Redeployment

by Klay, Phil

  I went through some of the steps he’d need to take as he checked out, then sent him on his way. The last thing he asked me was, “Sir, do you think they’ll give Sergeant Deme the Medal of Honor?” It was the only point where a little of his composure seemed to crack to let some emotion through.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.” It hardly seemed a decent answer.

  • • •

  I saw Vockler only two more times after that day in my office. First was at the ceremony where they awarded Sergeant Deme the Navy Cross, where he and Boylan both tried and failed to avoid crying. That was the week I got my acceptance letter from NYU. I was certain I wouldn’t have gotten in without my Marine Corps résumé. To NYU, I was a veteran. Two deployments. That meant something to them.

  The last time was the day Vockler left for Afghanistan. I was doing a three-mile run during my lunch break and his company was staged up off McHugh Boulevard, waiting for the buses. The families had enough U.S. flags that if you’d draped yourself in the Stars and Stripes it’d have constituted camouflage, and it was hot enough that every fat uncle there had pit stains big enough to meet in the middle of their chest.

  Vockler was in a circle of Marines, all of them smoking and joking like they were about to go on a camping trip, which from a certain perspective was true.

  I stopped my run and dropped by. Vockler saw me and grinned. “Sir!” he said. He didn’t salute, but it didn’t seem disrespectful.

  “Corporal,” I said. I put my hand out and he shook it vigorously. “Good luck over there.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You’ll do great,” I told him. “Handling your transfer, that’s one of the things in my job I get to feel proud of.”

  “Oo-rah, sir.”

  I thought about making some sort of joke, like, “Stay off the opium,” but I didn’t want to force anything. So I continued on my run, and three weeks later I was out of the Corps.

  • • •

  There’s a month after my discharge I can’t really account for. I traveled. I moved to New York, and then I think I spent a lot of time in my underwear, watching TV. My mom says I was “decompressing.”

  At the time, most of my college friends were in corporate law or investment banking or were reevaluating life after dropping out of Teach for America.

  Strangely, I started feeling more like a Marine out of the Corps than I’d felt while in it. You don’t run into a lot of Marines in New York. All of my friends thought of me as “the Marine,” and to everyone I met, I was “the Marine.” If they didn’t know, I’d make sure to slip it into conversations first chance I got. I kept my hair short and worked out just as hard as before. And when I started at NYU and I met all those kids right out of undergrad, I thought, Hell, yeah, I’m a fucking Marine.

  Some of them, highly educated kids at a top five law school, didn’t even know what the Marine Corps did. (“It’s like a stronger Army, right?”) Few of them followed the wars at all, and most subscribed to a “It’s a terrible mess, so let’s not think about it too much” way of thinking. Then there were the political kids, who had definite opinions and were my least favorite to talk to. A lot of these overlapped with the insufferable public interest crowd, who hated the war, couldn’t see why anybody’d ever do corporate law, didn’t understand why anyone would ever join the military, didn’t understand why anyone would ever want to own a gun, let alone fire one, but who still paid lip service to the idea that I deserved some sort of respect and that I was, in an imprecise way that was clearly related to action movies and recruiting commercials, far more “hard-core” than your average civilian. So sure, I was a Marine. At the very least, I wasn’t them.

  • • •

  NYU prides itself on sending a high number of law students into public interest, “high” meaning 10 to 15 percent. If an NYU student gets a public interest job that pays under a certain amount, they get partial or full debt forgiveness, saving them more money than the average American makes in three years. Like everybody else without a Root Scholarship or wealthy parents or a fiancée at a hedge fund, I’d sat through NYU’s presentation on the program and thought, Oh, they want me to work my ass off and live in Bed-Stuy for six years. With incentives like that, four out of five NYU students take a good look at public interest jobs, hem and haw, consider the trajectories of all the fire starters they admire, and then go to the same huge law firms as everybody else.

