Owen Sheers - I Saw a Man

He leant forward on the table between them. “Now, fuck knows how they got there, how the Pakistanis missed them, or what they were doing there. And fuck knows how we didn’t know about ’em either, but as you can see, Major McCullen, Senior Airman Rodriguez, from where we’re sitting, it doesn’t look too good. Not good at all.”

Agent Munroe questioned them for twenty minutes about the mission, flight conditions, the kill chain procedure, the weapons confirmations. Daniel knew he’d have already heard the mission tapes, and, no doubt, seen the chat-room conversations, too. As they’d answered his questions the colonel had looked on with a half-hidden expression of disgust. Not for them or for Agent Munroe, Daniel felt, but for the process as a whole.

At the end of his questions, Agent Munroe closed his file and reminded them both of mission confidentiality. He leant back in his chair. “I should tell you now,” he said, in a less formal tone. “That if this is what it seems, it’s going to get out there, at some point. We can exercise damage limitation to a degree, but only so far.” He looked at them both, one at a time. “So my advice,” he said, slipping the file into his briefcase, “is get ready for some turbulence.”

The colonel, taking his cue, gave them a curt nod. “That’ll be all for now,” he said. “Thank you, Major, Senior Airman.”

Maria and Daniel stood, saluted, and turned for the door. Before they reached it, Ellis spoke again. “Congratulations,” he said from behind them. “You did a good job yesterday.”

They turned to face him. He was standing, his shoulders square. “This is unfortunate,” he said, gesturing to Munroe. The colonel had close-cropped grey hair, the traces of a strong jaw beneath his jowls. “But you took out an important terrorist,” he continued, looking at them hard. “You upheld the American Airman’s Creed, and you should be damn proud of that. Don’t forget it.”

“Yessir,” they said in unison. “Thank you, sir.”

There was no guard outside the hut, so they walked back to the ground control stations alone. Daniel’s head was light. Maria was silent beside him. Eventually she spoke.

“There was no way to tell,” she said.

“I saw her,” Daniel replied. “In the van.”

“You saw something,” Maria corrected him. “You don’t know what it was.”

Daniel didn’t reply. The sun was setting, casting a pink light across the bare ranges of the surrounding hills.

“The screeners confirmed everything,” Maria said, as they approached the control station trailers. Her voice was hardening, as if in response to a silent accuser. “And the OB-4, too,” she added. “One of Munroe’s, I bet.”

―

Daniel told Cathy that night. He hadn’t wanted to, but he knew this time he had no choice. Agent Munroe was right. The story would break, and Daniel wanted Cathy to hear it from him before she saw it on CNN.

“A woman?” She’d looked away from him immediately, shaking her head, her mouth open. “A woman?” she’d asked again, as if willing his answer to change.

Daniel waited for her to say something else, or to look back at him, but she did neither. “Yes,” he said.

He wanted to say more. A woman, a child, a man. What difference did it make? They were innocent and they died, that was the horror of it. But it was a war. She knew it happened.

Cathy’s eyes were already welling.

“It’s not the first time,” he heard himself saying. “I mean, journalists. They get caught in the crossfire. They get killed.”

Cathy dropped her head. Why wouldn’t she look at him?

“But not by you, Daniel,” she whispered. “Not by you.”

―

When the story broke, it was worse than he’d thought. Somehow, they got to publish their names. Her name. Caroline Marshall. She was thirty-four years old, just recently married. They ran footage of her news reports. Cathy told him not to watch them, but he did, and he knew she did too. She’d been everywhere he had. Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan. She was pretty. Dark blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail or cut into a bob. Her features were delicate, birdlike. She was energetic on camera, as if she cared.

Munro and his team managed to keep Daniel’s name out of it, and Maria’s. “A U.S. drone strike.” That was all the press release said. No mention of Creech, screeners, Intel coordinator, an operator, a pilot. It was as if the Predator had been genuinely unmanned. As if there had been no hand behind its flight, no eye behind its cameras.

The internal inquiry began the following week. Just a month later Daniel was medically discharged, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome by an air force psychologist, his case rushed through the usual procedures. On Daniel’s final day at Creech, Colonel Ellis presented him with a file. It was several pages thick, detailing every mission to which he’d contributed while serving at Creech. Surveillance, house raids, buddy lasing, patrols, intelligence support, command control, search-and-destroy, targeted killings. “You can be proud, Major,” Ellis told him, as he shook his hand. “You’ve done your duty. And we thank you for it.”

Sitting in the car park at the wheel of his Camry, Highway 95 humming with traffic on the other side of the fence, Daniel opened the file and looked through its pages. On the first, at the bottom of a spreadsheet, a single number was printed in bold—1,263, the total number of enemy combatants killed as a result of the missions listed in the file. There was no other figure on the page. No other total, as if this, as far as the air force was concerned, was the entirety of his scorecard and any other reckoning would remain his, and his alone.

The next morning Daniel woke with a desire for the ocean. He’d been brought up in the Midwest. Among fields of wheat and dirt tracks leading to hills. The coast had never been his environment. And yet he woke feeling certain it was the ocean that could settle him. Only the ocean seemed vast enough to smother the harrowing of his anxieties. Simple enough to cleanse his eyes.

And so he’d left. Cathy had told him she understood, but he doubted she did. Despite sharing the house in Centennial Hills, over the last year they’d drifted further from each other every day, drawn apart by their different realities. She’d tell the girls he was working away for a few weeks. No, she didn’t think he should see them to say good-bye. Reluctantly, Daniel had agreed, and a few hours later he’d left, throwing his rucksack onto the back seat of the Camry and reversing out their driveway to leave his home.

He drove for twelve hours straight, stopping only twice for gas and to go to the bathroom. Skirting San Francisco to his south, he’d seen the city’s lights come on in the dark of his rearview mirror. Eventually, running out of land, he’d pulled up at a parking bay overlooking the mouth of the Russian River, his headlights swinging through a thickening of sea mist and spray. When he cut the engine the silence fell like a final breath.

He got out of the car. His legs and back ached. His throat was dry. There were stars above him and the sliver of a new moon. It was dark, and yet he could still make out the breakers on the rocks below, long ruffs of white pulsing along the shore. An oncoming breeze brought salt to his face, over his skin. He closed his eyes and let the wind blow his fringe from his forehead. He could feel, in its passing, the hairs moving on his arms.

And it was then, as he stood before the Pacific Ocean that night, with the river at his back, that Daniel decided what he should do. He would find her husband. He would find the man Caroline Marshall had married and write to him. He would tell him what had happened. Not because he should, but because he had to. Because he knew it was the only way he would ever be able to go on. He was tired of being unseen. Of being dislocated from his actions. Of witnessing but never being witnessed. He wanted to own his life, and he knew that meant owning all of it. If he’d thought he could find the others — the motorcyclist’s wife, the boys’ parents, the old man’s son — then he would have. And perhaps one day he would try. But for now, he’d start with her husband. This is what he promised himself as the breakers hushed below him. He already knew his name, and what he did. The newspapers had told him that. He would not be hard to find. But not yet. First, before he found him, he must find the words. It would take time. But they would come. All of it would come. This is what Daniel told himself as looked over the ocean that night. Because in the end, everything does.