Chapter Three
Zack
Morning PT was always the most grueling part of my day. Every morning as I lay out on the Grinder, a long strip of black asphalt, I experienced a moment where I wondered why I had signed up for this and whether there was any way to get out of it. After running a mile in full gear through the jungle, I could see why most recruits dropped out on their first day of training. Not one in a hundred people had the stamina to do this even once, let alone every day—the pull-ups, the sit-ups, the laps, the runs.
After spending half of the last month worrying about what I would do once I left the SEALs, here I was wishing I was back home again sipping orange juice in my mom’s kitchen. Half an hour into our training, sweat was oozing from every pore of my body. My bones ached so much I could hardly breathe.
This was what Sergeant Armstrong warned us on the first day of training. “The only thing that will get you through this,” he had said, and he looked at me as he said it, “is an iron will. You must make the commitment in your own heart that you are not giving up, no matter how hard it gets.”
Now as I staggered back to the mess hall in the scorching summer heat, the sergeant glowered at me disapprovingly. “You alright, Savery?” he asked. “You don’t look like you’re feeling too well.”
“I’ll feel a lot better once I get some food in me, believe me,” I replied.
The sergeant joined the back of the line and followed us into the relative cool of the dining room. “You know I always thought we let y’all go home for too long,” he said. “You get home, you kick off your boots, start to relax a little; then before you know it, you’ve been living off Coke and Five Guys, and you haven’t worked out in three weeks. You think I don’t know, but I do.”
My buddy Chuck Howell, a lean young man with a scruffy red beard and a tattoo of Lady Liberty on his left arm, muttered a few choice words under his breath. When we got back to the table with our lunch and the sergeant was out of earshot, he said to me in a low voice, “He acts like he had a camera pointed at our houses. Yeah, I went home for a month, but I certainly wasn’t eating Five Guys.”
Carson came over and pulled up a chair beside me. He’d gotten a turkey sandwich, a chicken salad with croutons, cranberries and balsamic vinaigrette, some salted crackers, and orange juice. “You guys been following the news for the last week?” he asked.
Chuck shook his head. “No, man, I had better things to do while I was home than to sit around watching TV. What’s up?”
Carson spoke as if he thought the whole thing was a joke. “Apparently the lamestream media’s throwing a hissy fit because a couple of ten-year-old girls got killed in Afghanistan. If they didn’t want to become missile fodder, they should’ve moved out of the way, or moved to a different country.”
A few of the guys laughed, but Chuck didn’t look amused. “Maybe it’s true the media shouldn’t be making hay about it,” he said gruffly, leveling his eyes at Carson. “But that doesn’t mean we should make sport of them girls’ deaths. Any civilian’s death is a tragedy, especially if they were just children. That doesn’t change just because we were the ones who killed them.”
Carson rolled his eyes, looking to the rest of the table for support. “Oh, go cry me a river,” he said. “War’s a dirty game, and we’re not going win it if we have to stop and inspect every goddamned, gutless terrorist who might be hiding some nine-year-old girl in their goddamn robes. And I guarantee you about half of them are,” he added, waving his fork in the air.
Carson was beginning to grate on my nerves. I wished he would shut up and keep eating. Sometimes I got the feeling he liked being flagrantly offensive because he knew it got a rise out of Chuck, or because he knew he could get away with saying things here he could never say back home. Either way, I tried to tell myself he didn’t really mean it, that he was just pulling our legs.
“What you think, Zack?” he asked me, swallowing a mouthful of turkey.
I carefully skirted the question. “All I can say,” I said quietly, “is that I’ve got a job to do here, and as long as I can, I’m going to do it to the best of my abilities and knowledge. Being a SEAL means sometimes you’ve got to make tough calls. I just hope if that ever happens, I have the wisdom to think in the moment and do what’s best for my country.”
A couple of the guys applauded, but Carson shook his head in disgust. “You sound like a damn boy scout,” he said. “This isn’t some Miss America pageant; you can say what you really think.”
“That’s what I really think, Cursin,” I replied, intentionally mispronouncing his name. Carson glowered in annoyance. I could sense he wasn’t going to let me put him off that easily, and as I was putting up my tray, he slunk over and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Hey, buddy,” he said. His breath smelled of cheap cigarettes; I wondered when he had found the time to smoke. “You know I appreciate as much as anyone how PC you can be when you need to be, but you don’t have to talk that way around me. We’re friends here.”
“Thanks, Carson.” I shrugged his arm off. “I’m just not sure what sort of answer you’re looking for.”
Carson sputtered as if offended by the question. “I’m not looking for you to give me the correct answer. I just want to know what’s on your heart. What do you, Zack Savery, really think about what’s being said about us in the media?”
I drew a deep breath and shook my head. “You know, I haven’t been paying really close attention. I’d have to know more about it—”
“Oh, quit giving me that evasive B.S.,” Carson said impatiently. “I know you have an opinion. I can tell by the way you’re trying to hide it. You know what I said to Chuck just before we went on leave?”
