All the Ways We Kill and Die

by Brian Castner

  “If I don’t come home, know I’ve lived a happy life.”

  THE DAY AFTER she was informed of Matt’s death, Jenny flew from Cheyenne to Delaware and spent three days at the Fisher House at Dover Air Force Base, waiting for him to come home. Three days of blur, three days of sitting at a kitchen table but not eating, three days of filling out insurance forms, three days of hiding in the nondenominational chapel in silence.

  If you’ve died in an American war over the last several decades, Dover has almost certainly been your first stop upon return to the United States. It hosts the Department of Defense’s only port mortuary in the Lower Forty-Eight, the only place red, white, and blue caskets are carried off of military transport planes.

  No, not “caskets.” They weren’t called that at Dover. Jenny was learning so many new terms, and she tried speaking them out loud to see how they fit in her mouth. Port Mortuary. Ramp Ceremony. Dignified Transfer. And not a casket with Matt but a Transfer Case with Remains. These new words burned and made her gag, like some cruel Tabasco-flavored medicine that somehow must be choked down twice: first for Matt’s death, then for the inability to name it.

  Since that knock on the door, Jenny had been so anxious to see him, to see his body and what state he was in, to make sure it was all true. But Matt was late leaving theater, and so she had an extra day to wait at Dover for the dignified transfer. But even then—and she had only just discovered this upon arrival in Delaware—she wouldn’t actually be able to see him. It was against policy. She was allowed only to see the transfer case come off the plane from a distant viewing area. The morgue did allow her control over other decisions, a thousand logistical concerns including this: was it okay to destroy parts of Matt they might find later, or did she want the odd toe or kneecap that might crop up? Jenny asked her priest about that one.

  Jenny and the girls kept vigil at the Fisher House, a large private boarding house for military families. A bum leg kept Zachary Fisher from enlisting in World War II. Instead, he became a leading New York City real estate developer, and after spending the first half of his life making his money, he spent the second half giving it away, to create a museum out of the USS Intrepid, to the families of the victims of the Beirut Barracks bombing in 1983, to a foundation to open free long-term residences for families of service members undergoing treatment at military hospitals. He would open twenty-four Fisher Houses in his lifetime, from Bethesda, Maryland, in 1990 to Fort Hood, Texas, in 1999. He died before 9/11, before the homes were flooded by families of casualties from the wars that followed. There are now sixty-five such houses, including the one at Dover, where there is no major hospital but there is a morgue.

  With nothing to do but sit and think, Jenny found it hard not to regret getting married so young, getting pregnant so young. The military encourages you to marry, she could see that now. You have to live in the barracks if you’re single, but if you get married you get to live anywhere you want and get a big extra check for rent besides. No way to live together first. No testing it out. There was too much money to lose. Together and married, and their first daughter was on the way in no time. Amazing it didn’t happen before the move to Florida, honestly. And now three daughters to raise, suddenly, on her own.

  Well, maybe not so suddenly. Everyone thought he was a family man, but he worked late, made the military number one, never took off to watch the girls, always made her find the babysitter if she had something to do for herself, take a class, accept an evening massage appointment. She was the one that made the family. What did he do? He just came home, took a big shit, ate dinner, went to bed. He never cooked. He never cleaned the kitchen. They had been on their own a while.

  She was so angry at him, but at least now he was coming home.

  The sun was out the day of Matt’s arrival, pleasant despite a January chill. They stood on the Dover flight line in a small group, Jenny and the girls and Matt’s parents and brother and sister. The girls got excited as the gray C-17 approached, jumped up and down and yelled, “Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!” In some ways it felt like any other deployment; always a day late, she and girls dressed up in their fancy clothes to welcome him.

  The back ramp opened. A small blue honor guard removed three transfer cases. Then it was done. They returned to the Fisher House.

