Eleven Days (11 page)

This was typical:

Those runs through the woods had bonded them. They were something that a boy would have done with a father. And she had always ended them in exhaustion, whereas Jason always ended them exhilarated.

Her phone rings. She picks it up.

“Yes?”

“Sara, we have him.”

“What?”

“Sara, they have Jason. He is alive. You need to get on a train to Washington. Pack enough for one night or two, and bring your things, and I will take care of the rest. I will pick you up at Union Station, and we will fly the rest of the way together. Okay? You need to get on a flight or train as soon as possible. Can you do that? Is there someone there to help you? Is there someone there to drive you?”

“Is he all right?”

“I don’t know any details. But he is alive. You have to come now. I am not sure how long they can keep this quiet, and I want to get you out before this leaks.”

“I’m coming.”

She turns and runs back to the house. She has no idea where she will be going from Washington, whether it will be someplace hot or cold, whether she will need a rain slicker or hiking boots or an arctic parka.

She enters the house and closes the door carefully behind her.

Sam calls out from the kitchen. “Is everything all right?”

“They’ve found him. Washington. I—”

And this young United States Special Operations Forces warrior, highly trained alongside her son to practice wise restraint in the presence of threat; to place sophisticated miniature explosive devices secretly on the hulls of enemy ships; to drop into oceans from fast-moving stealth helicopters; and to possess casual expertise in a larger weapons cache than she knows to exist (also trained not to question orders, and to believe in his country)—this young man comes out of her kitchen, wearing an apron, with tears in his eyes. The moisture obscures the outline of the Trident.

“I will take you to the train,” he says.

“Please,” she says, before heading up the stairs. “Please go tell the police to clear the driveway. Tell them—tell them we are going for some air. Tell them we are going to the market.”

In the small bag she elects to take, there isn’t much room for more than a few things, but before closing the top, she takes the letters she was reading and folds them into the side pocket. Something for the plane, she thinks. She knows she won’t be able to read much more than that. She checks her office. She checks the landing. She checks her son’s room for anything that he might like to have.
Stop wasting time
, she scolds herself. And she hurries downstairs.

“I’m ready,” she says.

He has put on a new shirt and a jacket, and he is ready, too.

The police, miraculously, have already all but cleared the end of the driveway, and the crush she expected to occur there is not what happens at all. For once, for the first time since she watched them as they started to gather there, the day after she had first learned the news, the reporters have put down their microphones and video cameras. They are all standing absolutely still, as her old, beaten-up blue Audi pulls past them. She wonders what the cops told them to get them to heel. Maybe they told them she had an armed escort. Maybe they told them to shut the fuck up. Maybe they told them that she was fragile, and that the sound of clicking cameras might break her in two.
It doesn’t matter. My son is coming home
.

NAVAL SPECIAL WARFARE TRAINING SITE,
FEBRUARY 2008

Jason and several of his teammates are gathered outside the entrance to the small house, the one they are using to practice room clearance. This is not their first time, or their tenth. They have done this so many times, they could build this house from sand, in their sleep. They know it well, and their bodies have, to some extent, internalized the kinesthetics of the drill. When you train, you walk a house first, no guns, in daylight. Then you walk with guns, unloaded. Then you walk with guns, loaded. Then you run with guns, loaded. Then you run at night—etc. Each step adds an increment of complexity. And this is before you start incorporating accidents and contingencies.

They look like warriors now: they are wearing their full kit—the pants, the vests, the helmets, the boots. Many have beards. And they all have their rifles. The only nod to trend is the Oakleys, ballistic eyewear almost all of the guys who don’t opt for goggles use, and which they like for this practice in particular; the lenses are tight, and they have an effect like laying slats of magnifying glass over already perfect eyes. Skiers love them, too. They pop the contours of objects, and in the kill house to be able to see any additional dust or hidden corner exposed is helpful.

The guys all have tiny mikes inside their helmets. They can talk to each other by MBTIR, the intra-team radio, too. Peltor headsets with boom mikes linked to earpieces: these things facilitate coordination, but on an op they’ll mainly talk with their hands. This not being a combat zone, new tools also occasionally facilitate antics. Especially today, because this newly formed platoon will think they know well how the next minutes will play out, and also because it happens to be a very cold, rainy day, and they’re all keen for distraction. The first time Jason saw the little mikes, he’d made a crack about their being better than what Eminem takes on tour. So that started a running Eminem joke, one that played hard on the fact that Jason was in so many ways wholly un-Eminem-like. The jokes eventually led to playing more Eminem around the base.
The Eminem Show
, the artist’s fourth album, was the uncontested favorite. It had been released nine months after 9/11.

Jason isn’t sure if the guys actually like the music or if they simply enjoy the irony of the predictability of liking it. They are all smart enough to know this. They don’t care. They just like the songs. And the more he listens, the more lyrics he remembers and respects. “ ‘Where’s my snare? I have no snare in my headphones,’ ” says Jason softly into his mike. They are all standing and waiting. Jason will be the one to kick open the door. “ ‘A-chick, a-chick, a-chick, a-chick,’ ” he sings softly. As he moves through the door, he’s thinking of the first lines of one song in particular; they go like this:

When he sings it, he changes
rhymes
to
crimes
. He thinks that this makes the lines more applicable to the young guys’ situation. They don’t think of themselves as criminals, of course; they’re not criminals. But even at this stage of their development, the guys are aware that many people think of them like that, that many people don’t believe that these wars are the right thing or that the warriors’ roles in them are justified. Most people wouldn’t know a Team guy from a Ranger or which side we fought on in Vietnam. Most people might concede the merits of World War I or Korea but be unable to identify the details. And most people, in the abstract, prefer butter to guns, but most mostly prefer not to think about it all. Has it always been that way? Does a public’s opinion rise and fall like a stock on the occasion of new information and new numbers—of dead, of days fighting, of the change in the price of gas? More likely it fluctuates with something more banal and abstract: the length of their attention span. But the kids who are fighting are not tracking MSNBC polls. They are aware that what they do and the
choice
to do it will never make sense to most people.

