I believe strongly that America can never sufficiently repay the debt it owes to pizza. It is pizza that almost single-handedly has kept American journalism alive. It is the original fast food; a highly skilled journalist can sniff out a passable pie anywhere in the country at any hour, it is a communal food that can satisfy an entire newsroom, it is filling, it literally can be eaten single-handedly and it is um-um-good. Among the first skills any aspiring TV journalist must master is how to eat a slice without oil or tomato dripping on a shirt or blouse (the famed Diane Sawyer Front-Leaning Technique is favored). And personally, I think the vicious debate between extra cheese and Sicilian is ridiculous.
I was three bites into a slice of pepperoni with extra cheese when the newsroom went silent. I looked at the monitor in front of me. ABC was reporting, “Shots reported fired. Explosions heard.”
There were about twenty people still in the office. We sat comfortably, enjoying the four pies Howie had ordered as the horror unfolded on the twelve screens surrounding us. Nothing like pepperoni to accompany a night firefight.
I still sometimes wonder if it is simply a coincidence that I have chosen two careers in which emotion plays zero part. In fact, in soldiers or journalists, emotions are considered an occupational hazard. They tend to get in the way of good fighting and good reporting. So I was able to watch this attack, at least what we could see of it, with a dispassionate fascination. Having been on several similar missions, I found myself far more interested in studying the technical procedures of the attack than in feeling any compassion for the human beings inside that house who were being blown into headlines.
My unit, when we were deployed, was designated AIA: Attack and Infiltration A Team. We lived by the motto “Shoot first. Then shoot second.” Literally, that’s how we stayed alive and mostly unhurt (well, except for those working legs I used to have). I assumed this unit, the 8th, had a similar philosophy. If the people inside the house did not surrender immediately I had no doubt the 8th was going to light up the whole neighborhood.
The feeds on all the monitors were essentially the same: No cameras or lights were permitted near the scene, so the best the networks could offer was a correspondent standing behind a barricade, seen through the greenish tint of night-vision lenses. Night clouds mostly obscured a half-moon, which periodically became visible through a break in the cover and added an eerie light tint to the picture. I clicked between stations, pausing only long enough to hear correspondents explaining in dramatic whispers that absolutely nothing was happening. The stations all tagged their broadcasts F. This was taking place in real time.
I was still savoring that slice of pepperoni when the night lit up. Two quick flashes, like flashbulbs going off, reflected off the cloud cover, followed almost instantly by a series of explosions. I recognized the sound of cannon shells blowing the shit out of a structure. Then came the instantly recognizable tattering of automatic weapons.
“Well,” Frankie sighed, “there goes the neighborhood.”
A few of my colleagues muttered an impressed “Jesus Christ” or “Holy shit” (no connection intended), but otherwise the office was completely silent. The images reminded me most of those televised pictures from Opening Night in Baghdad when Bush the Lesser launched his invasion of Iraq in 2003. But on a considerably smaller scale, as if this were the Disneyland version.
The firing continued in a cacophony of short bursts for 67 seconds. I timed it. Habit kicking in. I heard at least six distinct explosions. I recognized the strategy; my old squad leader, Sgt. Matt Hill, had called it “The Big Bang Theory,” which he defined as “What blows up ain’t coming down.” We had our own expressions for it: battle porn, shootin’ the shit, tickling the Taliban. We used to bet, really, on how high a 105mm howitzer could make a house jump. But the meaning was simple: if you pour overwhelming firepower into a target, all the good guys get to go home safe that night.
No one in that house was going to survive. Which was the intention. The assault ended with a few sporadic shots, as if the last few firecrackers were catching up. Then a cloud of gun smoke rose slowly into the night sky, like the residue of a fireworks display, to the loud silence of ending combat. A few seconds later those clouds got a lot darker and uglier; I recognized that too. Gun smoke was giving way to smoke and flames from the fires that had started. I half anticipated hearing the whines of fire trucks, but instead commentators began telling us loudly and excitedly that they knew absolutely nothing about what had just happened and were going to repeat that in as many different ways as possible for the next few minutes.
