The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  *

  The last day of Anthony Wakefield’s life was a deadly one in many parts of Iraq. At a Kurdish funeral near Mosul, two dozen people were killed by a car bomb. American soldiers handing out sweets to children were targeted by a bomber in Baghdad. As the new Iraqi government debated the Sunni cabinet positions, home-made bombs went off all over the country in a spree that saw 120 dead. It was two years exactly since George W. Bush had announced that ‘major combat operations’ in Iraq were over, an anniversary marked with seventeen co-ordinated bombings in Baghdad.

  Scholars of human chronology might have noticed several other anniversaries that day. It is the date of Joseph McCarthy’s death and J. Edgar Hoover’s. It is the date of Tony Blair’s 1997 election victory and the day in 1982 on which a British navy submarine torpedoed the General Belgrano. Soon after colleagues at Camp Abu Naji woke up to news of Anthony Wakefield’s death, Lynndie England would appear in a Texas court that day to plead guilty to charges of maltreating Iraqi prisoners.

  Many servicemen, British and American, were expressing disgust that day about the crimes of England and her associated military reprobates. One who did so was Lieutenant Colonel John C. Spahr, an executive officer with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 323, based at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, but serving during the spring of 2005 in the Persian Gulf on the USS Carl Vinson. Lieutenant Colonel Spahr was 6 feet 3 inches tall and did a memorable impression of John Wayne, which lent him his call-sign ‘Dukes’. His sister Kelly told me he wasn’t motivated by politics, but was driven by a keen sense of right and wrong. ‘Those top pilots are all alike,’ she said. ‘They are not available. That’s why a lot of them are single or marry late. They never really talked about what they did: there are things John did in the line of duty that I knew he would never talk about. But he said that being in the jet was like being inside his own skin.’

  At 7 p.m. – eighteen hours after Guardsman Anthony Wakefield was pronounced dead – John C. Spahr climbed the ladder onto the flight deck of USS Carl Vinson and walked to his F/A18 Hornet. Lance Corporal Lindsay, who did final checks on Spahr’s jet that evening, said he came out onto the flight deck smiling and joking with his fellow Marines. The ship is more than 1,000 feet long and can carry 5,500 personnel; its motto Vis Per Mare, ‘strength from the sea’. A major carrier is more like a floating town, often surrounded with smaller ships serving as warehouses. Lieutenant Colonel Spahr and his colleague Marine Captain Kelly Hinz had their orders: they would fly into south-central Baghdad and support the Marines on the ground, many of whom were fighting insurgents and taking sniper fire. Lieutenant Colonel Spahr was more than familiar with the journey. He had been the first pilot to fly into Baghdad on the night of 21 March 2003 – the first of 1,700 sorties flown by the US Air Force – at the beginning of the campaign called Shock and Awe. Launching from the aircraft carrier, ‘You go from about zero to 150 miles an hour in less than two seconds,’ says Captain Daron Youngberg, a colleague of Spahr and Hinz. The pilots left behind a series of signalmen scurrying on deck as each rose and tilted their $55-million plane over the empty horizon. Other pilots watched the pair ascend from the Carl Vinson: ‘There goes Dukes’, said one of them whom I later spoke to. ‘He was the best Top Gun pilot of his generation, and what I would call a complete man,’ he told me.

  I looked at hundreds of pictures of John Spahr over the months I spent looking for his story. Many of them showed him in the cockpit of his fighter plane: one with his visor down and his thumb aloft as he waited to launch from the carrier; another in the blue sky as he saw off some Russian jets; and yet another, looking focused and fit, under a message which said, ‘Do One Thing Every Day That Scares You’. On 2 May the two pilots were flying at 26,000 feet, high over fawn-coloured houses south of the Tigris, the river that stretches towards Al-Amarah. Lieutenant Colonel Hunter Hobson, who had been with Spahr at flight school and later ended up in the same squadron, the famous ‘Death Rattlers’ 323, told me Spahr had what few people have: ‘an amazing ability in the airplane’. When I spoke to Hobson he was at the Miramar base at San Diego. ‘When you’re flying complex, multi-million-dollar aircraft, hand–eye co-ordination is crucial,’ he said. ‘You have to know how to use that machine lethally. The tangible difference with John Spahr was his athletic ability. And you know, being in charge of that machine – it’s exactly where people like John and me need to be. All the training is for that moment. If you had to choose one place for it to end, it wouldn’t be in a hospital: it would be up there.’

