Benefit, p.3
Benefit, page 3
“Sorry.” He exhaled. A cigarette looked small in his hand.
“What are you doing?”
“You want one?”
“Yes.” He fished out a pack. I asked, “Were you waiting for me?”
He ignored that. “I didn’t think you’d go to the party,” he said. He emphasized the last word, or maybe slurred it a little.
“I got some food.” I leaned forward to a light in his cupped hands. It took a moment. I could smell his breath, tipsy and nicotined, and his fingers. I was aware of the proximity of his body, his warmth, his scent. “Thanks.” I exhaled once. I tried not to smoke very often in those days because I couldn’t afford to and it felt so good when I did. Now I never smoke, of course. “I got a drink.”
He said, “Can I have some of that?”
I gave him the whiskey. I probably shouldn’t have. His eyes already looked bright and jumpy. He didn’t return the cup. It was plastic, molded to look like an old-fashioned glass. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m good.” He drank. He confirmed this, convincing himself: “I’m good.”
“You want to come in?”
He didn’t answer. He drank more. He said, “So you want this job, huh.” His tone was a dare. It wasn’t a tone that men used on women. Not usually.
I said, “You mean Putnam Marsh?”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t get it.”
He made an expression I couldn’t decode. Disgust was part of it. “I thought you did literature.”
The last word—more disgust, or maybe that, too, was the sprawl of alcohol. I moved away from the aggression anyway. “What about you?” I asked, careful.
“Yeah. What about me.” He threw the ice from my glass into the bushes. A quick jerk of the wrist. For a moment, I thought he was going to throw the glass, too. But he caught himself. I looked around almost by instinct—checking if someone else had seen or overheard. Mark said, “Sorry.”
“Maybe you should come inside.”
“Okay.”
I ground out the cigarette and unlocked my door. The rooms were less spacious than one might expect, though mine had a little patio. Mark paced the length, as if assessing the dimensions, assessing how much of them he took up. A lot. I asked, “Do you want some water?”
“Do you have any more whiskey?”
“I can get some.”
“Forget it.” He turned his back to look out. “I’ve been thinking.”
I waited.
“I don’t want to go on with this bullshit.”
“Which?” I was still waiting near the doorway.
“I think the most important thing is not to do anything you don’t want.”
“Okay.”
“Right? You can’t be honest otherwise.”
“Well—”
“Pretending just makes everything worse.” He looked out into the darkness.
I said, “Pretending about what?”
He didn’t answer.
I said, “You don’t have the job yet.” I meant this to be comforting; it came out accusatory. This happened a lot, this switch.
He said, “I’m not really talking about a job?”
“The degree?”
He didn’t answer. “I guess I sound like an asshole.”
“No.”
“When I left for England, everyone at home—my family, I mean—was like, ‘Mark is in England.’ That was the point. I didn’t have to do anything else. And then I’m like, ‘Here I am, what is the point? What am I doing?’ And my mom is all, ‘You’ve worked so hard to get this far.’” He made a scornful gesture that was more forceful than he probably meant and the blinds at the screen door danced a little. He pulled his fist back and looked at it.
I said, “Maybe you should have some water.”
“Yeah, sure.”
On the counter of the bathroom stood two liter bottles I hadn’t dared move before now. I wasn’t sure if I would be charged. I gave Mark one.
“Thanks,” he said.
I said, “I don’t really care about your degree.”
He drank. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I know.”
“I don’t even know what your degree is about.”
“Yeah.” He reflected. “Me, neither.”
PPE was philosophy, politics, and economics, the program for everyone in Britain who wanted to work in government or near it and for everyone from the United States who wanted to go to law school or run for office. It began just after World War I in the confusion and hope of what was thought to be a new world order, when Modern Greats opened up Oxford degrees to students without training in ancient Greek from elite schools and ensured that Oxford graduates continued to administer properly the conditions of contemporary life: war, revolution, depression, colonies. Justin was probably right about PPE.
Mark said, “Also my mom is awesome.”
