The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘I’ve got these kids and I get the pension and that’s what bothers him,’ Ann said. ‘He never comes here. Neither does their mother, the kids’ grandmother. She hasn’t seen the children since the day of Anthony’s funeral. There’s been a lot of nasty stuff, but I’m not bothered really. People might think I stole Anthony away too young and made him have kids. But it wasn’t like that. We did it together and now he’s gone we have to make it the best way we can.’

  When I asked her, Ann said that Anthony really loved being in the army. That was his first love. ‘We probably married too young,’ she said. ‘He only had two days’ leave when Corey was born, then it was on to Iraq. It was hard and things just fell apart. But I don’t think the dislike will ever end with Paul and his family. It’s sad for the kids but you’ve just got to get on with it.’

  One of Ann’s neighbours in Byker is called Angela Cairns. As I walked to her house there was a crack of lightning over the estate and a roll of thunder. Angela knew Anthony and Ann when they first met. ‘He had a huge picture of the singer George Michael above his bed,’ said Angela. ‘Everybody teased him about it, but he said, “One day I’ll be famous like him.”’ Angela was wearing huge hooped earrings and slippers covered in hearts. Whenever she got excited she kicked an Argos catalogue that was sitting on the floor beside the front door. ‘One night, when he was home from the army,’ she said, ‘Anthony went out on the town with my son Stephen. They went to Buffalo Joe’s on the Gateside Quays – Steve was Gothic, then – and they were drunk and coming across the swing bridge. Stephen was really pissed up and he climbed onto the side of the bridge and lost his footing. He fell all that way down into the Tyne and he was struggling in the water ’cause his Gothic gear was dragging him down. Anthony dived in. The tide is strong down there and Stephen was losing consciousness, but Anthony pulled him to the side by the hair and then insisted on giving him artificial respiration. He saved Stephen’s life and then Anthony was up all night crying.’

  When he was leaving for Iraq that last time, it was a Sunday and he went with Paul and Kym to have lunch and then began packing his bags. ‘Don’t be a hero,’ said Paul. And when his truck back to Aldershot broke down, Paul and Kym decided to drive him and another young squaddie all the way down in Kym’s car. ‘We were exhausted by the time we got there,’ said Paul, ‘and we all fell asleep in the one bed in his living quarters, me and Kym with Anthony in the middle. In the morning all the soldiers were pleased to see him. He had a shower and then he gave me a microwave oven to take home and a DVD player. When it was time to go he grabbed me and gave me a big hug. It was usually me that instigated that, but this time it was Anthony and it meant a lot. That was the last time I ever saw him. He just looked spotless. We were always like that when we were kids, always spotless.’ We were in a restaurant at Newcastle quayside when Paul said this, and he sat back in his chair. ‘We didn’t have much as kids,’ he said, ‘and… that’s it. We didn’t have much.’

  Ann and the children were asleep on 2 May 2005 when the knock came at the door. Ann was shaking as the children came down the stairs, Scott saying, ‘When my daddy comes home I’m going to ask him to buy me a backpack.’ Ann took all the children into the kitchen and told them there had been an accident; ‘Daddy’s gone to heaven,’ she said. The children were screaming and Ann phoned her neighbour Angela in a terrible state – ‘heartbroken’, Angela said – and everyone was bewildered and disbelieving at four in the morning, the children crying and trying to imagine how it could happen. Paul says when he heard the knock on his door he thought it would be Anthony. ‘He must be home.’ But through the spy hole he saw it was Ann and Stephen. ‘I was so stunned,’ Paul says, ‘that they thought I was going to smash the place up. I remember just walking around the house putting pictures of Anthony in my pocket.’ Then the three of them went to tell Anthony’s mother. ‘It’s all my fault,’ is what Paul remembers her saying. ‘She was throwing up her hands,’ says Paul, ‘shouting, “Jimmy, Jimmy”… shouting for her husband. She said she thought it was all her own fault because of what happened when we were little.’

