“You must understand,” Fatima told her after one particularly frustrating encounter, “these women have lived through Saddam and embargo and invasion and now the people who were their neighbors a few years ago are their enemies and why should they believe you when you promise books and paper and glass on the windows? Promises are cheap to these people. Promises are the back side of lies to them.”
At the end of the day Frankie went to her rack worn out not from work but from the challenge of believing in the new school enough for all of them. In her mind she began referring to the project as Sad Sack School and then just Sad Sack.
They always left Redline for Sad Sack before dawn, a convoy of three or four vehicles. Generally Frankie and Fatima rode in a Humvee second in line, their driver a soldier, often a female. The first trip Frankie had been so scared that she couldn’t breathe normally; and she never became blasé about the trips outside the wire, but she learned to compartmentalize her fear and to identify it as a good thing when it was a motivation and kept her vigilant. They never traveled the same route twice in a row. Insurgents were always on the lookout for patterns of behavior they could exploit. Sometimes they moved at a crawl along the littered streets. Occasionally soldiers walked ahead of the first truck watching for trip wires and booby traps.
Over the months Frankie came to understand the Iraqi women who operated the school. But their fatalism could be contagious if she let it be, especially since progress on rebuilding moved glacially. The men required to clear the ruins were unavailable. Soldiers were needed elsewhere. It was too hot to lug rubble and the labor was considered beneath the dignity of most of the Iraqi men and so it had to be done by boys from Arkansas, Montana, New York. Some in the community were completely against building another school, and they blocked the way however they could. From the beginning all the men, Iraqi and American, resented being told anything by Frankie.
Along the way she lost her sense of humor and then found it again.
Eventually the rubble was cleared away and a new building began to take shape, constructed of locally fired bricks. Halfway through the kiln broke down and there was no one who knew how to fix it, so bricks had to be trucked in from somewhere else and half the time the loads never made it to Sad Sack or they were the wrong size or they were badly made and crumbled under pressure.
In her rack, in her can, standing in a cold shower with sand between her toes, Frankie despaired. Her CO told her to take it easy. He said she was too involved. “Ease up, Tennyson, you’ll give yourself a hernia.”
Eventually the school had a cement floor, walls, and half of a new roof, and she began to believe in the window glass and screens she had promised the women on the first day. Then came a Tuesday. She was in a room in all that remained of the original school, a ten-foot-square office of some kind, when a soldier outside smoking a cigarette was hit by sniper fire. After that Frankie was told it was too dangerous for her at Sad Sack. She was stuck pushing paper while soldiers and a handful of Marines went house to house, rousting the inhabitants and going through their possessions. Several weeks passed before Frankie could return to Sad Sack and then it was with a special contingent of soldiers who, like guardian angels, quickly spread out around the community, taking up surveillance positions on rooftops surrounding the school, their weapons at the ready. Frankie felt a surge of something like love for these men who were willing to risk their lives for her and for the school.
But after the sniper attack the atmosphere in the community was even less cooperative than before. The women and the few men she had counted on to keep the project going were reluctant to speak to her now. Or they were absent altogether. While Frankie was gone the school had been cannibalized for repairs to homes in the neighborhood. A section of wall was gone and a third of the roof tiles.
They were returning to Redline in a convoy of three—a truck, a Humvee, and a third truck. Over the last week there had been an uptick in insurgent activity and the day before there had been a mortar attack and a suicide bombing along two of the possible routes to the base. They were headed home through a busy neighborhood, a way no one wanted to go because it was always thronged and they were vulnerable from dozens of compass points but the obvious risks and inconveniences made it an unlikely choice and possibly safer for that reason. Frankie was in the front seat riding shotgun, Fatima behind her. A half-dozen soldiers rode in the first truck and more in the rear. The Humvee driver was Shawna Montoya.
The street they were traveling had been hit by IEDs several months back. The many destroyed buildings were proof of that and occasionally opened up wide sight lines from where Frankie sat. Suddenly the street did a dogleg and she heard Montoya mutter to herself. Holy shit and what the fuck, we’ve got us a problemo aquí.
The street was barely wider than an alley. The rear truck was out of sight, around the corner. The Humvee straddled the dogleg.
Fuck and frijoles.
The lead truck stopped where the narrow street entered a busy square. The squawk of Montoya’s radio filled the Humvee.
Frankie was the only person with a clear view of what lay ahead. On her side of the street, a building lay in ruins, and she could see through to the square crowded with activity. Directly across it, partially obscured by the busy marketplace, was an ornate building that appeared to be some kind of government office.
