Killer, Come Hither

by Louis Begley

  —

  The next day, Wednesday, was when I had intended to leave, but flights had been canceled across the nation, and trains weren’t running. I remained at Harry’s apartment, glued to the television. A conviction had grown by the evening that Osama bin Laden, a name I had never heard before, was responsible for the attacks; he had commissioned and masterminded them from his lair somewhere in Afghanistan. There were reports of explosions in Kabul, but the Pentagon denied rumors that we had attacked the city. Harry and I had dinner at his French restaurant. We ate the postponed grand meal, drinking too much, and both of us feeling we were at a wake. When I mentioned the explosions, Harry said that even if it were true that we had not yet moved against bin Laden we’d be doing so soon.

  You heard Bush, he continued, hunt them down and punish, making no distinction between those who committed the acts of terror and those who harbor and support them. That’s quite a brief! Lord knows what the country will get into. Look, he added after a pause, it doesn’t seem to me that you need to try to move heaven and earth to be in Cambridge tomorrow or any other day this week. You aren’t teaching or taking courses you shouldn’t miss. Why not stay here until things quiet down? Having you with me is a wonderful serendipity. It may not be repeated. I want to take the good with the bad.

  I agreed gratefully.

  The drumbeat of war continued implacably all that week, gaining in force. Colin Powell issued his own warning to foreign nations: You’re with us or against us. NATO invoked the common defense clause of the treaty, laying the ground for intervention. A couple of days later President Bush promised to lead the world to victory and declared that states that support terrorism would be “ended.” Reading the press compulsively, I came across an article filed by Tony Lewis, a New York Times columnist, that spoke bluntly about the president’s inexperience in war and statecraft and the danger that retaliatory action by the U.S. would trigger unintended consequences—such as those that followed from our arming the mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1979 and the early eighties. We woke up to find we had handed over that country to anti-Western extremists. But his was a voice crying in the wilderness. On September 14, Congress passed a resolution allowing the president to attack nations, organizations, and persons suspected of being involved in the 9/11 terrorist acts, or harboring such organizations and persons, and to prevent future acts of terror by such nations, organizations, or persons. The House voted for it 420 to 1; the Senate 98 to 0. The ground had been well prepared: a national poll taken the following Monday showed overwhelming public support for military action.

  Harry worked at the office during that first post-9/11 weekend. The weather being beautiful, I divided my time between Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum. In reality, wherever I was I brooded about the impending war, my chosen work—a revisionist study of the Athenian campaign in Sicily—that awaited me in Cambridge and that I was eager to complete, my family history, and the moral quandary I faced. By the time my father was my age, the pace of the Vietnam War had picked up. Conscription was in effect. When the notice from the draft board came, you had to report for duty unless you had secured a deferment or had avoided the issue by joining the National Guard or, like Harry, had been deemed unfit for service. My father didn’t wait to be drafted. Far from seeking a deferment for graduate studies—he had already been accepted by the Harvard graduate school and a deferment would have been his for the asking—upon graduation from Harvard College he applied for a commission in the Marine Corps and was accepted for training. As platoon leader and eventually company commander, he took part in some of the most vicious fighting of the Vietnam War, including the Battle of Khe Sanh. For bravery in that action he was awarded the Navy Cross; he had previously received the Silver Star. He had not had any particular desire to fight in Vietnam; although he loved France, he had deplored her colonial policy and thought it was a mistake for the U.S. to try to fix the mess the French had left behind when they lost Indochina. He joined the marines because he thought that if his country was at war he had a duty to serve. Consciously or not, he was emulating my grandfather—his father—also a volunteer who had fought his way across Europe with Patton and twice received the Silver Star in addition to the Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre. The abolition of the draft and the conversion of the U.S. military to an all-volunteer professional force had dismayed my father. So far as he was concerned, the obligation to bear arms and serve was an intrinsic attribute of citizenship, which he thought, surprisingly for a philosopher, must be fulfilled in the spirit of my-country-right-or-wrong.

