By the end of the next day, everyone on base knew. The special forces guys who got to go out and see real action ribbed him for it: Alek’s first contact with the enemy was getting fleeced by unarmed villagers. Alek laughed along with them; it was all in good fun, but it felt like being the little brother. Forced to stay home while the real men went out to play ball.
Not that there was much action anyway. Afghanistan wasn’t where the world’s attention was anymore. Now the real bad guys were ISIS, and there weren’t very many of them in Afghanistan. Jihadists going to fight in Syria, or to be trained there; the passage of extremists through Turkey.
Which was funny when he thought about it. His grandfather was Greek, but he was born in a part of Greece that was, back then, under Ottoman rule. Turkish rule, in other words. So his grandfather was born in Turkey, and now Turkey was the gateway to jihad. Not that his grandfather was an extremist; his name had been Sokratis, after all. “Socrates,” just like the philosopher.
Although he was a resistance fighter. A guerilla. He was an insurgent, and here Alek was, trying to fight an insurgency.
But that was just it. He wasn’t really fighting at all. He wanted to be a soldier, but instead he was a housekeeper. Before he’d left for his deployment, his mom came up to Oregon to say goodbye, and she’d made a big thing out of how she’d felt a sense of fear about him going to war. She’d been ill with it, she said, but then God spoke to her. “He told me that something very exciting’s going to happen to you, Alek, and I can’t wait to see it. I can’t wait to see what he has in store for you.”
God was wrong. Or Heidi misheard him, because there was no excitement. Nothing happened. Nothing besides one drill that went awry. The war in Afghanistan was winding down, and the only real missions available were gobbled up by the special forces guys. They were the ones who got to fight what was left of the war. They were the ones who got to kill bad guys. Alek followed janitors around.
21.
EVER SINCE THEIR history class at the small Christian school, Alek had been pretty sure he wanted to be in the military. That class had been the one respite from the whole long trauma he suffered there, and he still felt moved by history, by wars; he wanted to be part of them.
Perhaps it came from family too. The stories he heard about two grandfathers who each led heroic, interesting lives—he felt it was maybe in his blood. Wars were the culmination of history; wars were where you left your mark on it.
And he loved guns. The military would be fun; it would be cool. He knew early on it was what he wanted to do. It just took a few twists and turns to learn exactly how.
One important step came just after the small Christian school. When he left with Spencer, he found himself caught between two worlds. He and Spencer were wading into the new one together, but the rest of Alek’s friends, his entire community, had all been at the school, which was also his church. Most of his life revolved around an institution he now felt alienated from.
Spencer seemed driven to go out and find new friends, but Alek didn’t think he could be authentic, and be superficial enough to socialize, at the same time. He knew none of these people. How could he pretend to have anything in common with them? Spencer could at least connect with people about things like basketball. Alek preferred to paint. He started doing landscapes with his dad, then one day someone knocked a vase off a table and Alek looked at it, lying there on the floor, shattered, and thought it had a strange kind of appeal. He set up an easel and used oil paint to re-create the broken vase on canvas. It turned out well; it was still strange, but it was pretty, and interesting, and he liked it, so Alek began painting abstract art in most of his spare time. Which was a nice diversion, but a solitary one; not exactly a path to camaraderie.
And he couldn’t quite reconcile himself to the fact that he needed a new community. He’d had one, and it was just a few miles away. It felt strange to pretend his old friends didn’t exist. Spencer got up one day and walked out to try and find a clique, but Alek didn’t feel motivated to. And he felt if he tried, he’d only hold Spencer back.
“It’s okay,” Alek said that day, sitting on the school bench, “you go ahead.” And he let Spencer go.
His dad started talking around then about moving up to Oregon, because he had real estate investments up there, and it’s where Alek’s stepmom came from. Alek’s dad asked him whether eventually, maybe after graduation, he’d think about moving up with him, and though Alek couldn’t quite put his finger on why, the idea appealed to him.
Except, why wait until graduation? Why not go now? Spencer was off making friends; Alek didn’t have any here.
He loved Oregon the moment he landed. It was a slower pace of life; it was more solitary, more space. He didn’t miss Northern California. He missed his mom and his family; he missed Spencer and Spencer’s family; he missed the compound on Woodknoll Way, but he didn’t really miss California.
Besides, Spencer seemed to be doing okay without him. When they spoke, and when Alek went home to visit after they’d both graduated, he got a taste for how Spencer was getting on with his life. Spencer had a job he said he liked at Jamba Juice, and new friends. Friends who struck Alek as a little directionless, hippies really, but they seemed to care about Spencer. Spencer appeared to be unbothered by the fact that he was going to spend the rest of his life gaining weight and making smoothies. The only adventures Spencer would ever have were going to be getting drunk with friends who had exotic piercings.
To Alek, that seemed boring. Alek wanted more.
Back in Oregon, he was enrolled at Umpqua Community College, with a part-time job at Costco, but he decided it was time to begin thinking seriously about the thing he’d always planned for. Time to think about which branch of the military he wanted to join.
