Now and Again

by Charlotte Rogan

  4.9 Danny Joiner

  Danny spent a moment trying to find his binoculars, which would have been useful in assessing the situation, but they weren’t around his neck and they hadn’t fallen to the floor. He slid out of the truck and took cover behind it before shouldering his rifle and firing frantically at the wall before settling down and aiming, which helped to pin down whoever was there even if he didn’t hit them.

  The seconds ticked by. Whenever one of the Iraqis showed himself, Harraday would pop off a round, or Danny would, but then Harraday’s big gun went silent—jammed or out of ammo—so now Harraday was crouching in the gun turret and blasting away with his M4, which is when Danny noticed a vehicle that looked like a pickup truck approaching from the east. Danny figured the truck would have to leave the road at some point to get around the debris, but it didn’t leave the road. And it didn’t slow down. It was then that he noticed how the truck was riding very low to the ground and how it was heading straight toward Tishman and Kelly’s Humvee. “Incoming!” yelled Danny, but his head was pounding and he couldn’t even hear himself.

  The best thing he could do was to stop the truck before it reached the Humvee and detonated, which was what was going to happen if he didn’t do something quickly. He rammed another round into the chamber and steadied his arm. He remembered to breathe. He remembered that his left eye was dominant. He remembered to flip the safety. Now that he had a plan, his hands were weirdly steady. His head was clear as glass. He could have been a sniper, he was so cool and controlled. As he squeezed the trigger, elation flooded through him because he knew even before the windshield shattered that it was a money shot and that his buddies in the Humvee were safe because of him. The driver pitched forward. The pickup swerved and abruptly stopped. And then the feeling changed into whatever was the opposite of elation as his laser focus opened out again and he saw that something had detached from the roadside and taken human form. The figure had time to run a few steps farther up the road before the truck exploded and with it, Pig Eye and everything predictable about the world.

  4.10 Penn Sinclair

  Penn Sinclair woke with a start to the enormity of what he had done. He lay sweating on his cot for over an hour before rising and dressing carefully in the dark. By the time the pink desert light filtered in at the plastic window, he had written a two-page statement outlining what had happened between the announcement that the tours were being extended and the encounter with the IED.

  The men had been insubordinate. He had worried about losing control and overreacted. He had justified his actions by telling himself that the school was a priority, as was getting the supplies up the road for when the orders came through. But the truth was, he hadn’t asked enough questions or adequately assessed the intelligence or understood the implications of the surge for road-clearing crews or the general confusion that accompanied the implementation of any new strategy. He re-read the statement and thought again about how facts weren’t much different from fabrications. But it was the best he could do.

  At 06:30 he knocked at the door of the colonel’s quarters. Falwell was blessed with a permanent interrogatory look that made people answer questions before he could ask them. When he opened the door, Penn wished him good morning and handed the two sheets of paper across. Falwell’s expression turned from Who’s bothering me so early? to What the fuck is this?

  “It’s my statement, sir.”

  Statement? asked the look.

  “Confession, rather. To attach to the after action report.”

  Falwell opened his mouth for the first time and said, “I was just about to have coffee. Why don’t you come in and join me, Captain.”

  Penn didn’t want coffee. He didn’t want to sit down next to a picture of Falwell’s teenaged daughters or notice that in the picture, the daughters were lounging on a beach holding some kind of fruity drink while two dark-skinned people with trays hovered behind them and smiled for the camera. But he found himself sitting with a coffee cup balanced on his knees and blurting out the story of how he had sent the convoy before receiving the orders and how, once he had received them, he had allowed a unit to continue north to deliver a load of supplies to the school. “My actions were almost certainly the reason the convoy was attacked.”

  “Almost certainly,” said Falwell.

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “How many things in life are almost certain, Captain? Death and taxes, crabs—that’s about it.”

  “Likely, then.”

  “I see,” said Falwell. “Was it yesterday? Or was it the day before? Or maybe it was Wednesday of last week or the week before that.”

  “Yesterday,” said Penn, his eyes straying to the daughters, who wore oversized sunglasses and strapless dresses and the confident smiles of girls who knew how to get what they wanted. “It was the day after the troops found out they weren’t going home.”

  “My point is that it could have been any day. It’s too dangerous to send supply convoys every day of the goddamned week. But, of course, it’s also too dangerous not to send them because that would hang the guys on the front lines out to fucking dry.”

  The colonel swallowed a slug of coffee and said, “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics.”

  It was Sinclair’s turn to give Falwell a questioning look.

  “Sun Tzu,” said the colonel.

  “But I sent them before the orders came through.”

  “I heard the men were causing trouble,” said Falwell. “And the supplies got to where they were needed way ahead of schedule. It’s conceivable that the entire convoy would have been ambushed if it had started later. You might have saved something even worse from happening. Did you ever think that those first trucks only got through because of you?”

  “Five of my men were killed and others were injured. What could be worse than that?”

