36

O Gloria!

It was the promised Saturday. The recruiter was taking him to take the oath. Corey was looking at the ocean. They were driving up the Southern Artery along the marshes on the shore.

“Not getting cold feet, are you?”

“No,” Corey said. “Hell no.”

They crossed the river into Dorchester.

He thought:

Let’s say you make it, get through Hell Week—and then the further training, where you’re tested at every evolution, facing constant attrition, the constant pressure to wash out of the most ruthless meritocracy on earth (so-called by a former member); the hazing, the never-ending eat-shit-new-guy attitude, the training evolutions that send people to the hospital, the dives that kill people, forcing gases into their tissues, sending them to the hospital in comas with bloody brain swellings; the helo crashes, the quick funerals on deck and back to training, the unit brawls, the punch-outs in the confined space of a van on the way to a range, the coat hanger brandings, blood pinnings, young-wife-gangbangs and other rites that bring warriors closer at the expense of all else that is holy; not to mention the ever-harder training, the stress positions, the seven thousand flutter kicks in boots while being hosed down with ice water, the underwater blackouts and CPR resuscitations; the deliberate, planned, seemingly sadistic capriciousness of the instructors who are conditioning you to the nature of war, inflicting frustration on you to see if you break, compelling you to stand a microscopic inspection of your person and your gear, finding one speck of lint and failing you, trashing your entire room, dumping all your uniforms and equipment in the mud, including your personal effects, and forcing you to clean everything from scratch and stand inspection again—on no sleep, never any sleep, because war is a sleepless adventure—and on the threat of being canned from the team and sent back to the fleet, all your dreams over, to serve out your enlistment stuck on a destroyer, breathing diesel fumes, getting fat with nowhere to run or swim, wearing a Dairy Queen hat and bell-bottom jeans. Then you go home from that, work as a mechanic in a shitty garage, marry a woman who doesn’t like or respect you, get even fatter, get cancer and die.

Let’s say—and we know it’s unlikely—but let’s say he discovers he’s one of the rare men who can get through Hell Week, and he finds himself on the team, six months into advanced training, swimming with a rebreather and laying mines on the hulls of sunken training ships in the vast green sun-dappled underwater realm—the sea warm at the surface, then cooling as he sinks deeper, big black hard rubber government-issue fins on his feet, giving him unexpected propulsion every time he kicks. He has seen the weird bubble of air and been tossed by the turbulence that results when you set off a mine underwater; all the men have. They’ve swum twenty miles between islands, pushed jeeps and logs uphill for exercise, killed wild pigs and roasted them on the beach for dinner. On dares, they’ve eaten raw snakes. He’s here with them, in this strange place that no man belongs except a born soldier, and he’s arrived here to earn the respect of new fathers—such as the stocky sergeant with a short mustache, who will say, “We’re the baddest people around. I’ve killed, like, twenty people.” It’s the life of a man standing on a high wire, swinging his arms to stabilize his balance. How long can he last? Privately, secretly, he and others may ask themselves if they truly belong here. It is such a strange blue edge of the breathable atmosphere. But some men want to breathe it; they seem to show no fear of going even further, right out into space, where they know they will die.

By now he has experienced the competition and the likes and antipathies of his comrades, and, like them, he lives with the constant pressure to perform up to expectations that are both ruthlessly, corporately professional—and primordial.

And, today, he jumps out of an airplane. In the air, he has the extraordinary sensation of jumping after feeling that it is both impossible and expected—one fear next to the other, the fear of death next to the greater fear, the greater impossibility of not doing what is expected—as one man after another gets slapped on the shoulder and told to jump out of the plane in his helmet (essentially a skateboarder’s helmet) and goggles and black chute rig.

And so he’s falling. It’s terrible—like so many things they do. The body wasn’t meant for this—the falling body keeps expecting land beneath it—but the body can be made to do it anyway.

The gale tears his cheeks away from his mouth, which he clamps shut. The hurricane wind flogs his dull green jumpsuit. It reaches its fingers around his arms and legs, which have been trained to do thousands of push-ups and lunges, and tugs them enough to remind him that he’s tiny, that he can be pulled limb from limb by the sky. He’s balanced through physical control on top of a column of air that could obliterate him.

He cannot move the world, but he can move himself; he can, to an extent, control himself—to a greater degree than he once thought possible—but not absolutely. Accidents will happen. He and others will make mistakes—flip in the air, get caught in turbulence—and have to right themselves using techniques the jump-booted instructors taught them: “You’re gonna doggone spread-eagle your doggone selves and do a college-boy roll. Why? ’Cause college boys are smart. That’s why.”

They are taught to keep track of their fall, to count, and how to breathe.

For a few moments during his free fall, he’s alone and can briefly forget the unrelenting pressure of his profession. Now, he gets to see the land and the curved horizon—from the viewpoint of a demigod or a man about to die were it not for his technology. It’s much like the view from a commercial airplane. Even without the window glass between him and this bright cold world, even in the open air, the vista below looks misty and almost unreal. The miles of vapor in the air make the distant horizon look soft. The glowing sky ventures over the earth’s edge onto the sea—a fuzzy golden peach about to roll over a blue table, crushing under it minuscule fishing trawlers and tanker ships. Meanwhile, the ocean’s wave-scored surface drives out to the horizon and beyond, like an endless conveyor belt set to death metal played by Viking berserkers, whipping their hair up and down.