  Months after my first visit to Newcastle, I went back when the opportunity arose, very suddenly, to spend a little time with Anthony’s mother, Sylvia Grieve. Her house on Finsbury Avenue is very neat and modest, with a sign on the side facing the street that says NO BALL GAMES. Mrs Grieve was wearing black trousers and a black top; she is a small, easily embarrassed woman, wearing a bracelet covered in gold hearts, and with eyes that seem to show some experience of what the world is like; her world, at least. ‘Anthony had been a very happy baby and daft as a brush,’ she said. ‘I lost them when they were very young because of marriage difficulties. I was too young when I had kids. My own family background wasn’t very nice so you rush into things to get a house of your own. It was mainly worries with money and his dad liked a drink. When I got the news about him I just felt guilty and wondered why it wasn’t me that died.’

  Mrs Grieve has photographs of Anthony on several of her walls and she appears to live a lot of her life between the gas fire and the television set.

  ‘And did you worry about him?’ I asked.

  ‘You always have this thing in the back of your mind,’ she said. ‘But you could tell he was frightened the last time I saw him, before he went off. I says to him, “Just tell them your mam says you have to come back or else I’ll come looking for them and I’ll bash them.” And when they came with the news that he’d died, I just kept hearing Anthony’s voice saying to me, “Come on, Mam. You’ve got to say something.” That’s what I imagined him saying.’

  Mrs Grieve was quoted later as saying that she blamed Tony Blair for her son’s death. (Paul puts it differently: he says George Bush murdered Anthony.) You can tell Anthony’s mother isn’t actually very interested in politics, but she wishes her son had come home and she says she feels the Americans are taking all the glory. ‘But I suppose Anthony wanted to go,’ she said. ‘He was eager. From the beginning, from the very beginning, Anthony always wanted a little limelight on him.’

  *

  As evening approached in Cherry Hill, Eileen Spahr began to tell me her own story. She has the kind of faith in comfort and progress that comes from not having known enough of either in childhood. When it comes to her children, she points out that she may not always have got things right – too much pressure, perhaps, on Stephen, the younger son, who was more rebellious; too much emphasis, perhaps, on her husband’s hopes – but with all that she has a basic certainty about the values she sees her family as having tried to live by. ‘You’ve got to have testicles,’ she said to John when he was dithering at college. ‘Go full force and take advantage of the opportunities in life. John was my best friend – he had this beautifulness of spirit – and we could talk about pretty much anything.’

  Under his photograph in John Spahr’s high school yearbook, he chose the motto, ‘Good company on a journey makes the way seem shorter’. He got his degree from the University of Delaware, and he met and fell in love with Diane, who later became his wife. ‘He was affable,’ said his sister Tracy, ‘and he had a real soft side. At Delaware he did a lot of growing up.’ He came to university trailing high expectations, and he lost his football scholarship, which people say was just part of the bigger job of getting to know himself. ‘I think he was quite shaken up by not quite knowing what to do,’ says Tracy.

  After that, he worked for a while teaching physical fitness. He also spent time teaching sports to handicapped children. ‘I knew he wanted a large life,’ said his mother. ‘So I went down there to have lunch with him. I said, “John, what do you want to do?” And he said he wanted to fly jets, so I said, “Go do it”. Ronnie had totally figured out what John should do with his life – he should go to the Naval Academy and coach football: that’s the life my husband would have wanted. I don’t want to be disloyal to my husband, but he knew he was right. He became more and more German every day of his life. My father was domin
eering, you know, and my mother’s policy was appeasement.’

  Three times that summer John came home to tell his father he had joined the Marines, but three times he left Cherry Hill having failed to tell him. In any event, he had entered a five-year programme to become a pilot. On 6 August 1991 Mrs Spahr wrote about John in her journal: ‘On this day John called in the middle of the afternoon. And I said “why?” and he said “jets” and I said “happy?” and he said “yes”.’ A couple of years later there’s another entry in Mrs Spahr’s diary: ‘John called a few minutes ago. “I am alive and I am happy – the best day of my life, winged in the Marines… Whatever happens, I am content. I did my best.”’ Mrs Spahr says that from that point on, no man was ever so proud of his son as Ronnie was of John.

