They spent a little more time together, watched some more basketball, then said goodbye. Neither quite knew if it was time for a hug. They shook hands.
Spencer said, “Well, I guess I’ll see you when I see you,” and he turned to go back to his room.
“Listen,” Anthony said, “just . . . just keep your head down.”
Spencer smiled. He was touched, even though Anthony’s concern felt a little much. It’s the freaking air force, Spencer thought. It’s not like I’m going off to fight terrorists.
And then Anthony went back to his girl.
9.
LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE is an air education and training command. That means enlisted men come out of basic training and go there to learn specialties. As a cruel coincidence, the dorms for the SERE instructor program were directly across from all the special operations training squadrons, including pararescue. So as Spencer went into intense sleep deprivation, he got to watch pararescuemen from the next building over preparing to be battlefield airmen. He was constantly confronted with his failure. He did his physical training, running down to the SERE schoolhouse with his SERE classmates, while the pararescue trainees ran down to theirs, ran to the pool, carrying their rucksacks, looking just a little more badass, a little prouder, a little more glorious.
He managed to make it through the first week without major incident. It was all pretty straightforward: you worked hard, withstood some discomfort, picked up some skills, that was it.
But it was hard to bear suffering for something when the thing he was suffering for didn’t even appeal all that much, and as the instructors became more and more involved, old instincts kicked in like muscle memory. That habit he’d inherited from his mother, to look for bullshit, to always see it when it was there, to sometimes see it when it wasn’t. He had a hard time accepting authority and here authority was everywhere. SERE was a program designed to show him he had none. And still, of all the things he had to withstand, the one that finally did him in was sewing.
It turned out sewing was the survivalist’s secret weapon, because if you ejected from a stalling fighter jet, you could make almost anything out of a parachute, provided you knew how to sew. Hammocks, tents, trip wires for perimeter defense, hunting tools. So it was sewing for a good reason; Spencer knew that. Still—sewing! He wanted to be out training to save good guys and kill bad guys, instead, he was up all night practicing to become a poorly equipped seamstress. The more tired he got, the more orders rubbed him the wrong way, regardless of what they were. Someone told him he had to sew, which automatically made sewing feel worthless. Even when he knew why he was doing it. It was just reflex.
His hands felt big and clumsy. A classmate took pity and gave him a jury-rigged hand-saver, a device he’d made with a spoon stolen from the chow hall, wrapped with tape and bent nearly in half so he could put it around his palm and pound needles through, without his hands going raw. He was doing hundreds and hundreds of stitches, but still Spencer couldn’t get them tight enough. His assignment was simple: use a parachute cord to make a water bag, and a mat to keep equipment free from dirt and debris, but he couldn’t keep the stitches close. He was up at four in the morning, then physical training until one, then “team-building exercises” for the remainder of the day, which was really just physical training with extra challenges and punishments. He was getting behind on his assignments, and the course was designed to snowball on you if you couldn’t pick things up fast enough. He was banging a needle through hard uncooperative canvas all night; each row took four hours or more and he kept messing up, which meant he couldn’t sleep, which maybe was the point.
The instructors piled on more and more homework assignments. He had to prepare lesson plans too, because the whole point was not just to survive behind enemy lines, but to teach other people how to survive behind enemy lines. He needed to be a leader. He needed to be thinking. He needed to be creating. And he had to do it without sleep if he wanted to make the assignment deadline.
By day eight he was closing his eyes for not even half an hour, nodding off for five, ten minutes before they all mustered for breakfast.
After a whole night hitting the needle through canvas, he only had half of it done, but he took it to the instructor, wobbly with exhaustion and frustrated. His instructor took out a red marker and circled all the stitches that weren’t tight enough, which meant he had to undo the stitches all the way back to the first bad one, and then redo them all.
Another night with no sleep, working even harder and even faster, getting even further behind on the assignment.
The next day was learning how to navigate with a compass and plotting a route between two points on a map, learning in infuriating, pointless detail what every little sign and design meant. It took effort to just to look at the map: he was so tired his eyes kept unfocusing. He kept coming to and realizing he’d nodded off standing up. The instructor became hazy and spectral in his vision; Spencer wobbled, blinked, forced his eyes open, heard his name. Something, words trailing off, then, “Tone . . . Airman Stone . . . AIRMAN STONE!”
“Sorry, sir. Can you repeat that?”
“. . . the next step to plotting your course would be . . .?”
“Sorry, what was the—did you ask me a question?” He could barely keep his eyes open. Was everyone looking at him?
“Airman Stone, you’re a hazard to yourself and others. Why don’t you drop and give me some pushups, maybe that will wake you up.” Spencer got down on the ground and obliged, but he figured he was as good as done. He went through the rest of the navigation assignment in a half-waking haze of confusion, and the instructor closed by saying, “Any of you still working on your sewing assignments, we’ll give you an extra night. Report before morning chow and present to the instructor in the schoolhouse.”
