Chapter Six
Kelli
I spent the night in a rundown Cité hotel in downtown Kinshasha. Not my first choice, but it was the cheapest option available. I was given a windowless room on the second story with a single wood-frame mattress and a vase of fading peonies on the nightstand. The sheets smelled musty and looked like they hadn’t been changed in weeks, maybe longer. The tap water in the faucet was a russet brown color that looked faintly like blood.
I spent most of the night lying awake in my bed, listening to the disturbing noises emanating from the halls and behind the walls. At one point, an enormous bug wandered across the ceiling, so large that it couldn’t scuttle, so it just waddled. It seemed to have no fear that I would kill it, which was presumptuous but accurate. I had never seen a bug like that, and I couldn’t tell you what it was called. It was like a water bug, but bigger, roughly the size and shape of a plantain leaf.
The only nice thing about having a giant bug from the prehistoric era waddling across my ceiling was that it distracted me from the shouts and sounds of running feet in the hallway. At any moment, I felt sure a fight was going to break out, or that one of the hotel staff would pound on my door and inform me that the hotel had just been taken over by guerilla bandits and we were all being held hostage. I kept thinking about how Kim Kardashian had been robbed at gunpoint in Paris, and she had even had a bodyguard, which I did not. Perhaps it was selfish of me, but I began to wish the SEALs had sent one of their men to keep watch over my room during the night while I slept.
At around 3:00am, I resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to be getting any sleep that night. It’s the most miserable feeling, knowing you have to be up in an hour but knowing you’re going to spend the rest of the day feeling exhausted and wishing you could just climb back into bed.
About an hour later, there was a loud knock on my door that startled me out of my half-asleep state. I had thought it would be one of the men come to get me, but when I opened the door, it was Azzedine.
“Hey,” I said groggily. “Where are the boys?”
Azzedine laughed lightly. “As they need to be up and training in an hour, none of them could make it. Luckily when they phoned me, I was already up and awake. Are you ready?”
On our way to the plane through the misty half-darkness, I told him about the enormous bug and the unnerving noises that had kept me awake all night. “This doesn’t seem like the safest place to be staying,” I said. “Should I be worried?”
“This hotel is one of the safer places in Kinshasha,” Azzedine said. “And the city itself is a much safer place to live than it was during the sixties. When there are terrorist acts and political upheavals, we deal with them. We are not a fearful people.”
This was hardly reassuring, but I held my tongue. “What about natural dangers? What is the risk of me, say, contracting Ebola during the two weeks I’m here and accidentally becoming patient zero for an epidemic?”
Azzedine laughed a great big belly laugh. “Are you this afraid all the time?” he asked. “Do all Americans live in fear like this?”
When I thought about it, I had to concede that we mostly did. A good percentage of my fellow countrymen spent most of their lives online freaking out about health care, terrorist attacks, and climate change. Azzedine’s jovial imperturbability was simultaneously infuriating and refreshing—all the more so given the volatile political situation in his own country.
We arrived at base just as the sun was rising over the scrim of trees to the east, bathing the morning in hues of buttery yellow. I was beginning to regret that I hadn’t eaten breakfast before we left the hotel. Sergeant Armstrong had said nothing of food in our first meeting, and while I assumed I would be eating lunch with the boys at around noon, that was still hours away.
Now in the murky half-light, he stood over them as they bent low to the ground, doing push-ups in unison. “Keep your eyes to the ground,” he warned when one of the men seemed to raise his head for a moment at my approach, his eyes lit with a cold hunger. “Remember: the more you sweat in peacetime, the less you sweat in war.”
At his command, the men lowered themselves into push-up positions and began doing belly lift walks. Perhaps it was the light or perhaps I was just tired, but there was something both ominous and thrilling at the sight of these men in formation. Ominous because their exercises represented everything that scared me about the military: the unflinching obedience to authority, the emphasis on brawns over brain, the reversion to animal instincts.
I was filled with a sense of quiet foreboding at the thought that any one of these men could overpower me within seconds, at which point I would be powerless to stop them. They could easily kill me and leave my body to be eaten by predators and devoured by worms. In a sense, I was placing my life in their hands anytime I flew out here, trusting that their sense of decency would overrule their animal longings. They were men, too, I kept having to remind myself: men with families and social obligations; men who played baseball and ran marathons and went to church or synagogue or mosque.
I spent the morning watching them train together: running laps; doing jingle jangles; swimming in the large pool at the back of the warehouse; climbing a large obelisk-like structure with steel bars on the side. By the time we broke for lunch, I was exhausted just from watching them train. I couldn’t imagine how tired they must be, how it must feel to get up and do this every day before dawn, day after day, how it must have worn them down.