  ‘I met John as he followed his dream of becoming a Marine jet pilot at the basic school in Quantico, Virginia,’ said his friend Kevin Wolfe. They went on from there to further training at Kingsville, Texas. ‘Dukes stood out,’ said Wolfe. ‘He had the classic good looks and swagger of a Marine – he carried himself with confidence and right away you wanted to follow him and you didn’t know why. He had an unparalleled work ethic: he lived in our tactical manuals, perfecting his briefing and debriefing skills. John wanted to be a Top Gun instructor, and because he had performed so well in the navy’s premier strike fighter course, he accepted their invitation. It was there that Dukes would have an indelible impact on pilots throughout the navy and Marine Corps. He was funny too. My wife Heather and I were there when his daughter Chandler was born in San Diego. I remember as we all anxiously waited to know his or her arrival, John came out with a sheepish grin and said, “Well, she’s a Republican!”’

  John Spahr and his wife Diane worked hard at their marriage, but in the end, like so many military marriages, it didn’t work out. In trying to give an account of a life fully lived, a writer wonders what is most essential and most true. In the end, what we write is not merely an account of the bare facts, but an account of our choices and of other people’s: the Spahrs are a family who care about family and they speak of John’s endless affection for his daughter. ‘He was married to flying anyhow,’ said his sister Kelly. ‘It’s like a vocation, and that’s that.’

  Lieutenant Colonel D. A. Robinson was an instructor on the Top Gun staff with John Spahr. This is the elite training school for fighter pilots in Fallon, Nevada. ‘A number of his commanding officers said he was the best officer that has ever served under them,’ he said. ‘And a number of his own staff said he was the best officer they’d ever served under. He always had a special faith in the underdog.’ At the Top Gun school, instructors would be expected to debrief rookie pilots when they returned from a training exercise. This would normally take twenty minutes or so, but Spahr’s were famous for their length. Major Tim Golden remembers ‘a debriefing of John’s that took six hours. Nobody could believe it. The poor guy was in there for six hours and John would just go over everything in detail.’

  I met Major Tim ‘Nugs’ Golden and Major Dan ‘Knuckles’ Shipley in an Irish bar in Washington, only a few minutes walk from Capitol Hill. There was a game on television as we entered, and Rich Gannon was commentating on the Miami Dolphins’ performance as we ordered. ‘Gannon played behind John Spahr in school,’ said Nugs. ‘There was always this competition between them, and many people felt that John was better than Gannon.’ This is the world these men live in – a universe of professional self-improvement and ceaseless competition, where being better than the next guy is a survival instinct. ‘John was the guy everybody listened to,’ added Nugs. ‘He was the best instructor by far – a coach, really. And he was so competitive. We were all out there in 2003 in the Gulf and John would be involved in the most stressful things, then he would stay up all night playing X-Box. I remember we all played and then turned in for the night, and we kept calling him to get some sleep, but whenever I woke up, all the way to six a. m., he was still playing that damn thing, trying to get to the next level. He was up all night.’

  ‘And he had natural flying ability,’ said Knuckles. (I noticed these pilots liked me to use their call signs; anything else seems too formal to them.) ‘He had flown more dog fights than anybody else and was so far ahead of the action.’

  ‘That was it,’ said Nugs. ‘His only fault was to push and push and you’d say, “Hey, dude – relax, friggin relax.” But he always wanted to do more and more, which was a pressure on him and on others as well.’

  ‘He chose the toughest route,’ said Knuckles. ‘It’s much more intense being a Marine fighter pilot – six months’ infantry training, then two years’ flight school. You gotta learn how to land that thing on an aircraft carrier. Then they ask him to come back as an instructor and he comes back and he’s the best. God, man: you wanna kick him in the nuts. But he had humility. There were people who were as good pilots as he was but none of them had his humility.’

  In training videos, you see how John Spahr would explain to groups of elite pilots all the things that could happen while flying his particular jet, but he kept it mainly technical. He could draw on 3,000 hours of flying experience, but he was discreet about his missions. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Spahr had in fact spent a great deal of time in military combat, flying sorties in Bosnia and supporting the no-fly zone in southern Iraq. In 2003 he was aboard the USS Constellation, a veteran carrier made famous during Vietnam, and it was from here that he would lead a bombing campaign in Iraq that would exceed the might and devastation of all that conflict’s previous campaigns.