  Hobson had been flying the same course as Spahr and Hinz that night but he was called back and the others went on to refuel in the air. The conditions were terrible, an ugly sandstorm, low visibility, though Hobson says the weather was better in Basra. ‘There was lightning,’ said Hobson, ‘and after the refuelling John and Kelly lost sight of each other.’ It seems that Lieutenant Colonel Spahr was behind and below Captain Hinz when Hinz’s plane suddenly dropped fifty feet and slowed, at which point the planes collided. Both men were killed. Hobson and others believe that the pilots ejected, but an F/A-18 parachute was unlikely to deploy effectively at that height and in those stormy conditions. Lieutenant Colonel Spahr’s life may have ended at the moment of collision, but there are signs he died on impact with the ground. He fell more than 25,000 feet to the desert, where his body lay, still strapped into his ejector seat, until it was recovered the following day. ‘That night will never leave my mind,’ said his sister Sabrina when I met her in Philadelphia. ‘I feel I need to know exactly what happened to John so I can properly empathise with him in those final moments over Iraq.’

  *

  At the bus stop in Newcastle, people stood with damp hair and stared into space. The buses going east in the direction of Heaton were half full in the morning and nobody spoke. When I arrived at the house of Paul Wakefield I immediately saw a picture of his handsome younger brother on the coffee table. ‘He was my bodyguard,’ said Paul. ‘He was always quite tough, but brave. He was my hero and he always will be.’ Paul answered the door in his pyjamas and went off to grill some bacon. ‘He was too good for most people,’ he said from the kitchen. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever meet anyone who could compete with my brother.’

  The Jeremy Kyle Show was blaring on television. ‘You Abandoned Your Baby When He Was Two Years Old,’ it said on the screen, and all the people, audience and guests, looked angrily compliant or defiant. Paul’s sitting room smelled of fresh ironing and there were plastic bags from Primark and Iceland along one wall, with Misty the cat easing around them and pawing the legs of his pyjama trousers. Paul threw a dismayed look at the TV and stroked the cat. ‘It would be the best thing they ever did if they left their children alone,’ he said. On the pale wooden mantelpiece, there was a Girls Aloud CD and a photograph of Paul and Anthony’s late grandmother standing outside her house with a birthday cake.

  ‘My epilepsy started when my grandmother died,’ he said. The doctor gave him carbamazepine, an anti-convulsant, but Paul is reluctant to take it because he thinks it will aggravate his weight problem. He is twenty-eight and gay, with a part-time job in Marks & Spencer. ‘Anthony lived with me here when he split up with his wife,’ he said. ‘And it was a happy time, d’yer know what I mean? When my brother died in Iraq I think I just fell to pieces, to be quite honest. I had to take anti-depressants. It kills me to think that someone as strong and beautiful as Anthony could lose his life just like that. The army’s after-care service is rubbish. At the time, they say they’re going to give you the world but they don’t.’

  The last thing Anthony Wakefield saw in life was dimly lit waste ground, a road going out of town at the edge of Al-Amarah. But the sight could not have been unfamiliar to him: he grew up in a similar place in the north of England, in the depressed area of Walker, where he was born on 20 August 1980. Paul was almost exactly a year older, and the brothers were always ‘the boys’. Their father Jimmy Wakefield died of a heart attack when Anthony was fo
ur; he’d been beaten up in the street one day and died in the armchair of their house in Walker Road, aged forty. Paul says their mother abandoned them at that time and that things have never really been right between them since. She still lives in the area. ‘Anthony and I went to live with my grandparents,’ he said. ‘My grandmother was from Greenock in Scotland and my grandfather, he was from a mining village in Durham.’ But they were really brought up by their Aunt Emily and Uncle Danny. When I went to see Emily, her house in Apple Tree Gardens was teeming with porcelain cats. ‘Anthony really loved army films’, she said. ‘He watched Platoon every other day and he kept army films under his bed. My husband Danny bought him combat trousers when he was about seven – him and Paul – and you couldn’t get them off him to wash them. When Anthony wore his out he stole Paul’s to wear.’