Prayers were over and the men had gone from the mosques to cafés where they would drink coffee and smoke while women, veiled or wearing scarves, shopped at the stalls. Frankie couldn’t see what was for sale off the backs of dilapidated trucks, spread on rugs opened on the dust, or in tarp-covered stalls, but she had been in souks similar to this one. The vendors sold DVDs and Iraqi flags, bolts of cloth, kids’ clothes and cooking implements, and produce: onions and beans, figs, dates and oranges and tomatoes when they were available. In all such open-air marketplaces there were brightly colored spices sold from bins by the scoop. In the café the men were watching television, probably soccer. Frankie saw the flicker of the screen. Inside the gritty air would be dense with cigarette smoke.
This square in Baghdad was as far from San Diego as Frankie could imagine being. She had to keep reminding herself that the people she saw were essentially like her despite the obvious cultural differences. It was too easy to think of them as another species when she knew they loved their children, ate meals together, enjoyed sports, and gossiped just as Americans did. She thought about the school they were building and told herself not to stop believing in the mission.
Inside the Humvee the air was hot and rank and she felt sweat running down her side.
The convoy could not just charge ahead through the marketplace, expecting people and animals to move aside. The previous week a truck had run down a family’s goat and there’d been hell to pay. But parked where they were, Frankie felt like a duck wearing a “shoot me” sign in a fairground shooting gallery. She wondered why the US military didn’t travel in rattletraps like ordinary Iraqis. No one would notice them then.
A headache bloomed in the hollows of her eyes. The radio crackled and she heard the convoy officer in the forward truck tell them to hold where they were. Something was happening. Montoya kept on swearing to herself in Spanish and English.
“This is not good,” Fatima said.
Things happened quickly after that.
Three black Escalades sped into the square from the northeast corner, at Frankie’s ten o’clock position. Immediately the square began to clear. The men drinking and smoking outdoors left their coffee and cigarettes and fled into the café. The vendors slapped together their tables and chairs and awnings and disappeared with their cash boxes, leaving their goods unattended. Frankie saw a generic dog sniff at the table where something savory must have been displayed, but even it sensed trouble and skulked away with its tail between its legs. Frankie heard someone yell in Arabic, an answering yell, and then silence.
Heavy with armoring the Escalades careened into the square and wallowed to
a stop, forming a black line in front of the civic building.
From the radio Frankie heard the convoy officer tell them again to stay where they were. Nobody move.
Frankie reached behind her and grabbed a pair of powerful binoculars.
“What’s happening out there?” Montoya’s view was blocked by the truck ahead. “What can you see, Captain?”
“It’s G4S.”
Frankie could read the insignia on the car doors, a sword and saber beneath an olive branch. Some of the men formed a perimeter around the vehicles, others entered the building.
Frankie had met a few G4S contractors. She refocused her binoculars to get a better look at the men around the SUVs on the chance she might see a familiar face. One figure held her attention. He had silver-blond hair, worn rather long, and his skin was startlingly white. In Iraq the man’s pallor was freakish. She thought of him carefully applying sunscreen every hour to protect his skin from the sun and of the ribbing his crew must give him for this. She named him Whitey in her mind.
Montoya hit the steering wheel impatiently. “What the fuck is going on?”
They were all thinking about snipers and IEDs. To Frankie the tension was like an article of clothing, a bra many sizes too small.
Two Arab men in Western dress emerged from the civic building surrounded by G4S personnel. At the same moment, only a few yards from Frankie, a bearded man in a flowing white dishdasha darted out from the ruins on her right, a shopping bag swinging from his hand. Behind him came a woman, her face covered, gripping the hand of a child, a boy around Glory’s age. The woman tripped on a chunk of brick at the edge of the road a few steps ahead of the Humvee’s front right fender. She let go of the boy’s hand just before she hit the ground. The man, behind the Humvee now, ran on, and as he did he dropped the bag he was carrying, spilling onions and beans under the vehicle’s tires. The boy stopped and Frankie thought she could feel his indecision. Should he pick up the food, help the woman, or run ahead? Across the square someone yelled. Frankie lifted her binoculars, and in that second she saw Whitey take aim. She saw the flash from the muzzle of his M16.
Four feet from where she sat Frankie saw first the boy go down and then the woman hit, the bounce of her body as bullets ripped into her, the snap of her head as her chin hit the dirt. Blood geysered from her throat. The boy’s body was so light, the bullets lifted him off the ground and he seemed to flutter for an instant before he flipped onto his back. The shooting stopped. Frankie was vaguely aware of the Escalades speeding out of the square as she tried to open the door of the Humvee. She saw the boy blink, saw his hands grab at the air.
“He’s alive,” she screamed and struggled but Montoya held her back.
Alive. Alive.
“Look away.” From behind, Fatima tried to cover Frankie’s eyes. “You cannot help him. Look away.”
For Frankie to touch a Muslim boy, even to save his life, was taboo. Still she fought against Montoya’s strength and tore at Fatima’s hands until she had no more strength left and all she could do was rest her forehead against the dusty window and watch the boy blink. And blink and die.
As Frankie told the General her story, a line of crows had come to perch on the ridge of the house. She thought of them as jurors in a silent line.