“You okay?”
Howie must have sneaked up on me when my mind was in the middle of that battle. “Yeah, ’course. Why?”
He shrugged. “You’ve been sitting there holding on to that slice with your mouth open for a couple of minutes now.”
I looked down. I was frozen in pizza position, a folded slice poised a few inches from my mouth. I laid it down, took a deep breath. “I guess I drifted away,” I admitted.
Howie waved it away, no big deal. “You’ve been a lot of places,” he agreed, then walked away.
The media assault began the instant the shooting ended. Whatever actually happened on that block, a heroic portrait was being created. Praise for the troops was showing up on every platform. Wrightman had his team out in force, making certain he was given plaudits for his “leadership in a crisis.” Instant poll results reinforced the message that a significant majority of Americans supported this attack. I glanced at several threads and comments, almost all of them lauding our troops and the president for his decisive action. My, my, I thought, it’s almost as if the administration is writing these blurbs itself.
Within minutes, several approved photographs were circulated to the media, among them a blurry image showing a soldier carrying a computer out of a burning structure. If it had been necessary, the government happily would have put the factual F on every post or message; I would also have given them the F, but mine would have had a very different meaning. A deluge of positive and supportive hype filled Facebook and Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat; people were even creating Pinterest boards and, I was certain, were looking for celebratory companionship on Tinder. It was a masterful performance.
Less than ten minutes later, Press Secretary Kaufman tweeted an official statement: “Earlier this evening elite Special Operations commandos surrounded a house in which an unknown number of suspected terrorists positively associated with the recent attacks were believed to be hiding. Attempts to negotiate a peaceful surrender failed when gunmen inside the house began firing on our troops. In the ensuing battle, an unknown number of persons inside that house were killed. The unit suffered one casualty, which is being described as minor, in the assault. Computers, cell phones, and tablets were recovered and will be sent to the FBI Forensic Laboratory for examination. This is only the first strike in what will be a prolonged campaign to bring the killers of innocent Americans to justice. The president and first lady would like to express their gratitude to our brave men and women who risked their lives to protect this country. God bless them, and God bless America.”
I began to work my own sources, trying to confirm or dispute what little was known and add whatever bits I could grab. What I really wanted to know was if the people who died in that house—that’s assuming there were people in that house—actually had a connection to the attacks. Call me Mr. Cynic. Here’s another fact: You spend eleven years in the military, you develop a highly sensitive bullshit detector. It becomes necessary to navigate that system. My bullshit cowbell was clanking. That house seemed too small, thinking metaphorically, to have played a role in something so big.
Exactly one hour after the shooting ended, President Wrightman spoke to the nation. He spoke from the White House front lawn, with the building lit up artistically in the background. He was not wearing a jacket and his shirtsleeves were rolled up everyman style, obviously to convey the impression that he had been hard at work and was only pausing for a brief time to give these casual, carefully crafted remarks. “I just wanted to take a minute to thank the brave men and women who risked their lives tonight for all of us. I want to make this pledge in front of all of you: my administration will continue to work relentlessly to seek out and kill our enemies. While we don’t know for sure yet exactly what role these terrorists played in the attacks, we are confident the information collected at this safe house undoubtedly will provide vital intelligence in our ongoing fight to protect each and every American.” He concluded with the usual God blesses. Reporters shouted preapproved questions at him (my guess), but he turned, gave an aloof Trumpian wave, and retreated to the White House. The pool camera held on him as he walked alone, head bowed and hands in his pockets, across the perfectly manicured lawn. Ah, the loneliness-of-the-president image.
It was almost midnight; the administration began offering up talking heads to make certain it got full credit for the apparent success of the operation. Among them was Colonel Anthony Ruggerio, who led the attack. His camo unit patch had been covered with tape for security reasons. He was still wearing his battle rattle, including personal armor, with the exception of his helmet, which had been replaced by a baseball cap and sunglasses. The cap had been pulled down over his sunglasses, which I guess was supposed to disguise his appearance from any terrorists who might be watching, but instead made him look like one of the characters from Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy comic strip.