*

Room clearance is stressful because there is a lot happening in a very small space, at high speed. Navigating a room is an elegant contrast to being underwater. Underwater, in a wide and completely silent environment, there is the illusion of calm. The stress of those old diving drills seems quaint now, as the men work through their final months of predeployment training. After qualification training, the platoon forms up at a Team (even-numbered Teams on the East Coast, at Virginia Beach; odd-numbered Teams
on the West Coast, at Coronado). For the next eighteen months, the new guys will work with “old” guys, learning—and, critically, developing the platoon’s standard operating procedures. They are prepared to follow, and most will be ready to lead when given that opportunity. Yet despite over a full year of work, they have not spent one night in a fight.

Keep your teammates close, and your weapon even closer
. An operator holds his gun with extreme care and doesn’t drop his sights. It sounds simple, but try holding a seven-pound piece of complex machinery straight, at shoulder height, while leaning low over it to maintain your aim. Having to hold the gun like that, ironically, limits your field of vision, but the trade-off is possessing the readiness to fire. When Jason mentioned the words
room clearing
once to his mother on the phone, she heard
room cleaning
. Forever after that she was constantly teasing him about the Defense Department’s budgetary allocations for soaps and brooms. Jason told the guys, and they loved it. “Clean-up time!” someone would yell invariably as they headed out to the house. Jokes help cut tension. Room clearing is serious business, and close quarters fighting is a case study in team interplay. You can watch six different sets of guys clear the same room, and the subtle differences belie the leaders—and the flaws.

*

And this moment in their training is serious, too. It is not all physical drills and fully loaded extractions. The men feel a certain pride in having come this far, at having achieved a reasonable level of expertise with things they had never heard of before, and in subjects many of them had never studied, from physics to ballistics to triage to weather. It’s school. The classroom time
prepares them in the most essential way for the trickiest physical tasks, like leading a sixteen-man team through a warren of rooms in a cave, or dropping a twenty-four-man team from a moving helo into a fortified compound. Getting in is only prelude: then you have to identify the bad guys (“threats”), isolate the other guys (“unknowns”), and emerge unharmed. Anyone unarmed is “unknown,” even a female hostage or a child. A hostage might be suffering from Stockholm syndrome, and a six-year-old can press a button. The opposite of being underwater, clearing a room—or a house, or a building—is also the opposite of dropping a precision bomb from a plane onto a place you’ve never been, to hit a target whose hand you’ve never shaken. Violence at a distance is an entirely different art and requires different skills.

“ ‘His gift is his curse,’ ” says/sings Jason, again into the mike. There must be some technical glitch due to snow. They usually don’t have to wait like this, and it’s making them antsy. “Just be patient, guys,” one of the instructors says. “It’s the ice. One of our terrorists slipped on the ice.” They all laugh a little until someone shuts them up and says,
It’s time
.

Clearing a house means understanding what is in it. It also means removing anything from it, dead or alive, that is dangerous. You want to move as quickly as possible, but too much rush can have an adverse effect. Ten minutes can feel like an hour for the men involved; it is powerful, because you are not aware that your body and your mind are being tapped at their maximum capacity. It’s a little like runner’s high, plus weapons and threat of death. When done at night, even with the finest new NVGs, an operator’s visibility is compromised, adding another layer to the confusion.

This is what war looks like, and we’re in it
: this goes through some of the men’s minds in the last weeks before their first deployment,
especially for these men at this time in history, when the kind of fighting they are being trained to do is in unprecedented demand. Jason wonders whether and how that thrill will change once the drills become real. The point of drilling is to eliminate surprise or shock. But all drills can become tiresome. The guys are starting to want to make good on all the training they have done. They are anxious to know where they are going, and what the range of their missions will be.

As Jason moves into the last room in the house, he lets his mind wander—just for a second. He can’t help it, he was thinking about something else just before they started, and some echo of that thought just came into his mind when his eye caught something about the light through the window. It looked like a fold of bright fabric, like a dress, but that would mean a girl, and that would be impossible, so did that mean he was dreaming? When was the last time he saw a girl? When was the last time he thought about it? And in that half of a quarter of a second of stray,
click
: a pistol is cocked at his left ear.

“Put the gun down.” It is one of their guys pretending to be a hostile. He is wearing a black balaclava with a Steal Your Face embroidered on it. Jason cannot see who he is but he knows they know one another; the voice is familiar. “Whisky Tango Foxtrot, Eminem,” he says. “Here’s your ‘Fuck you for Christmas.’ ” He laughs. He puts his weapon down, and Jason does the same. The other guy turns to stretch, and when he does, Jason sees a patch he recognizes on the back of the guy’s jacket. The patch was made by an NSW platoon in Iraq, and only guys who have served there are merited to wear it. It’s a skull wearing a pirate’s hat, foregrounded by crossed swords. The skull’s eyes are red.
It’s a nice counterpart to the Steal Your Face
, Jason thinks. And then he
thinks that the Venn diagram of guys who have that particular patch as well as an appreciation of Bob Weir is quite small. It occurs to him that the other guy has much more experience than he does. Even the way he held on to and then lowered his gun, shifting it from hand to hand—that was something Jason has not seen yet. Finesse, ease, confidence: these were things Jason had not yet acquired. These were things that only came from time spent downrange.