It made me smile, that word. But his tone still felt violent. I sat on the little chair in the corner with the balls of my feet on the floor and let the wicker knuckle into my thighs. “Tell me about what you want,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”
“Nothing happened,” he said quickly. He’d spent the summer in Washington, in an internship, going to meetings, living with a roommate whose goals were to acquire cocaine and get invited to this party thrown every month by a political staffer Mark hated, and then he went back for two weeks to his hometown in Ohio, where his father ran an auto-parts store and his mother—his mother didn’t work except that she did the accounts for his father and a couple of other stores; so yeah, she worked, but she wasn’t—anyway, I knew what he meant. He had two sisters—one of them was engaged to a good guy—and he had a little brother who was autistic and went to school every day, even in the summer, on a special bus. This wasn’t what I’d asked, but I kept quiet. Mark had never said this much to me before. He sat on the floor, his knees near his shoulders, his forearms resting on his knees. As he talked, he unscrewed and rescrewed the cap of the water bottle quickly. His parents married for love, he said. He said this matter-of-factly, as he would say that they married in June. He was the first man in his family to have a college degree. He stopped. “What am I talking about?” he asked me.
“You’re talking about not doing anything you don’t want,” I said.
He looked at me then. He leaned over and hit my knee with the water bottle, gently. It felt so intimate I almost shivered. He smiled. “Don’t listen to me.”
“Oh, never.”
“Don’t listen to me, but you know what I mean.”
I was struck again by the sheer physical fact of his body—its size, its force. The confident way he deployed it. I thought about what would be the true thing to say. “No, not really.”
“Not really?”
“I mean you haven’t said yet what you mean.”
He smiled then. “Right.” The word evolving as it formed. Then: “Right on. See. That’s how it is with you. This is why—” He stopped.
I waited. “What?”
He didn’t answer, but his face suggested he’d made a decision. “You want something to drink?”
“Sure.”
“I’m going to get something to drink.”
“Okay.”
“What should I bring you?”
“You choose.”
“Okay. I’ll be right back. And we can talk.”
I agreed: “We can talk.” He left.
Late afternoon on Tuesday after I could finally call my mother, I put on a bathing suit and walked out to the beach again. The weekend’s schedule had not allowed any swimming. The water was warm, salty, so clear as to be unnerving. Mark had not returned with drinks, of course, the night before. I kicked out to the end of the area cordoned off for the safety of hotel guests and did a few laps back and forth. I floated. Then I came back in and tiptoed through the lobby toward my room. The television was still repeating that the attack had changed everything, and we flew home on Friday through enhanced security. But in a couple of weeks the Weatherfield fellows had returned to England and France, and at the end of the academic year, when results came in, I missed a distinction by three points; my paper on Henry James, the professor explained at our final meeting, substituted details for argument. I hadn’t asked him for this explanation. He sounded regretful. Mark got a first in PPE.
In June, I moved back to the United States to start a doctorate and Mark enlisted. The weekend in Puerto Rico faded. Years after, if the question came up—“Where were you when …”—I could say, “A hotel, weirdly enough” and not think about Mark’s high five before he left my room. When he walked out he was still fiddling with the cap on the water bottle. I didn’t, in the end, have to pay for that, or maybe the consultancy firm paid, or maybe I should have paid and I got away with something.
Onstage at the Mitchell Center, a panelist was talking about the importance of building bridges between civilians and the military. He was explaining the center’s directive to connect people and make visible the experience of war.
This was the last topic of the morning—a culmination of sorts. Earlier discussions had focused on terrorism, torture, and the law; then democracy, democratization, and sectarianism. Experts cautioned one another on the importance of economics and ideology, the specifics of geography and religion, the deep-rooted tendencies of extremism and secularism. Caution, specificity: These were the tones of the panels. The correct tones. I wasn’t really listening. I tried to remind myself that it was right, the opposite of wrong; it was good that professors and strategists and veterans stand at podiums and point to slides and pass a microphone back and forth during the question and answer period: “What we can say now—” “The evidence suggests—” “I’ll only add—” This is how we avoid mistakes, learning from experience. How someone does.