Although I didn’t get the chance to interview any of the SEALs, I did spend a good portion of the day talking to Sergeant Armstrong, who proved to be as genial and effervescent as Evan had said he would be.
“This seems like a lot to have to go through,” I said to him as the men did prisoner squats in the steadily mounting heat. “Do you ever have recruits who quit because they just can’t make it?”
Armstrong laughed. “We do, actually,” he said. “Luckily none of our recruits have died yet, at least not in this platoon, but it could very well happen.”
I froze with my pen in hand. “There are recruits who have died?”
He nodded grimly with an eye on my notepad, perhaps wishing he hadn’t brought it up. “There’s been a death every year for three out of the last four years of SEAL training. But I mean, what do you expect when they’re basically thrown into a lake with weights tied to their feet, forced to dismantle them and swim to the surface? It’s amazing there have only been three deaths.”
He smiled at the stunned look on my face. Probably he was thinking I lived a sheltered existence in my Manhattan apartment, immured from the dangers of the world. I could have easily disabused him of that notion, but I held my tongue.
No, what really unsettled me was that the government and military could place such a low value on life, that they would let this happen again and again.
“You must have scores of people who never make it past recruitment,” I said.
“Way more than that,” said Armstrong. “Every year, thousands of men sign up for this program under the mistaken impression that they’ve got what it takes. Most of them drop out when the real training begins. We have what’s called ‘Hell Week,’ which is easily the most grueling training regimen in the entire United States military. The entire week, the boys are out running, and climbing, and carrying boats, in extreme cold and heat.”
“How many of them make it?”
“Not very many,” said Armstrong with a grim smile, “and that’s by design. However many recruits we start out with, by the end of the week we’ll have lost about three-quarters. The whole time they’re training, we’re standing over them with bullhorns urging them to quit, to just give up and stop suffering needlessly. Which they can do at any time—all they have to do is ring the bell, and they’re done.”
“There’s a bell?”
“There is a bell. At any moment they can ring that bell, come in out of the water or wherever and enjoy coffee and doughnuts. But they’ll never be a SEAL, and they’ll never have the satisfaction of being able to say they made it through the toughest training regimen on earth.”
Relief swept over me at noon when Armstrong announced that the morning’s training had ended and that we could file into the mess hall for lunch. Remembering that we had never discussed my eating arrangements, I asked him, “Would you care if I ate with you?”
“You’re welcome to eat whenever we eat,” he replied. “Though I can’t promise the food will be as good as what you’re used to.”
“As long as you don’t force me to eat kale—”
But the words were ripped from my throat by an explosion to the east. The trees on the edge of the clearing exploded in a blistering ball of yellow flame. With a loud cry, each of the SEALs dropped to the ground as though by instinct. I followed, feeling a familiar knot of dread and apprehension in the pit of my stomach. Something told me this wasn’t a routine drill.
“What the hell is that?” asked a man I recognized as Carson. “Some kind of animal?”
Chuck shook his head. “That’s no animal. If it is what I think it is, then we need to get her out of here, quick.”
There was no need to specify whom he meant by “her.” Carson’s eyes drifted automatically toward me. “But are the roads safe?” came the voice of a third SEAL—Zack, I think.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Chuck, and there was a look of low, calculating cunning in his dark eyes. “She doesn’t need to be here. Now which one of us is going to escort her back to the city?”
Reluctantly, Carson and Zack raised their hands. Within a few minutes, I was unceremoniously ushered into the back of a Jeep. I didn’t even have time to tell Sergeant Armstrong I was leaving. When I looked for him, he was nowhere to be found.
For the next hour as the Jeep rumbled over uneven terrain, I watched their tense, sweaty faces. I didn’t dare speak; I had a horrible feeling that if I had tried they would have immediately shut me down. It was clear that I had become an inconvenience, that neither of them wanted me here, and that if I hadn’t come, they would be back on base at this moment, perhaps eating lunch, but more likely doing something else that they hadn’t wanted me to see.
The Jeep drove around to the front of the hotel. The back doors were locked from the inside; Carson got out and unlocked them, and I tumbled out. He stepped back into the car and drove off without a second glance.
I took the stairs up to the second floor with a disoriented feeling. My first full day of reporting hadn’t at all gone the way I had expected it to, and I couldn’t forget the look on Chuck’s face as he ordered me to be driven away. I would have thought he had been trying to protect me if they hadn’t known the road to be even more dangerous. No, I wasn’t the one being protected, I realized with a sickening clarity as I unlocked the door to my room. I was the danger; and they had been protecting themselves from me.