For a civilian, he knew the military inside and out. He knew every branch, what they did, how they spoke, what their lives were like.
But he wanted to be careful, smart, and not everyone had great things to say about their branches.
Some people returned from deployments talking about how big of a mistake it had been. Something in the back of his mind said, Try it out before you sign your whole life away. So he needed a way to dip his toe in the water before diving in, and he decided on a branch full of people with other careers. People who worked when they weren’t deployed, as analysts and consultants, middle management at big Oregon-based companies like Nike. The Oregon National Guard would be his carefully plotted entrée to the military.
Just when he’d made his decision, he got a text from Spencer. “Hey, man, big news. I’m signing up for special forces! Air force pararescue, baby!”
Alek thought before replying. Was that a joke? Spencer? In the special forces? Alek had studied every service inside and out and considered pararescue. Did Spencer actually know how hard it was? Did he think he was just going to waltz in and qualify for one of most elite branches of the military? Spencer was, what, fifty pounds overweight the last time Alek saw him? He’d never make it. Alek thought about checking his friend, sparing him the heartbreak. What if Spencer hurt himself? Clearly Spencer needed advice from someone who knew what he was talking about, before he got hurt, or embarrassed. How do I say this without being an asshole?
He deliberated, trying to figure out how best to be a good friend, and finally decided it wasn’t his place to be critical. Maybe Spencer would come out of it on his own. But Alek didn’t want to encourage him too much; he needed to be careful, not build up an inflated sense of hope that might devastate Spencer when it popped. So after a long pause, he finally just settled on something neutral. “That’s great, good luck.”
And he thought about how even though Spencer would never make it, it still must mean something that they both, independently, decided to join the military at the same time. Maybe that’s what happened when you were best friends.
Even when you didn’t have a plan, friends did things together.
22.
THE TWO FRIE
NDS HAD A PLAN.
It was the spring of 1941; the Nazi occupation of Greece was just a month old. The fascist Italians had tried and failed to take the country, so their Axis brethren came to bail them out with the full force of the German Twelfth Army. The Germans sent panzer divisions and the Luftwaffe, laying waste to the country on their way, and the advance took only weeks. When they reached Athens, they went straight to the Acropolis to raise the Nazi flag, so that the swastika could be seen from all over the city, and all over the cradle of Western civilization there would be no doubt about who was in control.
During the occupation that followed, thousands of Greeks died, many of starvation, many from harsh punishment as the Nazis tried to prevent a resistance.
What the Nazis did not count on was an almost absurdly brave plan carried out by a couple of young men.
Their plan should not have worked. The odds were against them. Two teenagers against the Twelfth Army. The Acropolis was heavily guarded and had only one authorized entrance, so they’d have to run a gauntlet of Nazis to get there. The boys decided they needed to sneak in from the side, but that presented another problem: the Acropolis was guarded by nature as well, with steep cliffs all around. They had to find a different way in, so they took the natural next step: they went to the library. They rifled through encyclopedias looking for ideas, and within the pages on historical sites around the city, the places in which the beasts and gods fought and formed alliances in ancient Greek mythology, they found a hint. A brief mention of a cave with a fissure leading all the way up to the top of the Acropolis. They scouted it out and decided it had as good a chance of success as anything else they’d come up with.
They went out and secretly scouted the perimeter of the Acropolis looking for evidence, found an old archeological site at the northwest cliff face with a wooden door and a rusty old lock. They skirted the barbed wire, broke the lock, forced the door, and went into the cave. They found the fissure from the myth, and while it was impossible to tell for sure, it seemed at least possible that it went deep and high enough.
The boys barely made it home before curfew, and even when they did, they received chilling news. Two hundred miles to the south, German airborne troops had begun an invasion of Crete. Crete wasn’t only a symbol of Greece’s continuing collapse to the Nazis, it was the country’s biggest island, and a base from which to project power over the Mediterranean and Middle East Theater, so it wasn’t just meaningful for Greece—whoever held Crete held a powerful advantage in the whole war.
The boys decided they needed to move faster.
A few nights later, just after news broke that Crete had fallen to the Nazis, the boys went back to the cave.
They were armed only with flashlights and a penknife, but they were able to use old planks from the archaeological dig to climb up through the shaft, and they found themselves at the base of the Parthenon, partially lit by a quarter moon.
They waited until guards had wandered away from the belvedere, which served as a lookout post at the east end. When the coast was clear, they crept over to the pole, pulled out the penknife, and sawed at the rope until the giant Nazi flag came tumbling down.
When Athens awoke the next morning, a giant symbol of evil was gone. It was like a huge black cloud had lifted, and a vision of what could be took over. Spirits rose all over the city, and a palpable sense of opportunity grew throughout the country. The day the flag came down changed the course of history, because it showed what a few normal people could do. It inspired thousands upon thousands of people all over Greece, proving they could have a real, visible effect on their own lives, on their world. On the evil in their midst. That bare flagpole inspired a resistance movement against the Nazis and drove tens of thousands of people all over the country to join it, among them a thirty-two-year-old shoemaker named Sokratis Skarlatos.