I think I’d followed the war about as well as most people over the decade prior. I think I knew about as well as most people how stupid it was, how futile, how incompetently handled, murderous, bigoted, how wrong. I knew these things in the vague way one knows things of great but not much personal relevance. During all this time I was reading what other people thought about literature; I was writing detailed and unnecessary summaries of these thoughts in careful essays; I was teaching classes, taking classes, submitting grades and essays, revising, resubmitting; I was getting married, getting a used car, getting divorced, extending my lease. When the largest protests happened I was probably in my library carrel, a place of dust and brown-painted metal so cold that I wore a hat and scarf as I typed. When the “surge” began, I was at the exact midpoint of writing my dissertation. I think I remember the arguments and justifications. Things were bad, they went, and a change of tactics was certainly necessary and a different strategy should be deployed, but the first thing, the most important thing, was to add more of everything, because more would, if not manage something right, prevent the worst of the wrong. I watched a news program in an airport bar, a barrage of numbers: over 100,000 civilians killed in Iraq, nearly 4,000 American troops, and over 28,000 soldiers wounded; in Afghanistan, over 500 troops killed, over 1,500 wounded, thousands of civilians, but no one even knew because the tracking was spotty. Over $125 billion spent by the United States in Afghanistan, $450 billion in Iraq, about $6,000 per second. I was on my way back from a conference at which I gave a paper to four others, all of them students waiting to give their own papers. I ordered ginger ale because I couldn’t afford alcohol. Ginger ale was the soda I hated least. Numbers are impossible to assimilate after a certain point, impossible to credit. Everyone knows that. I opened my laptop next to the glass so I could continue to work. “We need to get beyond the facts and figures of our military actions,” the panelist was saying at the war symposium, “to think about people.”
He pushed up his glasses. His remarks were introductory, exhortative. “We owe it to the generation that fought these wars.” Generation made everything less human, but the importance, this speaker urged us, was humanity. We owed human understanding, human attention. We ought not to remove ourselves in a false purity or false guilt. We are a democracy, he reminded us, with civilian control of the military, yet it was too easy for too many not to know anyone who had been through war. This is why the Mitchell Center was embarking on a longer initiative about leadership across military and civilian organizations. He sat down. The connection to leadership remained unclear to me, but another figure had come to the podium to agree on the contemporary problem of civilian ignorance: Such ignorance could lead to a faulty condescension toward soldiers, or maybe a faulty reverence, an unthinking support for more military action, or an unthinking opposition, a general horror of war, or a general ardor for it. I looked up from my program and realized that Mark was on this panel.
Actually, in that bar, in early 2008, I had opened my laptop to read a story about Mark. The story was written by one of the embedded journalists offering readers on-the-ground experience. This one followed a platoon in Anbar Province; Mark was in Fallujah, commanding a team that patrolled for high-level Al-Qaeda operatives. They swept streets and buildings in the green glow of their night-vision goggles. The embedded journalist had been out in these goggles. He spent a few sentences on the officer’s background, the Weatherfield, swimming, his hometown. He was naturally interested in how a young man of such bright and infinite promise had chosen war. “I had to be part of this.” That was the quotation from Mark. “I knew it was the most important thing. I knew this was what I had to do.”
At the war symposium Mark looked exactly the same. Maybe slightly more relaxed than I remembered, more comfortable in the reserved power of his large, lean frame. It was as if the previous ten years hadn’t happened, though of course if they hadn’t happened he wouldn’t have been on the stage of the Mitchell Center in a symposium about war. He had worked so hard to get this far.
