by Naomi Niles
“Listen up,” said Chuck. “I don’t want any of you breathing a word about what you saw last night. There are people here with us presently who have the potential to misconstrue anything you say. Whatever you do, don’t give them that chance. Is that understood?”
Everyone nodded except Bernie, who raised his hand and said, “But what if she asks us about it?”
“Then you know nothing ,” Chuck replied, with emphasis on the last word. “You got that? Nothing, Jon Snow.”
It made for one hell of an awkward lunch. The first thing she did after she sat down was to introduce herself—“My name is Kelli Pope, and I’m a reporter for the New York Bugle ”—and to tell us she had a few questions about last night.
We all sat there looking stone-faced and solemn. None of us wanted to be the one to reveal what had happened during her absence, or to risk the wrath of Curtis and Sergeant Armstrong. Luckily, we were saved from having to answer any questions by the canny intervention of Bernie.
“Wait,” he said slowly, lifting his head from his chin. “Isn’t your website the one that broke that story last year about the problem of revenge porn in the U. S. Armed Forces?”
Several of the boys, who had been in danger of dozing off just a moment before, snapped to attention. Carson visibly bristled; he hated whistle-blowers, and in the wake of the Bugle’s investigation he had spewed some unprintable words directed at the two Marine commandants who had helped break the story.
“The Bugle was instrumental in that investigation,” said Kelli with remarkable poise, pulling a long strand of blonde hair out of her face. “But it wouldn’t have been possible without the cooperation of men and women at the highest levels of the Armed Forces.”
“I understand that over thirty servicemen got court-martialed as a result of that hit piece,” said Bernie, a dangerous edge in his voice. Chuck shot him a warning look and mouthed a few words that Kelli couldn’t hear.
“Our team wasn’t responsible for any punitive actions the SEALS may have experienced as a result of the investigation,” said Kelli, repeating an answer I was sure she had given before. She tugged at the collar of her shirt, looking sweaty and uncomfortable. She had sat down expecting to interview us, and now she was the one under scrutiny.
“That’s B. S.,” said Bernie, beginning to rise out of his seat. Kelli flinched and shielded her face with her hands as though preparing for an attack. I got the sense that she had been expecting one almost from the moment she sat down.
Carson and Chuck, however, grabbed Bernie by the shoulders and lowered him down into his chair. “Don’t move from that spot until lunch is over,” said Chuck in a voice not to be trifled with.
“I would also like to suggest that you keep your mouth shut,” said Jake.
“I just don’t get why we’re all being so deferential to this woman,” Bernie moaned. “She’s no friend of ours.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Kelli, interrupting—which I thought was brave under the circumstances. “Are you saying you actually think it was wrong of the media to report on the massive revenge porn scandal?”
“I don’t have a problem saying it,” said Bernie. “You absolutely destroyed the reputation of the Armed Forces. The House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning us, for crying out loud.”
“As I understand, the resolution only served to make the sharing of revenge porn within the armed services a crime,” said Kelli, her voice rising. “We were protecting the Armed Forces by protecting the women who serve here.”
“I don’t fuckin’ care!” Bernie shouted, overturning his tray and sending rice and yogurt flying across the table.
“Okay, you’re done,” said Chuck. Getting up and throwing one arm around him, he pulled him out of his seat. “You’re done.” Carson and Jake stood up and grabbed his other shoulder.
“Really sorry about this, ma’am,” Chuck said to Kelli as they led him away. “If anyone’s besmirching the good name of the SEALS right now—” He let the thought hang there as his voice trailed off.
Kelli sat there for a moment in silence, too visibly shaken to finish her meal. I reached for something reassuring to tell her, but words seemed to have failed me. In the distance, we could hear the scuffle of boots on concrete as Bernie latched onto a post and had to be dragged to his room.
“I swear to God, the kid is like five years old sometimes,” said Jake, shaking his head in disgust as he finished his pudding.
“Thank God he’s the only one like that,” I said, with one eye on Kelli.
As lunch was ending, Sergeant Armstrong summoned me and Kelli into his office. I followed along behind them, wondering why he wanted me and already regretting that I hadn’t eaten more.
“First of all,” said the sergeant as he shut the door behind us, “I wanted to apologize to you for the way one of our men behaved today. I hope you know his words are not representative of this platoon or the SEALS generally and that we hold you in the highest respect.”
“Thank you,” said Kelli, though her brow was still creased with worry.
“Second,” said the sergeant, “you were supposed to go on a tour of the base yesterday before we got interrupted. Zack, I want you to take her around and show her everything—the pools, the break room, the tower… hell, take a whole hour if you need it. I’m giving you the rest of the afternoon off. Y’all go have fun.”
Sergeant Armstrong tossed me the keys to the golf cart and flung open the door so we could leave. Kelli smiled weakly at me as I motioned for her to go ahead of me. My face was a perfect mask concealing my secret glee at the thought of an afternoon without training—an afternoon spent with her.
