Donald begins packing with one week left to go in Buffalo. He’s become a good enough read of people at West Point to see that Loryn is sinking into emotional fatigue. “It was getting intense, scary,” he says. “She was confused on the inside—she was hurtin’.”
2330 used to mean taps; now it’s the start of another workday, punching in for a long stretch of hours on the telephone. What worries Loryn is Donald not being around; Donald knows they can get past that, he explains how the Army schedule isn’t as harsh as it appears—while, at the back of his mind, he’s struggling to forget everything that lieutenant once told him at Ranger, about how he hardly even saw women anymore. He gives Loryn the soldier promises. “I was desperate by this point,” Donald says. “I started telling her all the good stuff. ‘Do you know how much time I get off, all the holidays, do you know how often I can come back to Buffalo? This is worth it to me.’” At another restaurant, they sit down in the waiting area, and never get off the bench. “Loryn,” he says, “I know how you feel, I know I’ve got to go into the Army, but that doesn’t have to be forever. How do you feel about it? There’s no reason not to try this.”
They spend the last night back at Checkers. Like a good officer, Donald has performed reconnaissance and prepped the area. There’s a bouquet of roses waiting for Loryn, along with a letter explaining that he loves her and how much he wants to continue. If she doesn’t feel the same things, OK, they can end as friends. “I said that’s the whole point of life. There’s one bottom line, either you’re in something one hundred percent, or you’re out.” Loryn answers in the form of a kiss; she drinks, cries, tells him how he should become a writer but she’s ready to date a soldier. Donald drives off to Alabama the next morning.
The plan is to link up with Suppy in Virginia and convoy from there. The landscape washes past him—smokestacks, forests, signs for drive-thru and towns—and it’s all wallpaper, background for Loryn. Every so often he stops to wipe the bug apocalypse off his windshield. He knows he’s crossed South when religious broadcasters crowd the sports talk off the radio. Donald can see this is going to be one of those relationships that eat into a military salary. First hotel he stops at, they’re on the phone together—two beds strung by a wire—until four in the morning.
In Virginia, Suppy waves to Donald from a parking lot. They split a Ryder truck and set out on the last leg. They pass presidential birthplaces, old Indian trails, battlefields. Chickamauga in Tennessee, site of one of the last big Confederate victories in the war. In Alabama the gas pumps are the old slope-shouldered, nondigital type, and girls in flowered dresses sit on cement steps talking on the cell phone. Church signboards: The Lord Gives Strength. One Man Practicing Sportsmanship Is Better Than 50 Men Preaching It. Then they’re past towns where men wear chunky belt buckles with open shirts, cars start looking new again, drivers wear aviator sunglasses and have high-and-tights, and they’re back in the military world, another Army colony. Officers stride the sidewalks with the pilot’s look of having a business relationship with gravity. In Enterprise, home of Fort Rucker, the houses have signs saying Welcome West Point Class of ’99.
Right before flight school, there’s the kind of military foul-up that spins Herzog’s mind back into doubt. Donald had played too much music, sat too close to the amps at too many Allman Brothers concerts with Mark Matty. His hearing isn’t strong enough to fly helicopters, where catching instructions or a rotor spinning funny can make a life-or-death difference. “I thought it was God’s way of telling me I should have gone into the Infantry,” Donald says. But a week later, Donald is cleared. He receives his first pilot instruction. Helicopters sometimes crack up on high-tension lines, blades tangled by the telephone wires that always follow a road. It becomes a flight school slogan, something for the West Point grads to tell each other in the hallway. “Remember—all roads have wires.”
Loryn is supposed to make her first visit in the middle of September. A few days before, she tells Donald about a party at her beach house. The party was attended by her friend Rich. “I wasn’t worried, because there wasn’t anything in her voice to make me worry,” Whitey says. Then she calls again. Rich just told Loryn he has plans, and they involve Loryn and the act of kicking it to the next level. “What’d you say?” Whitey asks, mouth going dry. “I don’t want to be more than friends,” Loryn replies. The edge Rich has over Whitey is one he can’t compete with, the key civilian advantage of proximity. A day later, Loryn calls again. Rich just came by the house to say he’s in love with her.