  She had one final decision to make before she left Delaware: where would Matt be buried? Certainly not New Mexico, nor Cheyenne where they lived now. For years he was adamant that he wanted to be buried at Arlington, that it was the fitting end of his military life. But ambivalence had crept in during that last summer, that time of last family photos and the last vacation, and he had suddenly announced that he didn’t care anymore. Bury him anywhere. Rather than provide her freedom, though, this new lack of guidance was a straightjacket.

  In the end, only Matt’s grandparents had an opinion. They had raised him, had said good-bye, were not bound by martial concerns nor hearts hardened by six deployments. Their request was simple.

  “Bury him here with us,” they said. “Bury him in Traverse City.”

  She would, she decided. The Air Force was his job, but he wanted to be a good father and husband at heart, she thought. So she would bury him in Michigan. That first road to Florida, a highway to beaches and youthful opportunity, had somehow looped around in the distance and brought them back to where they started. After a dozen years of military life, and almost as many years of war, they could claim nowhere for themselves, nothing felt settled and right, not even their childhood home. That wasn’t a time of innocence anyway. But Traverse City was home to people who loved him, so it would have to do.

  She bought a plot at the traditional family cemetery. She bought the plot next to her parents’ graves. And then, at the age of thirty-three, she bought another, the one right next to him, for herself.

  3 ♦ A FROZEN FUNERAL

  MATTHEW SCHWARTZ DID NOT DIE alone. Bryan Bell and Matt Seidler, the two younger members of his team, died with him, making January 5, 2012 the EOD community’s worst ever day in Afghanistan. The last comparable loss in a single incident was five years earlier in Iraq. On April 6, 2007, a 107-millimeter rocket struck an armored Humvee and killed the entire Navy EOD team inside: Chief Greg Billiter and two petty officers, Curt Hall and Joseph McSween. They were near Hawija in the northern part of the country, traveling in the protected center of a convoy, when the projectile was shot from the side of the road. The warhead struck the weakest seam, the joint where the front door, side plating, and roof come together. The odds against such a precise strike are incalculable; it was luck that killed them. We know this because another EOD team did an investigation afterward, collected evidence, processed the data, and wrote a report. But that takes time, and on the day of Matt’s death and the several days after, most of us had almost no idea what killed him and his team.

  There was no question that Jessie and I would go to Matt’s funeral, only how soon we would leave and how many of our children—the Schwartz girls’ former playmates—should we bring. Jessie wanted to leave that night, as soon as we found out. She wanted to go, somewhere, anywhere, to immediately close the miles between her and the Schwartz family. But we didn’t know if Jenny was going to the morgue in Delaware. We didn’t know where the funeral was. We didn’t know anything. So we did the things you do, we called and Facebooked and told everyone who might not have already known, and then we kissed our children in their beds where they slept. Jessie packed until I stayed her nervous energy, and it was far into the night that we finally lay side by side in bed, staring at the ceiling in the dark.

  It was then that I asked the question that had been gnawing at me from the moment of my phone’s first fell buzz.

  “Why did you ask if it was Matt before?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” she replied.

  “When I got the message and we didn’t know who died, you asked if it was Matt. How did you know?”

  “I was always a good nurse because I knew,” sh
e said.

  “But how? Did you just pick the worst possible name you could think of?”

  “No, I was thinking about Matt this morning.”

  “Did he come visit you today?” I asked. She understood what I meant.

  “No. Don’t you just have days where someone weighs on your mind, on your heart, and then you call them and find out there was horrible news or they had a bad day?”

  “That doesn’t happen to me,” I said and rolled over to go to sleep.

