Chapter Eight
Kelli
For a moment just after Bernie’s tantrum in the mess hall, I had been sorely tempted to call Evan and tell him I wanted to come home a couple weeks early. His outburst was everything I had been afraid of when I signed up for this trip: an overly emotional male, weighing at least twice as much as me, hopped up on rage and testosterone and only restrained by the decency and strength of his fellow SEALs.
I kept going back to a line in one of the interviews the Bugle had done with the female service members whose naked pictures had been posted online without their permission. She said, “Ever since I joined the Armed Forces, I fear for my safety: not because I’m afraid of the enemy, but because I’m afraid of my own male colleagues.”
After what I had just witnessed, I couldn’t say I blamed her.
Still, I felt grateful for the intervention of Chuck and Jake and Carson and the other guys. Slowly I was beginning to trust that I could do my job without having to worry that they would attack me, or hit on me, or worse. It was with a sense of relief that I followed Zack through the back door of the compound to a shady pavilion where a golf cart sat waiting for us.
We climbed in together and sat there in silence waiting for the cart to start up. After a minute had passed and he still showed no inclination to speak, I risked a glance over at him; the expression on his face was inscrutable.
“Look,” he said finally. “I’m really sorry about what happened in there. I don’t want to harp on it, but that’s not how we’re trained to behave, and to be honest, Bernie’s always been kind of an odd duck. Chuck and the other boys will make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t especially feel like talking about it. Every time it was brought up, I wanted to retreat into myself like a tortoise and not come out again.
He stepped on the gas and the cart moved forward. For a few minutes, we drove along together in silence around the perimeter of the encampment. I could sense his reluctance to speak, and at first I thought maybe he was afraid of scaring me away, like a rabbit that was too easily startled. But then I remembered the strange and unsettling silence that had fallen over the table when I first sat down for lunch in the mess hall.
“I hope you know you can trust me,” I said over the roar of the engine.
Zack never took his eyes off the road in front of us even for a moment. “What makes you say that?” he replied.
“I know that most of the guys are scared of me because they think I’m writing some sort of hit piece on the military. I don’t hate you guys, and I don’t have any particular bias. I just want to tell the truth.”
Zack didn’t respond, but he sank back into his seat with a more relaxed air. We were approaching the base of the water tower, at the bottom of which stood a brown clump of shrubbery surrounded by wild hogs. After warning me not to be frightened, Zack pulled a pistol out of his side pocket and fired the gun once into the air. The hogs scattered in all directions.
“You get all kinds of weird creatures out here,” said Zac, returning his pistol to his vest. “One morning, I was up in the tower by myself when an eight-foot, two-thousand-pound gorilla came wandering out of the jungle. Looked straight at me, and we locked eyes for a couple seconds. Then, just as quick as it came, it turned around and wandered back into the jungle. Never saw it again.”
“Were you scared?” I asked.
“I mean, you learn to be prepared for anything,” he said, shifting his shoulders tensely. I couldn’t help noticing he hadn’t quite answered the question. “Gorillas, though, they’re not the ones you have to worry about. It’s the bugs and the snakes. I prefer the snakes because they eat the bugs. But I try to avoid both when I can.”
“I’ve got one living with me at the mo’,” I replied. “It’s big enough that I think we ought to split the bill, but I’m terrified to bring up the subject. I’m not sure what it would do.”
“Hmmm, best not to take any chances,” said Zack.
He took a pair of gloves out of his backpack and handed a second pair to me. Placing one hand on the steel rungs of the ladder, he motioned for me to follow him. “Anyway,” he said as we climbed, “you still haven’t told me anything about yourself. Who are you? Where are you from? How did you come to be a reporter?”
Briefly I told him about my youth—how I had been raised on a naval base in Somalia; how we moved to Cincinnati when I was twelve, though I omitted the circumstances that had led us there; and how I had majored in journalism and communications at a private liberal arts college in New Hampshire.