  Emily showed me photographs of the boys at that age. I could see from the photos the ubiquity of the combat trousers, and a certain fearfulness in Anthony’s face. ‘When his mam left and their dad died,’ said Emily, ‘I think Anthony was left with the feeling that if he got too close to people they would leave him.’

  The boys were ‘injured-seeming’ when they first arrived, said a teacher at their old school. Anthony was the more outgoing but he was clearly troubled when his grandfather died suddenly in 1987, while queuing for unemployment benefit. Anthony liked football and was always easy and popular with everyone. The boys didn’t see much of their mother (she had another family) and, as the years passed, their grandmother’s people, whom Paul calls ‘my family’, were estranged from her. Paul was initially keen to steer me away from her, which wasn’t hard, as she carefully steered away herself.

  Anthony was always very good-looking, and in childhood pictures is often jumping or running. On a trip to Holy Island, Anthony is casting himself about, seeming to look for adventure or entertainment, while Paul always appears to be retiring from the scene. ‘It was like he was the older brother,’ said Paul. ‘And eventually, telling him I was gay was just like borrowing a cup of sugar. Anthony just said, “I know. I used to share a room with you, Paul. I don’t care.” When Anthony was next to me I felt about twenty feet tall, d’yer know what I mean?’

  Sister Josepha, the headmistress of St Vincent’s Primary School, can still remember the boys coming to the gate for the first time. ‘Anthony was so neat and tidy,’ she said. ‘Walking up with their grandmother, you could just feel the pain. I just wanted to bring them in and look after them; they seemed so small and so tentative. Anthony wasn’t strong educationally. You know the way some children are… not shell-shocked, but frozen somehow.’

  St Vincent’s was built in 1932 as a result of the voluntary efforts of local Catholics. It is a small school in a difficult area, and, according to prideful lore, working men were known to have stolen building materials from the Tyneside shipyards to help with its construction. The day I went to see her, Sister Josepha was wearing sandals and a black wimple, and her eyes smiled through gold-rimmed spectacles. Behind her stood a large print of the Virgin and Child. ‘There was an awakening with Anthony,’ she said. ‘He developed into a bit of a monkey and people wanted to be with him. It was just too sad. When I heard Anthony had gone into the army I said, “No!” His whole physique was so thin and I couldn’t imagine him in that macho world.’

  Sister Josepha showed me some old registers and school photographs of Anthony. His hair was light brown and the headmistress remembered the way he suddenly just burst out of his shell and became popular. ‘But he wasn’t the sort of boy you had to check,’ she said. Listening to her talk of her fears about Iraq and compare the loss of young men to the devastations of the First World War, my eye fell on an open bible next to her. The passage was from Luke: ‘Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eye-witnesses and servants of the Word.’

  Memory was the issue for Mr Simpson. A former maths teacher at the school, he now suffers from Parkinson’s disease and he said he found it difficult to settle and remember things. Mr Simpson sat in a high-backed chair wearing purple pyjamas. His living room was small but it housed a great many bibles, which he sat in front of, his arms flailing and his legs jerking as he tried to clean his glasses and speak to me about Anthony. It seemed an incredible effort and I asked him if he’d like to take a rest. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They were great dancers, the girls in Anthony’s year. He never fought at school or anything like that. I think I had him as a full-back on the football team.’

  Paul leaned in to Mr Simpson’s chair. ‘Can I ask you a question?’ he said. ‘Can I ask you what you thought of me when I was a kid?’

  ‘Nice,’ said Mr Simpson, rocking. ‘A quiet boy.’

  Brian Simpson’s sister looks after him. She brought us tea and a plastic tub of biscuits. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘I remember’ – and his hands beat a semaphore, as if guiding the words into the room – ‘that Anthony would walk up at the end of the day and stand at my classroom door, showing his big smile. I remember several times he came up like that and I drew, with chalk, three stripes on the sleeve of his blazer. He seemed to like that, the stripes.’

