“Sometimes,” she says, “it finds you.” The three breathe together, and drift into sleep.
The next day at noon, he has to leave them to fly back to Edmonton. That evening, Sylvie walks out of the hospital with her two-day-old son swaddled in her arms. Her brother and her mother are with them, but she feels bereft. This isn’t right … Jeff should be here. A heavy foreboding envelopes her as they descend in the elevator to the underground parking lot. It’s the same gut-wrenching stab she felt when the words “It’s a boy!” echoed in the delivery room: Oh my god. This means it might happen now … and there’ll be a little Jeff here, walking around in his place. A clear, quick, intuitive flare of insight strikes her, but she doesn’t want to see. As they drive home through the dark city streets, blaring with sirens and horns, she cries silently in the back seat beside her sleeping son.
Jeff arrives back in CFB Wainwright late that night and saunters into the nearly deserted mess tent. Scott Lang is sitting alone at a table, warming his hands around a cup of tea. Jeff flashes back to their graduation ceremony, and the general’s prediction: At 3 a.m. in some rain-soaked tent, someone will come through the door that you knew from your basic, and you will instantly remember the trials, and feel that instant camaraderie.… He and Scott have been brothers-in-arms from day one, always ending up in the same place at the same time. During their officers’ training at CFB Gagetown, Scott brought his wife and kids out for visits to Fanjoy’s Point. Now, they also share the bond of fatherhood. Jeff pulls a stack of Ry’s pictures out of his pocket and effuses over each one as he lays it on the table. “Probably every parent thinks this,” he grins, “but there’s just something so special about him—the way he looks at you.”
Scott has never seen his friend so loquacious. Jeff never talks about himself; usually Scott has to pry information out of him. “I guess there are other places you’d rather be right now,” Scott says, smiling at the photos spread out before him.
“It’s like you’re torn down the middle,” Jeff says. “Part of you is ready, excited about finally going over there. But the other half is worried, and scared, not wanting to leave your family.”
Scott removes his glasses and rubs his eyes. “I’ve been away from my family for about two of the last six years all told. You miss a lot—birthdays, concerts, first day of school. It takes its toll on them too.”
“I’ve submitted a request for a transfer when I return. It will mean a desk job at Downsview. But I’d be able to take Ry with me to the daycare on the base.” He chuckles. “It’s incredible how quickly your priorities can shift … once you feel those eyes looking into you.”
November 19 is a cold overcast day in Toronto. Bloated grey snow clouds graze the skyscrapers. After-work traffic is swarming as Jeff and Marion drive to the liquor store to buy some bubbly for Jeff’s belated thirty-sixth birthday celebration. The radio news headlines a story on Afghanistan, and Jeff glances over at his mother. “I’m going in February,” he says. The words that for months have been lurking like thieves beneath the surface of her mind have finally been spoken—words with the power to steal her son and derail their lives.
“Why, Jeff?” she asks, lips trembling. “Why do you have to do this?”
“It’s my job, Mom,” he says, pulling into the parking lot. “Those people need help. Do you know what the Taliban are doing to women? Imprisoning them in their homes and underneath those burkas. They’re bartered and sold like pieces of property. And children aren’t allowed to go to school. The Taliban burn down the schools and kill the teachers.”
“But, Jeff, you have your own child to take care of now,” she says, eyes brimming, “right here at home.”
“Mom, the 9/11 hijackers trained in Afghanistan. This mission is for our tomorrow too.”
“Do you know what it would do to us if anything happened to you?” She looks into his eyes.
“Nothing will happen to me,” he says, squeezing her hand. “I’ll be okay.”
In the store, she stares at the blur of sparkling wines and bursts into uncontrollable sobbing. He comes over and puts his arms around her in a great hug.
That Christmas in Eastern Passage, Jeff and his father take six-week-old Ry with them to pick out the Christmas tree. Jeff insists on going to the same lot on the corner of Windsor and North in Halifax, even though they have to drive across the bridge and contend with the congestion of downtown traffic. It’s a tradition, one he can carry on with his own son, who sleeps against his chest in the Snugli as they survey the trees, and load a seven-foot fir onto the roof of the van.