  ON THE MORNING of Thursday, January 11, my wife and I and my two oldest boys climbed into the family van and drove the many hours from Buffalo to the top of the mitt of Michigan. The wake was scheduled for Friday evening, the funeral Saturday morning. A recent storm had left behind a heavy blanket of snow that made rounded barrows out of parked cars. The drifts and piles only deepened as we crossed the low Canadian farmland and gradually climbed into the glaciated hills and thick pine forests of northern Michigan. The highway ended, the roads narrowed and slickened, the mounds of snow grew ever higher, the woods ever wilder, and I was reminded again that a winter’s journey into the north is also a journey back in time to a harder past. In a northern winter, the natural world still holds sway, and human exertions are kept to the limited concerns of warmth, sure footing of boot and tire, and the next belly-filling meal. The thermometer was thirty degrees lower and the snow two feet higher by the time we reached the huddle of silently smoking chimneys on the frozen East Arm of Grand Traverse Bay.

  All out-of-town family and friends were staying at the Grand Traverse Resort, where Jenny had worked answering phones as a teenager half a lifetime before. For the first time, she returned now as a guest, for free, a comp provided by the hotel’s owner.

  We parked the car in the hotel’s unplowed parking lot, and with careful stutter-steps began to unload bags and carry them through the knee-deep snowdrifts and across the icy sidewalk to the entrance and check-in. The lobby was an empty vault, oversized in the off-season, and as we stood in line at the check-in counter, wet below the knee and holding wet bags, Jenny and the girls appeared on the far side of the space.

  I learned something in that moment. The lonely years together at remote bases, late-night phone calls, playdates while husbands were deployed, months of meals prepared to ensure the spouse left behind would eat, the encouragements and support to go back to school, the commiserations about unsanitary base housing, the secretly crafted mutual plans to leave unworthy husbands, the rituals and schedules, the endured deprivations and disappointments, the practiced grief, all those trials that form the bonds of military wife sisterhood, all was in preparation for this:

  The two women caught sight of each other, and with no hesitation or shame, ran into each other’s arms.

  “I’m so sorry, Jenny,” Jessie said.

  “When they told me, I didn’t want to believe them. I kept asking, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure?’ I would have punched someone if they were wrong. I wanted to punch someone so bad. I think I threatened to punch the chaplain if they were wrong. But they said they were sure, and they were right.”

  “I love you, Jenny,” Jessie said.

  “But I didn’t believe them, because I said, ‘If he’s really dead, then where is the shop? Where are his EOD brothers? Where is everyone? They would all be here if he was really dead.’ But they weren’t. It was just the commander and the first sergeant and the chaplain, and I barely know them. Why didn’t any EOD guys come to tell me?”

  “I’m sorry, Jenny.”

  “They said, ‘Is there anyone we should call,’ and I said they should call you. But the Air Force couldn’t find your number. They couldn’t call you. And I, I didn’t know what I could do. But I thought, if he was really dead, you would have already been there somehow. But you weren’t.”

  “I’m sorry, Jenny. We’re here now.”

  UNFORTUNATELY, THE COMMANDER and the first sergeant and the chaplain were right, and Jenny knew this because earlier that day she and the girls had finally been allowed to see Matt. The Air Force conducted a second dignified transfer, transported him from Dover to a funeral home in Traverse City, and it was there that they and the rest of Matt’s family finally got their first look.

  Jenny and her three girls passed through the decorated public front of the parlor and into the EMPLOYEES ONLY preparation rooms in back. Matt was in a casket, and as one, all four peered in over the lip.

  They looked at one another. Then they laughed. This wasn’t their daddy. This wasn’t her husband.

  Matt’s beard had been shaved and his hair had been trimmed, but into a style he had never worn, faded along the sides with trendy sideburns. They were thin and narrow, unlike anything he had in life; Matt preferred a standard-issue, seven-dollar high-and-tight from the Base Exchange. His jaw was set oddly forward and shifted to the right, giving his head a boxy look. There was a massive bruise around one eye. The undertaker had filled him full of embalming fluid but hadn’t yet applied makeup, so he was puffy and pallid. But none of those inconsistencies compared to the most obvious flaw.

  “Why doesn’t Daddy have his glasses on?” one of the girls asked.

  Yes, that was it. No glasses. Matt was blind without them. The thought of him buried without his glasses was too much. Jenny sought out the funeral director.

