Unremarried Widow (15 page)

In the conference room we were suddenly at the crash. Time of impact: 12:31 a.m. The colonel showed a photo of the crash site taken from above so that we could see the path the helicopter cut through a lemon orchard. The gash was wide and brutal, the kind of damage caused by something hurtling very fast.

My stomach dropped as we fell over the edge.

On the night of November
6, 2006, the midnight sky stretched wide to the horizon, unraveling blackly toward Syria in the west and Iran in the east. A full moon shone overhead and illuminated the palm groves and the black waters of the Tigris, and the blades of the Apaches hummed as soldiers came out to gas up the birds. Warhorse was tight: two concrete landing pads with just enough space for two helicopters. Most dropped in, fueled up, and pulled out, never powering down their engines or shutting off their blades. The rotors from the two helicopters beat in tandem, so close they almost seemed to touch. Miles and John were in the trail aircraft of a two-helicopter team and John was the pilot in charge of the mission. He sat in the backseat of the Apache, behind and slightly above Miles in the front seat. A small round mirror sat to the left of Miles's shoulder so that the forward pilot could see the pilot in the rear, but the Apache's interior was too dark to see much. The only light came from the faint glow of the computer screens on the instrument panel. The helicopters had stopped to refuel after a night mission and would press on, first twenty-five miles west toward the forward operating base near Balad and then fifty miles north to their home base at Speicher outside Tikrit. John let Miles fly the helicopter into Warhorse with its tricky approach and cramped landing space, coaching him on how to pilot the bird in. It was not Miles's best parking job. The soldiers on the ground struggled to maneuver the fuel line over to the Apache.

“Let's see,” John had said to Miles over the aircraft intercom system. “He came up. I think they got it hooked up but now there's nobody to give the wave.”

“Give the signal,” Miles said.

“They're going, ‘Miles Henderson, huh?' ”

“He's causing trouble in FARPs everywhere.”

John laughed. “I think what we'll do is we'll continue to march. Visibility is ten miles here. We'll continue to march toward Balad and we'll take a look at how it is.”

“Okay,” Miles said.

“The only thing would be—” John stopped and chuckled. “It probably wouldn't happen, but if you call in and the weather was below visibility minimums, that would be bad.”

“That would be really bad,” Miles said. But he laughed too.

The ground crew connected the gas line to the helicopter and began fueling.

“We're getting gas now,” John said.

“See. It all worked out.”

“Yeah, it worked out. It took, like, three people twenty minutes of pulling and shoving.”

“You want everything easy.”

John radioed to the second aircraft. “Hey, One-Six, this is Zero-Eight.”

“This is One-Six, Zero-Eight,” the second helicopter radioed back. “Did they actually get you gas?”

“Yeah, Mr. Henderson really made it tough for them.”

“Awesome. What do you want to do? Do you want to try to push it, see if we can get home? Or do you want to hit the pad here?”

“Well, the message I have says visibility is less than five hundred feet from Balad north,” John said. “What I know is that they really, really stink at forecasting the weather. So what I'd just as soon do, if everybody is comfortable, is we know visibility here is, like, ten miles anyway coming
in here, let's head out toward Balad. We'll turn the corner and we'll head up. We'll listen for anybody that is out that way, and if the weather gets bad, we'll just head back to Balad and call it a day. What do you think?”

“I say we press to get home,” the pilot of the second helicopter said.

“Roger. And the reason I'm saying that is because the weather reporting is so bad here that, you know, it could be a lot better than they think it is.”

“I agree. The FLIR might be able to see through it, on top of that. It might blow out, and we've got nothing but good weather behind us. So, yeah, I'll go with that. I'll give you a call when we're REDCON one and we'll push out.”

“Roger. I'll do that,” John said.

Then he had said to Miles, “Okay. Power levers shift to fly.”

