clean my weapon. He showed me how again and again. “Don’t feel bad,” he said. “This can be pretty tricky if you’ve never handled a gun before.” As I practiced, he entertained himself by shooting targets at the end of the firing range with a Browning nine millimeter, methodically plugging the flapping paper with bullets. When he was done, the neat holes he’d left formed a perfect smiling face.

  On the day we practiced with automatic weapons, they brought the first-aid crew and an ambulance to stand by in case of an accident. I asked the paramedic what they would do if someone accidentally shot himself with one of those monstrous things. “Get the mop,” he said economically, gesturing with his head in the direction of the utility closet.

  “No reason to be afraid of it,” Joe reassured me as I contemplated the M-16 I’d been handed, packed with live ammunition. “It’s just a tool like any other. Follow the instructions and you’re safe as houses.” When I finally pulled the trigger, lying on my belly and bracing the rifle against my shoulder, the recoil slammed me back so hard that on the next day I had an angry bruise in the shape of the butt of an M-16.

  Joe always beamed with a genuine boisterous gratitude to find himself still alive, no matter how little sleep we’d had, and he never once expressed irritation or shortness of temper. Despite having a jack-o’-lantern’s face and a head shaped like a lightbulb (rather like the screamer in Munch’s famous painting), he had recently convinced a ravishing, limpid-eyed blond schoolteacher to marry him. When I saw how kind he was, I decided that his bride had done well for herself.

  Nan, on the other hand, who had always seemed perfectly pleasant to me before, if in no way especially interesting, became the hair shirt of my short paramilitary life. A thick-legged woman from Michigan with a moon face—formerly a commercial real estate saleswoman—Nan had a voice that registered a single note, an adenoidal whine elongated with the diphthongs of the Midwest. She had blisters. She had a mye-graine. She thought someone wasn’t pulling his wei-ei-ght. The cigarette smoke sickened her. Whenever I lit up, she would start waving her hands in front of her face and making coughing sounds, as if she were discharging a hairball. “Do you mind?” she’d say, wrinkling her nose. “I’m allergic to cigarettes.” I wondered if she would specify in her assignment request that she would work only in the nonsmoking section of Kazakhstan. I began to light up in front of her just to annoy her.

  I made a vow to myself that I would be like Joe: I wouldn’t complain or lose my temper. I stuck to it pretty well. But the tension built up to a point where we were all irrational. One evening we found a group of strangers in our bar, men who looked like our men—alert and clean—but whose faces were unfamiliar. They were drinking beer and swaggering as if they owned the place. We asked them who they were, and they told us they were Secret Service trainees, sent to the Farm for training in explosives detection. Our men puffed themselves up, and soon both groups of men were trading tales of masculine daring. They might fly on Air Force One and take bullets for POTUS, but we used aliases and fake I.D., and since when did John le Carré ever write novels about the Secret Service? The men from the Secret Service asked questions that slyly suggested that anyone who had to work undercover must not have the balls to go face-to-face with his opponents. They managed to imply that espionage was somehow effete. Our guys suggested in turn that anyone whose job description was to make his face look like a bull’s-eye must be a little short on candlepower.

  Later in the evening, one of the Secret Service men sidled up to fluffy-haired Rita, the perky trainee with the wide smile. Something inappropriate was said. Our boys and the Secret Service rumbled. We kicked them out of the bar and told them not to come back. Our boys were very pleased with themselves. Everyone felt better the next day.

  At last, the summer came to an end. The mornings and evenings grew cool. We reached the final week of the course. I’d been dreading the final week. I loathe airplanes. I’ve always loathed airplanes. I need three shots of vodka just to board a 747. Once I went to a hypnotist to try to overcome my fear of flying. Her office was decorated in purple and potted ferns; there were macramé skirts around the planters. The mating cries of a whale, superimposed upon harp music, played in the background. When you buckle your seat belt, she intoned in an oleaginous voice, you will feel safe and calm. Safe and calm. Safe and calm. When you buckle your seat belt, you will feel safe and calm. It had cost a hundred bucks, and it didn’t take. The whale music was an abomination, and I still hated flying. The idea of jumping out of a Twin Otter made me absolutely nauseated.

  On the first day of jump week, Ed, the jumpmaster, lined us up. “This week is the heart and soul of your training!” he cried. “The one week where you cannot make a mistake!”

  Ed had been a Navy SEAL. Judging from his face, he was past sixty, but below the neck he looked about nineteen, all sinew and brawn. When he met us at dawn for our morning hike and calisthenics, he was always in a sweat from having been up an hour before us, running and pumping iron with his two demented, drooling Rhodesian Ridgebacks. “Sanskrit,” he had repeated slowly when I answered his question about what I had done before joining the CIA. “Not very practical, now, is that.”

  “Jumping from an airplane,” he bellowed on the first day of jump school, “is optional. You do not have to be airborne!” He surveyed the class, arms folded across his chest. “Raise your hand if you’re a pussy who wants to stay on the ground!”

  The pussies in the class, of whom I was the prime example, looked at each other nervously. I tried to convince myself that the real act of courage would be to raise my hand in the face of this kind of pressure. Wouldn’t that take courage? More courage than jumping out of a plane? I tried hard to persuade myself that it would. My hand stayed by my side, as did everyone else’s. Ed smiled a narrow, mirthless little smile. “Good. No pussies here. Airborne!”

  Recreational jumpers usuall
y exit at some five thousand feet, allowing themselves a half minute or so to respond to a malfunction. But we were going to jump military style, Ed told us. “Military jumpers exit at the lowest altitude possible to minimize the time they’re targets in the air! So you are going to jump from 1,250 feet! If there is a malfunction in the main canopy, you will deploy the reserve in four seconds or less! Otherwise, you will not survive! Airborne!”

  We rehearsed on the ground for several days, wearing harnesses attached to pulleys that lowered us to the ground when we jumped from a thirty-foot tower. We practiced landings and did emergency drills. As each day passed, I knew with greater certainty that I did not want to jump out of that plane. Nan had gotten all gung-ho about it and kept telling everyone how excited she was. “Airborne!” she squeaked every time Ed addressed her.

  I hoped her chute wouldn’t open.

  On the morning we were supposed to jump, it began to rain, and the flight was canceled. Thank God, I thought. But at lunchtime the sky cleared, and by the afternoon it was bright and cloudless. The aircraft sat on the tarmac, engines growling. Ed told us to suit up.

  The day had turned positively radiant, with green fields and woods as far as the eye could see. The grass and milkweed swayed in the fine breeze, and a monarch butterfly settled on my packed parachute. I shooed it away furiously.

  I put on my helmet and Joe helped me into my parachute rig, tightening the harness around my legs and chest. Jumpmaster Ed checked each of us personally before we left the shed where the equipment was stored, making sure the metal clasps were fastened securely. I begged him to check me twice. The annoyance I’d felt with his fanaticism for order and discipline had completely disappeared.