by Klay, Phil
“All I know is I’m coming,” Boylan proclaims. “I just got back.”
He means from Afghanistan.
“I just got a job offer,” I say.
“Sweet!” he says. “How much they gonna pay?”
Not the sort of question I’m expecting, but it’s Boylan, so I answer. “A hundred and sixty thousand dollars,” I say. “Plus bonuses.” Before he called, I’d been depressed about the job. As soon as I name the figure, though, I’m suddenly delirious, saying it, but also feeling like a schmuck because anybody with an Internet connection can find out exactly how much Boylan—an O3 with no dependents and six years in—is making. Hint: Less.
“Dude!” he says. And I’m smiling, because it’s a big deal to him and because my fellow law students at NYU couldn’t give two shits. Most of them are heading to the same sorts of firms, most of them knowing how much they’ll hate it because they’ve already done the summer associate thing.
There’s a pause and then he says, “One hundred sixty . . . whoa. I guess you made the right choice getting out, huh?” And there it is—the least hint of approval from a real Marine and I’m swelling with pride. Though I’m not even sure he actually approves. There was a German zoologist, Jakob von Uexküll, who claimed a tick would try to feed off any liquid at the temperature of mammalian blood. Law school has left me starving, and I’ll take what I’m offered.
I ask Boylan how he’s been and he tells me, “Afghanistan’s not Iraq, dude,” which makes sense but probably needed to be said, because Iraq’s what I’m thinking—the sound of his voice sending me nostalgic, as if I’m missing Iraq. I’m not. What I’m missing is the idea of Iraq all my civilian friends imagine when they say the word, an Iraq filled with honor and violence, an Iraq I can’t help feeling I should have experienced but didn’t through my own stupid fault, because I went for an MOS that wouldn’t put me in harm’s way. My Iraq was a stack of papers. Excel spreadsheets. A window full of sandbags behind a cheap desk.
“They kept changing the mission on us,” he’s telling me. “War’s end is a weird, weird time to be at war.”
We talk a little more, and when we hang up I stay motionless for a while, sitting in my bed in my dark room with the curtains drawn against New York, still huffing that same old glory in the air, the taste like that first time I got popped one good in the face during training and didn’t back down while my inner lip bled past my gums. That time. So I get up and go to my computer, where I’ve got my whole life in pictures and files, and I pull up Deme’s citation. “For extraordinary heroism while serving as a Rifle Squad Leader, Company K . . .” I tear up a little, like I always do. It was when I got choked up the first time that I knew I’d nailed writing the thing.
See, our unit had one no-shit hero. Hero like you read about, like you see in the movies, and that hero was Sergeant Julien Deme, and that sergeant was good, and that sergeant was brave, and that sergeant is dead, but most important, that sergeant was Boylan’s, and he’s the whole reason Boylan and me are tight, and why at two in the morning, drunk off his ass but full of plans to continue to drink away his deployment money and his demons, Boylan is calling me.
That’s Boylan’s motivation. I never knew Deme, so Deme is not why I’m answering the phone. James Vockler is why I’m answering the phone.
• • •
I’d been 3/6’s adjutant, on my second deployment to Fallujah. Of all the lieutenants in that unit, Boylan was my favorite. Not the greatest at writing FITREPs or awards or doing any of the things that would bring him to my office—on a purely professional basis, he was a pain in the ass—but still, he was sweet. Sweet in that way that gentle giants sometimes are. Boylan had wide ears, a round, expressive face, and a stooped posture that seemed to be perpetually apologizing for the sheer monstrous size of him—arms thicker than my thighs, thighs thicker than my torso, a neck thicker than my head. Also, thicker than his own head. Boylan’s pride at the time was being able to do a quick six faster than any other officer in the battalion, sucking down beer quicker than I can drink water. He belonged more to the frat house than the battlefield, the ideal dudebro and the sort of guy who made girls feel comfortable because he’d always give the skeezy ones a good talking-to. He was also the only officer who never seemed to think that, because he was in the infantry and I was an adjutant, there was some huge penis differential between the two of us.