Actually, when I returned from the conference where I gave my uninteresting paper to four other uninterested students, Renata said I should take a break from work. “Read something else,” she wrote on a chapter draft; “you’re not thinking well right now.” So I spent a few weeks seeking out more articles and books about the experience of war. Even at that point there were plenty; I could read right into the experience—the ugly, ad hoc density of sandbags and concrete and concertina wire; the pall of settled dust and old sweat; the smell of sewage tanks and burning rubber and gasoline and decomposing flesh; the texture of sandstorms and the patterns of tracer fire and the sound of a mortar attack. The feel of body armor in one-hundred-degree heat. I read about the tense watchfulness of a gunner in a convoy, the spikes and valleys of adrenaline in a team clearing buildings, the madcap valor of a grunt kicking trash piles for IEDs. I read about instant coffee lumpy from too much hot cocoa mixed in or MRE chocolate bars spread with MRE cheese product. I read about skulls in ditches and corpses in muddy culverts. I read about a quick-clotting compound that hardens into a fresh wound and sometimes prevents a person from bleeding out. I learned that a soldier in the street should avoid standing in one place for too long to prevent a possible sniper from lining up their shot. I read “hearts and minds” and “weed out the weak” and “head of the snake” and “clear-hold-build” and “human terrain teams” and other phrases I forgot to define; I read about speedballs and go pills, MRAPs and TICs and FOBs and COPs and other acronyms I forgot to decode. I gave all of this a lot of what you maybe could call human understanding, human attention. And then I stopped reading and went back to my dissertation.
Before I read, I thought it logical that humans would need the most extreme reasons to adopt as their work the task of violence against other humans, that the choice to kill should be the most viscerally difficult one we make. After the surge ended I submitted my dissertation and began application letters for jobs I would not get. After the surge ended Mark left the Marine Corps with a Bronze Star and started law school and then came here, to the Mitchell Center, where at the war symposium someone was laughing and handing the mike down the row of chairs onstage and it was his turn to answer something.
I meant to leave right away at the noon break. But I was trapped for a moment by a group talking over their reactions and unconcerned about the fact that they were blocking the route to an exit. When the clump of idlers eventually moved off and I picked up my bag again, quickly, I saw Mark notice me. He was several groups of conversation away, near the stage. Recognition passed over his face. He made a small “Excuse me” gesture to those around him. I pressed myself back into a folding seat as the others passed toward the aisle.
“Sorry,” I said to them.
“Laura.” Mark was there.
“Hi.”
“I had no idea you’d be at this thing.”
“I know. Me, neither!” I sounded inane. I didn’t know what to say. In never deciding to come I had overlooked what might happen if I did.
“But it’s great,” Mark added in a hurry. “It’s great to see you.”
“You, too.”
“I guess I knew you were here for your degree,” he said. “I thought you’d finished, though.”
“I have,” I said. I left aside more explanation. I said, “It’s my last day in town.”
“Right on.” He nodded. “And what’s next?”
“Back to my mother’s, for now.”
He narrowed his eyes in concern. “Is she okay?”
“She’s fine.” I smiled. I think it was a smile. “And you? Where are you?”
“Here for a few months.” He made a gesture at the wall, where the full name was stenciled: The Mitchell Center for International Peace. “A fellowship.”
“Fellow again.”
He laughed. “Yeah, well.” He looked away.
“Congratulations.”
“We should get together, though. Before you go. You have anything tonight? I have dinner with—” He tilted his head at the rest of the room, emptier now. “But after? A drink?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll call. Give me your number.” Someone was already saying his name near the stage.
Mark’s remarks at the symposium were brief. He was there to listen and learn as much as to offer any opinions, he said. What he did have to offer was just what everyone had mentioned already: the fact of experience. And if his experience had taught him anything relevant to this particular conversation, it was definitely the connection; there wasn’t one thing of value he learned in the military, he said, that wasn’t useful to him in civilian life, too. “And probably vice versa? Yeah, I would say vice versa. And I’m not just talking about courage. I’m talking about all of it. Decisions, empathy, people.” He passed the mike back.
“What are you doing?”
“You want one?”
“Yes.” He fished out a pack. I asked, “Were you waiting for me?”
He ignored that. “I didn’t think you’d go to the party,” he said. He emphasized the last word, or maybe slurred it a little.