  I asked myself what those brave men—warriors without a trace of bellicosity in them—would think of my saying to myself that this new war is different, that since there is no draft, no legal obligation to serve, it can be left to those who see no great future ahead of themselves, listen to the recruiter’s siren song, and enlist, and to the service academy meatheads appointed to lead them. Would they nod approvingly and say that times do change, and while I should, of course, be ready to answer the call to arms if it came, in the meantime my less showy, but just as important, obligation was to honor the terms of my fellowship at Harvard and get on with my research? It was not an unlikely result. My grandfather and father, both of them reasonable men, both opposed to reckless foreign adventures, might well have given me that advice or some near-enough variation on its theme. But I wasn’t comfortable with it, and wondered what misgivings they would have felt once they had given it. How likely were they to think that it was small wonder that Harry thought of me as his son.

  Harry was out with clients that Saturday evening, but on Sunday he got home around seven—which for him was on the early side—and announced that after he’d taken his bath and changed he’d cook pasta for our dinner. Spaghetti aglio e olio, a garlicky specialty of his laced with crushed red peppers, which I remembered fondly from visits to Sag Harbor. But first we’d have drinks. Over gin martinis, which were another one of his specialties, he told me he’d been meeting with Abner Brown and his second-in-command. The work he was doing for Abner continued to expand in a manner that was flattering to him and was naturally very much appreciated by the firm. The conglomerate of which, except for a small number of joint venture partners, Abner was the sole owner, and also Abner as an individual, had become very important clients. In fact, he worried about the weight of the Brown matters in the firm’s business mix, and what he considered the overly optimistic assumptions his partners made concerning its continued growth and even the nature of the relationship itself.

  Never rely on the favor of kings or excessively rich men, he said shaking his head. They’re heartless and fickle.

  In any event, spending more and more time with Abner and being treated by him as an intimate friend, as well as his principal outside counsel, however flattering, was no bed of roses. Harry had made it clear at the outset, when Abner first asked him to represent him and his businesses generally, that while he wasn’t active in politics he was a registered Democrat, and the only Republican candidates he’d ever voted for were Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay.

  As you might expect, he continued, Abner didn’t bat an eye. Considering that he’s somewhere to the right of the John Birch Society and Attila the Hun, it isn’t just proof of good manners. I think it also means either that he’s intelligent enough not to need to surround himself exclusively with fellow true believers—Lord, how I hate that expression!—or, more probably, that he considers the views of someone like me, who doesn’t have money to back them up, completely devoid of importance.

  Beyond that discomfort, he said, the breadth of Abner’s convoluted affairs was such that he feared being swept away in an avalanche of problems without having the time or detachment necessary to grasp the entire background and all the ramifications. He had to beef up his team, but he hadn’t figured out yet what mix of skills and personalities he needed. These questions were nagging at his mind, and he was nowhere near a resoluti
on.

  Uncle Harry, I broke in, that’s a fascinating and difficult situation. I’m really interested, but I have something urgent I must talk to you about. Would you forgive me if I changed the subject?

  Of course, he answered, go right ahead.

  Over the weekend, I told him, I came to a decision of which I think you’ll disapprove. Perhaps you’ll think I’m totally fucked up. Here it is. We both see that a war is coming, and I don’t think people like me should say, Let’s leave the fighting to the other guys, the kids who don’t go to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, or Saint Paul’s, the kids who are lucky if they make it through high school, who enlist because other doors are closed and they’ve been watching fancy television commercials about military training. That’s too easy. I want to be in there with them. So unless you talk me out of it I’ll do what Dad did: get into the U.S. Marine Officer Candidates School and take it from there.

  That’s quite a piece of news, he replied. It calls for another batch of martinis. Back in a moment.