Spencer went back to his bunk, exhausted, demoralized, and sore from all the physical training. He got down on the floor to stretch out his back, just for a minute . . . and woke up six hours later. He panicked. It was after midnight, he had to report at 4 A.M., and he had at least eight hours of sewing left that he’d have to do in less than half that time.
In the morning he presented his work, well aware it wasn’t near good enough, went to breakfast, and an instructor walked in. “Airman Stone, you’re eliminated. Come to the back room, and you’ll be served your elimination papers.”
SPENCER HAD FAILED AGAIN. This time, he wasn’t home in California; he was stranded on base in Texas.
He knew he was still hung over from failing to qualify for pararescue training, but he was proving to himself, with an abundance of evidence, that he was just a failure, period. He lost his motivation, and he started to spiral. Now he was two months into the military, he’d committed to the air force, he’d been ruled out of the only job he really wanted, then the only other one he felt he could really tolerate. Somehow he’d have to find a way to survive four more years in a service whose only two appealing jobs he was now barred from. He was a “student out of training,” like a free agent no one wanted. He became a janitor. He had to help the SERE instructors put new mats in the gym, he organized the rooms in the schoolhouse, did whatever glamourless work they needed. Now he had to choose his top six out of a bunch of jobs, none of which were elite, none of which were killing bad guys, none of which were out in the action. He figured the closest he could get was EMT, emergency medical technician, which would at least set him up to be a firefighter back in Sacramento, so he selected that, and after another month he left Lackland, left the world of special forces for good. He gave up on his dreams.
10.
SPENCER MANAGED TO convince himself that things would work out. On the bus ride east to Fort Sam in San Antonio, he told himself that he still had some direction. He had some purpose. But his stomach dropped when he arrived. This base was different. The environment back with all the special forces had been like what he’d always imagined the military would be like. People knew they were elite and didn’t have
to prove it.
Here people were all marching in unison, singing air force tunes. People cared too much. Worse, people had to conform. Now he had a curfew. It felt like daycare for adults.
Still, he did his best to find some pleasure in it, because what else was there? Be miserable for the rest of his life? So he rolled up his sleeves and dug in. He got on okay. It wasn’t thrilling, but he was using his hands. At first, things made sense. If a person stopped breathing, you pumped their chest to make the blood flow. If a person started bleeding, you found a way to stop it.
After EMT training, he moved on to the second phase, five weeks of nurse training. This was more civilized; no more trying to figure out how to handle a wounded soldier in the field. Now you had a hospital around you; you had all the resources and civility of an actual building. He just needed to learn how to use them. He had to learn bedside manner. He had to learn things he’d never have to do in the field: how to use all the things that hummed and buzzed to keep a hurt person alive.
And even though nursing was mostly learning how to work in a hospital, it turned out you had to spend a lot of time in a classroom, too. Whole days studying in a schoolhouse, which activated his reflex against authority, but he tried to keep it in check. He still had no love for books, still wanted to be out in the action, and spending all day in a room with a teacher wasn’t his idea of glory but still, he’d found his way into a field he felt fine about. He wouldn’t be jumping out of planes like the men on the high-gloss posters, but he’d be useful.
One afternoon as Spencer sat in class, letting his mind wander to the battlefield, a fifty-two-year-old retired army sergeant major approached his wife at the army medical center, just down the street from the classroom. The sergeant major wanted a word about her decision to leave him. The two spoke, the conversation turned into an argument, the argument escalated; she led him outside to a veranda, where he pulled out a .45 caliber handgun and began firing. She fell to the ground and tried to crawl away, but he kept shooting, firing eight rounds before he was done, including one bullet that missed vital organs only because it hit a key fob in her pocket.1
Spencer heard the sirens first. Police cars, base security, and state troopers raced by his classroom window.
What the—
An active shooter alert went out over the base PA system and popped up on computer terminals but didn’t specify that the shooter was involved in a lovers’ quarrel rather than, say, a terrorist attack on a military target, so the thirty thousand civilian and military personal on the base were ordered to follow the “shelter in place” protocol.
Spencer received the order from a nursing teacher who looked up midsentence with panic in her eyes.
“Okay, listen, we have an active shooter on base.”
A moment of nervous laughter.
“Guys, listen, you two, get that desk to the door and make sure it can’t open. Now! Everybody else, under your desks, this is not an exercise.”
It was something in the way she said it, in the cars rushing past—Spencer thought the shooter might be right outside, right there in the schoolhouse. A man walking through the halls maybe just a few dozen yards from where he stood, about to kick in a door and start mowing people down. So why were they being made to hide under their desks? They were military! Who better to disarm a shooter?
There were protocols for this, since a concentration of military personnel was an attractive target to a man motivated in a particular kind of way, especially if the concentration of military personnel wasn’t actually armed and was, instead, sitting in classes, rather like civilians. All the symbolism of attacking the American military, with none of the challenges. So the protocol was rehearsed, and it was very clear. You escape; you do not engage. If you cannot escape, you “shelter in place.” You hide. Because if you engage, you create the opportunity for more violence. When first responders come, they might mistake you for the attacker. The idea is that the only people moving are the bad guy and the security forces. So if you can’t escape, you find a hiding spot from which you can observe the way in; you “mitigate the room vulnerabilities.” You barricade the doors, the windows if you can. You take out radios, turn the volume down, and monitor them closely. You shut off lights so that it looks like the room is unoccupied.
