The Fifth Act, page 9
His favorite restaurant, in Venice, was on the rooftop of the Hotel Danieli. It overlooks the mouth of the Grand Canal. Months before—when the Afghan government still held Kabul—my wife had made a dinner reservation for us here. Neither of us has slept much the past few nights, and we’ve had full days with our children. We consider canceling our booking and staying in. Because the restaurant was her father’s favorite, I ask my wife whether he would’ve kept the booking or stayed in. She says unequivocally that he would never think to miss a dinner at the Danieli.
We sit on the rooftop. The night is perfect, warm and clear. The view over the canal is spectacular. The Salute, with its domed basilica, sits diagonally across the water from us on the Punta della Dogana. Carved into its lit-up facade are four ornate statues of the four apostles turned saints: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Each sits in a perch above the basilica’s entrance. Looking across the water at the saints, I know my wife feels close to her father here, and we talk about him. His love of travel. His love of learning. “To follow knowledge like a sinking star” was a bit of Tennyson he quoted fondly. He loved his home, his family. But he was restless too.
My wife tells me—not for the first time—of some of the ways that I remind her of him. It is, of course, flattering to be so favorably compared to her father. Sitting on this rooftop, I imagine him here at around my age, launched into his second career, into his second life, with his beautiful wife beside him and this ancient and singular city spread below like a land he’d conquered in his youth.
His war was fought by the Greatest Generation. My war was fought primarily by the Millennial Generation. A Marine turned cop I once met, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, told me that the reason he’d enlisted, in 2009 at age seventeen, was because of his reaction to 9/11 eight years before. When I pointed out that this seemed like a rather dramatic reaction for a nine-year-old to have had, he’d said, “There’s a stigma around millennials, but people forget that millennials fought America’s longest wars as volunteers.”
I was born in 1980, which, depending on your definition, might make me a millennial, but I’ve never felt like one. I mentioned this once to another friend of mine, a former bomb technician who’d fought in Iraq. He’s about my age. He said he’d never felt like a millennial either, so he’d come up with a different generational criterion: if you were old enough to have had an adult reaction to the September 11 attacks, you’re not a millennial. By that criterion, I’m not a millennial after all. But neither is my friend, the Marine turned cop. At nine years old, he’d had a distinctly adult reaction: he’d decided to enlist, and eight years later he’d gone through with it, convincing his parents to sign an age waiver. Wars, which were once shared as generational touchstones, are no longer experienced the same way in America because of our all-volunteer military. In the past, did this make the return home less jarring? Perhaps so. I’d rather be part of a lost generation, I think, than be the lost part of a generation.
In 2017, in an effort to shape generational memory, Congress passed the Global War on Terrorism War Memorial Act, which authorized the construction of a monument on the National Mall. One of the bill’s cosponsors was Representative Seth Moulton. Seth and I are contemporaries from the Marines, and not long after the bill’s passage, he and I took a run past some of the potential sites for the memorial on the mall. We’d met in front of the Longworth House Office Building early on a muggy July morning. Seth had been wearing an old desert-brown Under Armour shirt from his Iraq days. We’d jogged west on the south side of the mall, skirting the vast lawn along with the other joggers as we progressed toward the Lincoln Memorial. When I asked him how he might design a memorial to our wars, he laughed, saying, “In another life I would’ve liked to have been an architect.” I pressed him on the question. He was, after all, a cosponsor of the legislation. If this memorial came to be, it’d be in large part due to his efforts. Eventually, he settled on “It should be something that begins with idealistic goals, and then spins off into a quagmire. It will need to be a memorial that can remain endless, as a tribute to an endless war.”
A memorial to an endless war is an interesting prospect. It’s been said that war is a phenomenon like other inevitable, destructive forces of nature—fires, hurricanes—although war is, of course, a part of human nature. Perhaps for the right artist, this will be an opportunity to make the truest war memorial possible, a monument to this fault in our nature.
If I had my way, I would get rid of all America’s war memorials and combine them into a single black wall of reflective granite, like Maya Lin’s winning entry (number 1,026) for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
I’d place the wall around the Reflecting Pool, beneath the long shadow of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, the wall descending into the earth like something out of Dante. Etched into the wall would be names, and the very first would be Crispus Attucks, a black freeman shot dead by redcoats at the Boston Massacre. From there the wall would slope downward, each death taking it deeper into the earth, the angle of its descent defined by 1.3 million names, our nation’s cumulative war dead. The wall itself would be endless. When a new war began, we wouldn’t erect a new monument. We wouldn’t have debates about real estate on the mall. Instead, we’d continue our descent. (If there’s one thing you learn in the military, it’s how to dig into the earth.) Deeper and deeper our wars would take us. To remember the fresh dead, we would have to walk past all the ones who came before. The human cost would be forever displayed in one monumental place, as opposed to scattered disconnectedly across the mall.
The memorial would have a real-world function too. Imagine if Congress passed legislation ensuring that every time a president signed a troop deployment order, he or she would have to descend into this pit. There, beside the very last name—the person most recently killed in defense of this country or its interests—would be a special pen, nothing fancy, but this pen would be the only pen by law that could sign such an order.