  It was a suspiciously long moment, lasting five minutes or more, but finally Harry emerged from the pantry with the shaker, refilled my glass and then his, and said very solemnly, Let’s drink to your undertaking. You’re a nut, but so was your father. And your grandpa. As for me…You probably know some version of the story. I was deemed unfit to serve in Vietnam, unfit to cover myself with glory like your father. Well, he got back…All I ask is that you don’t get yourself killed and do your best to come back in one piece. If possible in better shape than your papa. You’re the only person I have left in this world.

  Plato, pretending he was a lion, lay in repose on the coffee table, a practice that I had a suspicion Harry didn’t just tolerate. He actively encouraged it. Just then the little Burmese raised his head questioningly.

  Yes, of course, Harry said, laughing, I have you and thank the Lord I have Plato, who has the good sense not to go off to war. He’ll look after his old pal Harry. All joking aside, take good care of yourself and be sure to write a nice letter to the Society of Fellows people. That’s a lawyer speaking. You may want to be welcomed back when you return.

  II

  Nothing mattered to me when I got out of Walter Reed except the desperate, consuming need to get my writing done. I was telling what the fighting had been like, and what it had done to my men and me. I wanted the whole world to know. Had it been possible, I would have shouted the story from rooftops. Harry had said back in 2001 that I was all he had left in this world. Now, seven years later, I could say the same of him: he was my sole remaining link to humanity. Felicity gave up on me quicker than I would have thought possible. She left me while I was patrolling through Musa Qala, and married a fellow archaeologist. I saw it on Facebook. They had a little girl. She sent pictures as though I could give a shit. Later, Facebook told me that she was once again pregnant and hoped for a boy. Did she want to bring up a warrior? My school and college classmates had become lawyers or investment bankers. I had no desire to see any of them. That left Scott Prentice. He had been my classmate at school and we were classmates again at Yale and joined the same college senior society. It didn’t take me long to come to the conclusion that he was the smartest man I knew or was likely to know, but so low-key and modest most people didn’t have an inkling of the speed with which his mind worked. He was a fine athlete as well, and we were both on the school lacrosse teams. Our school had recruited him as a fencing prodigy, and he stayed with the saber through school and college. Our academic paths diverged at college, and I saw a good deal less of him. Scott had a passion for mathematics. I was wrapped up in my history courses and Greek and Latin classics. In the summers I wangled stints at archaeological sites. We sat next to each other last at a Bones dinner just before graduation and went back to his room afterward to talk. I was disgustingly full of plans for Balliol. Scott confessed he was at loose ends. Graduate school beckoned, perhaps MIT, perhaps Stanford, but he wasn’t sure he was ready to commit. His father, a career diplomat and a noted Arabist, at the time serving as the CIA section chief in Beirut, was killed in the bombing of our embassy there in April 1983. Scott and his mother were in New York, on a home visit, when it happened. His mother remarried promptly, and he hardly remembered his father. It was nearly dawn when we drank our last beer, and as we were saying goodbye he told me that he was truly torn. Mathematics was his love. Government service attracted and repelled powerfully. He promised to write and to do his best to visit me in England. In fact, I didn’t hear from him, and the letter I sent to the only address I had, his mother’s apartment in New York, went unanswered. I thought of calling her, and in the end didn’t. She’d been widowed again; I hadn’t written to offer my condolences; I felt stupidly embarrassed.

  My surprise and delight were extreme when Scott and I ran into each other in Kandahar, shortly before my team moved out to Delaram. He wore an army officer’s uniform with a major’s golden oak leaf. I’d just made captain. Did that mean that he’d gone to OCS straight out of college, even though we weren’t then at war? Even the premonitory attack against the USS Cole didn’t take place until the fall of 2000. It turned out that that wasn’t the reason, but there wasn’t time to get into that sort of stuff during the brief cup of coffee at the base PX. I learned that the uniform was a cover, and Scott’s real employers were the Special Activities Division boys over at Langley. He told me of his sudden decision to join, and some of the stuff he had been doing, when he came to visit me at Walter Reed, which he did at least once a week. He’d been brought back to headquarters. As we talked about everything we had lived through and the shape of our future, it became clear to me again that he was my closest friend—the brother I had never had. I didn’t doubt that was also how he felt about me.