You act, in Spencer’s mind, precisely like a coward. He didn’t buy it. The notices posted everywhere had clear instructions: how in the case of “immediate danger” you try and “escape/evacuate,” and if you can’t, you “assess situation/location—what can protect you (stop bullets)—look for way in/way out routes—leaders TAKE CHARGE.”
This, as far as Spencer was concerned, was what he should do. Take Charge. His own instinct was up against these orders holding him back like a caged animal.
The students barricaded the doors, and the staff sergeant kept yelling for them to get under the desks. He moved slowly, grumbling to himself as he got down on his hands and knees, shimmying under his desk, submitting yet again to the senseless edicts of some undeserved authority. Here was a moment of excitement, and he was being instructed to cower. Under the fucking desk. We’re fish in a barrel. He felt pathetic. But he was a student, and he couldn’t afford to be kicked out of another program, so he did as instructed.
For a while.
He looked across at a classmate under a desk who was reaching for his penknife, they made eye contact, and he nodded at Spencer as if to say, If this guy comes for us, we’re jumping him. Which made Spencer think that if the shooter really came in while they were all under their desks, he’d be defenseless. He’d probably be killed. Everyone in the room would be killed too. If somebody actually came in shooting, what would he do?
He got up. With the staff sergeant scolding him in an angry whisper, he got up and stood by the door, readying himself to pounce on anyone who came in. At least if a shooter came in he could engage, wrestle him, maybe slow him down enough to give others in the room the chance to beat the shooter down. The only advantage he had was numbers, and maybe, if he was quick enough, the element of surprise. Go ahead, he thought, write me a little piece of paper. If he took a bullet trying to confront a shooter, at least he’d have gone down swinging.
After an hour the all-clear sounded, but Spencer had spent most of that time imagining all the different ways this could play out, and one of those scenarios seared itself into his brain. What if a shooter had come in while I was hiding under a desk?
What if he was found like that? What if the last image anyone had of Spencer Stone was his body, lying dead, where he’d tried to cower? If he ever found himself in this situation again, he decided, he wouldn’t be found under the furniture. If he died, he’d at least die being useful.
11.
SPENCER HEARS A LOUD PULSING SOUND behind him. Sirens blare, he can hear machine guns exchanging fire and mortars landing. It’s total chaos. Before him lies a man squirting blood so powerfully it’s almost satirical, a ridiculous movie prop. Three men stand behind him as Spencer tries to decode what’s going on. This body is broken, unconscious, and has a brachial bleed; the arm has been blown off and the long artery down the bicep severed right down the middle. So the nub of an arm is pulsing blood out all over Spencer, but more importantly—or less importantly?—the man does not seem to be breathing. Spencer gets behind the body and puts his hands under the neck, cupping it like he’s ladling water from a pond, easing the chin back so the mouth and nose are facing up. You do that so if there’s something he’s choking on or if he has a kinked airway you’ll unkink it—but of course it’s not kinked; Spencer knows the mechanism of injury, and this guy is obviously not choking. Spencer collects himself. He shimmies back over to the arm and pulls out his tourniquet, sliding the man’s arm through the loop, and the man does not resist, of course, so Spencer manhandles the arm. He’s not worried about breaks and fractures; he’s worried about blood loss, followed by loss of blood pressure, followed by lack of profusion, lack of oxygenated blood to the brain, brain dama
ge, and after that—he doubles the tourniquet over and then pulls it tight enough that he can feel the tissue compressing, like he’s trying to permanently reduce the size of the man’s arm, but that’s good, that’s good—now back up to his head, to address the next pressing problem: is he breathing? His chest is not rising. CPR? No, not yet. First he has to establish an airway. The man is unconscious so . . . Spencer remembers—when you’re unconscious the muscles in your jaw relax and your tongue can fall back and block your breathing, plus with trauma there could be blood clogging the airway. Spencer rifles through his pack for the long surgical-looking tube with the trumpeted end; he drops it, damn it, picks it up, wipes it off, starts fumbling with a pack of lube, tries to tear it open but it slips through his grasp, fuck, he picks that up too, tries to tear it open again but loses his grip and the pack goes flying—fuck, fuck!—and then decides, What the hell, and then he’s got his left hand over the man’s cheekbones, and he’s driving the tube up the man’s nose. Gunfire behind him. He guides the tube with one hand and shoves with the other, threading it up the nose and into his windpipe, all the way down until all that’s visible sticking out of the man’s nose are a few millimeters and the trumpeted end, like a tiny mushroom sprouting from the right nostril. The background noise is no longer there, it’s entirely shut off in fact; suddenly it’s totally silent, and Spencer feels a tap on his shoulder.
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