Brian Haig - The Capitol Game

Jack smiled at him. “Four years, Floyd. What’ve you been up to?”

“Same old, same old.”

“How was Afghanistan?”

“Is that a question?”

Jack laughed. Fifteen years earlier he had served beside Floyd, back when Floyd was a newly promoted buck sergeant, E-5, and Jack was his commander. Now Floyd was an E-8, on the list for promotion to sergeant major, the highest enlisted rank in the Army. The first wisp of gray salted his temples, though he still looked as fit as he had at 23.

“Ike and Danny can’t make it this time,” Floyd informed him. “Ike’s in Afghanistan, Danny’s doing Iraq.”

“Some guys will do anything to get out of this.”

Floyd smiled. “Miss it?” he asked with a quick glance at Jack. “I mean, the life.”

“Which part? The early morning five-mile runs, sleeping on the ground, lousy pay? Frequent tours to countries I wouldn’t send my worst enemies to? Being shot at?” Jack paused, then smiled. “Sure, who wouldn’t?”

Floyd laughed and they caught up on their lives and drove generally westward for two hours, eventually ending up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, at a small, obscure country cemetery on the outskirts of town. The morning was cool and blustery. A light drizzle was coming down. A small knot of people had already arrived and were milling around in the rain by the parking lot.

Like Floyd, four of the men wore Army uniforms bedecked with ribbons and military merit badges and a long procession of time stripes on their sleeves. And two, like Jack, wore suits appropriate to their current status as former soldiers, now civilians.

The men filed over and they all shook hands but said few words. Next they all marched solemnly to a gravesite where a woman, Selma Gaither, was standing, using the moment of solitude to share private thoughts with the man in the grave, her husband, Thomas Gaither, former staff sergeant and a former comrade of the men in the group.

It was a ritual they adhered to every four years, coming together at Tom Gaither’s final resting place, a way to honor a fallen friend. Floyd shuffled behind the gravestone and managed to produce a few simple words, then started crying; he just managed to choke out a barely coherent amen. He and Tom had joined the Army together, a pair of stout defensive linemen at Salisbury High School looking for a new life. They had grown up on the same block, raised hell as teenagers, barely escaped high school, then gone off to war under a stint the Army called the Buddy Program.

They all stood in an awkward silence another five minutes, each man remembering what scraps and remnants he could of serving beside Tom. The memories became dimmer with the passing years, though nobody cared to admit it. Two of the men owed their lives to Tom and both cried quietly but unashamedly.

Finally, Jack led the procession back to their cars. They drove five miles in a caravan over twisty back roads to The Gut, a remote roadside eatery that had somehow become part of this little ritual. The Gut was little more than a shack, a shabby collection of cramped booths and chipped, linoleum-topped tables. Someone had called ahead and four tables had been jammed together and reserved for the party. Except Jack, the offspring of a military professional, the rest of the men came from hardscrabble backgrounds and were quite at home there.

Jack sat at one end of the tables, Selma at the other. She also had grown up with Tom, had had her pigtails pulled by him in kindergarten, had flirted shamelessly and relentlessly with him throughout elementary school, had dated him continuously through high school, then broke it off when Tom left for his Army Basic training.

Selma had deep roots in Allentown, her family having settled there a hundred years before. They were immensely prolific types and there was barely a block in the city without her kin. She had no intention of leaving her family and friends, of living the gypsy life of a military wife. The night before he left for boot camp, she and Tom had a loud, raucous fight. The first battle in their relationship, it was also the last, both swore resolutely to themselves when the brawl ended. That firm divorce lasted all of three days, before Selma hopped a train for Georgia and they were married, till death do they part, the day after Tom completed basic training.

Selma was a large black woman, bighearted and fiercely independent. It was clear that Tom would be the only man in her life. They had produced two lovely children, Jeremy and Lisa, and raising them had occupied whatever loneliness Selma felt.

A gargantuan breakfast was served-ten plates piled high with flatcakes, five dishes overloaded with greasy bacon and greasier grits, ten pots of stiff black coffee, and an assortment of local side orders. The Gut was no place for the health-conscious.

Conversation flowed easily as the men caught up on their lives-who had gotten married, divorced, had children, and so forth. The men had all gone their separate ways, those who got out jumping into various professions, and those who stayed in, buffeted by the Army’s chronic wartime needs, bouncing through an assortment of assignments. But they had survived a war together. They had fought and bled and nearly died together. That bond was more special than a common college or fraternity brotherhood: it lasted a lifetime.

“Remember the day it happened?” Floyd eventually asked, sipping his coffee and staring at Jack. It was time to get down to business. The table was loaded with empty dishes. A sullen waitress in the corner eyed the mounds of empty plates but made no move to retrieve them.

“Like I could forget,” Jack answered, giving a look down the table at Selma, who quietly produced a resigned nod. She eased back in her chair, cupped her coffee in her hands, and settled in for the talk.

Pete Robbins, two seats down, muttered, “Tell you what I remember most. There was a sandstorm like I never seen before or since. Stuff filled your ears, crawled up your nose, couldn’t see two feet.”

“Yeah,” Willy Morton joined in, “the third day of the war. We had that big fight the day before, the one at that sand dune, remember? Still can’t believe we all made it through that fight.”

Three or four men began nodding. Yep, they remembered.

Floyd put down his coffee and leaned back in his chair. “And then Captain Wiley got ordered to move to the next village. They said by the radio emissions there had to be a big headquarters there. We was supposed to knock it out.”

Selma, at the other end of the table, sipped from her coffee and patiently let the men ramble on. It was the same thing every time, the men recounting the day Tom died, going through the painful details as if it happened yesterday. She knew what it was, survivor’s guilt. They needed to return to that day and explain what happened because it was too late to change it. Well, nothing would change it, so she guessed talking it out had to suffice.

Willy Morton, then the team medic now a doctor with a razor-sharp brain, performed most of the narration about that day, about Jack planning their assault, making the exhausted men rehearse and rehearse again, treating them all like packhorses, forcing everybody to haul a triple load of ammunition and six canteens of water. By the time the captain had finished adding more of this and a lot more of that-extra claymore mines, extra AT-4 rocket launchers, and so forth and so on-each man was hauling well over a hundred pounds through the hot desert. Jack had seemed to have a premonition, Willy explained, but nobody objected or complained.

Yeah, that’s right, Walter Guidon chirped in. A crusty, foul-mouthed Cajun, he’d been with Jack in the Panama invasion, too, and quickly recounted a similar incident there when Jack had a hunch-a seer’s eye, he called it-and changed the plan at the last minute. Good thing, he said. The old plan would’ve gotten them all butchered.