  *

  John C. Spahr was born on 9 January 1963 at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey. His mother, Eileen, is the eldest of her Irish family, the Kellys, who came to Boston from Ireland before the Second World War. Eileen married Ronald Charles Spahr of Philadelphia, the son of German immigrants, and in the late 1950s the couple moved to a three-bedroom colonial house in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, which is fairly close to Philadelphia. Everyone you ask speaks of the Spahrs as a classic American post-war family, moderately affluent and natively tough, putting great stock in education, sports, mealtimes, prayers, memories, and earning money. It is the kind of American family that knows its European origins, each generation doing a little better than the one before, while remembering where they came from. The Spahrs could always dilute conventionality with a few drinks, but overall they gleam with a sense of family duty, a common purpose, which might sometimes have chimed with the national mood.

  It was obvious from babyhood that John Spahr was going to be big. He filled the crib and was often irate at first, but before he was three years old his gentleness had begun to assert itself. He was Ronnie and Eileen’s first boy – their fourth child – and in all the pictures he appears placid and willing to be charming. Yet there always appears to have been something reticent about him; on his first day at kindergarten, as he left his mother and faced the new doors, he turned and said to her, ‘What’s my name?’

  ‘We were the house in the neighbourhood that all the kids would gravitate to,’ says Sabrina, his sister. ‘I guess being the house on the street with the largest number of kids was the reason, but if you ask us, even today, we’d say it was because we were the most fun.’ Dinner always happened at 5.30 p.m. and everybody remembers Eileen laying out the food on seven plates. They all said ‘please’ – always twice, ‘Mother, may I please be excused from the table, please?’ – and their father would never say much. Before the children left for the bus every day, the whole family would kneel down in a circle in the middle of the carpet. ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,’ they said, ‘Good Morning, Dear God, thank you for another lovely, happy day. God Bless Mommy and Daddy and all my brothers and sisters. Amen.’ Then off they would go down the path with their satchels and lunches in brown paper bags, each with his or her name marked on them: Kelly, Sabrina, Tracy, John, and Stephen. They liked to build a snow wall in the yard at Christmas, to battle the Burcher boys across the street. And they had Easter outfits and lots of swimming at the beach in summer and every kind of sport you can imagine. It sounds like the world of the Kennedys, and not just because of their Irishness. It’s that American open-air life, that instinctive response to conditions outside.

  Early on, it became obvious that John was gifted at sports.
He was peaceful but determined. When he was trying to learn to ride a bike, he just fell off and got on, fell off and got on, until finally he mastered it. For John’s father, the great hope was that his son might become an athlete. Some of the siblings feel today that the pressure to succeed was almost too much, but Ronnie would get up with John at five in the morning and drive him down to the boathouse, just to see him row. It was Ronnie’s dream that his eldest son prove his specialness that way, perhaps exceeding hopes he once had for himself.

  When I turned up in Cherry Hill, the lawns were already twinkling for Christmas. It was not so much a matter of keeping up with the Joneses as showing the Joneses that some values were held in common, the wire Santas and flashing sleighs a signal of consistency. Eileen Spahr answered the door in a Chanel suit and a beautiful silk blouse; there was something rather resplendent about her looks and her Irish sense of rules. She appeared to aim for correctness – or perfection, to judge by her hair and her nails, her teeth and her sense of manners – but a merry air of devilment occasionally rises as if from her genes. Mrs Spahr made me a cup of tea and set it down in a green cup. She has lived in that house for almost fifty years, and the bustle has gone. Her husband and her elder son are dead and the others are out there prospecting for happiness, while Mrs Spahr maintains a sense of style among the lonely hours.

  ‘Ronnie was passionate about sports,’ she said. ‘My husband was an intense person.’ Mrs Spahr is a keen reader and she asked me several questions about books I had written and pieces I’d done. She had never allowed a writer into the house before and wanted to be sure she could handle it. She is intelligent enough to know that other people’s writing can offer disclosures that may be a little difficult to bear if you are close to the subject, but the Irish in her wanted to speak and pack up her troubles. ‘Oh, yeah,’ she said, when I asked her if John was fixated on pleasing his parents. ‘And it wasn’t a burden for him. He wanted to be a good guy. He said to his brother once, “Don’t you want to be all right for them?” From a young age John was focused.’