It’s been some time since I’ve thought about that run on the mall with Seth. My wife and I are sitting on the rooftop of the Danieli, talking about our children, when my phone rings. The caller ID reads Unknown. Typically, I wouldn’t answer at dinner. But the past few days have been anything but typical. My wife waits patiently as I take the call. “Hello?”
“Hey, man, it’s Seth. Listen, I’m in Kabul, at HKIA.” Seth had—along with Congressman Peter Meijer—controversially hopped on a military flight. The two wanted to see the situation for themselves. “If you need anything,” he adds, “I’m going to be here for the next few hours and might be able to help.”
If only Seth had arrived last night. He might have been able to get one of the airport gates open for us. After that failure, we haven’t scheduled an attempt to enter the airport tonight, and will not, until we find a more reliable way to get through the gates, one that doesn’t rely on a convoy that presents such a large and dangerous target. Seth is earnest in his desire to help. I imagine I’m one of dozens of similar calls he’s making. He says that if anything changes, I should hit him up on Signal. He’ll do whatever he can. I’m glad he’s made the trip and tell him so.
“Who was that?” asks my wife after I hang up.
“Seth. He’s in Kabul.”
The psychic disconnect of where we are versus where Seth has called from imposes a brief silence. Then my wife says, “Do you think he’s okay?” She doesn’t express the nature of her concern with any specificity, but she doesn’t have to. She has seen over the past few days how the war has tugged me back into its orbit. She has seen the same among friends of ours who are veterans. And now, with Seth, she’s seen a veteran not only psychically return to Afghanistan but physically return there as well. Granted, he sits on the House Armed Services Committee, so one might argue he isn’t a veteran returning to war but rather a member of Congress executing the oversight duties of his office. But what really differentiates Seth isn’t the office he holds, but that he had access to a flight, the same flight so many of us want to board so we might return to Afghanistan to finish our war, to count ourselves present in this, its final act.
The final act of this war has been more difficult than the final act of my other war, in Iraq. When in 2014 cities like Fallujah fell to the Islamic State, it didn’t have nearly the same emotional impact as watching the Taliban blitzkrieg through Afghanistan. Not long after Kabul fell, I was on the phone with another friend, Josh, a Naval Academy graduate. He’d also fought in Fallujah and then went on to fight in western Afghanistan. The two of us were struggling to understand our disparate reactions to the ends of these two wars. We had served in the same Marine special operations unit and had advised the same group of Afghan commandos within one year of each other. Our experiences in the Corps tracked closely. We’d fought in the same battles, earned the same campaign ribbons, and had many of the same mentors and friends. We also had sons who were around the same age. The ostensible reason for our call that day was to coordinate the logistics of a long-planned trip to take our two sons to Annapolis to watch Navy play Air Force in football on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, a game that would now take on a very different resonance given recent events in Afghanistan.
“Has this been harder for you than Iraq?” I’d asked Josh.
“Definitely harder.”
“Why is that?”
Although Josh and I had a great deal in common, one area where our experience differed was that Josh had been medically retired from the Marines. He’d already earned two Purple Hearts when he was wounded a third time, after an A-10 Thunderbolt flying overhead had fired its 30 mm cannon off target. Fragmentation from the cannon’s rounds nearly cost Josh his right leg below the knee. To walk he wears a brace. But the reason Josh gave had nothing to do with his final set of wounds. “Afghanistan was the good war,” he said. “No one attacked us from Iraq.”
In our country’s history, we’ve only fought two wars predicated on an attack against our homeland. The first was the Second World War, a conflict that ended with the unconditional surrender of our enemies. The second was the war in Afghanistan, a conflict that is ending with our unconditional surrender. And our enemy, the one setting the terms of our departure, isn’t Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan; it’s 75,000 Taliban fighters. They are dictating the terms of withdrawal to the largest, most powerful military on earth. It’s a bitter thing. A humiliating thing. An added irony is that one could make a credible case that our other war, in Iraq (though predicated on a faulty premise), was the war we didn’t lose. I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to say we won the Iraq War, but I also wouldn’t go so far as to say that we lost it, particularly as the country has now successfully held four consecutive sets of parliamentary elections without any meaningful violence. Yes, the Iraqi government is plenty dysfunctional. But so is our own. America’s mixed outcome in Iraq paired with our unequivocal loss in Afghanistan feels not only like a national indictment, but also a generational one.
When my wife’s father sat on the rooftop of the Danieli after his war, these questions did not exist for him. In that way we are different. Fighting in a war is one experience, but winning or losing your war is another experience entirely. This is where he and I diverge.
My wife and I enjoy our meal. We make an effort to talk of other things. We stay later than I imagined we would, the two of us savoring the view, the city, the magic of this place. Eventually, our server brings us the bill. My wife stops him. Would he mind taking a photograph of the two of us? We step to the railing. The city is below. The water is beyond us. The Salute stands to our side, its dome fitting like a third person in the frame. Our server takes the picture. He hands my wife her phone. She smiles sweetly when she sees the photo. She will send it to her mother. She says, “It will remind her of Daddy.”