The Special Ops community is pretty small, but I couldn’t remember crossing paths with a Colonel Ruggerio. But I definitely knew the type. This guy reveled in his tough-guyness. His tone in responding to reporters’ questions was a verbal flex: Shots were fired from the house. His men returned with increased intensity. Communications devices had been recovered. No intact bodies had been found yet, but the fires probably … A beginning, his men will go anywhere, do anything … Pleased to report his injured man will make a full recovery. Big victory for America over “those who would do us harm.” God bless.
Other spokespeople started showing up on other outlets, drilling the message into the American psyche: This was a great victory against international terrorism. America was on the march. The Wrightman administration is protecting you.
Rumors were popping up everywhere, like a digital Whac-A-Mole. Most of them, on the largest sites or feeds, were removed within minutes by the monitors or quickly countered. My favorite came from an anonymous poster on a Facebook Warrior group, which was a hub for active and former combat soldiers. G.I. José claimed that a friend of his on the assault team had told him that the only injury in the attack was one badly wrenched knee, which was caused by a soldier slipping on a pile of dog shit as he was advancing. As his legs went out from under him, he accidently fired his weapon into the air. His squad saw him suddenly fall backward, and hearing shots, assumed he had been hit by fire from the house—and opened up.
No one seemed to know if there had been any firing at all from the house.
The White House released the first official video after one A.M. It was the usual battlefield mess. People advancing, things getting blown up, lots of tracers scratching into the darkness. Then it cut to the aftermath—everything seen through a green night-vision haze. People in hazmat suits were moving cautiously through debris as small fires still popped up, and wisps of smoke curled into the air like geysers, making it look like they were strolling through hell. If anything in the wreckage was recognizable, I sure couldn’t pick it out.
I was looking at it for maybe the fifth time, trying to make some sense of it, when Cher interrupted. “The White House is calling, boss.” I had placed several calls to administration officials. When I started writing, I wanted to be able to include the fact that I had reached out to various people for comment. But I hadn’t really expected any response.
It was the secretary of defense, Rip McCord. That didn’t completely surprise me. McCord and I went back to the sandbox. In the desert he was considered a wild man, an officer who never cut corners, just smashed through them, bringing along anyone with enough guts to take the risks and, if necessary, the blame. A lot of people didn’t like his methods. But I did. He did whatever was necessary to protect his people, even if sometimes his methods weren’t exactly by the book, and that mattered to me. We had done several missions together that remained classified. After he retired, he’d tried to take me with him into his post-military wonderworld. I’d decided to stay in and, as Robert Frost had written, that had made all the difference.
Mostly we’d communicated by rumor and bar tales. But once you spill blood with a guy, that bond never goes away. “How they hangin’, my man?” he asked.
“Still rolling along,” was always a good answer.
We exchanged the necessary banter for several minutes; then he set the rules. He would be identified in any story as “a knowledgeable White House source” but would not be quoted directly. As he began filling in the gaps, it became obvious to me that I was being fed A#1 superspecial White House bullshit. Everybody was a hero, brilliant work, just the beginning. He gave me a few details, the types of weapons the “terrorists” were firing, the guesstimate that there had been as many as eight people in the house, the fact that license plate numbers of every vehicle in the area were being checked and there had been some “interesting” results. He kept shoveling. Mighty Chair recorded it all. I knew it was all bullshit, McCord knew I knew it was bullshit, and both of us knew I was going to have to write it anyway. I wasn’t going to forgo the opportunity to quote “a knowledgeable White House source” even if I knew he was lying. The story would be picked up and reposted nationally, with my byline—good for me, good for the Pro, good for the administration.
I was writing the story when Howie showed up again, reading it over my shoulder. “That’s good,” he acknowledged. “Any of it true?”
I considered that. “Well, the attack did take place tonight.”
Howie chuckled wearily. “You know, it almost makes me nostalgic for the days of real fake news.”
Three nights later, I had a revelation: If I ever write another book, it is going to be entitled Thoughts After Sex: A Personal Memoir. Those postcoital moments might well be when we are the most emotionally vulnerable. Defenses get stripped away and the subconscious sneaks out to play. What you are feeling in those few seconds is as close as you may ever get to touching your soul.