“Dartmouth?” he asked.
I shook my head. “You’d never have heard of it.”
Zack glared down at me in annoyance. “You don’t know that,” he said. “Maybe I had a cousin who went there. Hell, I could’ve gone there!”
“Did you go to college in New Hampshire?”
“No,” he said. “But I could have!”
“Well, maybe someday when we’re better friends, I’ll tell you all about it.”
“What, are you expecting to stay here for the next year?” Zack replied. “We ain’t got the whole rest of our lives, sweetheart.”
“It’s not important right now!” I said, waving one hand in the air with a mixture of amusement and irritation. “I should never have brought it up. And anyway, I thought I was supposed to be the one asking the questions!”
“I mean, if that’s how you wanna do it,” said Zack with a shrug. “When I’m having to field a bunch of questions, I Just feel better if I know a little something about the other person. Makes me feel like they genuinely care about me.”
“If it makes you feel better, I’ll tell you I love you, Zack,” I said dryly.
“Thank you. It’s all I ask,” Zack replied.
Finally, we reached the top of the ladder. From the deck of the observation station, I could see the jungle for miles around: the scorched treetops slowly being cleared away to make room for industry; the Congo River snaking sinuously along to the east; in the distance, a collection of hovels outside of which a couple of scrawny children stood watching a tank roll past. One of them appeared to be doing the dance moves to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.”
“I don’t guess there’s any chance you’re going to tell me what happened last night,” I said after we had stood there for some time in silence.
“If I was going to, I would have done it already,” said Zack. There was enough of an edge to his voice that I knew better than to keep pushing the issue. I studied his face with a growing sense of frustration. What was the point of traveling halfway around the world if I was going to be barred from finding out the very things I had come to find out?
It was tempting to take my own fact-finding mission into the jungle. But I knew it could never happen, first because of the risk of being killed, and second because Sergeant Armstrong would never allow it. From the moment I stepped foot on base in the morning, my every step was carefully monitored. They’d have noticed if I went missing for more than a few minutes.
I would have to discuss this with Evan during our next Skype call. Until then, there was no chance of learning what they were determined to keep hidden.
“What about you?” I asked, sensing that the conversation was going nowhere. “You must have a family somewhere.”
“I do,” said Zac, looking relieved at the change of subject. “Down in East Texas.”
“How many brothers?”
“Four, last time I counted,” he replied. I raised one brow at him. “One of ‘em we don’t talk about much.”
“Fair enough. What made you decide to enlist in the Navy?”
Zack stared out over the guardrails, scratching the back of his head. “I don’t know if I could point to a particular reason. I just always really cared about my family and country and wanted them to be safe. I was never great at the guitar like my brother Braxton, or especially good at farming like my dad. But I was strong and motivated, and I knew how to swim, and one day in my last year of high school it just hit me, what I wanted to do. It was like I was being called, almost. Would you believe a man could be called into the military?”
“If you say it happened to you,” I said, smiling, “then I’ll believe it.”
“Anywho, so that’s what happened.” He turned to face me. “And I’ve been here for a couple years now, and in another year, my deployment will be up and I’ll be headed home. And I don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”
At first I hadn’t been able to shake the suspicion that he was just feeding me canned answers because of his distrust of all journalists. But as he had gone on talking, a sincerity had crept into his face and his voice. By the end, I felt my heart being strangely moved. “Have you thought about becoming a recruiter?” I asked him. “You could go to schools and talk about your experience. I bet it would be really powerful.”
“Yeah, I might do that,” he said, but without much conviction. “You wanna start heading back?”
“Sure.” As we began descending the ladder, I told him, “I don’t guess there’s any place we could go to get dinner around here, but I would like to talk to you more, when you’re ready.”
He stared down at me for a moment as though attempting to measure my honesty. Whatever he saw in my face, it must have reassured him, for he nodded coolly and said, “Yeah. I’d like that, too.”