IT WAS NEARLY evening, about a month before Dog Company’s date with Wardak, and Corporal Joseph Coe sat downstairs in the company spaces. His uniform was recruit-poster perfect, which made sense, since he was reporting from recruiting duty.
Coe studied the sparse space. A big conference table surrounded with plastic chairs. Clipboards with required reading tacked across the wall in precision ranks. In-country photos of platoon-sized groups of men in desert ACUs,7 weapons brandished, astride and front of Humvees. Ramadi pictures, Coe guessed.
He wasn’t nervous… but he was nervous. He knew the company was deploying to combat again in just a month. Coe looked down, straightened his tie. Another corporal—a short, stocky guy in charge of in-processing—walked up and pointed at Coe’s uniform. “They’re not gonna like that.”
Coe glanced down. The corporal’s index finger was aimed at his recruiter badge.
“Okay,” Coe said. He reached up, ripped off the badge, and put it in his pocket.
“And they’re definitely not gonna like that.”
Now he was pointing to Coe’s corporal patch, the insignia designating him as an E-4. After recruiting school, he had been automatically promoted to corporal—it was part of the deal. Better to have a little more flash on your uniform when you’re trying to get America’s best and brightest to sign on the dotted line, raise their right hands, and swear to defend the Constitution so help them God.
But Coe knew what the other corporal was saying: I’ve looked at your service jacket. You’ve been in for four years, you’ve got an infantry MOS,8 but you’ve never been in the real infantry. You may as well be a brand-new private.
The corporal moved away. Without hesitation, Coe ripped the stripes off his sleeves. Now he looked like an E-1. And, with his baby face, probably like he was just out of high school.
When ordered, Coe appeared in the doorway of 3rd Platoon’s office and braced himself for a heavy dose of Omigod, a useless cherry private.
“Private Joseph Coe, reports as ordered,” he said.
SFC Shon Haskins was sitting at a desk, his back to the right-hand wall, the desk facing out into the room. The room had no windows, but Haskins had had someone draw a window on the wall with chalk, complete with blue curtains and scenery “outside.” He had grown up on a six-acre farm in central Washington and wanted a view.
LT Donnie Carwile was half seated on the front corner of Haskins’s desk, right boot on the floor, left swinging casually. Fit and handsome, Carwile was both a former cop and prior enlisted. That made him an older lieutenant, and he seemed to Coe to emit a laid-back vibe.
Haskins looked up at Carwile, eyebrows raised. “Joe Coe? Sir, did we seriously just get a private named Joe Coe?”
“Sounds like we did, Sergeant.” Carwile regarded Coe genially. “Do push-ups,” he said.
Coe assumed the position and began flexing his arms. Up, down, up, down.
Carwile: “Where you from, Joe Coe?”
“Kind of all over, sir.” Up, down. “Grew up part-time in Ohio and part-time in North Carolina, sir.”
Carwile could relate to that. A Mississippi native, his parents had divorced before he was six, each remarrying after just a year. For six years, Donnie shuttled back and forth between his real mom and her new husband, and his real dad and his new wife.
Coe was still banging out push-ups. “Okay, you can get up,” Haskins said.
Coe unfolded himself and stood at attention. For the first time, he noticed that both the lieutenant and the sergeant had wads of tobacco tucked in their lips.
Carwile raised a Gatorade bottle to his mouth and spit. “At ease, Coe. Brand-new private?”
“No, sir.”
“What was your last assignment?”
“Recruiting duty, sir.”
“Recruiting?” Haskin said in mock disbelief. “Oh my God! Get back down, Coe!”
Carwile laughed. Coe dropped and resumed the push-ups.
“How long you been in the Army, son?” Carwile said.
“Four years, sir.”
“What did you do before recruiting?”
“Tested new weapons systems at the 1-29th, Fort Benning.”
Up, down, up, down. Coe’s PT scores had always been off the charts, so he wasn’t winded. Perhaps this impressed Haskins, because the sergeant let him up.
“Well, L.T., what are we gonna do with young Private Coe here?”
“Your call, Sergeant,” Carwile said.
“Why don’t we make him a driver? I just moved Ochoa to gunner. It’d be cool to have a driver named Joe Coe.”
Without prompting, Coe dropped to the floor and started pumping out push-ups on his own, this time even faster.
Surprised, Carwile laughed again. “You do know how to drive, don’t you, Coe?”
“Yes, sir!” Up, down, up, down. “But my driver’s license is suspended.”
Once again, Carwile burst out laughing. “Holy shit, Sergeant! A weapons-testing recruiter with no combat experience and a suspended license! He’ll fit right in!”
The next day, Carwile, the former cop, telephoned the North Carolina jurisdiction where Coe had been nabbed for—seriously—doing 30 in a 25. Given that his driver’s license was needed in service to his country, North Carolina was willing to let it go. Haskins also “promoted” Coe back to E-4, and he was wearing a specialist insignia—instead of corporal—by his first full day with 3rd Platoon.
SPC Paul Conlon reclined on his barracks bunk, a laptop propped on his legs, updating a document he’s been working on for some time. He called it Synopsis. Conlon leaned back and stared at the ceiling for a moment, then refocused on the computer screen and let his fingers go to work.
I don’t know if I am making the right choices, but I would like to think that I am. So much is happening to me, both big and small. My life’s happening. It’s moving at the slowest rate, somewhere along the rate of continents. I know that in time I’ll be able to see the progress I made, but sometimes I wish I could fast-forward to the middle of my life.
There had been a time in his late teens when Conlon had been sure he wasn’t making good choices. A brief and tumultuous marriage that didn’t work out. A stint in Marine Corps boot camp cut short because of an injury. After that, he cast about for some direction in life. He applied to Franklin Pierce College and was awarded a scholarship for writing. He’d written all his life, loved art and music, taught himself to play guitar. Studying on a writing scholarship seemed like a natural fit, but somehow it didn’t feel natural.
When Conlon received the acceptance letter and scholarship, he had sat down with his mom, Maria, a tiny, tough New Englander who had raised two sons alone. “Is this really what you want to do?” she said.
“No,” he told her. “I was doing it for you.”
That had been just a few months ago. Conlon had joined the Army in the fall of 2007, gone to boot camp at Fort Benning, and landed at Fort Campbell, assigned to the famed 101st Airborne. His unit was set to deploy in just a few weeks, but he wanted to see his family one more time before he went. He’d been playing with the idea of sneaking up to Cape Cod and buying his mom a gift, something really special. He’d have to talk to his aunt Victoria about it, get her to help him. Conlon looked at the computer again, thought some, tapped the keys.
I want to know who I’m going to be when I’m almost thirty.
Am I going to have earned medals? Am I going to be remarried? Am I going to have children that look up to me? Will I have even made anything of myself?
He looked hard at the screen, decided the answer was yes, and typed some more:
Give me five to ten years and I promise to have made something of myself. Somebody will have taken note.