So when Deme died, Boylan came to me with the hopelessly shitty citation he’d written, begging for help. Deme had been shot trying to pull injured Marines out of an ambush, the sort of thing that, if he’d survived, would have certainly been Silver Star worthy. With Deme dead, the unit as a whole was talking Medal of Honor. More important, so was the battalion commander.
“I know it’s no good,” Boylan told me, clutching the citation. The two of us were alone in my office in Camp Blue Diamond, right outside of Fallujah but effectively in another universe from the violence Boylan lived and breathed every day. “I’m no good at these.”
It had been only a few days. There still wasn’t a clear account of exactly what had happened, and I had a distraught Boylan looking ready to go to pieces with only a thin plywood door separating us from the junior Marines who worked for me. It wouldn’t do to let them overhear an officer breaking down and weeping in my arms. That happened later, stateside, and it wasn’t pretty.
“You’re better than most,” I said, skimming the pathetic write-up. “You care.”
Therapist is not part of the adjutant’s responsibilities. I was supposed to handle the battalion’s paperwork: casualty reports, correspondence, awards, FITREPs, legal issues, et cetera. Difficult work, even if you don’t take into account that most infantry guys didn’t join the Corps to do paperwork and tend to suck at it. But mental issues—guilt, terror, helpless anxiety, inability to sleep, suicidal thoughts—that was all for Combat Stress.
“Most lieutenants,” I said, “when they get into their first firefight, they write themselves up for the Combat Action Ribbon immediately. I get it before the dust has settled from the IED.”
Boylan nodded his huge head with its large, childlike eyes.
“Their men,” I said, “that comes later. When they get around to it. But you’re the only guy, in either of my deployments, who ever put in all your men and forgot to write up yourself.”
“Deme has two kids,” Boylan said. He paused. “They’re too young to remember him.”
We were getting far afield. “The citation . . . ,” I said, looking it over again. “A lot of what you write here . . . it’s beside the point.”
Boylan put his head in his hands.
“Look, Kevin,” I said, “I’ve edited a million citations. Some of them for valor. And the point is not what a wonderful guy Deme was. I’m sure there’s plenty of wonderful guys in your unit. I think you’re a wonderful guy. Should we give all of you the Medal of Honor?”
Boylan shook his head.
I turned to my computer and clicked through my folders. At random, I pulled up a citation from my last deployment. It was for a Corpsman who’d treated Marines injured in an IED despite having a ballpoint pen–sized piece of shrapnel stuck a centimeter below his groin, barely missing his balls and a hair away from his femoral artery. “Displaying the utmost courage . . . ,” I read, “with complete disregard for his own injuries.” I closed the file and opened another. “Decisive leadership,” I read, “fearlessly exposing himself to enemy fire . . . great personal risk . . . with complete disregard for his own safety.” I opened another one. “Displaying the utmost courage . . . bold leadership . . . wise judgment . . . his courageous actions enabled . . .” I looked up. “You get the idea.”
Boylan’s face let me know he didn’t.
“We don’t give awards for being a great guy,” I said.
“He was a great guy,” Boylan said.
“No shit. That’s pretty fucking
clear. But you don’t use a citation to describe the richness of all his humanity and blah blah blah. He’s got to measure up to every other Marine who did ridiculously brave shit. And there’s a lot of ridiculously brave Marines. Really. It’s ridiculous. So it’s not about Deme. Or rather, what it’s about is how Marine he was, not how Deme he was. You’ve got to fit him into all the right categories.”
Boylan didn’t seem to be listening.
“Hey,” I said. He looked up. “There’s good news. Decisive leadership, check. Rapidly organized his unit to provide suppressive fire, check. Complete disregard for his own safety, check. Utmost courage, check. I could go on. I don’t know the full details, but there’s a lot to work with here.”
Boylan smiled. “It’s good talking to you,” he said. “There’s no chicks here. But I can talk to you.”
I sighed. “Great,” I said. “How about I write the damn thing?”