“I went to the chaplain and he advised me to go to my CO. He told me it was awful what happened, the child and all, but he was sure the contractor had a good reason to fire. I told him they were coming from the market with beans and onions, but he said it didn’t matter and I should put it out of my mind.”
“Your CO was right. It could have been beans or onions or it could have been grenades.” The General took her hand and held it between his own. “Terrible things happen in war, Frankie. Things I never wanted you to see.”
“You say that, sir, and so did the CO, and Bunny. It’s what people always say. But it’s not an excuse. It doesn’t make it okay. I could have saved that boy.”
“It’s reality.” The General’s hold on her hand tightened. “I never wanted you to go—”
“But I did! And what I was doing, working with people, trying to build a school, I was good at that, and I was a good officer, my Marines respected me and they knew I had their backs.”
The General scuffed his shoe at a line of ants.
“I was, I am, a good Marine. But that day? I wasn’t a good human being.”
“And now you want to go in front of cameras and air that dirty laundry? Make a public confession and bring shame on the military?”
“This is about G4S, sir. My story? I don’t know if I’ll talk about that or not. Probably. Maybe. I will if I have to. I just don’t know yet. Right now, I’m talking about one man wearing a G4S uniform who shot down two people in cold blood. I’m not saying they’re all bad because I know they’re not. I honor the good ones, sir. But this guy was dirty. I saw him take aim at that boy and his mother.”
“He saw the bag in the man’s hand, Frankie.”
“So he shot the mother and child? After the man had dropped the bag of groceries? It went down fast, but I saw it all.” They had been no more than target practice for the blond-haired man. “They were killed for a paycheck, sir. Most of us, we believe in something more important than that.”
The General had no response.
“Bunny said that if I told you the truth, it would kill you. Well, I’ll be honest, holding it inside is killing me. I don’t want to lose my husband over this, sir. Or Glory.”
“Is it that bad?”
She knew only this for certain, that she could not go on as she had been. She would rather be dead than face the same memory and shame every morning for the next forty or fifty years. “You taught Harry and me to do the right thing even when it wasn’t easy. Well, this isn’t easy. I don’t want to testify but I’ve thought about it a lot and I know it’s the right thing to do. I’ve known it from the beginning. That’s why I went to the chaplain.”
“What about the interpreter. Or the driver. You weren’t the only person there.”
“But I’m the only one who saw it all.” She pulled her hands away from his and folded them in her lap. Her voice was thin and clear, trembling. “I have to do this, sir. With or without your blessing.”
She waited, not knowing what he would say.
The General stood up and she knew he was going to walk away as he had the other night when Glory announced she had PTSD, as he had done when she told him she was going to Iraq. He stared up at the crows staring down at him.
He said, “You’ll wear your uniform, of course. And you’ll stand tall and you’ll answer every question.” He turned, his back as straight and strong as it had ever been. “Senator Delaware’ll give you a hard time but you won’t dodge around and you won’t cry. He’ll eat you for lunch if you cry.”
“I won’t cry, sir.”
“You’ll tell it to the committee just the way you told me?”
“I will.”
“And you won’t forget who you are?”
“Never.”
“You’re my daughter and you’re a Byrne, never forget that.”
“I won’t, sir.”
“Then I’ll be proud of you.” His blue eyes filled with tears as he saluted her. “Semper fi, Francine. Semper fi.”
Discussion Questions
1. In the prologue of When She Came Home we are introduced to Frankie as a child, and we see the way her family interacts during a very important moment. What does this tell us about the Byrne family and how does it prepare us for the rest of the novel?
2. Frankie attributes her desire to enlist in the Marines to the attack on September 11. She says she imagined that her own child could have lost her life, and she wanted to help ensure that kind of violent tragedy would never happen again. Do you think this truly was her motivation, or was there another desire driving her? Could she have had more than one motivation?
3. General Byrne has clear feelings regarding the roles men and women should play
both in the military and at home. How do you feel about his position? When it comes to women serving in the armed forces, is there a double standard? Is there a difference for a child when her mother deploys rather than her father?
4. What do you think about Rick’s relationship with Melanie? Do you believe they were just friends? Is this friendship understandable and acceptable given the circumstances?
5. Rick suggests that the problems in their marriage are more Frankie’s fault than his, and she seems to agree with that assessment. Do you agree that Frankie is more at fault than Rick? If so, why? If not, is Rick more to blame, are they equally at fault, or is there another factor to consider?
6. Should Rick have done more to help Frankie readjust to life after Iraq? What more could he have done to help her? Is two months an acceptable amount of time for a person to adjust after coming home?
7. How do you feel about the way Frankie handles Glory’s troubles at school? Should she have gotten Rick involved sooner? Should she have punished Glory in some way? Do you think she gave her sound advice for how to deal with the problem? What might you have done differently if you were Glory’s parent? How common do you think bullying really is? Did you ever experience bullying in school?
When She Came Home Page 21