Chapter Eight Kelli
For a moment just after Bernie’s tantrum in the mess hall, I had been sorely tempted to call Evan and tell him I wanted to come home a couple weeks early. His outburst was everything I had been afraid of when I signed up for this trip: an overly emotional male, weighing at least twice as much as me, hopped up on rage and testosterone and only restrained by the decency and strength of his fellow SEALs.
I kept going back to a line in one of the interviews the Bugle had done with the female service members whose naked pictures had been posted online without their permission. She said, “Ever since I joined the Armed Forces, I fear for my safety: not because I’m afraid of the enemy, but because I’m afraid of my own male colleagues.”
After what I had just witnessed, I couldn’t say I blamed her.
Still, I felt grateful for the intervention of Chuck and Jake and Carson and the other guys. Slowly I was beginning to trust that I could do my job without having to worry that they would attack me, or hit on me, or worse. It was with a sense of relief that I followed Zack through the back door of the compound to a shady pavilion where a golf cart sat waiting for us.
We climbed in together and sat there in silence waiting for the cart to start up. After a minute had passed and he still showed no inclination to speak, I risked a glance over at him; the expression on his face was inscrutable.
“Look,” he said finally. “I’m really sorry about what happened in there. I don’t want to harp on it, but that’s not how we’re trained to behave, and to be honest, Bernie’s always been kind of an odd duck. Chuck and the other boys will make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t especially feel like talking about it. Every time it was brought up, I wanted to retreat into myself like a tortoise and not come out again.
He stepped on the gas and the cart moved forward. For a few minutes, we drove along together in silence around the perimeter of the encampment. I could sense his reluctance to speak, and at first I thought maybe he was afraid of scaring me away, like a rabbit that was too easily startled. But then I remembered the strange and unsettling silence that had fallen over the table when I first sat down for lunch in the mess hall.
“I hope you know you can trust me,” I said over the roar of the engine.
Zack never took his
eyes off the road in front of us even for a moment. “What makes you say that?” he replied.
“I know that most of the guys are scared of me because they think I’m writing some sort of hit piece on the military. I don’t hate you guys, and I don’t have any particular bias. I just want to tell the truth.”
Zack didn’t respond, but he sank back into his seat with a more relaxed air. We were approaching the base of the water tower, at the bottom of which stood a brown clump of shrubbery surrounded by wild hogs. After warning me not to be frightened, Zack pulled a pistol out of his side pocket and fired the gun once into the air. The hogs scattered in all directions.
“You get all kinds of weird creatures out here,” said Zac, returning his pistol to his vest. “One morning, I was up in the tower by myself when an eight-foot, two-thousand-pound gorilla came wandering out of the jungle. Looked straight at me, and we locked eyes for a couple seconds. Then, just as quick as it came, it turned around and wandered back into the jungle. Never saw it again.”
“Were you scared?” I asked.
“I mean, you learn to be prepared for anything,” he said, shifting his shoulders tensely. I couldn’t help noticing he hadn’t quite answered the question. “Gorillas, though, they’re not the ones you have to worry about. It’s the bugs and the snakes. I prefer the snakes because they eat the bugs. But I try to avoid both when I can.”
“I’ve got one living with me at the mo’,” I replied. “It’s big enough that I think we ought to split the bill, but I’m terrified to bring up the subject. I’m not sure what it would do.”
“Hmmm, best not to take any chances,” said Zack.
He took a pair of gloves out of his backpack and handed a second pair to me. Placing one hand on the steel rungs of the ladder, he motioned for me to follow him. “Anyway,” he said as we climbed, “you still haven’t told me anything about yourself. Who are you? Where are you from? How did you come to be a reporter?”
Briefly I told him about my youth—how I had been raised on a naval base in Somalia; how we moved to Cincinnati when I was twelve, though I omitted the circumstances that had led us there; and how I had majored in journalism and communications at a private liberal arts college in New Hampshire.
“Dartmouth?” he asked.
I shook my head. “You’d never have heard of it.”
Zack glared down at me in annoyance. “You don’t know that,” he said. “Maybe I had a cousin who went there. Hell, I could’ve gone there!”
“Did you go to college in New Hampshire?”
“No,” he said. “But I could have!”
“Well, maybe someday when we’re better friends, I’ll tell you all about it.”
“What, are you expecting to stay here for the next year?” Zack replied. “We ain’t got the whole rest of our lives, sweetheart.”
“It’s not important right now!” I said, waving one hand in the air with a mixture of amusement and irritation. “I should never have brought it up. And anyway, I thought I was supposed to be the one asking the questions!”
“I mean, if that’s how you wanna do it,” said Zack with a shrug. “When I’m having to field a bunch of questions, I Just feel better if I know a little something about the other person. Makes me feel like they genuinely care about me.”
“If it makes you feel better, I’ll tell you I love you, Zack,” I said dryly.
“Thank you. It’s all I ask,” Zack replied.
Finally, we reached the top of the ladder. From the deck of the observation station, I could see the jungle for miles around: the scorched treetops slowly being cleared away to make room for industry; the Congo River snaking sinuously along to the east; in the distance, a collection of hovels outside of which a couple of scrawny children stood watching a tank roll past. One of them appeared to be doing the dance moves to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.”