  Joe-the-corporate-lawyer told me, “Do Legal Aid. Do the Public Defender’s Office.”

  We were having drinks at a rooftop bar with a stunning view of the Chrysler Building. The drink Joe had bought me was made with a cardamom-infused liquor. I’d never had anything quite like it.

  “I’m not really an idealist anymore,” I said.

  “You don’t have to be,” he said. “You just have to be a guy who doesn’t want their life crushed doing shit that isn’t even mentally challenging. Sometimes I hate my clients and want them to lose, but that’s actually a rare improvement over most cases, which involve huge corporations where I can’t even bring myself to care. Aside from bonuses, which get smaller every year, I’m on a set salary. But I bill by the hour, which means the equity partners make more money the more I work. And nobody works their ass off for ten years to become partner because they’ve got a burning ambition to improve the lifestyles of first-year associates. They do it for money. And so do I.”

  “You’re paying off law school and college debt,” I said.

  “Which you won’t be,” he said, “thanks to the G.I. Bill and the Yellow Ribbon Program and your savings from the Corps. If you go my route, you’ll be stuck doing doc review every day and every night and every goddamn weekend and you’ll want to blow your brains out.”

  Joe was right about the debt, but I already had some experience as a true believer, and if the Marine Corps was any indication, idealism-based jobs didn’t save you from wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

  • • •

  Paul-the-Teach-for-America-dropout told me, “If you go public interest, be careful where you go.”

  We’d met up in Morningside Heights at the railroad apartment he shared with his two roommates. The place was schizophrenically decorated with old “Rage Against the Machine” posters, framed New Yorker covers, and Tibetan prayer flags.

  “America is broken, man.” Paul took a swig of beer. “Trust me, you don’t want to be the guy bailing water out of a sinking ship.”

  “Iraq vet,” I said, pointing at my chest. “Been there, done that.”

  “Me too,” he said. “I’ll throw my middle school tour against your deployment any day.”

  “They shoot at you?”

  “One day a student stabbed another kid.”

  That wouldn’t have trumped Vockler or Boylan, and it sure as hell didn’t trump dead, heroic Deme, but it trumped the shit out of me. Closest I ever came to violence was watching the injured and dying come into the base hospital.

  “Saddest thing in that school,” he said, “was the kids who gave a shit. Because, honestly, that school was so fucked the smart option would have been to check the fuck out.”

  “So what’s the solution? Charter schools? No Child Left Behind? Standardized testing?”

  “Yo, I got no idea. Why you think I went to get a master’s in education leadership?” He laughed. “So if you go public interest—”

  “I need to make sure I’m not the Band-Aid on a giant sucking chest wound.”

  • • •

  “You’re not doing public interest,” Ed-the-investment-banker told me while the two of us smoked cigars at a James Bond–themed bar that required khakis and nice shoes to get in.

  “But I think—”

  “How long have I known you? You’re going to a firm. It’s the easy option. Let me break it down for you.”

  “Joe says—”<
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  “Joe’s a lawyer. I hire lawyers.” Not strictly true. His bank hired lawyers, though I suppose it doesn’t really make a difference, because a guy like him can make a guy like Joe work until five A.M. if he wants.

  “Listen to me,” he said, spreading his hands. “There are fourteen top law schools. Not thirteen. Not fifteen. There’s fourteen that matter. And guess what, congrats, you’re in one of them.”

  “NYU is top five.”

  “Top six, but who’s counting,” he said. “The top firms, they hire pretty much from those schools. Maybe a handful from schools a bit lower down, a few kids from Fordham or someplace who did amazing and are so shit-hot they learned to shoot fireworks out of their dicks. But for the most part, if you’re not from one of those schools, it’s a hard life trying to get a job in this city.”

  “You mean getting a job like Joe’s. And Joe hates his job.”