Obviously, that’s the problem with it. The safest thing to do, I’d learned, was to sigh in a way that indicates great satisfaction, then mumble something that includes the word amazing. Best would also be a good word choice. The problem with turning this idea into a book is that I don’t actually remember a lot of those conversations, and it’s an awkward time to take notes. I do know those thoughts have ranged from how soon it would be appropriate to get dressed and leave to what I was feeling as I lay there that night next to Jenny—I could stay right here forever.
Sex was the last piece of the puzzle when I started my second life. I had accepted as a general concept that my life was changed forever, but filling in the details was a day-to-day process. The military has a very good rehabilitation program, unfortunately honed through experience, but it stops short of sex. The staff assured me all my parts were working, which to me offered all the security of a test pilot’s preflight check.
I had zero-point-zero idea what to expect when I got out of the hospital. I was realistic; I knew there weren’t going to be any more moonlit walks on the beach. I did what many people in my situation have done: I compensated. Maybe even overcompensated. I threw myself into new challenges, sometimes literally. When that happened, I picked myself up and tried again. I experimented with new things. I began working out at the gym to strengthen my upper body. My shoulders filled out, I sprouted muscles, but it turned out that the upper body part that most benefited from those workouts was my head. I bought a racing chair and eventually ran three marathons. Just to prove I could do it. I went to work learning how to “do journalism.”
And there was that other unmentionable. I wasn’t quite back to staring at the phone trying to gin up courage to call a woman, but my confidence had taken several steps backward. I was tentative at first about dating, having no experience in how to act or react. Women surprised me, but that was nothing different—women have always surprised me.
Going through that first time, for the second time in my life, was equally anxiety-provoking, then thrilling, and concluded with the same sense of relief. I’m not going to describe it; I’m not good at writing sex scenes. I’ve tried in an aborted novel. My problem was I could never get beyond the awareness that my mother was going to be reading it. Nothing kills a passionate sex scene more than that.
In the days following Detroit, Jenny and I had spoken as often as possible between her meetings and my deadlines. Mostly, though, we communicated by brief messages and emojis (mostly hearts, smiley faces, and an occasional “adult pleasure enhancer,” which looked more like a wired cucumber) just reminding each other we were breathing. But the story was unfolding quickly. The White House carefully controlled the news cycles, releasing just enough information every few hours to maintain momentum. Wrightman humbly refused to take personal credit for the success of the attack, doing so on every network, cable channel, and social media platform. The people inside the house were identified as members of an Al-Qaeda splinter group whose name translated as Children of the Sword. Nobody I knew had ever heard of them, but hey, terrorism obviously was a growth industry. DNA recovered from the charred remains was matched to that of relatives and friends of missing persons, and it was determined that at least eight people had been killed inside the house, possibly more. Two of them were identified as “illegal Somalian immigrants who had overstayed visas and settled undetected in the Detroit area.” The soldier “wounded” in the raid was awarded his Purple Heart in a private ceremony to protect his identity. The administration continued meeting regularly with members of Congress to discuss taking the necessary steps to defend the country while protecting individual rights—which to me sounded about as likely as gift wrapping a cloud.
Jenny Miller had come into my life at the Bernstein bar mitzvah. I had worked up a pretty good sweat doing the hora. When the band struck up the first bars of “Hava Nagila,” I was just another guy in a wheelchair; when it ended, I had become a legend at the Riviera catering hall. I had returned to my seat at the Climate Change table (Rachel Bernstein, Howie’s daughter, was always precocious; “Preparing for the Future” was her bat mitzvah theme) and was wiping my brow with my napkin when Jenny sat down in the empty chair next to me. The first thing she ever said to me was “Well, don’t you give new meaning to rock and roll.”
I gave her my practiced “aw, shucks” smile. “Just in case you’re wondering,” I said, “the only thing I can’t do is dance.”