But behind the tree, soon glittering in the corner, and the candles flaming on the mantel, a shadow looms, touching them all. The sound of carols and laughter, the smell of balsam, turkey and sage, can’t block out the impending reality of Afghanistan. Only the blessing of baby Ry can lift them up, keep them present, and allow them to rejoice. Home from her teaching job in the Northwest Territories, Mica witnesses her brother’s metamorphosis. She watches him soothing Ry when he’s fussy, snuggling him onto his shoulder, patting his back. He rocks his son in his arms as he glides back and forth, singing—Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. If anyone asks to take over, he refuses: “This baby is going to know I’m his father.”
By the end of 2006, thirty-four Canadian soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan. In its first combat mission in fifty years, the Canadian military discovers its Achilles’ heel: no troop-carrying helicopters. They were sold years ago to the Dutch—who are using them in southern Afghanistan. Hillier’s overloaded defence budget can’t purchase replacements.
On February 1, 2007, the Lucky 13 team boards the Canadian Forces airbus in CFB Trenton, Ontario—without their leader. Jeff has to fly to England to take one final two-week course for forward observation officers. While he’s there, he buys a soccer suit for his son—red shorts, a red-and-white-striped jersey with an All England crest—size 12 months. When his tour is up in six months, Ry will be just the right age to wear it. Just six months, he thinks, and I’ll be home for good.
V. GOODBYE
When a hero is called for, from a burning building or on the wine-dark seas, the voice behind the request is looking for someone to intervene, to overcome hopelessness, and to beat back the angry, thanatic forces of the cosmos that appear to be running out of control. Perhaps what resides at the heart of the highest definition of the hero is the notion of divinity, the idea that something greater than ourselves can create from darkness a guiding and redeeming light.
Bruce Meyer, Heroes: The Champions of our Literary Imaginations
HOW DOES A MOTHER say goodbye—a contraction of God be with ye—to a son who is going to war?
I have tried to picture this scenario, but cannot imagine enacting this ultimate letting-go of my sons. When the mother of Robert Ross, in Timothy Findley’s The Wars, realizes her son has enlisted for World War I, she glares at him with Delphic concentration. Intuitively knowing her son’s destiny, she lashes out in bitter resignation: “I know you’re going to go away and be a soldier. Well—you can go to hell. I’m not responsible. I’m just another stranger. Birth I can give you—but life I cannot.” She and her husband travel in their private railway car to see Robert before he departs for overseas, but she’s too numbed by alcohol, too frozen with dread, to go out and say goodbye: “She waved from behind the glass and she watched her boy depart.… And this is what they called the wars.” Private internal wars accompany the global ones: When a soldier goes to war so does his mother. The umbilical cord is never really severed. It stretches across countries, oceans, continents, even into death’s kingdom.
The character of Mrs. Ross helped me understand the story of the young man who would become my father, leaving for World War II without his mother getting up to see him off. Why didn’t she? I had always wondered. When her nineteen-year-old son enlisted in 1942, my grandmother—Ada Langille Murray—already knew about enduring hardship and the merc
iless twisting of fate. Born in 1896, she grew up in the Nova Scotia farming community of New Annan where her father, King, was the blacksmith. When he died, his wife, Hannah, and their eight children were left with no means of support. Ada quit school to work on the farm, so that her brothers and sisters wouldn’t be sent to live with neighbouring families. They stayed together in their white farmhouse on the hill, surrounded by apple orchards and fields of brown-eyed Susans.