  Penn blinked and lowered his eyes. When he raised them again, the colonel was blinking too and the questioning look was gone.

  “No person on earth is sorrier about that than me. No one. Not a single fucking person cares more about his troops than I do. But it sounds like they were out of line and you tried to control them. You just couldn’t control the Iraqis. If you could, you’d be sitting here instead of me.”

  The rising sun cast the room in a warm and almost otherworldly glow so that with a little effort, Penn might have convinced himself that he would walk outside to find a row of beach umbrellas and smiling waiters peddling the illusion that the world was a beautiful place and that those who weren’t yet happy would be after another mai tai or a hot stone massage or a leisurely swim in the blue-black infinity-edge pool.

  “So, what?” asked the colonel. “You want to be punished, is that it? Well, that won’t solve a goddamned thing.”

  “I made two bad decisions in a row. First to send the convoy before receiving the orders, and then to split the platoon.”

  “And why were those bad decisions?”

  “Because they led to unnecessary deaths.”

  “The end justifies the means, then? An action is good if it leads to a state of affairs that is better than the one you started with? Setting aside the well-worn tropes about torturing or killing some people in order to save others—we’ve all heard those arguments a thousand times—how does focusing on the consequences provide guidance about what a person should do? Here you are, assessing your options, and you decide that sending the convoy will accomplish more than not sending it. But in the end it doesn’t, so now you determine that your action was bad. The problem with this theory is that you can only see what you ought to have done after the fact.”

  “In any case, I want to take responsibility for it. And I want to keep from doing any more harm.”

  “There’s an easy answer, then,” said the colonel. “Go ahead and shoot yourself now. Or join a monastery.”

  Penn tried to take a sip of his coffee, but the cup was shaking in his hand, so he put it back down and checked out the daught
ers again, calmed somewhat by their innocence or whatever it was that allowed them to look so alert and oblivious at the same time. One of them was prettier than the other, but he could tell that the second one had bigger—well, the word that came to him was “balls.” She reminded him of Louise, except that Louise would have managed to convey that behind the perky smile was an important itinerary, and only by rigidly sticking to it had she carved out that moment of relaxation and fun. Still, they had the same assured look, a look he recognized because he used to have it himself. He owed Louise a letter or an email, but he didn’t know what he would say to her or what he would want her to say in reply.

  “Call me a pragmatist,” said the colonel, “but I don’t believe there’s a single, unified answer to any of the questions we might ask ourselves about how a person decides what to do. Should I be concerned with the consequences? Of course I should. Mostly I don’t lie, but when the Nazis come knocking, I don’t tell them where Anne Frank is hiding. I take my best shot given the available time and information—that’s the thing I’m paid to do. Anything more than that is above my pay grade, and certainly above yours.”

  “But if I’d waited a little longer, thought a little harder…”

  “There are the thinkers and there are the doers, Sinclair. The thinkers sit around in their libraries talking in circles about what is morally required or permitted—you can’t judge a person without considering his actions, and you can’t judge actions without considering consequences. But consequences can’t be predicted with any accuracy, so you talk about intentions—and where does all that mumbo jumbo leave us? It leaves us exactly where we are. Someone has to be out here on the front lines doing something about all the shit in the world, and that’s us. We’re the doers, Sinclair. We don’t have the luxury of waiting until we’ve got the theory all worked out. While those guys are trying to come up with answers—and don’t forget, they’ve been trying for thousands of years—life is happening all around us.”

  “And death,” said Penn.

  “Which is a really lousy part of life,” said the colonel.

  “It’s not really part of life,” Penn started to say, but he wasn’t sure of his ground, so he stopped.

  The colonel got up and poured himself another cup of coffee. He looked at Penn and then past him at the scratched plastic window and the yard where groups of soldiers had started to move about, their faces glowing in the morning light as if lit from within. “To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing,” he said.

  “Aristotle?” asked Penn.

  “Elbert Hubbard, whoever the hell that is.”

  The colonel rose and moved toward the door. The morning light hit the crevices of his face, but when he turned, his features were erased by shadows. “I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, Sinclair. I don’t much like confessions.”

  “Sorry sir.”

  “Do you know why I don’t like them?”

  “No sir.”

  “They create problems is why. And I think you’ll agree we’ve got problems enough.”

  “Yes sir,” said Penn, gesturing toward the pages Falwell was holding but hadn’t read. “Anyway, it’s all in there.”

  “Which computer did you write this on?”

  “My personal computer, sir.”

  “Are there other copies?”

  “No sir.”

  “Good.” Falwell walked to where a waste receptacle was nestled in a corner of the room. He put the pages in the receptacle and lit a match, and they both watched as the paper burned. “You didn’t email this to anybody, did you? You didn’t save it on a disk?”

  “No sir.”

  “See that you don’t. You go delete that file and then you empty the trash bin on the computer and then you never mention this to anybody again. And when the incident report is written up, make sure it’s routed through me.”