The colonel showed us the
scene of the crash up close: the torn and bent rotor blades, an engine flung off to the side, fragments of the aircraft strewn around a crater in the earth. I had been well-behaved until that moment. I watched the presentation with tears leaking from my eyes and I politely wiped at my dripping nose. I hardly spoke. Yet seeing the crash ripped a sob from me. Miles's mother moved to stand behind my chair and she pressed her small hands into my shoulders. With my own hands, I held tight to Teresa. We cried together in great heaving gasps. The colonel paused and in that moment I wanted him to cry too. I mentally dared him to show that he was hurting behind the ordered military procedures. I wanted to see from him some of the unruliness of grief that Teresa and I were spilling all over his sanitized conference room. But the colonel did not flinch.

When we had quieted, he started again. The next slide showed
where they had recovered the bodies and an
X
marked where each man was found. Miles's seat had come unhinged with the force of the impact and he and it were thrown from the cockpit. He was not burned. I tried not to imagine him slammed through the front window and into the ground, but of course I did.

The
X
for John marked where his seat had been in the helicopter. Only charred fragments of the cockpit remained.

Teresa turned to me.

“What did I bury?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

The helicopters lifted out of
Warhorse at 12:06 a.m. They would head toward Balad and then fly north along MSR Tampa—the main supply route that connects U.S. bases in a north–south line from Kuwait through Baghdad and beyond. John gave Miles the controls.

“You have the controls,” he said.

“I have the controls,” Miles responded.

The helicopters cruised at four hundred feet above the ground and the pilots saw through the dark, like cats.

“Man, nobody's out tonight,” Miles said. “Air, ground—nowhere.”

“Everybody else knows the weather blows.”

The second helicopter radioed. “Did you guys just get that message?”

From Scott Delancey, the battle captain.

“Negative,” John said. “What's it say?”

“That weather is less than one mile around Balad. Five hundred meters at Speicher.”

“I'm estimating our visibility is six miles,” John said. “What do you think?”

The second aircraft radioed back. “I think we can make it home through this.”

As we neared the end
of the presentation, I steadily worked my way through the plate of brownies. I told another widow this story later and she half jokingly diagnosed me as a nervous eater. I didn't think to call myself that then but I knew my blood sugar kept dropping so that I was shaky and fluttery and faint. I washed down the brownies with glass after glass of water, and we had to stop the briefing three times so I could pee. I was still in the habit of talking to Miles in bathrooms, and in the stall at unit headquarters I pressed my hands together.

“Please help me,” I said. “Please help me make it through this.”

At 12:30 a.m. the sandstorm
was moving northeast to southwest. The helicopters had flown into the middle of the tempest. What had appeared at first like haze on the horizon became a blinding rage of gritty sand. Visibility was less than one mile. John ordered both aircraft to turn around.

“Hey, One-Six, turn it around please,” John said. “Make a left turn.”

“Coming left,” the second helicopter responded.

“Okay. See him?” John asked Miles.

“I got him.”

With the bad weather and poor visibility, John took over flying.

“I have the controls,” he said.

“You have the controls,” Miles answered.

The second aircraft radioed. “Do you want to go back to Warhorse? Because Balad doesn't look any better.”

“Okay,” John said. “What's—”

Then: “Oh, shit.”

Then, to Miles: “What's going on? Talk to me.”

A warning sounded in the aircraft.
Altitude low.

“Pull up,” Miles said. “Pull up, pull up, pull up, pull up.”

Until the colonel let us
read the last forty seconds of the transcript from the in-flight audio, I had clung to the idea that the helicopter had fallen so quickly that it hit the ground before either John or Miles realized there was a problem. I had hoped there was no time to be afraid, no moment to imagine the bludgeoning or burning that was to come. If I could not spare Miles from disfigurement, at least I could spare him from fear. The force of my not knowing would keep it from being real.

My throat was hoarse when I spoke to the colonel.

“Do you think—” I said.

My voice caught and I had to start again.

“Do you think Miles said ‘Pull up' because he knew from the instruments that they were headed down? Or do you think he said it because he saw the ground?”

