Now and Again (14 page)

Once he understood the situation, his indecision and doubts vanished. Unless it was the pills that chased them, for suddenly he wasn't worried anymore. Suddenly he felt like Superman, drenched in a downpour of rightness and karma and luck. Above him, the sun was a hot lid on the day. The earth embraced him from below as if he were not quite separate from it, as if he were poised somewhere between what he had been and what he would become. Then he pulled the pin on the grenade, holding the handle tightly in place and tensing his muscles for a run.

He couldn't slow time down, but he could speed it up. He could speed it up by running toward the truck, which floated soundlessly toward him on its cloud of dust like a low-flying desert-colored bird. He couldn't stop the bomb, but he could detonate it prematurely, before it reached the Humvee. And he could improve his accuracy by tossing from close range into the truck bed, where he figured the explosives were packed. In his imagination, the vehicle would sail by, continuing on for another three or four seconds while the fuse burned and while he kept running another three or four seconds past it, putting him outside the primary blast zone if he was lucky and exploding the truck before it reached his buddies. It was the best he could do, given the situation and the fact that he didn't have any more time to come up with a better plan. Time and opportunity were the two most important elements in any escape kit—he had them, he just didn't have enough.

D
anny spent a moment trying to find his binoculars, which would have been useful in assessing the situation, but they weren't around his neck and they hadn't fallen to the floor. He slid out of the truck and took cover behind it before shouldering his rifle and firing frantically at the wall before settling down and aiming, which helped to pin down whoever was there even if he didn't hit them.

The seconds ticked by. Whenever one of the Iraqis showed himself, Harraday would pop off a round, or Danny would, but then Harraday's big gun went silent—jammed or out of ammo—so now Harraday was crouching in the gun turret and blasting away with his M4, which is when Danny noticed a vehicle that looked like a pickup truck approaching from the east. Danny figured the truck would have to leave the road at some point to get around the debris, but it didn't leave the road. And it didn't slow down. It was then that he noticed how the truck was riding very low to the ground and how it was heading straight toward Tishman and Kelly's Humvee. “Incoming!” yelled Danny, but his head was pounding and he couldn't even hear himself.

The best thing he could do was to stop the truck before it reached the Humvee and detonated, which was what was going to happen if he didn't do something quickly. He rammed another round into the chamber and steadied his arm. He remembered to breathe. He remembered that his left eye was dominant. He remembered to flip the safety. Now that he had a plan, his hands were weirdly steady. His head was clear as glass. He could have been a sniper, he was so cool and controlled. As he squeezed the trigger, elation flooded through him because he knew even before the windshield shattered that it was a money shot and that his buddies in the Humvee were safe because of him. The driver pitched forward. The pickup swerved and abruptly stopped. And then the feeling changed into whatever was the opposite of elation as his laser focus opened out again and he saw that something had detached from the roadside and taken human form. The figure had time to run a few steps farther up the road before the truck exploded and with it, Pig Eye and everything predictable about the world.

P
enn Sinclair woke with a start to the enormity of what he had done. He lay sweating on his cot for over an hour before rising and dressing carefully in the dark. By the time the pink desert light filtered in at the plastic window, he had written a two-page statement outlining what had happened between the announcement that the tours were being extended and the encounter with the IED.

The men had been insubordinate. He had worried about losing control and overreacted. He had justified his actions by telling himself that the school was a priority, as was getting the supplies up the road for when the orders came through. But the truth was, he hadn't asked enough questions or adequately assessed the intelligence or understood the implications of the surge for road-clearing crews or the general confusion that accompanied the implementation of any new strategy. He re-read the statement and thought again about how facts weren't much different from fabrications. But it was the best he could do.

At 06:30 he knocked at the door of the colonel's quarters. Falwell was blessed with a permanent interrogatory look that made people answer questions before he could ask them. When he opened the door, Penn wished him good morning and handed the two sheets of paper across. Falwell's expression turned from Who's bothering me so early? to What the fuck is this?

“It's my statement, sir.”

Statement? asked the look.

“Confession, rather. To attach to the after action report.”

Falwell opened his mouth for the first time and said, “I was just about to have coffee. Why don't you come in and join me, Captain.”

Penn didn't want coffee. He didn't want to sit down next to a picture of Falwell's teenaged daughters or notice that in the picture, the daughters were lounging on a beach holding some kind of fruity drink while two dark-skinned people with trays hovered behind them and smiled for the camera. But he found himself sitting with a coffee cup balanced on his knees and blurting out the story of how he had sent the convoy before receiving the orders and how, once he had received them, he had allowed a unit to continue north to deliver a load of supplies to the school. “My actions were almost certainly the reason the convoy was attacked.”

“Almost certainly,” said Falwell.

“Certainly, sir.”

“How many things in life are almost certain, Captain? Death and taxes, crabs—that's about it.”

“Likely, then.”

“I see,” said Falwell. “Was it yesterday? Or was it the day before? Or maybe it was Wednesday of last week or the week before that.”

“Yesterday,” said Penn, his eyes straying to the daughters, who wore oversized sunglasses and strapless dresses and the confident smiles of girls who knew how to get what they wanted. “It was the day after the troops found out they weren't going home.”

“My point is that it could have been any day. It's too dangerous to send supply convoys every day of the goddamned week. But, of course, it's also too dangerous not to send them because that would hang the guys on the front lines out to fucking dry.”

The colonel swallowed a slug of coffee and said,
“The line between disorder and order lies in logistics.”

It was Sinclair's turn to give Falwell a questioning look.

“Sun Tzu,” said the colonel.