“I got some food.” I leaned forward to a light in his cupped hands. It took a moment. I could smell his breath, tipsy and nicotined, and his fingers. I was aware of the proximity of his body, his warmth, his scent. “Thanks.” I exhaled once. I tried not to smoke very often in those days because I couldn’t afford to and it felt so good when I did. Now I never smoke, of course. “I got a drink.”
He said, “Can I have some of that?”
I gave him the whiskey. I probably shouldn’t have. His eyes already looked bright and jumpy. He didn’t return the cup. It was plastic, molded to look like an old-fashioned glass. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m good.” He drank. He confirmed this, convincing himself: “I’m good.”
“You want to come in?”
He didn’t answer. He drank more. He said, “So you want this job, huh.” His tone was a dare. It wasn’t a tone that men used on women. Not usually.
I said, “You mean Putnam Marsh?”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t get it.”
He made an expression I couldn’t decode. Disgust was part of it. “I thought you did literature.”
The last word—more disgust, or maybe that, too, was the sprawl of alcohol. I moved away from the aggression anyway. “What about you?” I asked, careful.
“Yeah. What about me.” He threw the ice from my glass into the bushes. A quick jerk of the wrist. For a moment, I thought he was going to throw the glass, too. But he caught himself. I looked around almost by instinct—checking if someone else had seen or overheard. Mark said, “Sorry.”
“Maybe you should come inside.”
“Okay.”
I ground out the cigarette and unlocked my door. The rooms were less spacious than one might expect, though mine had a little patio. Mark paced the length, as if assessing the dimensions, assessing how much of them he took up. A lot. I asked, “Do you want some water?”
“Do you have any more whiskey?”
“I can get some.”
“Forget it.” He turned his back to look out. “I’ve been thinking.”
I waited.
“I don’t want to go on with this bullshit.”
“Which?” I was still waiting near the doorway.
“I think the most important thing is not to do anything you don’t want.”
“Okay.”
“Right? You can’t be honest otherwise.”
“Well—”
“Pretending just makes everything worse.” He looked out into the darkness.
I said, “Pretending about what?”
He didn’t answer.
I said, “You don’t have the job yet.” I meant this to be comforting; it came out accusatory. This happened a lot, this switch.
He said, “I’m not really talking about a job?”
“The degree?”
He didn’t answer. “I guess I sound like an asshole.”
“No.”
“When I left for England, everyone at home—my family, I mean—was like, ‘Mark is in England.’ That was the point. I didn’t have to do anything else. And then I’m like, ‘Here I am, what is the point? What am I doing?’ And my mom is all, ‘You’ve worked so hard to get this far.’” He made a scornful gesture that was more forceful than he probably meant and the blinds at the screen door danced a little. He pulled his fist back and looked at it.
I said, “Maybe you should have some water.”
“Yeah, sure.”
On the counter of the bathroom stood two liter bottles I hadn’t dared move before now. I wasn’t sure if I would be charged. I gave Mark one.
“Thanks,” he said.
I said, “I don’t really care about your degree.”
He drank. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I know.”
“I don’t even know what your degree is about.”
“Yeah.” He reflected. “Me, neither.”
PPE was philosophy, politics, and economics, the program for everyone in Britain who wanted to work in government or near it and for everyone from the United States who wanted to go to law school or run for office. It began just after World War I in the confusion and hope of what was thought to be a new world order, when Modern Greats opened up Oxford degrees to students without training in ancient Greek from elite schools and ensured that Oxford graduates continued to administer properly the conditions of contemporary life: war, revolution, depression, colonies. Justin was probably right about PPE.
Mark said, “Also my mom is awesome.”
