Eleven Days (3 page)

*

Her increasing interest in all things military ran parallel to her son’s becoming an officer. With Jason at the Naval Academy, she got back to D.C.—and Virginia—regularly. She would meet friends for lunch. They were all amused to see how she had changed. She was only thirty-seven, so to many of them she was still a girl.

“You’ve traded Athens for Sparta,” teased her old boss from Langley, the only boss she’d ever had, the one who had got her to the conference where everything had started. Or ended, depending upon your point of view.

“Yes, I guess I have,” she said. She was proud of her son. She thought about that trade and thought she was fine with it. Sparta suddenly struck her as mission-driven, and relevant, Athens as lazy. But that wasn’t really what was changing in her. What was mission-driven and relevant was what had always been: her love for her boy. Had he decided to join the circus, she might have developed an obsession with elephants.

Elephants would have been easier. There was a new generation of soldiers and sailors born that September day. Sara had not lost a son on 9/11; she lost him later to something she could not provide at home.

*

Rather than slow down she decides to speed up her pace.
What if I could make it home in half the time it took me to make it out here?
she thinks.
What if I could increase my time by ten percent on each run? At what point will my body simply say, Stop
. She runs so fast that, coming to the two-lane she almost trips over a branch thrown down by the storm—one too skinny to see in the dusk but still thick enough to break your leg. The near-miss is exhilarating. She feels like she has been given another chance. She can see the garden up ahead. The tomato vines are bent with rain.

*

The call came late on May 2, the first day of what should have been the last ten days of Jason’s fifth tour. First, last, fourth, fifth: everything in military life involved numbers—or letters. This rigorous precision was not just for art; it was necessary for saving lives. Soon she got good at math, at placing events in time precisely, like a criminal witness. She had not known where he was; he had not been able to tell her throughout this deployment. She had given up reading newspapers, although old friends who knew Jason reached out regularly with a question or a view.
Yemen? Libya? It must be the Maghreb
. She simply wanted to know he was safe.

Since it is spring, people at the market talk about yesterday’s tennis or last week’s lacrosse games; they discuss plans for the upcoming antiques show or their newly cleaned infinity pools. People rarely mention the war because most of them care very little about it. Those who know her and know she has a son serving don’t ask either; they are not sure what to say. Sara hasn’t met any local veterans although she has heard that there is a retired Army Ranger around. When she thinks of her son, she still thinks
of her baby, lining up spoons. She hopes he has enough socks. “Socks” was the request she found most often in a book that was a collection of letters written home by soldiers during World War II. Jason had given it to her.

She’d spent so many years educating him, but now he educated her.
Phronesis
is a word she never knew before she read about it in a memoir written by a former Team guy, a memoir she never would have noticed or even known about at another time in her life.
Phronesis
is a quality. “The most interesting people are the people we don’t know,” said the father of another Academy boy at graduation. He had leaned over and whispered this to Sara as they sat there in the thick heat, watching their sons, all in white. She had only just met him and thought his comment was a compliment, perhaps a pass, but when she thought about it later she realized he was talking about all the kids that day, the kids who would leave and fight foreign wars for little pay and less power. And she thought:
The bravest people are the people we do not know
.

Phronesis
was a word that cropped up once, and then increasingly often, in the e-mails she would receive periodically from her son. She never knew where he was when he was writing them, but his heart and his character were the same as they had always been, despite what had gone on in the course of his days. He was not writing about politics or about war zones. Mostly he was writing about what was on his mind that day, and more and more he was preoccupied with the question of whether to come home. Or, how to come home. Any shrink would have loved that. A father and son, both living the better part of their lives in undisclosed locations.

Phronesis
, according to Aristotle, is wisdom learned from action that allows you to make choices about what to do in a given situation. It stands in opposition to
sophia
, or wisdom gained from
books.
Phronesis
was less for scholars than for soldiers. And what Sara learned over time was that each division of the military had its own, even if slight, variation on the larger code and culture of the overall enterprise. The Teams had very strict code. Part of it was from their training. Part of it is soldered in the fight. Her son had elected to join the military when there was a major fight on.

“We don’t lose our men, ma’am,” she was assured, when they—a chaplain, and a casualty assistance calls officer—arrived at the house that May morning, the morning following the phone call, to talk to her in person. On the phone she had only been asked if she would be at home. They had not told her anything more. On the phone, she had imagined a brigade. In person, there were two of them: an older man, maybe in his mid-fifties, in uniform, and a younger man who didn’t look much older than her son. He was an officer home on leave. He had heard the news of Jason being missing and had asked that he be the one allowed to come, to be there when she heard. He lived three thousand miles away from where he stood now and had been spending his short time at home with the girl he planned to marry, but he had taken a plane and then driven a car across the country to be there to tell Sara this news. He knew her son. He had trained with him at Coronado and at Otay Lakes, and he had lived with him briefly at Virginia Beach. His name was Sam. She had met him before, but she had forgotten him. He looked older. He was missing an eye. When she saw that, she remembered his story.

The two men asked her to sit down, and then she was told: her son had been missing for two days. They said that they had a general idea of where he was, but that they could not tell her any more than that. They told her that Jason had been part of a very important mission, one she might even read about in the papers, but they could not tell her what that was, either—or where it was.
Sara didn’t sense any drama from the word
mission
because it was what her son did every day—and every night. Missions were routine. That was the job. The older man told Sara her son would come home.
Dead or alive; is that implied?
she thought at the time.