At age twenty, Ada married Kenneth MacLean Murray—“Clain,” everyone called him—and moved to the spacious red farmhouse that Clain and his father, Angus, had built at Tatamagouche Mountain. By the time she was twenty-five, Ada had seven children, aged six and under; her twins, Clifford and Pearl, were born thirteen months after her twin girls, Hilda and Hazel. In Ada’s twenty-seventh year, just before the birth of her eighth child, Clain was stricken with polio and bedridden for many months. He recovered with a steel brace on his foot, leg and back, and limped around the farmyard with the help of a cane. Not long after, he contracted chronic asthma. So it fell to Ada to manage the farm as well as her household.
She rose with the rooster’s crow to milk the cows, then turn them out to pasture. She collected warm eggs from the cackling brood in the henhouse, and was back in the kitchen by six to light a fire in the wood stove, cook porridge, fried eggs, toast and tea—the first of the day’s three big meals. After breakfast, she hurried back to the barn to hoist the heavy milk pails and pour a white waterfall into the hand-cranked cream separator. She fed the skim milk to the pigs and calves, washed and sterilized the stainless steel tubs, then churned the thick yellow cream into butter.
Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, Ada baked seven loaves of bread. The flour was ground at the gristmill from wheat they’d harvested; the yeast she made from the hops growing outside the back door. On Monday and Friday, she pulled out her galvanized steel washtub, scrub board and homemade lye soap to hand wash clothes for her family of ten. She hauled buckets of water from the brook behind the house, pulling a cart in the summer and a sled in the winter, then stoked a roaring fire to heat the tub of water. Every night for ten years, she hand washed diapers, for four babies at once after the birth of her second set of twins.
She grew a garden to feed her family for the entire year; stored turnips, carrots, onions and potatoes in the root cellar; canned green beans, peas and corn; pickled cucumbers and beets; transformed strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and currants into sweet jams and jellies. In the evenings, she quilted, or sewed on her Singer treadle machine—soft flannelette nighties and diapers for the babies, matching cotton dresses for the twin girls. She would often be up past midnight, spinning wool from the neighbour’s sheep, then knitting it into socks, hats, mittens and sweaters. Some nights she’d be roused by a loud knocking on the door, someone from a neighbouring farm calling on her to midwife the delivery of a baby.
I once asked my grandmother how she had coped with a life that demanded so much of her. “You have no idea,” she replied, shaking her head, “no idea.” Then she told me a story that clarified why she hadn’t gotten up that morning to say goodbye.
One warm summer evening, she had to search in the woods for two cows that had strayed from the herd. She tramped for an hour in the waning light through the tangled undergrowth before she heard their bawling and found them, completely disoriented. She steered them back to the pasture, then hustled for home to wash the kids and put them to bed. Half running, she was halted by a barbed-wire fence. She crawled beneath it and stopped, midway. She sank against the cool damp grass, inhaling the sweet smell of Queen Anne’s lace and timothy. She closed her eyes—not wanting to move, or to get up, ever again.
Many years later, on that March morning in 1942, Ada woke before the rooster’s crow. A fire crackled in the kitchen. She smelled the porridge Pearl was cooking for her twin brother, Clifford, the bread toasting over the flames, the black tea steeping. She knew Pearl would pack a good lunch for him—thick slices of brown bread with last night’s roast pork between them, a wedge of apple pie, a jar of the Jersey’s creamy milk. In the shadowy pre-dawn light, she lay there on the straw mattress where she’d given birth to her eight children. The front door squeaked open, then thudded to a close. She felt a chill in the breeze that riffled the flowered curtains, and pulled her quilt more tightly around her—not wanting to move, or to get up, ever again.
Like Mrs. Ross, and my grandmother, and the millions of mothers before and after them, Marion had to say goodbye to her son as he left for a war on the other side of the world—knowing, but trying not to know, that this farewell could be their final one. When Jeff got back from his two-week FOO course in England, he had two days in Toronto with Sylvie and Ry before he left to board the Airbus at CFB Trenton, Ontario. He didn’t want his parents, or Sylvie and Ry, to accompany him to the airport. He didn’t like goodbyes, especially public ones—the paparazzi zooming in, exploiting private moments of anguish.
But the day before he departed, he received a letter.
