Michael Gruber: The Good Son

We ran into a little problem, which is really part of a big problem. Okay, the army hates Special Ops, but it’s like the bad girl on the block; they know she’s bad but they can’t keep their hands off her. So instead of being a self-contained operation there’s levels of sign-off on every mission, which tends to compromise our security and slow things down; also, when we actually get clearance to go in, everyone in the area wants to be involved in this real exciting stuff and get part of the credit, if any. For this thing, they gave us a reinforced platoon of Special Forces guys, under a Captain Lepinski, who were supposed to hover in the area and provide backup and extraction in case we got into trouble.

We actually didn’t get into trouble. Everything was going okay; we snatched up our insurgents and a little firefight broke out, nothing we couldn’t handle, but Captain Lepinski got his signals crossed and the fuckhead painted the house with his laser target designator, and an F-16 loitering way up high dropped a 250 kg GBU- 12 bomb on it. The explosion caught me and Billy Olin going out the door and killed eighteen people inside including women and children. Rittenhouse died too.

It could’ve been worse for me, I guess. My left leg was broken in three places and my right shoulder was smashed up some and my right wrist was cracked. Fred Rice and Buck Claiborne and the LT came running back and dragged me and Billy and Steve’s body out of there, not that I was personally aware of anything at the time.

We got air-evacuated to a hospital, first in Afghanistan and then in Germany. They covered the whole thing up per usual, because as a unit we don’t exist, and the story that surfaced was internecine fighting between insurgent factions, and the Pakistanis lied too because they never admit that the U.S. has boots on the ground in Pakistan even though we do all the time. No one said a word about the blue-on-blue shit.

None of which I told to Gloria then, and she didn’t press me for war stories-she probably got her fill at work-so we chatted and drank our beers and I asked her if she wanted to go out for something, drinks, a movie, a club, but she surprised the hell out of me by saying, “No, why don’t we stay here and have sex?”

I have to say that I have not had much experience with regular women. I was too young in Pakistan and I grew up in the middle of a war surrounded by men. Then I was in jail and then in the army. There are plenty of women available around army bases, and not only whores; there is a particular kind of woman who is a groupie of the elite formations, they like being around lethality and hard bodies, and a small number are interested in marrying someone with a short life expectancy and G.I. insurance.

I’d been with groupies enough, and lots of fun too, but we all regarded them as a kind of gym equipment. Maybe they felt that way themselves, I don’t know. Anyway, I’d never had a direct invitation like this and it threw me; what was the catch? I asked her, why me? and she said she liked my look, I had what she called the wolf look; I was a loner basically and so was she, and she said she used to stand in the doorway of the PT suite and watch Brenda torture me and also she would get a whiff of my sweat and she liked it; she thought it was chemistry. Which I guess it was, but confusing a little, American women being so much like boys are where I come from and not like women in that country at all. So that was our first date, and it became a couple-of-times-a-week deal, always the same.

After I left Glori’s I drove to the PT clinic at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for my date with Brenda Crabbe. I’m renting a junker while I’m in D.C. I don’t care what I drive, unlike many of my comrades; that’s another thing I didn’t get growing up, the whole American you-are-what-you-drive thing. I get in, it goes, I get out, and I could care less what it looks like.

It’s strange, driving in the real world again. You never get your cherry back; I mean, except for the odd drunk, driving long distances in the U.S. is pretty safe. But I still keep my foot on the brake most of the time and my eyes are scanning like a motherfucker, looking for death on wheels. Like just this morning driving up Georgia Avenue a woman in a Dodge van swung out of a side road and cut me off and I practically ran off the road, and what I was thinking was that if someone had done that in Iraq the grunt on the fifty cal above me would’ve trashed her and her little van, probably killed her and six kids. It happens all the time over there and no one even slows down.

And I look at the neat rows of houses here and imagine them with their fronts blown out and all the domestic shit exposed: the TV and the couch, dishes, letters, and photographs all strewn like leaves in the fall; also, I can hardly look at my fellow citizens, like in a mall or on the street, without imagining them lying in blood, nicely dressed bureaucrats or businesswomen, reading their Posts, with their clothes blown off, no legs, a long streamer of guts running down the street and people stepping daintily over it.

They tell us that we’re over there so it won’t happen here. High strategy is not in my job description, but you know, when you come back, you kind of secretly want your fellow citizens to get blown up a little; we don’t admit it but it’s true. How the fuck can they be so-I don’t know, normal, like in a dream of shopping and careers and ordinary daily bull-shit, while what’s going on over there is going on?

Brenda gave me a big smile when I showed up at her station. She spends all her time with guys who are resentful and bitter because their bodies are fucked up beyond repair, and I try to ease the tension some by a little flirting through the pain, although she is a large powerful woman and plain as a manhole cover.

So for an hour I lit up her life and she made me wish I was dead, and afterward I had some lunch in the cafeteria and walked over to Building 18, where they had Billy Olin. This is one of the crappy old buildings where they keep soldiers who are too busted up to fight but who the army hasn’t got around to kicking out yet. Peeling paint, black moldy walls, really decrepit; they were supposed to fix all this up but they haven’t got around to it yet. Personally, I’m not surprised or shocked. This is how the army is. What surprises me more is that people think they’ll get anything different from an organization whose main purpose is to kill people and whose leaders are easily distinguishable from Mother Teresa.

There’s a couple of squashed water bugs on the floor of Billy’s room and he’s sitting in his wheelchair watching an animal show on a portable TV. I mean the show was playing, but I couldn’t tell if Olin was watching. He’s got a dent in his skull now, from a chunk of debris probably, and it’s hard to tell if anyone’s home in there. I try to go see Billy when I come for my sessions here; I’ve known him for a long time and I feel bad about what happened to him. I was the senior guy so I should’ve been the last man out, covering his back, but I went out first. Stupid thing to think, really, a bomb like that goes off and it’s more or less random what happens, but still.

It’s not like we’re a band of brothers or anything. There are about three hundred of us, I don’t know for sure, and they arrange us in task forces for special missions, mix and match, shake and bake. Also, we’re not really soldiers, we’re spies, and spies have a different standard of unit cohesion and comradeship. We’re not warriors either, although that’s the bullshit they pass out in the kind of training people like me go through-elite warriors, Special Forces, SEALs, Delta: each level more elite warrior-ish than the one before, until you’re so elite you can’t get killed or shrunk down to a husk like this poor sucker. As it happens, I’ve fought with actual warriors and there’s a difference. The warrior’s an individual before anything else. Sure, he has a family, a clan, and a tribe, maybe even a national movement, but the main thing that drives him is personal: his honor, his fame. A soldier is a whole different thing. I take the silver solidus from the Man and I kill on command, nothing personal about it. The reason there are a lot more soldiers than warriors nowadays is that soldiers will beat warriors every time, if they’re well led and paid on time. This whole warrior thing is a sick fantasy to protect guys who’ve grown up secure in the burbs from realizing what business they’re in. I could give a shit, myself. I’ve been killing people since I was nine years old; it’s the only thing I’m really good at. And like I say, I’m not even much of a soldier anymore, given the outfit I’m in.