Jenny Miller’s face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth. Okay, actually that was Jay Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan. The reality is most journalists aren’t very good at florid descriptions. That’s not what we do. Our focus are the police blotter details: height, weight, hair color, complexion, and distinguishing marks. Honestly, I’ve always had difficulty visualizing the heroine. I read that she has “an aquiline nose” or “succulent lips” and “piercing blue eyes,” and I still can’t create an image.
Raymond Chandler did it best when he described his femme fatale as simply “A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
That wasn’t Jenny Miller. Jenny was … still is, I suppose, a brunette. That night her hair just brushed her bare shoulders. She was about five-seven, and I never knew her weight. I estimated it as approximately perfect. Her complexion was radiant. (I remember thinking, No visible tattoos, which called for further investigation.) She had a mischievous mouth that seemed to be sharing a private joke with her twinkling green eyes. She had applied just enough makeup to show she cared, but not enough to make a statement. What impressed me most was that she wore her confidence as if it had been designed by Saint Laurent. That’s style.
“I know who you are,” she said. “You’re the Rolling Stone.”
I nodded. That was the pretty obvious nickname I’d picked up within weeks of starting at the Pro. “I know who you are too,” I said. There was an old saying that Capitol Hill was the place where money married power and gave birth to politicians. The Hill attracts more bright and ambitious young people than Tinder late on a Saturday night. Most of them come here intending to do good, and many of them end up staying long enough to do very well. Eventually the best of them get noticed, and Jenny Miller was hard to miss, even without a wheelchair. It wasn’t just those angular cheekbones; she was the chief of staff for Democratic congresswoman Martha McDonnell, making her at thirty-five (as Cher told me later that night when I asked for her bio) the youngest chief on the Hill. I had spoken with people in that office on many occasions. I believe I might have even spoken with her once. But I took one look at her and realized that she easily could become an important source.
Jenny and I flirted through the night, really savoring the possibilities. There were women for whom my chair was an impediment they couldn’t overcome; I got that, I understood it, there were times I wasn’t too thrilled about it myself. That question was always in the back of my mind. My “can’t dance” line was one of several jokes I could wheel out to cover any discomfort. But I knew it made no difference to Jenny when she asked the band to play “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” and to the cheers of the guests rode along of the back of Mighty Chair, waving her napkin through the air with great bravado, à la Katharine Ross on Paul Newman’s bicycle handlebars in Butch Cassidy.
We approached the possibility of a relationship with the ease of people dipping our toes in peanut butter. I had never been married; she was one-and-done, thank you very much, she told me, determined never to pay psychic alimony again. How can you not love a beautiful woman who tells you, “All I’m looking for is a good meal and a soft pillow”?
We’d finally gotten together in my apartment on the third night after the initial attacks. Here’s something else most people don’t know; the strongest bond in nature exists between the protein avidin and the ligand biotin. Once they find each other, they cannot be torn apart “by extremes of pH, temperature, organic solvents and other denaturing agents.” Or as I like to describe it, tighter even than a rock star and a supermodel. That was us. That was Jenny and me. We weren’t officially anything, but we were bonded more tightly than any known non-covalent interaction!
There. A sex scene my mother will love.
All our frustrations, our fears and our anger, our shades of loneliness and sadness, all of it got released in great bursts of passion until we had nothing left inside. If we had been in a 1950s Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie, the director would cut first to a steaming teapot, followed by a nuclear explosion. And then we lay there, Jenny nestled under my right arm, and in those vulnerable moments we openly discussed our feelings—about politics.
That was the second language we spoke. Both of us loved the complexities, the challenges, and the possibilities of politics. We loved trying to decipher the swirling currents and predict the eddies. Jenny working on the inside, me in an aisle seat. So after sex we had some hard-core politics to catch up on. “There’s a lot of confusion,” she said, brushing back several strands of hair.
“No kidding,” agreed Mr. Cynic. “Everybody’s trying to figure out how to squeeze something out of this.”
She shook her head. “Not everybody. Not Martha, that’s for sure. We’re already trying to schedule hearings to find out why we were so unprepared.”
