C. Box - Force of Nature

For the last seven and a half hours, he’d driven straight through the state of Wyoming from north to south on Interstate 25 and squeezed through Denver before the morning traffic approached its apex. Because he had no cell or satellite phone and he paid cash for food and fuel and therefore created no credit card receipts, his route and movements were untraceable.

The U.S. Air Force Academy glinted like a glass-and-steel castle fortress in the foothills to the west as the highway expanded to three, then four lanes. Cars and pickups streamed onto the highway from entrance ramps, drivers sipping coffee and dressed for work. An SUV shot by him, driven by an attractive fortyish woman applying lipstick in her rearview mirror and singing along with a song on the radio. Nate smiled to himself because he’d been away so long he’d almost forgotten what it was like to experience the morning rush of normal Americans going to work at normal jobs for normal hours. The pure dynamism and hurly-burly of the scene made him wistful.

Seeing the academy brought back a flood of memories, several so powerful they made him wince. He recalled arriving there as a freshman just appointed by Montana senators, a tall and raw-boned middle linebacker with a buzz cut, still stinging from his goodbyes and from releasing his falcons to the wind. The upperclassman cadets jeered and confronted him, and he was paired with an older cadet named Vince Vincent who informed him that as of that moment he was his “dooley”-all freshmen were dooleys-and he had no past, no reputation, no rights, and no value as a human being. It was Nate’s responsibility, Vincent said, to start his life over at zero. And he could start by shining Vince Vincent’s boots. Nate gritted his teeth, said, “Yes, sir,” and dropped to his knees with a brush and jar of polish. Vincent stood there in the gleaming hallway with his hands on his hips and his chin in the air while other cadets walked by and laughed.

The humiliation continued. Between classes, orientation, and football practice, Nate fetched Vincent’s lunch and dinner, ironed and hung his uniform, and cleaned up after him. Nate was asked to stand at attention outside the bathroom stall while Vincent had his morning bowel movement, and to note on a pad the shape and number of excrement bits Vincent called out to him.

He spent days shadowing Vincent through the grounds so he was available do his bidding at any moment. The campus was numbered with similar relationships, and dooleys rolled their eyes at one another in shared humiliation as they passed in the hallways. But after a month, Nate observed that most of his classmates, although still designated dooleys, as they would be throughout the first year, spoke comfortably and freely with their assigned cadets. The pairs could be seen walking side by side on the campus, and the cadets became more like mentors and advisers. They even sat together in the cafeteria, where Nate was required to stand at attention beside his cadet in case Vincent dropped a napkin or fork and needed it retrieved immediately.

And Vince Vincent didn’t let up.

That lasted for forty-eight days, until Nate slipped into Vincent’s dorm room at three in the morning and crouched down next to the bed and hissed into the cadet’s ear: “I know how the game is played and I’ve played it without bitching. Your role is to break me down and build me back up. But you don’t know me, and you’ve let your power go to your head. My father is an Air Force technical sergeant who spent his life breaking me down. He’s a professional. Compared to him, you’re a bad joke and a fucking embarrassment to the uniform. You’ve had your fun, and I’ve taken it until now for your sake, not mine. I’ve been your dooley.”

As Vincent started to sit up, Nate reached over and placed his fingers around Vincent’s windpipe and pushed him back down. The cadet’s eyes pleaded to him to stop. Nate said, “I’m a falconer. I’ve spent more time outside than inside. I’m a student of violent death in nature. I could rip your throat out right now and it wouldn’t make me blink. You’d bleed out before you got to the door, and I’d step over your body on the way out to brush my teeth for the night.”

Nate tightened his grip. “We don’t have to be friends, and I don’t like you, anyway. But from this minute on, you’ll respect me and I’ll pretend to honor your rank. No one will have to know we’ve had this discussion. Do you understand?”

Vincent blinked his eyes to indicate he did. Nate’s life improved after that, and Vince Vincent went on living.

Discipline and routine at the Academy was nothing new to Nate; he’d grown up that way. His father was an Air Force lifer, and they’d lived all over the country and the world on military bases: Goodfellow in San Angelo, Texas; Edwards in Rosamond, California; McChord in Tacoma, Washington; Ellsworth in Rapid City, South Dakota; Incirlik in Adana, Turkey; Mountain Home, in Idaho; and Malmstrom in Great Falls, Montana.

He’d been a dooley all his life. Friendships with kids his age were fleeting and incomplete. Schools and teachers were temporary. Nate sought some kind of permanence and an anchor outside his family and found it outside. No matter where they were located there was hunting, fishing, camping, and wildlife. Sure, the weather and terrain varied. But outside the base housing and civilization, there was a whole world out there that was harsh, beautiful, tough-and didn’t judge him.

While they were still stationed in Montana, Nate’s mother died from lupus and his father doubled down on Nate because he didn’t know what else to do. He instilled in his son, through thought and deed, an ethos of loyalty, duty, and love of country. In his father’s mind, warriors held an exalted place in society and should be honored even if they weren’t in the modern world. According to Nate’s father, it was more important to serve than it was to be recognized or appreciated for it by those soft and ignorant ninnies who benefited from the warrior’s service. Every right the ninnies and sissies enjoyed had been protected over the years by the blood shed by American warriors, despite the contempt shown them as a result.

The message was pure and tough and noble, but Nate’s father was absent for long periods of time. And when he was gone, the worldview he described fascinated Nate, who wondered how much of it was true and how much of it was self-justification for a nomadic life and a dysfunctional family. To confirm or deny his father’s rationale, Nate sought out and found another ordered universe in the amoral world of nature. He found a place where the strong killed and ate the weak and the small. Nate came to realize the only difference between a warrior culture and the tooth-and-claw natural world were the values and compassion humans had but wild creatures didn’t. So to better understand the former, he became a student of the latter.

That’s when he got his first falcon.

When Nate was a junior in high school in Great Falls, his father was thrilled when his son was nominated by the Montana senators and accepted by the Air Force Academy, but it came with well-known caveats. As a lifer, he had very mixed feelings about college-bred officers, and he wasn’t shy about expressing them. When his father found himself in a situation that was chaotic, disorganized, or wholly screwed up, he described it as “worse than following a second lieutenant with a map.”

As Nate melded into the flow of traffic toward the center of town, he recalled standing in the end zone of the football stadium in uniform during a home game. He’d been in the Academy for a year and had been assigned a dooley of his own, whom he’d released the day before without humiliating him. The Air Force Academy Falcons were playing the Colorado State Rams. Because of a knee injury the year before, Nate was no longer on the team, but he’d been chosen for a role he relished even more: falconer for the school’s live mascots. It was an Academy tradition. The birds were released at the start of the game and at halftime, and they’d circle the stadium and return to fist.