“What did you say to Chuck?” I asked, knowing he was going to tell me anyway.
“You were on your way to bed. I pointed at you and said, ‘There goes a man who needs to have his own opinions.’ And it’s not that I don’t think you have them. Deep down, I know you’re a very opinionated person. But for whatever reason you always feel like you’ve got to be the peacemaker, so you never speak what’s on your mind.”
This was an oddly insightful analysis to come out of Carson’s mouth. I eyed him warily, as if suspecting he had been killed and replaced by an imposter. “You know what?” I told him. “That is the first time in our friendship I’ve felt truly understood by you.”
“Yeah?” he said loudly, flush with excitement. “It’s all true then, what I said?”
I shook my head slowly as I reached for a bottled water. “I’ll just say that sometimes I think it’s better to hold your peace than to throw logs on a fire. No matter what I say, it’s going to offend somebody at that table. And then they’ll be mad, and they’ll say something, and somebody else will say something, and then a fight will break out, and before we know it, we’ll all out there doing jingle jangles on the Grinder. I figured I would just save us all some trouble and keep my opinions to myself.”
To my surprise, Carson nodded, looking impressed. “Smart man,” he said, turning to address the rest of the mess hall. “Really smart guy here.”
I smiled with a sense of relief. That was a conversation that could’ve easily turned nasty. Sergeant Armstrong liked to say one of my gifts was as a peacemaker, and I was beginning to think maybe he was right. It helped that Carson was one of the less combative guys in our platoon. He wasn’t the sort of man who would deck you for having a different opinion. Matter of fact, he was about the only guy in the platoon with whom I felt comfortable sharing my true feelings.
We spent the afternoon out on the gun range, which I found somewhat relaxing after the ordeal of the morning. It went well, barring a few hiccups when my pistol jammed and I couldn’t get it to fire. I swore in frustration and had to take it apart to figure out what was wrong with it. Meanwhile, the other guys were looking at me and snickering behind their hands like we were in second grade. Ugh.
After we finished practice but before dinner, the sergeant called us into a meeting. I’d figured this was coming, given that it was our first day back, but I wasn’t at all prepared for what he had to say.
“K, listen up,” he said as he paced in front of the chalkboard. “Starting Monday, we’re going to have a visitor staying with us for the next couple weeks. They’re a reporter for a New York City website. Now before you freak out”—for the room had erupted into shocked, nervous, unhappy grumbles—“I just want to let you know that the editor of this website is a dear friend of mine from back home. We used to play basketball together back in the Windy City. And, while he is fairly liberal, he has promised me that his reporter will be objective and unbiased.”
Behind me, Bernie Kasdan groaned loudly. A lumbering, acne-faced man with a nose that was just slightly too large and slightly off-center, he had the most volatile temper of anyone in our platoon. Although he was an incredibly skilled sniper and climber, I sometimes got the uncomfortable feeling that he had only joined the SEALs because he liked to kill things.
“You know,” he said in his loud, nasally voice, “that when they say ‘objective and unbiased’ it’s always going to have a liberal bias. God, I hate those assholes.”
“Bernie, calm down,” said Chuck levelly. “The sergeant says they’re gonna do right by us, and I think we ought to give ‘em a chance.”
Sergeant Armstrong nodded in appreciation. “It’s a done deal,” he said. “They are already making plans to fly out here. This reporter will eat when we eat, will sleep when we sleep. He or she may want to interview some of you one on one. Do not be surprised or alarmed by this. You can trust this person. They will not misrepresent you.”
Bernie scoffed so hard I thought he was going to spit. Carson grinned and leaned back with his arms folded, evidently enjoying himself. “Just one question,” he said, with a nod to the sergeant. “This reporter, are they going to be a boy or a girl?”
Sergeant Armstrong grimaced. After a slight pause, he said, “That I do not know. But it shouldn’t matter either way. If it’s a woman, you will treat her with the same respect and dignity that you treat your male peers. You will be representing your country,” he added, looking hard at Carson, “the entire time she’s here, so if you embarrass yourself, you’re embarrassing this whole platoon and the country you claim to be protecting. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir,” said the platoon, though some of the voices sounded bored and unconvincing.
As we were filing out on our way to dinner, Carson nudged me in the ribs. “You hear that, Zeke? There’s going to be a lady living with us. Looks like your little shindig at the airport might not have been the end after all.”
“Lordy, you’re getting my hopes up,” I replied, running one hand across the back of my neck. I could feel how much I wanted it to be a woman—lady reporters could be obnoxious, but they were usually cute and intelligent. “If that plane lands in Kinshasha and a man steps out, there’s no telling what I might do to you.”
Carson grinned and said softly, “What if it’s a she?”
“Well, in that case,” I replied, “there’s no telling what I might do to her.”