Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

4.11 Gordon Falwell

I should have been a priest,” said Falwell before the door closed. “I should have been a fucking priest.”

He’d been told to cancel all logistics missions until after the meeting at HQ, which he had done. But now he had five casualties to explain in an incident where supplies were being skimmed off for an unauthorized school and who knew if that was just the tip of the iceberg as far as the supplies went, not to mention that certain road patrols had been temporarily pulled, which is a detail he had known but hadn’t passed on in a timely fashion because he’d thought canceling the missions was enough. If he had, though, Sinclair would have made a different decision when it came to disciplining his men, and this rat fuck could have been avoided. It was ultimately his fault. Something like this could stall his career. Now he’d have to change the date on the incident report. Or fudge the time line. Hell, he’d figure it out. At HQ he’d talked to combat commanders, and all of them had reported that insubordination among the troops was on the rise, as were visits to mental health personnel, as were IED attacks, as were demands on soldiers to do things for the Iraqis that the Iraqis should be doing for themselves, as was the belief in counterinsurgency of exactly the school-building kind, and as was the inability to tell who was the enemy or where he was hiding. The war was 360 degrees with surround sound, so how were he and his officers supposed to make good decisions when either way they were fucked.

“Lessons learned” had been the catchphrase of the meeting, and now Falwell had to submit yet another after action report that would be scoured for useful observations, information, and lessons — OIL. The report would trigger still other reports and analyses that would be sent up the command chain, where new policies would be crafted and handed back down with the hope that past mistakes could be avoided. Ha!

He winced at the AARs already littering his desk — the one where the lesson learned was about keeping engines from overheating in this blast furnace of a country and the one where it was about destigmatizing mental health care and the ones about combatting complacency and up-armoring cargo trucks and conserving water and building trust and preventing rape and recognizing likely ambush points. And now the one about how the light footprint strategy had been a — well, people had started to use the word “fiasco.” Just thinking about the piles of paper and analyses one more incident would spawn was enough to make him weep.

And yet, the optimism he had brought back with him from HQ hadn’t completely dissipated. There was something about tragedy that strengthened resolve and annealed the soul, and there was something about the surge that spelled “Fresh Start.” A new strategy always conjured up in his mind a pristine set of pages, ones with that fresh-ink smell and the lines not yet filled with fuck-ups and confusion. He called his CSM and said, “Everyone in the DFAC in thirty.” Then he spent a few minutes pondering the HQ briefing and deciding what to pass on to the troops. He’d keep it short. In war, only the simple succeeds, he told himself, quoting Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. He liked the words “simple” and “focused” and “decisive.”

By the time he was walking across the yard, optimism was tugging his center of gravity by its string. The men were sitting quietly this time, waiting and wary, but they snapped to attention when he entered the room. As he spoke, he amped up his speech a little, and instead of “attempt,” he said “high-octane effort,” and instead of “senseless deaths,” he said “magnificent contribution.” And then he talked about balancing kinetics with human intelligence and diplomacy. As he spoke, he saw that there were valuable lessons to be learned after all and that he was articulating them forcefully. Fuck the papers and reports. It was he, along with the men and women arrayed before him, who would make the difference in this war.

“There is nothing you cannot do,” he said, and he saw his belief reflected in the faces in front of him. The troops who had been sitting back leaned forward, and the ones who had been leaning forward squinted and tensed their jaws.

“If you fall,” he said, “you will pick yourself up and do your job. And if the enemy pushes you down, you will pick yourself up and you will push back harder, and then you will do your job. But if he pushes you down and steps on you…”

Now the colonel was feeling the old sort of ecstasy, the kind that could only be forged of forces that were nameless and primal. He thought of quoting General Patton, who had said, We will twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him, decided not to, and then the words burst past his lips and had on his own mind the effect he hoped they would have on his troops. And for an instant, in spite of everything that had happened before that moment and everything that was to come, he felt pretty goddamned ready for the surge.

5.1 Will

Soon after taking the SAT, Will had fractured his wrist sliding home. He had gone for x-rays and a cast, which is what he was thinking about as he filled out a questionnaire aimed at getting the juniors to consider college and the future. For many of them, that meant following their parents into local jobs, with the more adventurous signing on to an oil rig or enlisting for the war if it wasn’t over by graduation, which was still a year away. Will was picturing the curvy nurse in the tight white uniform who had pressed up against him as she set his arm and remembering how the word “x-ray” sounded like “sex-ray” when the nurse mentioned retakes to the technician. The long, thin bones of Will’s arm stood out in sharp relief, edged by shadowy soft tissue, and nestled into the radius just above his wrist was the BB that had been there since the day he’d gone rabbit hunting with Tyler Hicks and Tyler had gotten angry about something and banged his air gun against the ground, causing it to catch on a root and go off as it fell.

“Is that an old war wound?” asked the nurse in a gravelly voice.

“Yeah,” said Will. “I guess it is.”

“Tough guy, huh?” said the nurse, and the way she said it still set Will’s heart racing whenever he thought about it.

Will’s test scores surprised everyone. Because he was quiet in class and so was a relative unknown, the doctor idea caught hold among the teachers, who were eager to have a story of unexpected success to put in their end-of-year report. Even Will was not immune to the fiction, and the day the report came out, he sat for a while in an echoing stairwell as students flowed past him like a river around a sturdy rock. He started to see paths and possibilities. He started to wonder if he actually was becoming the person profiled in the report, if a shifting idea of who a person was could change things about the person himself. Just that morning, the principal had stopped him in the hallway and put a hand on his shoulder. All he had said was, “Well done, Will,” but the words carried a freight train of meaning, as if Will and the principal had many such conversations behind them and many more ahead. He felt like Bon Jovi for a moment, or Spider-Man, or Barry Bonds. He wasn’t arrogant, just newly aware that packed within his body and brain was something unusual, something most people only recognized in others and wished they had.