Boylan nodded happily, one small weight among many lifting off his shoulders.
• • •
The colonel let me track down the details and I ended up getting the story in bits and pieces. The Marines I talked to tended to ramble in little grief-stricken monologues, so I learned not only what Deme did that day, but also that he and his wife rescued pit bulls, that he wrote terrible rap songs and sang them over oddly soothing homemade beats, that his wife was “crazy hot, wanna-lick-her-ass-like-an-ice-cream-cone hot,” and that his daughters were “crazy fuckin’ retardedly cute.” But I also got, “There was a ceiling of small-arms fire,” and, “When I saw Vockler’s head snap back like a broken fucking doll,” and, in a hollow monotone from James Vockler himself, “I should be dead, not him.” Everything I needed, and I took those phrases and turned them into the flat, regimented prose the Corps requires for its medals.
Here’s what you won’t get from Vockler, who quickly became known in the battalion as “the guy Deme died saving.” The highlights:
After the (unidentified) enemy opened up on his squad in a narrow alley, Sergeant Deme rushed to the front of the squad, realized he had three helplessly wounded men, organized suppressive fire, and ran into the kill zone to rescue his guys. I don’t have any experience with combat, and I certainly don’t have any experience with organizing suppressive fire, running into kill zones, or rescuing people, but I’m reliably informed by Marines who know about those things that it takes huge fucking balls.
With bullets flying everywhere, ricocheting off the narrow walls of the alley like some pinball machine of death on tilt, Sergeant Deme ran up and grabbed the unconscious Vockler by his flak and pulled him out of danger. Then he ran back and was pretty much immediately shot in the face. So it’s more accurate to say that Sergeant Deme died while trying unsuccessfully to save the lives of the other two Marines in Vockler’s fire team than it is to say he died saving Vockler.
As an added bit of irony, Vockler might not have even died if Sergeant Deme had left him there. Unlike the other two Marines, who were bleeding out in an exposed position, Vockler was neither in any immediate danger nor in need of immediate medical care. An AK round had smacked into the top left side of his helmet, true, but it hadn’t penetrated. The force of the glancing shot knocked Vockler out and sent him sprawling backward into a relatively safe position behind a marginal bit of cover in the trash-filled alley. So it’s possible Deme could have left Vockler there.
Nobody ever told this to Vockler. As far as he knew, he went through a second of gunfire and terror, got shot (sort of) in the head, and woke up to his squad telling him that Sergeant Deme, whom he revered, had proven once and for all how goddamn Marine he was by dying in the most heroic way a Marine can—saving your stupid, worthless, not-even-badly-injured-enough-to-need-a-MEDEVAC ass.
None of this discounts Deme’s heroism, but if Vockler knew the full truth, it’d weigh on him even heavier than it already did. Unlike your average American citizen, Vockler could locate who had died for him in a particular human being. A particular human being he’d known and loved with the sort of passion Marines have for good combat leaders. Even most marriages can’t compare with that, because most partners in a marriage aren’t routinely aware that they’d be way more likely to get killed every day if their partner wasn’t such a hell-of-a-baller spouse. So to add to that the notion that, hey, maybe Deme could have left you where you were and possibly saved one of your fire-team buddies before getting himself killed . . . that wouldn’t help.
Rough, even to get it secondhand. The experience of talking to Deme’s squad put life into all the phrases I’d seen trotted out in all the awards I’d ever processed. And this wasn’t just any write-up. It was for the Medal of fucking Honor, which a part of me knew wasn’t going to happen, but still, it didn’t matter. Deme would get something, maybe even the Navy Cross, and he’d at least be considered for the big one. Just writing the words was exciting.
Medal of Honor recipients are the saints of the Corps. You’ve got Dan Daly in Belleau Wood and Smedley Butler in the Banana Wars and close to three hundred others in American conflicts stretching from the Civil War to the present day.
So I wrote the citation with my every frustration melting away in the excitement of the thing. Like reaching out with my fingers and touching a god through the keyboard of my computer. My job, I felt, meant something.