  “Of course he does. He’s at a law firm, not a brewery. He works longer hours than you did in the Corps, and I guarantee that at no point in his life will a complete stranger walk up to him and say, ‘Thank you for your service.’ But here’s how it works. All the top firms pay the same, except for one, which is the top, which you’re not getting into unless you too learn to shoot fireworks out your dick—”

  “I didn’t know that was an important legal skill.”

  “In this city, it is. There’s a million lawyers and only so many really good jobs. Even the top public interest jobs, like the U.S. Attorney’s Office or Federal Defender, tend to hire people from top firms. So everything matters. What school you go to determines what clerkship you get, what firm you work at. If you don’t have the right credentials from the right sorts of places, you’re fucked.”

  “So what are you telling me?”

  “Don’t screw around like you did in college. Welcome to adult life. What you do matters.”

  • • •

  I found out about Vockler a month later, alone in my empty apartment, bare walls and one lone chair next to the windowsill where I put my computer. The Corps had accustomed me to spartan living, though I figured if I ever brought a woman home, it’d probably give off a serial killer vibe.

  The one thing the place had going for it was the view. Facing midtown from a side street off York Avenue, I had the city from Central Park to the Empire State. Late evenings when I came in drunk, I’d stop and gape at the constellations of apartments. And then, sometimes, I’d open my computer and check DefenseLink. The idea was to go through the Web site to see if anybody I knew had died. On their “Releases” section, there’s a mass of links running down the Web page, and I generally click on the ones that read either “DoD Identifies Marine Casualty” or, if it’s a bad day, “DoD Identifies Marine Casualties.” Then it takes you to a page with the names.

  Earlier that night, I’d had a few drinks with Joe-the-lawyer and Ed-the-banker. With them I’d reverted back to college, cracking dirty jokes and telling drunk stories, so when I sat down at my computer, I think I wanted to recover whatever it is that I am when I look at the names of the dead.

  I sat in my chair and clicked on one of the bad ones, snapping my night in half. Joe and Ed drifted off, insubstantial.

  The Department of Defense announced today the death of two Marines who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Lance Cpl. Shield S. Mason, 27, of Oneida, N.Y., and Cpl. James R. Vockler, 21, of Fairhope, Ala., died October 3 of wounds suffered while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. They were assigned to the 1st Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

  For additional background information on this Marine, news media representatives may contact the II Marine Expeditionary Force public affairs office at (910) 451-7200.

  The date on the release, October 3, was more than a week and a half before. I typed his name into Google to see what might come up, and a slew of news articles appeared. “Baldwin County Marine Killed in Afghanistan.” “Fallen Marine Returns Home.” And, bizarrely, an older article entitled “Home for Christmas!” I clicked on it.

  A page opened with a photo of Vockler, his arms outstretched to the sky, while his two younger sisters give him a hug, one on each side. The girls only came up to his shoulders, and the photo looked as though it had been taken the day he left. Below was a block of text.

  Today my wife and I watched our son, our Marine, Corporal James Robert Vockler, go off to war. Though it is hard for us to see our son embark on such a dangerous mission, we are tremendously proud of him and his brother Marines.

  We drove down earlier this week with James and can report that he and his brother Marines are in high spirits. Despite the dangers, they are excited at the opportunity to do their mission, which will be to clear the enemy out of strongholds in southern Afghanistan. This is an important task they have been training months to do.

  James is a 21-year-old Class of 2006 graduate of Fairhope High School. He fought in Iraq last year and returned home safe for Thanksgiving. He joins his Fairhope High School classmates Cpl. John Coburn and Lance Cpl. Andrew Roussos, who also fought in Iraq with him.

  We look forward to the Marines accomplishing their mission and their safe return this Christmas.

  —George, Anna, Jonathan, Ashley, and Lauren Vockler

  I clicked away, back to the search results, and I looked around the room. Empty corners, a twin mattress lying pathetically on the floor. Quiet. I looked back to the computer. There were video results as well. I clicked on a YouTube link.