  Harry invited me to move in with him as soon as the hospital released me. I accepted without hesitation, because I wanted to be near him and, to tell the truth, in some small part because I had no other place to go. He did everything to make it comfortable for me to work, setting up a large desk, additional bookshelves, and filing cabinets in the guest room that was to be my study. I was to sleep in the smaller guest room. We had dinner together whenever Harry was free, and after a while I realized that he was making an effort to be free most evenings. Dinner was invariably late. That made possible long workdays, without interruptions or respite from my manuscript other than for a sandwich at lunch, runs in the park, and weight lifting and Krav Maga sessions at a Third Avenue gym in which Harry had given me a membership. Push-ups and pull-ups I did at home since Harry, who apparently thought of everything, had had a bar installed in my bathroom. Getting back as near as humanly possible into Force Recon shape had become, next to the book, an obsession. My other daytime forays from the apartment were few and far between. I would slink back to the apartment revolted by the luxury of store-window displays and the parading princesses of Madison Avenue—skinny tall girls with big hair, big tits, big sunglasses, and big shoulder bags talking into their big phones—and sickened by pity, pity like a newborn babe striding the blast, for soldiers still stuck in the hellholes I’d known, for veterans coming home to a country that didn’t give a shit, for everyone who’d been dealt a lousy hand. Even for myself, although I knew that my case was different, that eventually I would recover and never face the indignities and desperations the others would.

  I gave Harry the complete draft of my book on a Friday so rainy that he’d decided not to go out to Sag Harbor. This is very exciting, he said, and started reading right after dinner. He kept at it the entire weekend, practically nonstop. He read in his library, the door to which was always open. Unable to restrain myself, I found reasons to pass by from time to time and check whether he was still at it. I think he was too absorbed to notice. We had dinner together on Saturday, but neither of us said a word that touched on the book. I thought Harry was filibustering, talking endlessly about Abner Brown and his new investments in Peru, Argentina, Chile, and Pakistan because I had disappointed him and he hadn�
��t figured out how to break that to me. By the time we’d eaten our dessert I was falling asleep at the table. On Sunday afternoon I was in despair and went to the gym for a long workout. When I returned I found a note on the table in the foyer asking me to stop by the library.

  I’ve finished your book, he said. Some parts I’ve read more than twice. I wish your parents were alive. They’d be very proud of you, but no prouder than I.

  I knew no one in literary New York, no writers, no agents, and no editors. Harry steered me to Jane Bird, a young agent who took me on as a client and has become a friend. Harry had obtained an introduction to her through a cultural reporter at the Times married to a partner in his firm. The first publisher to whom Jane offered the book bought it and decided to publish on an accelerated six-month schedule, in October. A few weeks later Jane succeeded in selling a film option to a studio on terms so favorable that they staggered me. Astonishingly, incredibly, I was launched. When I tried to thank him, Harry just laughed and laughed. He came up with the line that whatever he was doing for me and my book was done for the honor of the family. In a more serious mode, he told me that he’d give a big party in October to celebrate me and the book. It’s time you met some people who count, he said. He also talked about the summer. He intended to be in Sag Harbor on weekends as often as possible—It’s good for my pal Plato, he claimed—and to take all of August there, returning to the city only after Labor Day. He hoped I would join him in Sag Harbor often—as often as the spirit moved me. But I didn’t go out in August at all. Work on galleys and related chores were easier to handle if I was in New York, and I had started work on my second book and felt a powerful need to be alone. All the same, when Harry invited me specifically for the Labor Day weekend, I accepted. The work on the new book was progressing; the chores relating to what I now called the old book were done; I felt I could use a couple of good swims in the ocean.