The colonel looked apologetic but did not hesitate. “I would imagine, based on the audio and what we know about the flight, that he said it because he saw the ground.”

If he saw the ground, then he knew they were going to crash.

“Did you listen to the audio?” I asked the colonel.

“Yes,” he said.

“Did you hear Miles at the end?”

The colonel nodded.

“Did he sound afraid?”

This time the colonel was slow to respond.

“No,” he said finally, and I knew he was lying.

I often wonder how long it takes to fall four hundred feet. It took thirteen seconds from the time John assumed the controls to the time the helicopter hit the earth. It took five seconds from the time he realized something was wrong to the time the helicopter made impact. It took only one second for Miles to say “Pull up” five times. In that final second, did he glance reflexively into the mirror over his shoulder, trying for a last reassuring look at John?

The colonel reached the final slide, headed
INVESTIGATION FINDINGS.

“What they're telling us,” he said, “what the investigators are saying, is that the sandstorm decreased visibility for the helicopter and Mr. Priestner became spatially disoriented. Instead of turning left, he turned left and down.”

In the chair next to me, Teresa wiped at her eyes with a crumpled tissue. I squeezed her other hand between mine.

“Mr. Henderson was overconfident in Mr. Priestner,” the colonel continued. “He didn't catch the error.”

Error. The word resonated in the room as the findings glowed on the projector screen.
PILOT ERROR
. According to the official report, John and Miles had flown the Apache into the ground.

In the Buick after the
briefing, Teresa's face looked red and swollen. I flipped down the visor and looked in the mirror. Mine was red too. I licked the tip of my finger and scrubbed at the corner of one eye where the mascara had smudged onto my skin.

“Can you believe that?” Teresa said. “They're lying. I know they're lying.”

I licked my finger again and tugged at the other eye. The skin was thin and tender.

“There is no way those men crashed that helicopter,” Teresa said. “It's just not possible.”

She put on her blinker and turned onto Gruber Road. We passed through the security checkpoint and drove slowly away from the base.

“I'm going to put in a request for the full report,” she said. “The full accident investigation.”

The asphalt thrummed beneath the tires and the yellow line in the middle of the road ticked past. I wondered what it would be like to be inside Teresa's skin, to wrestle with the blame she doles out—to the military, to John, to herself. I thought of how each of us nurses our secret shames. Here's my secret: in the hours before I knew the name of the second pilot, I selfishly hoped the man who died with Miles had been one of the unit's best. I wanted it to be someone who would have made Miles feel safe through the last seconds of the flight, someone who would have made him think there was a chance they would survive even as they crashed into the ground. I hoped it was John Priestner.

The broad-leafed trees gave over to tall pines, and the dirt beside the road grew sandy as the trees thinned and the land rolled in low hills. Teresa held the steering wheel with both hands. Tears carved tracks in the foundation on her cheeks, and I could see the pale skin underneath. A drop reached her chin and hung suspended above the thin weave of her sweater. Her mascara had also run and we had matching circles under our eyes, as if we had been in the same fight.

“I'm just so afraid you hate me,” she said, “for what John did.”

I watched the highway unspool and disappear at a distant point. The road sloped upward and the grass out the side window rolled past in a smooth green carpet. A current of air blew through the vents on the dashboard and the inside of the car smelled like lilies. I took a deep breath.

“They're gone,” I said. “It doesn't matter how it happened.”

In the spring of 2007,
the stock market dropped nearly five hundred points in a day and the housing bubble finally threatened to burst. The Dixie Chicks topped the charts while people watched Britney Spears self-destruct. I surprised myself by changing almost nothing. I soldiered through one brittle hour after the next, making my way toward a destination I could neither see nor imagine, like a swimmer crossing the English Channel, paddling ahead on blind faith alone. Most days I tamped down thoughts of Miles until his memory became small and hard, like a fossilized ammonite buried within me. At work people remarked on how strong I was, how unbelievably well I handled things. But I was barely functioning. I moved through the motions of life, lost to everyone and everything, lost to myself.