  “Sir, what happened to his glasses?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, he didn’t have any when he arrived,” the older man said.

  “Please, do you have any more? He needs his glasses.”

  The funeral director did keep a store on hand, for cases such as this, but all were bifocals in elderly styles. He had no glasses for a man in his thirties. He certainly didn’t have the type Matt always wore, a round, steel-rimmed pair issued free by the military hospital; Matt was too cheap to go buy his own.

  In the end Jenny selected a style Matt’s grandfather would have been more comfortable in. They were as close as she could get. At least he had something.

  THE WAKE WAS the next day, on Friday, and the first to arrive at the church that afternoon were not clergy or family or military officials but rather strangers, large, bearded men, clad in black leather, riding coughing motorcycles the color of an Iraqi burn pit. They were not modern riders of pale horses but rather protection, and comfort.

  Since 2005, a relatively small group of citizens have exercised their right to free speech by protesting at military funerals, using the semi-public occasion as a platform to spread a political message linking dead soldiers and the civil marriage of homosexuals. In response, a much larger group of citizens, over two hundred thousand total at last count, have exercised their Constitutional right to counterprotest, forming a much larger human wall to block the sightlines between the fundamentalists and the friends and family of the deceased. Since that first protested funeral, the Patriot Guard Riders have literally ridden around the country, from tragedy to tragedy, flags unfurled from the backs of their bikes, standing shifts at memorial services and interments from Maine to California. They even brave Michigan in January.

  The Riders set up for the wake hours before the event officially began. They fitted flags on poles. They straightened their jackets and vests, dressed in padded overcoats of Cold War Army camouflage to keep out the worst of the chill. They parked their bikes in the most remote corner of the lot, and when they approached the church, few smiled and few spoke. Many were old enough to be Jenny’s father. They were already in formation, two lines forming an impenetrable corridor from parking lot to church’s front door, before the first guest arrived.

  By design, Jenny and the girls also arrived at the church early, to claim a few solitary minutes before the two days of public performance would start. Family and close friends kept a respectful distance at the back of the nave, where a table had been set up with news clippings and memorial testimonies and the traditional large, framed photo of the deceased. Eschewing modern military norms, in his death mask portrait Matt has no beard from a mon
th on patrol, no rifle and body armor, not even an American flag in the background. Instead, Jenny chose a close-up, her goofy Matt with a toothy smile that lights up his entire face.

  I recognized the photo. This one had been cropped, but the larger version was put on Facebook months before. In the full view, he is grabbing a fellow EOD brother in a side bear hug, their faces close, Matt reaching his left hand across to secure his bro’s right nipple for a playful twist. In the background are rows of aircraft seats and overheads bins; the photo was taken on the rotator from Baltimore, Matt’s last flight to his last deployment. There is a sense of anticipation, a tender deviousness, a joy, a love. But no such context for this solemn memorial, and no titty grabs in church.

  While her friends waited, Jenny and her three daughters walked up the aisle to the open casket alone, to spend a last family moment together. The girls carried the prayer shawls given to them at the Fisher House. In a cluster of oddly linked arms and hand-holding, they approached the box and stood and held one another and looked.

  His makeup was on and the bruise was covered and the glasses were there, but she still didn’t recognize him, not really, lying there in the coffin. But she didn’t know the man who had left, either. Not the one that had left the last time.

  One night, in the summer before his final deployment, after the girls had gone to bed and the house had grown quiet, Jenny and Matt stayed up alone, watching television. It was a typical show common on America’s commercial networks, involving police and terrorism and homeland security. In that particular episode, a woman was forced to drive a car with an IED in the back. She was forced to be a suicide bomber. Matt got agitated, restless, and then loud, far too loud for a quiet house with three sleeping girls.

  “This is bullshit!” he yelled. “That never would happen.”

  “Honey, be quiet, please,” she urged, trying to soothe. “What would never happen?”