As she listened to them talk, her mind drifted back to that night at the same kitchen table they were sitting around now. “Not Harvard” had been about belief; after that, there had been no turning back. She had been so proud throughout those next years, through all the Academy games and then, later, the early, tense selections for “Mini BUD/S,” followed by her son’s increasingly odds-defying failures to fail. She resolved to remain proud now. And strong. She was not ready for this. She could feel herself starting to faint. It’s okay, she thought; one of these guys will catch me. I know how the protocol works.

Later that same day there was another knock on the door. And then another one. First, it was the local Catholic priest. He wanted to pray with her. Then it was the retired Ranger. He looked like he could really break some glass, and she took his number. He said he would come back every day and that she didn’t have to worry. Then a man in a beautiful suit. He was a former Middle East–based CIA station chief who had traveled from his retirement in northern Maine and who insisted he would stay as long as she needed, down the road, at the little inn. This was all through word of mouth, as far as she could tell. Neighbors flooded her porch with offerings: sweets and alcohol and honey-baked ham. Someone sent a cook to help organize the kitchen and make dinners. A new refrigerator was installed, a gift from a local store. One of the state’s senators arrived and promised to protect her from the press. She thought that was pretty funny. He said the governor would like to come and what time would be convenient for her? She had not even brushed her hair.

Like most people living through such a moment, she did not hear most of what was said or remember who had said it. She knew that things like sleeping and eating were necessary but remembered to do them only when prodded. People fell into various active roles and informally but carefully kept watch over her and the scope creep of her chaos.
Come on in. Yes, please. What beautiful peonies
. She suddenly did not want to be alone.

She was happy to have Sam in her son’s room. His left eye was the most sensational blue. Ocean blue. And in the place of his right eye was a glass orb, with the NSW Trident inked onto it. She wanted to look at it closely but knew asking that would sound strange. She knew what the Trident was. Like most Team moms and wives, she had read what she could find of the existing literature and history. And she had heard about the glass-eye Tridents, but she had never seen one up close. It was the contrast with the boy’s other eye that made it uniquely upsetting. And yet it was beautiful.

The Trident is made up of four elements: an anchor, a trident, a pistol, and an eagle. When her son had asked her for her interpretation of it, she’d said, “Well, the trident’s for Neptune.” She paused and said, “And the pistol’s for strength?” Jason gave her a little essay on the Trident’s meaning (the kind of thing she loved), which she had saved in a drawer somewhere. The part she always remembered was the part about the eagle. Something along the lines of “the eagle keeps his head down, because humility is the true sign of a warrior.” When the guys are awarded their Tridents, at the end of their qualification training, their diplomas carry not only their own names but also the names of men killed in action. This tradition was not subtle, but it was powerful.

*

When Jason was seven, Sara left him overnight for only the second time. An old friend was marrying another old friend, in Washington. In her toast, the young bride mentioned Naval Special Warfare training. She had seen a documentary about the base in Coronado that her husband had ordered from the Military Channel. Watching what those young men did, she said, made her think that perhaps they were preparing for the real fight of their lives: marriage. Everyone laughed. The groom worked on the Hill, and the only way he was likely to get close to the barrel of a gun was a weekend skeet shoot. He had an idea of his work as deeply civic and virtuous, and he liked to spend late nights watching reenactments of Civil War battles. He always told his wife and friends that he wished he’d gone into the military, but that given the chance at Stanford, well, there had not been any contest. He would marry this girl, they would raise a family, and he would make his mark in some more socially and politically less flammable way. He would write laws and work hard to try and pass them.

The bride was beautiful. Sara envied her dress. Sara envied the whole experience and ritual, one she knew now for certain she would never have. As the bride’s toast went on, the room quieted down. She soon unintentionally stunned the clinking glasses to silence. She was describing an exercise—what they called an “evolution”—known as drown-proofing. In drown-proofing (the bride read this from a printed page), a boy’s hands and feet are tied. He is also blindfolded. Like this, he jumps into a pool. He has to bob, and he has to swim fifty meters under water, without emerging for air. This is meant as much to test the will as it is to test physical stamina. And it is meant to test fear, because the fear that results from anticipation of failure is enough to keep a boy from ever reaching the edge of the pool. The bride had been trying to say something about commitment, and about romance, but
all anyone could talk about the entire rest of the night was those boys, bobbing in the water, blindfolded.

Driving north the next morning, Sara remembered thinking about the toast. How noble to enter into something so you can save the lives of others; no one she knew did that. What was she doing that was remotely noble? She’d woken feeling guilty about the sandy-haired seven-year-old at home with a sitter. When she got back, it was dark. She sat on the end of his bed for a long time while he slept. She looked at him and she thought,
You are the product of a very poor decision, but you are the most important thing in my life
. She thought,
I could easily swim fifty meters underwater for you
.

*

She checks her watch. She has been gone for nearly two hours. The last stop at the garden must have been longer than she realized. It is time to go home. It is almost all uphill through the neighbor’s yard, and it looks different now. It is wet and dark. Does anyone even live there anymore? When was the last time she had seen those neighbors? Were they the ones who brought the blueberry pies? She can’t remember. The ground evens out. She can see her favorite tree now in her own yard, a tree that once held a swing and that later served as poor protective cover for a target board. This is the lawn where she learned to shoot the little guns. As she reaches the top of the driveway, she can see a new car out front. It is not a police car, but it has government plates. There are two men standing by it. One of them is in uniform. They have come to bring her news.

CORONADO, CALIFORNIA,
NOVEMBER 2006

Jason jumps in feet first. As his heels hit the water, he fills his lungs with air one last time. He knows this test well. He read about it before he practiced for it, and he has practiced for it many times before now performing it in front of his peers. Not all the men will pass this test. He knows that the most important thing is to stay calm and not to panic. Panic is the assurance of failure.