He sees the blessed white line of the ocean where it meets the land; and he sees how the beach slides below the water and stretches out to sea, a downward-grading terrain, which appears turquoise until it drops away into opaque blue darkness. If you drained the sea away, you’d see the dinosaur hills and canyons of the Dakotas.

His eye takes in the land, which is in vivid, sharp relief. Plummeting closer by the second, he’s still ten thousand feet above it. The high definition of what he sees dizzies him: the super-clear rooftops and the man-made world of rectangular boxes—houses, hangars, storage sheds, trucks, containers; hoses, tanks, and pipelines; the violin wires of power lines strung for miles by human hands, by men on cranes and ladders in safety glasses, dealing with harnessed lightning, being very careful.

He sees the sectors of the land: the forest where they have trained to protect the country and its wealth, while getting eaten by mosquitoes; the open fields, one of which is the drop zone; and the farms—the entire economy, agriculture and power production, dirt roads leading to well-engineered highways, and trucks moving along them into the sun, shipping tons of frozen meat, oil and broccoli to people who will consume it.

The land is wealth. You can see this truth from the sky. It has been used and tended, divided into squares bounded by straight roads, trimmed, cultivated, watered, rid of pests, tamed and controlled through industry and hard labor. He sees a tractor working across it—from up here a tiny intricate toy that he would have never been able to stop studying if he had owned it as a child.

At the borders of the tended land, he sees more forest, wild areas, marshes and the saltwater curdling up in a scummy estuary inside a hooked finger of brown terrain where it wouldn’t be wise to swim. He understands that when they are deployed this is precisely where they will go, trying to swim and run and maneuver while wearing protective suits, among rusting barrels of rotting sewage and nuclear waste. The muddy earth is going to peel open in his future and he’s going to see rioters tearing buildings apart with their bare hands, ripping out the boards, smashing the windows, hurling the desks down marble stairs, scattering clouds of documents, flinging computers into walls, trailing wires—flinging a screaming woman bodily out into the street. They drag her outside in the stench and heat ripple of burning tires, pour oil on her, make her drink it, bring newspapers and tires and leaves from the underbrush and set her on fire, chanting and clapping, push her down into the ditch, and heap more burning trash on her. She cries and they laugh.

They drag a man out of the building in a tie and a Western dress shirt drenched bright red with blood and kick him in the back, knocking his glasses off, and throw him in the fire, saying, “Here’s a man to keep you warm!”

And the brush crackles, burning. And the shouting boys with rags tied around their heads roll tires down on the man and woman, who suddenly comes alive, slapping at the smoke coming from her hair, before slumping and rolling down into the smoking leaves. The boys hit their victims with sticks, to discourage them from trying to beat the flames out.

He will attend a PowerPoint briefing on board an aircraft carrier. A man’s face appears onscreen—a so-called high-value target, a rebel leader, an insurgent—a man from a different people, not Boston Italian but black and bearded—but hearing what the man has done, he’ll recognize his father and say to the confusion of a colleague, “That’s a Leonard.”

The rebel leader comes from West African bureaucratic parentage and got his degree at Virginia Tech, where he felt alienated. He tells his followers to roast and eat the flesh of their victims.

“I get that,” say the SEALs, because they are warriors too.

The politicals and the advisors come into the briefing room—a genderless group in suits. You distinguish them not by gender but by competence and sympathy, though most of them are somewhat muted, repressed and cold, by dint of corporate culture.

But the warriors are cold too, ice-cold professionals. They don’t indulge in lightheartedness until they have a break in their crushing deployment cycles, most of them dealing with chronic pain, hernias, bad shoulders, stress fractures, tropical infections, STDs, nightmares they don’t admit to, bad backs, lost wives, estranged sons, no cartilage left in the knees—especially the older ones—they don’t laugh that much anymore. And the young ones are all ambition; they have nothing to smile about either.

A helicopter lands on deck, and our president enters the briefing room—our first woman, a woman from South Philadelphia who went to law school—and everyone stands up, and the team salutes their commander in chief. She listens as an admiral with short neat white hair and a wedding ring on his finger lays out the operation and predicts its probable outcome. She asks a question or two, nods, and gives the order to go ahead. She closes a folder, stands up and leaves, followed by an aide carrying a briefcase, and the rest of her core staff. The mission is a go.

Sitting in the briefing, he knows that, according to some, he and his team are there to project American power onto foreign lands and defenseless people. Probably it’s absolutely true—even though it’s complicated, too complicated to say for sure. They also want to help. But the government is enormous—it’s far bigger than a couple of highly motivated guys who can swim for days and do a lot of push-ups—so who knows what it will accomplish in the end. Thousands of people with competing agendas are running it. Whatever he’s a part of—call it war—it’s going to eat up a lot of people—and their homes and land—and money, oh the money!, so much money, so staggeringly much money—and time and energy and paper and ink and electricity and gas and food and marriages and men—before anyone sees the humanitarian payoff. How you see the use of force probably depends on who your father is.

As they unfold, these events will be debated on the Internet. Much later, they’ll be analyzed by a scholar who has studied the Greeks and Moghuls, working fanatically day and night at her laptop while listening to the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man”—believing that her own sex and destiny is to absorb all of history, going back to the Stone Age, the age of cave paintings, and express in clear, forceful language the patterns she sees in human affairs.

My mother could have done that, he thinks. She could have overcome herself.

O Gloria!

And they arrive at MEPS and he goes inside with the Navy man and does what he says. There’s a giant American flag on the wall. After stripping to his underwear and seeing the doctor who measures his arches, Corey lines up with the other young men and, holding his spine straight, swears in.