“Good luck on that. You know that’s not gonna happen,” I predicted. “The last thing Wrightman wants is somebody suggesting he had some responsibility for this.” I kissed her on the top of her head. “Well…” and we said together, “at least he’s not Trump.” Then we laughed, a knowing innocent laughter. She snuggled closer, laying her leg over my groin and settling her breast into my chest. A typically casual, entirely intentional Jenny move.
“So? What?” she wondered, tilting her head and looking up at me through wide-open green eyes.
“The usual,” I admitted. “All of recorded history.”
“Oh, that.” She waved it away.
“Well, you see what’s going on.”
She lifted the sheet and looked down at my resting passion. “Not much,” she reported. Then she said softly, lovingly, “Okay, go ahead and tell me again so everyone reading this book will know that we were in the middle of a crisis that threatened our democracy.” So maybe she didn’t say that, not exactly. What she did do is kiss me and complain, “Your timing is exquisite.” Then she took me in her hand and said seductively, “Hello, little friend.”
Rather than going into details of what then transpired (once again), let me cover those few minutes by explaining what Jenny was referring to; and no, I’m not writing this in hindsight. This was the gist of our conversation: I believed completely in the great American experiment. The concept that people of all races and creeds and religions could be bound together in some degree of harmony by a system of laws. That belief was one of several reasons that I had volunteered to fight for this country. It was worth fighting for.
But I also believed that our uniquely American version of democracy had been in decline for decades. That we were slowly morphing into what we had been fighting. This was a discussion that Jenny and I had had several times. (This was us: a small candlelit table at an out-of-the-way family Italian restaurant, a subtle wine, and a lively discussion about the philosophy of George F. Kennan.)
I argued that politicians had been eating away at our core principles like termites chewing on hidden beams. While they distracted us with temporal issues—capital punishment, for example, which in actuality is never going to affect any of us, unless we have a friend on death row—they had been steadily weakening our constitutional foundations.
One night several months earlier we had gone to hear Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Malinsky lecturing at Georgetown about his new book, Complexities Made Simple. What I remember most about that is the great imitation he did of George Carlin’s explaining the demise of the American Indian. “Just back up a little, please,” he said. “Just a little, little more. One more step. A little bit more, don’t worry about it, just a tiny step, a little more, and more … Next thing you know you’re in North Dakota.”
That was what we were doing to our constitutional safeguards. The irony of it is, of course, that the biggest steps have always been taken in response to an event. To keep the nation together during the Civil War, Lincoln had to ignore the constitutional protections that the North was fighting to make the South respect. In 1941 we went to war to fight dictators—and to do so, it became necessary to give FDR dictatorial powers. To deal with the pandemic, first the Trumpers, then the Democrats treated the Constitution as an inconvenience to be acknowledged and respected, but ignored like an irritating older relative.
Essentially, every time there’s been a crisis, we’ve disregarded the Constitution. And lost just a little more freedom. Just a little more, one more step, a little farther. Vietnam. Wow. Congress voluntarily gave Johnson war powers granted to them in the Constitution. So much for that. 9/11, boom! Next thing you know we’re standing in long lines at airports, smiling into surveillance cameras, and giving away our privacy.
What I wondered was how Wrightman was going to use these attacks to consolidate all the small steps he had already taken. I smelled the stink of fascism.
Jenny asked me to pause here and tell you she thinks I am overreacting. She would tell you herself, but she’s … uh, she’s busy right now.
This slow erosion might have continued apace for several more decades if the internet hadn’t burst into our lives and changed everything. The internet allowed people to find their tribes, to locate people who believed as they did—no matter how sensible or wacko. It allowed small, highly motivated groups to organize and take power away from much larger but complaisant or distracted groups. The result of that was Trump.
Voltaire wrote: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” But this was exactly the type of warning Wrightman would have erased if it had been possible. Several weeks after Wrightman’s inauguration a group of students at Vermont’s John Rogers University occupied the administration building to protest an announced tuition increase. In response, the chancellor said that while he admired their spunk, he abhorred their tactics, and to “crush dissent” he sent in the cops. The kids were carried out and charged with disturbing the peace.