SKARLATOS jOINED THE RESISTANCE. He lived in the city of Alexander—Alexandroupoli—so he became a guerilla fighter there. He trekked through the Evros Mountains with an old rifle and waited for opportunities to sabotage his oppressors. Eventually he was captured and held in a camp near the Evros River, but he was wily and bold. He escaped, dodging bullets as the guards fired at their fleeing prisoner, and dove into the Evros. He fled into the Rhodopes Mountains, traversed north, then came back across the river and hid in the foothills, waiting for the right time to go home.
As soon as he did, Skarlatos was recaptured.
This time, he wasn’t given a chance to escape. The Nazis had a more creative idea for him. He was a shoemaker, after all, so he might as well put his skills to use. They conscripted him into the Nazi war effort, sent him to Germany, and assigned him to a plant in the east where he would help make boots for soldiers.
He was good at it; he was made a supervisor. He’d gone from being a freedom fighter to being just about the opposite, manufacturing one of the most recognizable symbols of oppression, the Nazi jackboot. But still, he’d found a way to survive. And he found a girl: a teenage leather cutter in his charge who caught his fancy.
Skarlatos rode out the war at the boot factory, and when it ended he took his young bride to a small town on a lake at the foot of the Bavarian Alps. Übersee, it was called, “over the water.” They had a son, Emmanuel, and when the Iron Curtain fell, the old freedom fighter took his family to the land of opportunity.
Colorado, then Oakland, where Emmanuel grew up, met his first wife, a customer service rep for Greyhound named Heidi Neuberger, and in October of 1992, a boy with heroism in his blood was born. He was given the name of the greatest Greek of them all, Alexander, with a slight tweak suggested by a speech therapist at a Lamaze class, to make the full name easier to say: Alek.
He came from a people who’d fought one of the world’s greatest evils, and done so with hardly any weapons. It was this history with which he’d always felt the need to commune. It was why he took to history class, even when little else in school held his interest. It was why he loved guns, maybe even part of what drove him to join the military. He grew up wishing he could go see where his grandfather was born, to see where he’d fought, and loved, and found a way to survive among the Nazis. He wanted to see where his father was born. And after his tour in Afghanistan, he would finally, finally have the money to do it.
23.
“GERMANY FIRST. We gotta go to Germany.” Alek was in the MWR after shift, messaging Spencer. After another boring day. He hadn’t realized quite how boring life on a base in Afghanistan was going to be, but he knew he wouldn’t have many chances to spend money. He knew that his best friend was going to be stationed in Portugal, and he knew both of them would finish their tours with some savings. He wanted Spencer to see this part of him, a part he himself was only beginning to understand.
“Alek, I’m getting good at this!” Spencer’s messages were so enthusiastic Alek was almost jealous. He’d seen pictures of Spencer’s base—it was like a beach resort or something. Spencer didn’t know what it was like to be at a real posting.
“Good at what, like checking rashes?”
“No, asshole, I’ve been doing jujitsu. I’m starting to give my class instructor a run for his money.” Spencer and his jujitsu. “Anyway,” Spencer wrote, “adventure starts soon. I’m getting excited, man.”
Spencer had no idea. Alek was desperate for it to begin. Spencer asked, “What ended up being the deal with your friends?”
“Strasser can’t come,” Alek wrote. “Honestly I don’t think Solon will either. I know he wants to but I don’t think he has the money.”
“Sucks.”
The planning was getting complicated, partially because Alek was spending too much time doing it. In reality he didn’t really need to be doing this now; he’d have plenty of time to plan later, after his tour, because he had to go back to the US for demobilization before he could fly to Europe. He planned anyway though, because for him it was a diversion, one of the only ones he had, the one fun thing he could do while stuck here on a gloryles
s tour. So he overplanned.
“So,” Alek wrote, “then when do you want to come back through Germany?”
“It’s just that there’s so much I want to see, you know? This will probably be my last chance to do something like this, there’s a lot to do. I know you have that girl there . . .”
Lea. He knew Spencer was going to bring that up eventually. She’d been a German exchange student in Oregon, and he’d met her over a friend’s Snapchat he photobombed. Then they began talking, and once he started planning his German tour, he decided he wanted to see her. But the plan to see her when he was passing through Germany evolved into something more; she’d invited him to stay with her at her family’s house, and now he figured he might spend a few days with her.
“It’s not just that,” he wrote Spencer. “Just don’t want to be moving every day, I want to, you know, soak it in a little.”
“All right, well, we don’t have to decide right now. Let me know if Solon comes through. In the meantime, whatever happened with the sniper training?”
“I’ll tell you about it later.” The last thing Alek wanted to talk about was being here. “But basically, I’m still really bored.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll have a couple of beers for you. ”
“You piece of shit. All right, it’s midnight here. I gotta go to bed.”
“Hang in, brother, later.”
Two days later, after his shift, Alek went down to the MWR to lift weights, and decided to check his messages first. He had a Facebook message from Spencer. “Good news, I think Anthony’s coming.”
Alek had to think for a minute. Anthony? “Anthony from middle school you mean?”
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