I even wrote about Deme in the personal statement I submitted, midway through the deployment, as part of my application to law school.
“Even the best adjutants aren’t saving lives, like Sergeant Deme, or risking their life on daily patrols, like your average grunt. But the best of us make sure those sacrifices are honored by providing them the administrative support they need, whether it be getting them absentee ballots or in assisting them with their wills. There isn’t any glory in this kind of work. The adjutant’s job is generally only noticed when it goes wrong. Both of my deployments have been spent at a desk, relieving Marines of burdens they will never know could have existed. That’s enough for me. It’s more than enough. And it’s what has led me to desire a public interest career in law.”
What I didn’t mention was that the death toll for our battalion by the end of the deployment was five, meaning that alley had been responsible for more than half of our total casualties. I also didn’t mention that that alley was in an area where the previous commander had warned our battalion to avoid aggressive patrolling. “We’re not going to see success here until we develop better relationships with the local population,” he’d said.
The reaction of the unit had been unanimous: “Those guys are idiots! We’re Marine infantry! We don’t avoid the enemy, we close with and destroy the enemy!” Lieutenant Colonel Motes, our CO, had an aggressive style, and the battalion didn’t really get on the COIN train until afterward.
That he’d sent his platoon into a death zone was not lost on Boylan, who had spent every moment since second-guessing every decision he made, convinced better leadership could have saved those Marines’ lives. His instincts about that were probably right. Boylan came back to the States thirty pounds lighter than when he’d left—skeletal, with bruise-purple skin underlining eyes that looked out from the bottom of an ocean. I’d never had a personal relationship with any of the five fallen Marines, so I tended to think of their deaths with a solemn, patriotic pride rather than the self-loathing and self-doubt so clearly tearing Boylan to shreds.
When we got back from Iraq he was a mess, embarrassing himself at the Marine Ball, blacking out every weekend and probably weekdays, too. I remember him one time walking into the admin office, eight in the morning, hung over, with a huge dip of chewing tobacco in his lip, asking, “Anybody got a dip cup?” Nobody wanted to let him spit into anything they owned, so he shrugged, said, “Ahhhh, fuck it,” and then grabbed the collar of his cammie blouse and spit into his shirt. The Marines talked about it for weeks.
That was one approach. Vockler had another. Pretty much as soo
n as we got back, he’d started angling to get on a deployment to Afghanistan. Iraq was running down; that much was already clear by the tail end of our deployment. So he stalked a company commander from 1/9 until he got them to reserve a line number for him. Which led him to the admin office, my office, and instead of having my Marines handle his shit, I had them send him in to me. I wanted to see him again, face-to-face.
“So you want to go to Afghanistan?” I said.
“Yes, sir, that’s where the fighting is.”
“1/9,” I said. “The Walking Dead.” As battalion mottos go, they’ve probably got the best. Thanks to Vietnam, 1/9 boasts the highest killed in action rate in Marine Corps history. Marines, who like to think of themselves as suicidally aggressive rabid dogs and who sometimes even live up to that self-image, consider this “cool.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know,” I said, “they set minimum dwell time for a reason. Just because you think you’re ready to deploy again doesn’t mean you are.”
“There’s a lot of Marines from 1/9 who’ve never deployed, sir.”
“And you’ve got the experience they need?”
“Yes, sir. They’ll need good NCOs.”
Marines often speak to officers in platitudes, so it’s sometimes hard to tell how much of what they’re saying they actually believe.
“1/9’s got a lot of Marines who’ve been over three, four, five times,” I said.
He nodded. “Sir, I know what it’s like to have really bad things happen.”
Impossible to argue with that.
“It’s very hard,” he said, his voice calm, as though he were describing weather patterns. “Chances are, these guys are gonna have to deal with the same thing.”
“Some probably will.”
“I’m good with people,” he said. “I’d be good with that.” He spoke with absolute composure. It made the room around him feel cold and still.
“Good to go,” I said. “I’m glad you’ll be over there. They’ll need good NCOs.”