Trump was a proud pussy-grabber, Wrightman turned out to be a quiet power-grabber. He turned this minor incident at Rogers U. into a federal case. “To protect the constitutional right to protest, one of our core freedoms,” he issued a presidential directive allowing the federal government to issue a cease and desist order to any person, business, or institution that attempted or appeared to attempt to take away or limit First Amendment rights. It was a beautiful bit of legalese, giving the government cover to use First Amendment powers to curtail First Amendment rights.
That same type of twisted logic was being applied to the most important freedoms. To guarantee the right to safely demonstrate, for example, Wrightman had limited the size of demonstrations. We were leaking civil liberties like oil from an old Dodge Dart. What bothered me was that as long as their Xbox was working, people didn’t seem to mind.
“You’re exaggerating again,” Jenny said with the usual tolerance in her voice.
She had popped up beside me. “You really think so?”
I frustrated her. Intellectually, I mean. Always did. I used to complain she was much too smart to be such an optimist. She described me as the only person she knew who worried that the sky was falling and my insurance had expired yesterday.
I reminded her about that actual building that did fall on me.
Jenny wasn’t naive. She didn’t necessarily trust Wrightman much more than I did, but at times she was willing to defend him. That was the whole “the country’s in desperate trouble” argument. She wasn’t the lone ranger: a lot of people bought into that. The country was facing potentially catastrophic economic, social, and geopolitical problems. Trump had alienated our allies and surrendered ground to our enemies, and we couldn’t even agree on whether to permit a right turn on red. What we really needed was a human superglue. “If Wrightman can bring us together,” she posited, “then I’ll accept some temporary limitations. I just don’t want to see anybody get hurt.”
We never argued about it; we defended our beliefs, we discussed, we disagreed, we cajoled, but we never argued. We also never reached any conclusions. I wondered, where do you draw the line before you end up in North Dakota? To satisfy my fears she promised that if it ever came to that, she would move there with me—but insisted we have two Franklin stoves in our cabin.
What was true was that immediately after the attacks, the country had rallied to support Wrightman. So it was not surprising that instant polls showed strong support for the Detroit raid, even if no one was quite sure what was accomplished. We sure got ’em! Got who? Them! Way to go!
The administration spent the following few days doing everything possible to link the people who died in that house to the July eleventh attacks. But that just didn’t ring true to me. Their activities were like trying to fit together pieces taken from several jigsaw puzzles: no matter how hard they tried, it just didn’t add up to the picture on the cover of the box. I collected sourced stories, rumors, even obvious fabrications. I read several foreign newspapers on the web and put them together to try to figure out which organization was pushing what story line, and from that determine what the administration wanted people to believe. Whatever was going on, what the administration wanted us to believe it was wasn’t it. They clearly wanted Americans to believe ’twas a famous victory.
In late July a sidebar in the Detroit Free Press caught my attention. The mother of one of the people reportedly killed in the raid, a man who had been identified as Mustafa Haddad, had hired an attorney to initiate a wrongful death suit against the government of the United States. If that wasn’t weird, it definitely was unusual. Families of terrorists rarely sued their assailants.
On a whim I decided to call her. It had the potential to be a good story. A friend in my battle buddy network had a contact at FedEx, who got me her phone number. She answered on the second ring. I introduced myself and started speaking without waiting for a response. To catch her attention, I said a few words in Arabic, basically a noncommittal commiseration: I share your sorrows. I am a big believer in the five-sentence rule: If I could get five sentences into an introduction without the other person hanging up, I’d get my interview. One: My name is … Two: I’m a reporter (always a reporter, never a journalist). Three: I am sorry about … (Or, when appropriate, I was happy to hear that…) Four: I understand you … (whatever action I was calling about). Five, the clincher: Would you tell me about … (your husband, wife, daughter, amazing animal)?
She wanted to talk. There wasn’t a comma of hesitation in her voice. She spoke firmly and clearly with a lilting accent I couldn’t quite pinpoint but recognized as from someplace in North Africa. Too many reporters had banged on her door and shouted nasty questions at her, she said. They had no respect, they had scared her. “Ghouls,” she said, “ghouls.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said somberly, while actually pleased that she considered me sympathetic.