SCENE III
Firebase Thomas, Herat Province, 2008
After Momez’s death, the major came to visit us. He had returned from Bagram to his headquarters in Herat the week prior. His convoy of four vehicles now arrived in a cloud of dust at our firebase, a three-hour drive south, at a little before lunch. When the major and his convoy dismounted in our gravel parking lot, I could see Tubes among them. He swung down from the door of an RG-33, a new super-armored, monster-truck-size fantasia of a fighting vehicle designed to survive the worst IEDs. Unlike our Humvees, the RG-33 had a remote turret that allowed the gunner to sit safely buttoned up within the steel confines of the vehicle. It also had a powerful suite of radios, which allowed Tubes better communications with distant aircraft. The RG-33 looked mean, vengeful, the type of vehicle Hollywood might design for a Marvel movie but which had instead found its way into our war.
The major was annoyed when he arrived. On the drive down, his communications with Tubes had proven spotty. What good was Tubes’s new suite of ultrapowerful radios if the major’s Humvee couldn’t talk with them? When I approached the major, I could hear him telling Tubes that it was a problem they’d need to solve. I crossed the parking lot and welcomed the major. I told him that we had lunch ready. He thanked me and we walked to the mess tent. Tubes walked with us. His mustache seemed to have grown back a little. When I mentioned this to Tubes at lunch, he gave its end a playful twist. His hands seemed to be healing too.
We sat in the mess tent at a picnic table with a vinyl tablecloth. Afghan workers had prepared our meal in stainless-steel vats. We scooped food onto plastic plates and ate with plastic utensils. Willy and Super Dave also sat at the table with us. The major was asking Super Dave about his team and how they were holding up. Although we were all feeling the loss of Momez, he was Dave’s soldier, a member of the special forces, not one of us, not a Marine. Dave was sanguine and appreciative of the major’s interest. He didn’t tell the major about how some in his team were asking why no one else in the vehicle had tried to save Momez, why it had fallen to Tubes. Dave felt his team sergeant could have gotten to Momez sooner. But he hadn’t. (When Dave later fired him, he said that was why.)
Everyone was happy to see Tubes. Lang and Redbone came over and asked how he was doing, as did Angry Dave and a few others from the special forces. Everyone knew Tubes had done all that he could. His still-bandaged hands were a testament to that. Our table finished eating and got up at the same time. We were going to walk over to the TOC (said “tock”), the tactical operations center, where I’d take the major through our upcoming missions, to include a series of helicopter raids we were planning just to the south of us, in the Zerkoh Valley, a cluster of hamlets that had become a haven for Taliban fighters after a controversial battle there had led to the Karzai government calling it off-limits to both Afghan and US military forces a year ago.
On our way to the TOC, the major asked me to hang back with him for a minute. “I’ve got one thing I want to talk over with you.” He stepped off the gravel footpath between the TOC and the mess tent, toward some dusty trees where we’d be out of view. As I followed the major, I caught Tubes giving me a sympathetic look, as if he knew what was coming, as if the major had previewed for him the talk we were about to have.
“What’s up, sir?” I was trying to sound upbeat.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “You want to tell me what happened in Shewan?”
I slipped my hands in my pockets. “What do you mean, sir?”
“We don’t leave our people behind.”
“We didn’t leave anyone behind.”
“I ordered you to go back and get Sergeant Nunez.”
I now planted my hands on my hips and half-pivoted away from the major. “Sir, all of our vehicles except for two were towing a downed vehicle. I only had those two vehicles to go back into Shewan with. If we’d tried that, we would’ve taken more casualties, possibly more dead, and made the situation worse. And in the end the other team was able to—”
The major cut me off. “He was your responsibility.”
“And so was everyone else. I wasn’t trying to disobey an order. I was trying to let you understand how precarious our situation was.”
“I understood the situation.” The major’s arms remained crossed over his chest. When he spoke, he hardly opened his mouth. “I was there.”
“Sir,” I said, “you were in fucking Bagram.”
I stood there and took the rest of my dressing-down. The major told me that it didn’t matter that he’d been in Bagram. He could’ve been on the moon for all he cared. He was my commanding officer and he’d given me an order. I hadn’t followed that order, or at least hadn’t followed it in the way he’d wanted me to. He pointed out that his instincts—even if he was in Bagram—had proven correct because our sister team was ultimately able to recover Momez’s body without incident. Our sister team had—according to the major—completed a mission that should’ve been completed by us.
He finished by saying, “No one’s doubting your courage here. But I do doubt your judgment. Don’t let it happen again.” I asked him if that was all. He said that it was. And we walked toward the TOC, where I briefed him on our upcoming mission in the Zerkoh Valley. After the briefings, there was some discussion as to whether the major and his headquarters would stay for dinner. Willy thought we might have some steaks in the large, refrigerated shipping container where we stored our food. Our cooks checked, but the steaks wouldn’t arrive until our next resupply flight. The major decided they would return to Herat instead. Tubes stood outside in our gravel parking lot waiting for Redbone to make some final adjustments to his radios in the RG-33, so they wouldn’t have the same communications problems they’d had before. Tubes pulled me to the side. “You okay?” he asked.