“I don’t guess there’s any chance you’re going to tell me what happened last night,” I said after we had stood there for some time in silence.
“If I was going to, I would have done it already,” said Zack. There was enough of an edge to his voice that I knew better than to keep pushing the issue. I studied his face with a growing sense of frustration. What was the point of traveling halfway around the world if I was going to be barred from finding out the very things I had come to find out?
It was tempting to take my own fact-finding mission into the jungle. But I knew it could never happen, first because of the risk of being killed, and second because Sergeant Armstrong would never allow it. From the moment I stepped foot on base in the morning, my every step was carefully monitored. They’d have noticed if I went missing for more than a few minutes.
I would have to discuss this with Evan during our next Skype call. Until then, there was no chance of learning what they were determined to keep hidden.
“What about you?” I asked, sensing that the conversation was going nowhere. “You must have a family somewhere.”
“I do,” said Zac, looking relieved at the change of subject. “Down in East Texas.”
“How many brothers?”
“Four, last time I counted,” he replied. I raised one brow at him. “One of ‘em we don’t talk about much.”
“Fair enough. What made you decide to enlist in the Navy?”
Zack stared out over the guardrails, scratching the back of his head. “I don’t know if I could point to a particular reason. I just always really cared about my family and country and wanted them to be safe. I was never great at the guitar like my brother Braxton, or especially good at farming like my dad. But I was strong and motivated, and I knew how to swim, and one day in my last year of high school it just hit me, what I wanted to do. It was like I was being called, almost. Would you believe a man could be called into the military?”
“If you say it happened to you,” I said, smiling, “then I’ll believe it.”
“Anywho, so that’s what happened.” He turned to face me. “And I’ve been here for a couple years now, and in another year, my deployment will be up and I’ll be headed home. And I don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”
At first I hadn’t been able to shake the suspicion that he was just feeding me canned answers because of his distrust of all journalists. But as he had gone on talking, a sincerity had crept into his face and his voice. By the end, I felt my heart being strangely moved. “Have you thought about becoming a recruiter?” I asked him. “You could go to schools and talk about your experience. I bet it would be really powerful.”
“Yeah, I might do that,” he said, but without much conviction. “You wanna start heading back?”
“Sure.” As we began descending the ladder, I told him, “I don’t guess there’s any place we could go to get dinner around here, but I would like to talk to you more, when you’re ready.”
He stared down at me for a moment as though attempting to measure my honesty. Whatever he saw in my face, it must have reassured him, for he nodded coolly and said, “Yeah. I’d like that, too.”
Chapter Nine Zack
Over the next week, I didn’t get to see Kelli much one on one. She was still there every day at the break of dawn standing over by the helipad as we did our morning exercises. But opportunities for private chats were few and far between. It was disappointing, especially after we had spent a whole afternoon together wandering around base.
I could tell being around me and the other guys made her nervous, but I had hoped that spending some time with her might give me an edge over them. She would realize she could come and talk to me about any questions she might have, like a rabbit being lured into a cage with promises of leaves and carrots, but it didn’t pan out that way. She spent more of her time visiting with Chuck and Sergeant Armstrong. Sometimes the three of them sat together at lunch, sharing fries and laughing while the rest of us looked on with resentment.
The one positive thing was that Bernie was being less of an ass. Not that he had much of a cho
ice. On the day of his outburst, Armstrong called him into his office and gave him a stern talking-to. Armstrong seemed like a gentle guy at the best of times but it was wise not to get on his bad side. I didn’t know he was capable of yelling that much.
Carson, who was in the dining room when it happened, heard everything.
“I’m giving you a choice here,” Armstrong said to Bernie. “Either you receive a letter of reprimand, which would basically be the end of your naval career. Or you can do jingle-jangles until I get tired.”
Well, what choice did he have? Bernie chose jingle-jangles, and he was still doing them that night when the rest of us went to bed.
“It’s nice to see that son of a bitch brought down a peg,” Carson told me as we washed up, and I was in no mood to disagree.
I went to bed late on Thursday night and had only just managed to fall asleep when all the lights in the room flickered on. I groaned in despair and rolled over, hoping to shield my eyes from the harsh light.
“Chuck, what the hell are you doing?” demanded Carson, rubbing his eyes wearily as he sat up in bed. “PT’s not for another three hours.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Chuck, walking over to Jake’s bed and shaking him roughly by the shoulders. “Y’all need to get up. Get dressed. You’ve got three minutes to get your gear and be out that door.”
“Will you just tell us what in hell’s going on?” Carson said again.
“Report just came over the wireless,” Chuck replied. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a hostage situation in Bafwasende. A group of militants just raided a girls’ boarding school, murdering several teachers in cold blood and kidnapping most of the 200 girls who lived there.”
“Great, and what do you want us to do about it?” asked Bernie.
Chuck threw him a cold glare. “Currently they are fleeing into the jungle, armed with high-powered weapons. If we wait until morning, they will scatter like roaches into their holes, and we will never find them. Our best hope of rescuing the girls is by going after them now while they’re fleeing on foot through the rainforest.”