  “Yes sir,” said Penn. Then he added, “I think I cared too much about the school. And I cared too much about how I looked to the other officers. I let those things overshadow my duty to my men. That’s the thing I can’t forget.”

  “You sent some troops on a mission that might or might not have been poorly timed, which had the side benefit of letting some hotheads cool off. The orders changed and you adapted the best you could according to the information you had at the time. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, Sinclair. But I’m glad you told me about this. I’ll write a press release. We’ll inform the next of kin.”

  Penn said, “Yes sir.” He moved the untouched coffee from his knees to a table.

  “You’re like me, Sinclair. The army needs us, but we need the army too.”

  As Penn left the hut, the weight that had been pressing down on him since the afternoon before left his shoulders, but it settled somewhere deep inside his rib cage. When he got back to his quarters, he deleted his confession, but only after emailing it to his civilian account and only after enclosing a printed copy in an envelope and addressing it to himself care of his mother, who would recognize the handwriting and wonder vaguely why he was writing to himself. Then she would carefully sort the envelope from the bills and invitations, and the next time she went upstairs, she would put it in the top drawer of the antique chest that stood in the hallway underneath the Sinclair family crest with the rooster on it and the words they repeated at holiday gatherings but otherwise forgot: COMMIT THY WORK TO GOD. She would recognize his handwriting, but she wouldn’t open the envelope the way Louise would open it if he sent the letter to her.

  4.11 Gordon Falwell

  I should have been a priest,” said Falwell before the door closed. “I should have been a fucking priest.”

  He’d been told to cancel all logistics missions until after the meeting at HQ, which he had done. But now he had five casualties to explain in an incident where supplies were being skimmed off for an unauthorized school and who knew if that was just the tip of the iceberg as far as the supplies went, not to mention that certain road patrols had been temporarily pulled, which is a detail he had known but hadn’t passed on in a timely fashion because he’d thought canceling the missions was enough. If he had, though, Sinclair would have made a different decision when it came to disciplining his men, and this rat fuck could have been avoided. It was ultimately his fault. Something like this could stall his career. Now he’d have to change the date on the incident report. Or fudge the time line. Hell, he’d figure it out. At HQ he’d talked to combat commanders, and all of them had reported that insubordination among the troops was on the rise, as were visits to mental health personnel, as were IED attacks, as were demands on soldiers to do things for the Iraqis that the Iraqis should be doing for themselves, as was the belief in counterinsurgency of exactly the school-building kind, and as was the inability to tell who was the enemy or where he was hiding. The war was 360 degrees with surround sound, so how were he and his officers supposed to make good decisions when either way they were fucked.

  “Lessons learned” had been the catchphrase of the meeting, and now Falwell had to submit yet another after action report that would be scoured for useful observations, information, and lessons—OIL. The report would trigger still other reports and analyses that would be sent up the command chain, where new policies would be crafted and handed back down with the hope that past mistakes could be avoided. Ha!

  He winced at the AARs already littering his desk—the one where the lesson learned was about keeping engines from overheating in this blast furnace of a country and the one where it was about destigmatizing mental health care and the ones about combatting complacency and up-armoring cargo trucks and conserving water and building trust and preventing rape and recognizing likely ambush points. And now the one about how the light footprint strategy had been a—well, people had started to use the word “fiasco.” Just thinking about the piles of paper and analyses one more incident would spawn was enough to make him weep.

  And yet, the optimism he had brought back with him from HQ hadn’t completely dis
sipated. There was something about tragedy that strengthened resolve and annealed the soul, and there was something about the surge that spelled “Fresh Start.” A new strategy always conjured up in his mind a pristine set of pages, ones with that fresh-ink smell and the lines not yet filled with fuck-ups and confusion. He called his CSM and said, “Everyone in the DFAC in thirty.” Then he spent a few minutes pondering the HQ briefing and deciding what to pass on to the troops. He’d keep it short. In war, only the simple succeeds, he told himself, quoting Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. He liked the words “simple” and “focused” and “decisive.”

  By the time he was walking across the yard, optimism was tugging his center of gravity by its string. The men were sitting quietly this time, waiting and wary, but they snapped to attention when he entered the room. As he spoke, he amped up his speech a little, and instead of “attempt,” he said “high-octane effort,” and instead of “senseless deaths,” he said “magnificent contribution.” And then he talked about balancing kinetics with human intelligence and diplomacy. As he spoke, he saw that there were valuable lessons to be learned after all and that he was articulating them forcefully. Fuck the papers and reports. It was he, along with the men and women arrayed before him, who would make the difference in this war.

  “There is nothing you cannot do,” he said, and he saw his belief reflected in the faces in front of him. The troops who had been sitting back leaned forward, and the ones who had been leaning forward squinted and tensed their jaws.

  “If you fall,” he said, “you will pick yourself up and do your job. And if the enemy pushes you down, you will pick yourself up and you will push back harder, and then you will do your job. But if he pushes you down and steps on you…”