Her lawyer, the cousin who had been born in America and worked very hard, a good man, had helped her file the lawsuit. “They killed my son, mister, they killed my son.” And then she wailed, a long primitive expression of a mother’s pain that instantly transported me to another life, in another place, at another time. “They killed my son.”
The one thing of which she was very certain was that her son was not a terrorist. She repeated that twice, three times. I sat at my desk, eyes closed, absorbing her emotion rather than hearing her cries. Unfortunately, I’d heard similar protests before, and then I’d found weapons hidden under floorboards. That didn’t make her pain any less real. But what was clear is that she wanted me to tell her story to the world. When finally she quieted, I said, with the sensitivity of a fisherman sensing a tug on his reel, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Haddad, but other people don’t believe this. If you want me to tell them about your son, I need your help. I need to know how you can be so certain.”
“My son, he was born in America,” she said, pausing at times to take a calming breath. “He was American. He didn’t care nothing about those people. Crazy people, he said they were. He didn’t go to the mosque or say his prayers. He played the games on the television, that was his love. And his motorcycle. And the girls. All the time I tell him, Mustafa, stop with the girls. He is a handsome boy, my son.”
I let her ramble, let her pour her memories into Mighty Chair’s taping system. The portrait she painted of her son did not resemble the typical terrorist profile. If he had been radicalized, she swore, it was to be against killing innocent people. The Boston Marathon bombing had enraged him. “He screamed at the stupid people who had done it. They make it…”—she fumbled for the right word, easy or nice, remembering his fury—“nice for people to hate us.” He would get angry when others called the bombers martyrs. She lowered her voice and almost whispered, “One time he heard about people planning something and he made a phone call without telling no one his name to stop it.”
She certainly sounded convincing. But in my experience few sons have admitted to their mothers, Yeah, Ma, you’re right. I’m a terrorist. True or not, she certainly believed he was innocent. And as our conversation wound down, I finally found out why: “Here is the truth, mister,” she said. “My son, Mustafa, he was a drug man. What could I do, that’s how he worked. What could I do?” Her son had gotten into the drug business as a fourteen-year-old, making deliveries on his bicycle. Then he started dealing. “But not to children. No time, never. He promised me, never to children. My son was a good boy.” He was making a lot of money, she continued, offering to show me Mustafa’s “money pad,” his notebook. He had bought beautiful things, a beautiful car, a motorcycle. He had bought the house for her. None of it was in his name, though, because the police would know where the money had come from.
I took notes as I listened to her. Not to rely on when I wrote my story, but to remind me of the questions I wanted to ask. The kid was living a big life; he was making money and he had no overt religious beliefs to get in his way. In the background I heard a baby crying. Twice the mother had asked someone to pick up the child. Then it suddenly dawned on me. “Do you need to take care of the baby?” I asked. I figured that was the best way to ask the question.
She responded with a massive sob as her emotions again overflowed. “My grandson…” she started. “Mustafa lived for his son. His boy, his whole life is that boy.”
After I’d thanked her for her time, given her my contact information in case she thought of anything else, and left open the possibility I would call her again, I leaned back and asked Cher to play Night on Bald Mountain. It seemed like the appropriate background music for my thoughts; it was soft and dramatic, loud and threatening. Her words settled in my mind. On balance, I decided, who the fuck knows? To me, it seemed pretty unlikely this guy was a terrorist, but stranger connections had been made. Was it possible? It definitely wasn’t impossible. “Cher,” I said, “transcribe and print, please.” The transcription wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be good enough for me. F or O, I wondered?
One thing for certain: The administration was not going to love this story. If the mother was right, the government of the United States essentially had assassinated her son and everyone else in that house. I could imagine the phone call I was going to get from harmless, lovable Eunie. And who knows, maybe even an in-person scolding from one of her boys.
It could be worse, I thought. I could still be walking down dark streets in Fallujah.
(And within the flick of a Bic I remembered that in actuality that was not possible. So I guess it couldn’t be worse.)