  On 20 March 2003 the CIA received reports from Iraqi spies that Saddam Hussein would spend the night at a farm on the banks of the Tigris in eastern Baghdad. The Shock and Awe air campaign was launched at 9 p.m. local time on the following day, involving, according to William Arkin of the Washington Post,

  1,700 aircraft flying 830 strike sorties plus 505 cruise missiles attacking 1,500 aimpoints at several hundred targets: palaces, homes, guard headquarters, government buildings, military bases. More targets were attacked in Baghdad in the span of one hour on March 21 than we hit in the entire 43day air campaign in 1991, and airpower followed up reliably every day with hundreds more strikes. When the sandstorm came, when the Fedayeen arrived, when ground commanders got nervous that Iraq was not the country that the U. S. had wargamed against, when the Red Line was crossed, when the public got equally nervous, airpower continued in the background, bombing, bombing, bombing.

  According to Jon Lee Anderson’s account in his book The Fall of Baghdad, ‘The sheer power and scale and precision of the attacks were at once terrible and awe-inspiring and placed us in a state of mind in which almost anything seemed possible.’

  John Spahr was the first pilot over Baghdad on 21 March and the first to deliver bombs. His sister Kelly said he would never talk about what happened; ‘That’s what John said,’ remembers Kelly. ‘There are things he did that I knew he would never talk about. But John wasn’t political in the way some people are: he believed in the commander-in-chief and he followed orders. That’s what he did.’ John told his friends that if his commanding officer said ‘Go’, he’d go, and personal opinion had nothing to do with it. At the end of that first mission in Baghdad, as the sun was coming up, John had his photograph taken in mid-air by one of his colleagues. For the photograph, John tilted up the bottom of the jet, to show the camera his bombs were gone.

  Knuckles, another member of the Death Rattlers on those missions, told me what it’s like up there in a fighter plane during a mission. ‘There’s anti-aircraft stuff coming at you,’ he said, ‘and you’re working via night goggles. Your mouth goes dry and it ain’t funny any more. This is what happens when you’re “in-country”. Time slows down to an incredible level and everything is deliberate. And you’re making sure you’re getting precision in the bombing. You’re taking information like drinking from a firehose. You’ve got to be aware of your altitude; you’re looking at your wingman. You’re worried if you can make it back. I
t’s literally overwhelming. It’s such a frickin challenge and you know it’s a son of a bitch. And then at the end you have to land this thing on a ship in the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night.’ Nugs was a mission commander that night. ‘You’re saying, “Please, God, don’t let me mess this up,”’ he said. ‘It’s as confusing as hell out there.’

  ‘I loved to fly with Dukes,’ said David Peeler, another pilot who served with Spahr in Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 323. ‘John and I had something in common in our childhoods that prepared us very well for that business. It was not a game to him. He understood that to “go to the show”, as he put it, was what we all aspired to do, that is lead in combat.’

  Anthony Wakefield and John Spahr were, at whatever remove, brothers in arms, but they also had brothers back home who would have to live with the glory they had sought and found. John Spahr’s brother Stephen wears his own duty with a smile: he is proud of his older brother, and perfectly silent on the pressure that must always have existed for him to live up to his example. But, whatever he says or doesn’t say, his burden multiplied after that fatal flight on 2 May 2005.

  Their mother says Stephen was always different. She remembers him, as a boy, pouring water down from the top of the stairs onto the carpet below, an act of gleeful destruction that would never have occurred to the solid John. Stephen got into drinking and girls pretty early and his freedoms were never squeezed by his father’s dislikes. He was just his own man and he still is, while knowing that his brother’s example is now not only an alternative to his own life, but a hallowed ground that surrounds him. ‘We stayed up late, John and I, at my sister’s house one time,’ said Stephen. ‘We’d had a few cocktails together and were pretty drunk, and John said we were different in a way that he did what was important to make my parents happy… going to St Joe’s Prep, a stepping stone to a good career and all that. Whereas I did what made me happy. John was more focused. He didn’t want to share the glory, neither would I – if you’re gonna play baseball, you wanna be the pitcher. If you’re gonna do crew, you want to be in a single shell. He wanted to make my parents proud.’