Chapter Fifteen
Zack
It had been several months since Kelli had flown home and we had left the Congo. Now we were stationed in a remote outpost in the Sahara, far from any town. Here, temperatures regularly soared into the 120s, and Armstrong had taken the extraordinary step of cutting our morning exercises down to an hour a day because he feared the heat would prove lethal otherwise. The men were split evenly on whether or not this had been a good idea; a few of them thought it violated the whole point of our training, which was to suffer in extreme conditions, though even they didn’t complain too much.
Regardless, my suffering was alleviated somewhat by the fact that every single day brought me closer to going home. The wonderful and terrible thing about time is that it doesn’t slow down. No effort was required on my part to make it go by: I just had to make it through the next moment, and the next, and the next, and the next. Eventually, assuming I survived this final ordeal in the desert, I would be headed home. It was already done, and there was no way to stop it. I just had to keep moving forward until I made it over the finish line.
Despite the isolation and extreme heat, I was glad to see the back of the jungle. Maybe because I could sense the end approaching, or maybe because the worst of my deployment was over and I knew we were unlikely to be killed by radicals out here in the desert where no man lived, I was in weirdly high spirits. Me and the other guys were getting on well, all of them except Bernie, and it had been several weeks since there’d been a serious incident. More than that, I think my brief fling with Kelli had instilled in me a confidence I hadn’t had before. It was one thing to enjoy a quickie with a clueless bimbo in a filthy airport closet, but to woo a sophisticated journalist, a woman of the world, was something else entirely. Something I hadn’t known I was capable of before it happened. And it was going to make it hard to go back to the kind of girl I was used to. Anyone I banged in the future would have to be at least as intelligent and thoughtful and charming as Kelli. I deserved that much.
When I came in from dinner on the night of our second Friday in the Sahara, I found Carson lying on his bed with his arm over his face. At first, I thought he was asleep, but then just as I was climbing out of my pants and into a pair of shorts, he raised himself and said, “Bet you’re looking forward to being home, aren’t you?”
“More than you would believe,” I replied. “I can’t wait to be in New York again, to fly back home and eat breakfast with my mom; to drive down Highway 40 blasting The Gaslight Anthem while the moon rises over those Texas fields.”
“What’s the first thing you’re gonna do when you hit the states?” Carson asked.
“I don’t know, man.” I knelt down on the edge of my bed and ran my fingers across my scalp. “Probably go into some little, old mom-and-pop diner and order the biggest, thickest chicken fried steak they have and smother it in brown gravy. And then order a tall glass of cherry cola with no ice.”
“Why no ice?” asked Carson. “Don’t you want it cold?”
“Nah, ice dilutes it. And then I’ll put Garth Brooks on the jukebox, assuming they have one of those. Maybe one of his early hits.”
“Didn’t know you liked country music.”
“Garth Brooks is mainstream. He’s pop; he’s rock. Everyone likes him. Anyway, what are you going to do?”
“First thing when I get back? I don’t know.” He reached for his Stetson and placed it over his head. “Probably go out and find some big-tittied German woman and fuck her until my legs give out.”
“Sounds uplifting,” I said in a tone of mild sarcasm. “Isn’t there anything else that brings you pleasure in life?”
“Nope,” said Carson with admirable frankness. “It’s German women or GTFO.”
I shook my head. Sometimes I wasn’t sure why, but I was really going to miss him. “I’ll let you in on a little secret,” I said quietly. Carson removed the hat and raised his brows with interest. “I think when I get home I might write a book.”
“A book?” Carson asked in surprise. “You mean like a memoir?”
“Not a memoir, exactly. More like a novel.”
Carson hadn’t cared much for fiction, and the disgust was plain on his face. “You mean like with dragons and some crap?”
“No, not like Game of Thrones. I was thinking about writing a novel loosely based on my experience of my time in the SEALs.”
Carson ran his hands through his hair and shook his head. “No, no, no, no,” he said, as if I had just volunteered to help him cook and eat his grandmother. “You can’t do that, man.”
“What, why not?” It was an unusually forceful, and serious, response, and I was taken aback by the amount of conviction in his voice.
“Because,” he said, “whether you intend to do it or not, you’re going to end up leaking information that shouldn’t be shared with the wider public. And then you’ll be branded a whistleblower, and it’s going to cast a dark shadow over your whole time in the service. Really it’s not worth the trouble.”
“Yeah, I guess not,” I said sadly. I struck the palm of my hand lightly a few times against the wooden bedpost. “Anyway, it was just a thought.”
But as I turned to leave, he called after me. “Hey, by the way, there’s some mail that came for you.”
I froze instantly at the mention of the word. “What mail?”
“There was a pretty bulky package. I left it on your bed.”
With a feeling of insatiable curiosity, I strode over to my bed and found the package he had indicated. There was no return address, but it had been stamped from New York about a week earlier.
“Who’s it from?” asked Carson. “Your girlfriend finally write back?”
“She’s not my girlfriend, but yeah.” Eagerly I ripped into it, pulling out a thick sheaf of printed papers and a handwritten letter. It smelled of her perfume and for a few seconds, I was transported back to that outdoor patio in Kinshasha.
Dear Zack, read the letter,
I hope this letter finds you well. I’ve been back in the States for a couple months now, and I’m settling in well. My essay went to press and, surprisingly, I haven’t been raked over the coals for it. My inbox is full of emails from SEALs and former SEALs thanking me for portraying them in a positive light. I’ll admit, it wasn’t the kind of response I was expecting, but you won’t hear me complaining.
Anyway, I’m sending you a copy. I hope you find it to your liking. Don’t show it to the other guys, or they might give you a hard time about it. I never did feel like I won their approval, and it still stings a little.
I smiled and shook my head sadly. If the article was as good as those other SEALS said it was, then maybe letting the guys read it would go some way toward rehabilitating her reputation on base. But of course I wasn’t going to violate her expressed wishes. I kept reading.
I expect you’ll be coming home in a few weeks. When you touch down in New York maybe we can go out for coffee. I can understand if you don’t want to see me again, but I’d at least like to catch up and find out what you thought of the article, and how your last couple months in the SEALs went.
Yours,
Kelli
It was an unusually thoughtful and sentimental letter, and it gave me hope that perhaps she hadn’t completely forgotten about me. Of course there was only so much one could say in a single page. Most likely when I got back to New York expecting another wild romp in the sack, I would find out she had a new boyfriend whom she had been dating ever since her return. And then she would insist on inviting him when we got coffee, and I would be too polite to refuse, leading to the most awkward coffee date ever.
That’s the hard thing about relationships and friendships in general: the other person begins to move on and forget about you the second you leave the room. Sometimes when I thought about going home, it felt like those old sci-fi movies where a man travels into outer space and returns after a few hundred years to find everyone he knew and loved has died. It wouldn’t be quite that drastic, but it wouldn’t be the same, either. Nothing ever was.
So even though I was feeling tired and groggy, I knew I couldn’t put off my response for another day. Reaching deep into my backpack, I unearthed my supply kit and retrieved a pen and some paper. Maybe I would never write that novel I had been dreaming about writing, but I could do this. I needed her to know I was still out here, still waiting and thinking about her, even though right now it seemed like there was an immeasurable distance between us.