Jeff, please know how truly proud I am of you and all that you have accomplished. I read about Maya Angelou describing her son as her “monument”—and you are my monument—for all that you are and all that you do, Jeff, I love you. I will be with you each day that you are away—the positive energy force of my thoughts will go out to you over the universe … never forget that Jeff … love you forever, Mom xo.
IN THE MIDDLE OF February, Jeff flies from Trenton to an “unknown” staging area in the Middle East. All deployed troops touch down here at Camp Mirage for two days before heading on to Kandahar. The worst-kept secret in the Canadian Forces, this acclimatizing point is at Minhad Air Base, just south of Dubai on the Persian Gulf. Adjacent to a vast runway, clusters of flat white portables and grey hangars shimmer mirage-like in the middle of the gravelly desert. Around the outskirts of the fenced-in Canadian section, large one-humped dromedaries graze on thorny tufts of grass. A lone acacia tree leans windward, dusty green against a brilliant blue sky.
At this desert base, the only hazards are the searing sun, jumping spiders and snakes. Soldiers eat at a five-star dining hall with exotic fresh fruits and lobster on the menu. They can work out at a well-equipped gymnasium or play beach volleyball. Dressed in their civvies, they can take a bus into Dubai, lounge in deck chairs under fanning palms, float in turquoise sea water—their last chance to chill out with a beer for at least three months.
The camp is a liminal zone, a place in between training—“playing” at war—and being at war. And like his comrades, Jeff exists in a liminal state, wavering between fear and anticipation. After the long, hard preparation, he is eager to put his skills into practice. He has read every book he could find about Afghanistan—its history, politics and the present conflict. But an unknown world awaits him, all the trials and tests of a war zone: How will I handle the stress of combat? Will I be afraid? What if I make a bad decision that endangers my crew? What if something happens to one of them? Or to me?
Outside the dining hall, he sits in the baking heat at a picnic table and reads the names his comrades have carved into the wood. Most of them came back. Some of them didn’t. But he knows he has to return, to raise his son—a purpose he is surely meant to fulfill. And the words of Castaneda’s Yaqui shaman resurface: “A man goes to knowledge as he goes to War, wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance.”
VI. AFGHANISTAN
Losing yourself, giving yourself to some higher end … is the ultimate trial. When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
JEFF STEPS DOWN FROM the Hercules aircraft onto the Kandahar Airfield. A glaring noonday sun assaults his eyes, and he pulls his Ray-Ban aviators out of the breast pocket of his uniform. The NATO base sprawls before him—an expansive monochromatic maze of brown buildings, tan tents, grey prefabs, white portables. Dust-co
vered military vehicles, ATVs, SUVs and golf carts drone across gravel lanes. Beyond the walled and wired perimeter, a stony desert extends to distant craggy mountains—an arid moonscape, like Luke Skywalker’s desert planet at the beginning of Star Wars. Even the few scraggly mulberry bushes and patches of grass are dull with powdery dust. A parched wasteland leached of colour, but for the wide cyan sky.
He strolls across the wood-planked boardwalk; wind whips sand into his eyes and mouth. Diesel smoke fills his nostrils. He nods to passing soldiers, many with rifles slung over their backs. They wear varied camouflage-pattern uniforms, all with ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) badges, but with different flag insignias on their sleeves—United States, Britain, France, Australia, Romania.… Men in khaki shorts and T-shirts play a raucous game of basketball in the square, their shouts and laughter mingling with the roar of engines and the whirr of helicopters. He peruses the boardwalk shops selling carpets, pashmina shawls, lapis jewellery. Familiar signs pop out: Burger King, Subway, Pizza Hut and … Tim Hortons. He yearns for the touchstone taste of a triple-triple, and joins the long lineup—just like at home.
High-pitched screams resound from the other end of the boardwalk. Skinny barefoot children push and shove each other, rummaging in and around the overflowing garbage bins buzzing with flies. “Where do those kids live?” he asks the Brit in line behind him. “Is there a village nearby?”
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