  On the screen, a line curled around a school building—Fairhope High School, I guess. It looked like the images of Iraqis queuing to vote during those first elections, everyone patient and serious. This was Vockler’s wake. The whole community had come out to mourn. I thought I caught a glimpse of Boylan in his Alphas, but the video quality was too poor to tell. I closed the computer.

  There was no alcohol in the apartment, and I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t know any vets in the city. I didn’t want to talk to any civilians. As I lay on my mattress, struggling with a violence you might as well call grief, I realized why no one had thought to inform me of Vockler’s death. I was in New York. I was out of the Corps. I wasn’t a Marine anymore.

  • • •

  That Saturday I went to a documentary with Ed-the-banker. It was Ed’s idea. The film was about veterans dealing with civilian life, the four main characters ranging from a congressional candidate to a complete train wreck of a human being. One, a mixed martial arts fighter with PTSD, described an incident overseas where he’d shot up a civilian vehicle and killed a small girl about the age of his daughter.

  After the film, the couple who made the documentary stood up, answered questions, and then chatted with the audience at a small reception. I walked over and thanked them for making it. I told them that the difficulties of transitioning to civilian life weren’t covered enough and that I especially appreciated how they avoided taking political positions that would have interfered with telling the men’s stories. I had a sense I was the only veteran in the room and thus better equipped to talk than anybody else. If I’d seen just one single guy rocking one of those OIF combat veteran ball caps, I would have kept my fucking mouth shut.

  “Very powerful,” I told Ed-the-banker as we walked out.

  He mentioned the scene where the MMA fighter described killing the little girl.

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling this was another area I could speak with confidence. “You know, I saw a lot of injured kids in Iraq . . .”

  There I stalled. My throat constricted. This was unexpected. I wanted to tell him the suicide truck bomb story, a story I’d told so often that I sometimes had to fake emotions so I wouldn’t seem heartless. But I couldn’t get it out. I forced out, “Excuse me,” and ran upstairs to the bathroom, where I found a stall and cried until I got myself under control.
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  The incident surprised and humiliated me. When I walked out, neither Ed nor I said a word about what happened.

  • • •

  When I got back to my room, I checked DefenseLink and scanned past the newest names—all of them meaningless to me. So I started Googling “1st Battalion, 9th Marines,” Vockler’s battalion, and then I started reading the articles and watching the YouTube clips that came up.

  With the Internet you can do nothing but watch war all day if you want. Footage of firefights, mortar attacks, IEDs, it’s all there. There’s Marines explaining what the desert heat is like, what the desert cold is like, what it feels like to shoot a man, what it feels like to lose a Marine, what it feels like to kill a civilian, what it feels like to be shot.

  I listened to the clips, sitting in my apartment. There was no answer to how I felt, but there were exams to study for, books to read, papers to write. Contracts, Procedure, Torts, and Lawyering. An insane amount of work floating in the back of my consciousness. I brought it to the front.

  Over the following weeks, I stopped thinking about the Marines in Afghanistan. I did my work. Days spent busy don’t feel like time.

  • • •

  I didn’t form friendships easily at NYU, and for the first year I didn’t date anyone. I’d started the year with contempt for my fellow students, but you spend enough time alone and you end up feeling somehow defective. And the girl who finally got to me, another student who was handling law school the same way a high-functioning alcoholic drives, she sniffed that out pretty early.

  One day she pulled me aside to tell me the sorts of things you don’t tell people you don’t know that well, the sorts of things you tell only close friends or your psychiatrist. “I thought I could trust you,” she said after going through her whole history of child abuse, “because, you know, you’ve got PTSD, too.” I don’t have PTSD, but I guess her thinking that I did is part of the weird pedestal vets are on now. Either way, I didn’t contradict her.

  “Look,” she said, “I’m tall, I’m blond. I can do the girl thing. But eventually I have to tell people. And they’re gonna think, This one is damaged.”