“But I sent them before the orders came through.”

“I heard the men were causing trouble,” said Falwell. “And the supplies got to where they were needed way ahead of schedule. It's conceivable that the entire convoy would have been ambushed if it had started later. You might have saved something even worse from happening. Did you ever think that those first trucks only got through because of you?”

“Five of my men were killed and others were injured. What could be worse than that?”

Penn blinked and lowered his eyes. When he raised them again, the colonel was blinking too and the questioning look was gone.

“No person on earth is sorrier about that than me. No one. Not a single fucking person cares more about his troops than I do. But it sounds like they were out of line and you tried to control them. You just couldn't control the Iraqis. If you could, you'd be sitting here instead of me.”

The rising sun cast the room in a warm and almost otherworldly glow so that with a little effort, Penn might have convinced himself that he would walk outside to find a row of beach umbrellas and smiling waiters peddling the illusion that the world was a beautiful place and that those who weren't yet happy would be after another mai tai or a hot stone massage or a leisurely swim in the blue-black infinity-edge pool.

“So, what?” asked the colonel. “You want to be punished, is that it? Well, that won't solve a goddamned thing.”

“I made two bad decisions in a row. First to send the convoy before receiving the orders, and then to split the platoon.”

“And why were those bad decisions?”

“Because they led to unnecessary deaths.”

“The end justifies the means, then? An action is good if it leads to a state of affairs that is better than the one you started with? Setting aside the well-worn tropes about torturing or killing some people in order to save others—we've all heard those arguments a thousand times—how does focusing on the consequences provide guidance about what a person should do? Here you are, assessing your options, and you decide that sending the convoy will accomplish more than not sending it. But in the end it doesn't, so now you determine that your action was bad. The problem with this theory is that you can only see what you ought to have done after the fact.”

“In any case, I want to take responsibility for it. And I want to keep from doing any more harm.”

“There's an easy answer, then,” said the colonel. “Go ahead and shoot yourself now. Or join a monastery.”

Penn tried to take a sip of his coffee, but the cup was shaking in his hand, so he put it back down and checked out the daughters again, calmed somewhat by their innocence or whatever it was that allowed them to look so alert and oblivious at the same time. One of them was prettier than the other, but he could tell that the second one had bigger—well, the word that came to him was “balls.” She reminded him of Louise, except that Louise would have managed to convey that behind the perky smile was an important itinerary, and only by rigidly sticking to it had she carved out that moment of relaxation and fun. Still, they had the same assured look, a look he recognized because he used to have it himself. He owed Louise a letter or an email, but he didn't know what he would say to her or what he would want her to say in reply.

“Call me a pragmatist,” said the colonel, “but I don't believe there's a single, unified answer to any of the questions we might ask ourselves about how a person decides what to do. Should I be concerned with the consequences? Of course I should. Mostly I don't lie, but when the Nazis come knocking, I don't tell them where Anne Frank is hiding. I take my best shot given the available time and information—that's the thing I'm paid to do. Anything more than that is above my pay grade, and certainly above yours.”

“But if I'd waited a little longer, thought a little harder…”

“There are the thinkers and there are the doers, Sinclair. The thinkers sit around in their libraries talking in circles about what is morally required or permitted—you can't judge a person without considering his actions, and you can't judge actions without considering consequences. But consequences can't be predicted with any accuracy, so you talk about intentions—and where does all that mumbo jumbo leave us? It leaves us exactly where we are. Someone has to be out here on the front lines doing something about all the shit in the world, and that's us. We're the doers, Sinclair. We don't have the luxury of waiting until we've got the theory all worked out. While those guys are trying to come up with answers—and don't forget, they've been trying for thousands of years—life is happening all around us.”

“And death,” said Penn.

“Which is a really lousy part of life,” said the colonel.

“It's not really part of life,” Penn started to say, but he wasn't sure of his ground, so he stopped.

The colonel got up and poured himself another cup of coffee. He looked at Penn and then past him at the scratched plastic window and the yard where groups of soldiers had started to move about, their faces glowing in the morning light as if lit from within.
“To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing,”
he said.

“Aristotle?” asked Penn.

“Elbert Hubbard, whoever the hell that is.”

The colonel rose and moved toward the door. The morning light hit the crevices of his face, but when he turned, his features were erased by shadows. “I'm going to be perfectly honest with you, Sinclair. I don't much like confessions.”

“Sorry sir.”

“Do you know why I don't like them?”

“No sir.”

“They create problems is why. And I think you'll agree we've got problems enough.”

“Yes sir,” said Penn, gesturing toward the pages Falwell was holding but hadn't read. “Anyway, it's all in there.”

“Which computer did you write this on?”

“My personal computer, sir.”

“Are there other copies?”

“No sir.”

“Good.” Falwell walked to where a waste receptacle was nestled in a corner of the room. He put the pages in the receptacle and lit a match, and they both watched as the paper burned. “You didn't email this to anybody, did you? You didn't save it on a disk?”

“No sir.”

“See that you don't. You go delete that file and then you empty the trash bin on the computer and then you never mention this to anybody again. And when the incident report is written up, make sure it's routed through me.”

“Yes sir,” said Penn. Then he added, “I think I cared too much about the school. And I cared too much about how I looked to the other officers. I let those things overshadow my duty to my men. That's the thing I can't forget.”

“You sent some troops on a mission that might or might not have been poorly timed, which had the side benefit of letting some hotheads cool off. The orders changed and you adapted the best you could according to the information you had at the time. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, Sinclair. But I'm glad you told me about this. I'll write a press release. We'll inform the next of kin.”