It made me smile, that word. But his tone still felt violent. I sat on the little chair in the corner with the balls of my feet on the floor and let the wicker knuckle into my thighs. “Tell me about what you want,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”
“Nothing happened,” he said quickly. He’d spent the summer in Washington, in an internship, going to meetings, living with a roommate whose goals were to acquire cocaine and get invited to this party thrown every month by a political staffer Mark hated, and then he went back for two weeks to his hometown in Ohio, where his father ran an auto-parts store and his mother—his mother didn’t work except that she did the accounts for his father and a couple of other stores; so yeah, she worked, but she wasn’t—anyway, I knew what he meant. He had two sisters—one of them was engaged to a good guy—and he had a little brother who was autistic and went to school every day, even in the summer, on a special bus. This wasn’t what I’d asked, but I kept quiet. Mark had never said this much to me before. He sat on the floor, his knees near his shoulders, his forearms resting on his knees. As he talked, he unscrewed and rescrewed the cap of the water bottle quickly. His parents married for love, he said. He said this matter-of-factly, as he would say that they married in June. He was the first man in his family to have a college degree. He stopped. “What am I talking about?” he asked me.
“You’re talking about not doing anything you don’t want,” I said.
He looked at me then. He leaned over and hit my knee with the water bottle, gently. It felt so intimate I almost shivered. He smiled. “Don’t listen to me.”
“Oh, never.”
“Don’t listen to me, but you know what I mean.”
I was struck again by the sheer physical fact of his body—its size, its force. The confident way he deployed it. I thought about what would be the true thing to say. “No, not really.”
“Not really?”
“I mean you haven’t said yet what you mean.”
He smiled then. “Right.” The word evolving as it formed. Then: “Right on. See. That’s how it is with you. This is why—” He stopped.
I waited. “What?”
He didn’t answer, but his face suggested he’d made a decision. “You want something to drink?”
“Sure.”
“I’m going to get something to drink.”
“Okay.”
“What should I bring you?”
“You choose.”
“Okay. I’ll be right back. And we can talk.”
I agreed: “We can talk.” He left.
Late afternoon on Tuesday after I could finally call my mother, I put on a bathing suit and walked out to the beach again. The weekend’s schedule had not allowed any swimming. The water was warm, salty, so clear as to be unnerving. Mark had not returned with drinks, of course, the night before. I kicked out to the end of the area cordoned off for the safety of hotel guests and did a few laps back and forth. I floated. Then I came back in and tiptoed through the lobby toward my room. The television was still repeating that the attack had changed everything, and we flew home on Friday through enhanced security. But in a couple of weeks the Weatherfield fellows had returned to England and France, and at the end of the academic year, when results came in, I missed a distinction by three points; my paper on Henry James, the professor explained at our final meeting, substituted details for argument. I hadn’t asked him for this explanation. He sounded regretful. Mark got a first in PPE.
In June, I moved back to the United States to start a doctorate and Mark enlisted. The weekend in Puerto Rico faded. Years after, if the question came up—“Where were you when …”—I could say, “A hotel, weirdly enough” and not think about Mark’s high five before he left my room. When he walked out he was still fiddling with the cap on the water bottle. I didn’t, in the end, have to pay for that, or maybe the consultancy firm paid, or maybe I should have paid and I got away with something.
Onstage at the Mitchell Center, a panelist was talking about the importance of building bridges between civilians and the military. He was explaining the center’s directive to connect people and make visible the experience of war.
This was the last topic of the morning—a culmination of sorts. Earlier discussions had focused on terrorism, torture, and the law; then democracy, democratization, and sectarianism. Experts cautioned one another on the importance of economics and ideology, the specifics of geography and religion, the deep-rooted tendencies of extremism and secularism. Caution, specificity: These were the tones of the panels. The correct tones. I wasn’t really listening. I tried to remind myself that it was right, the opposite of wrong; it was good that professors and strategists and veterans stand at podiums and point to slides and pass a microphone back and forth during the question and answer period: “What we can say now—” “The evidence suggests—” “I’ll only add—” This is how we avoid mistakes, learning from experience. How someone does.
I think I’d followed the war about as well as most people over the decade prior. I think I knew about as well as most people how stupid it was, how futile, how incompetently handled, murderous, bigoted, how wrong. I knew these things in the vague way one knows things of great but not much personal relevance. During all this time I was reading what other people thought about literature; I was writing detailed and unnecessary summaries of these thoughts in careful essays; I was teaching classes, taking classes, submitting grades and essays, revising, resubmitting; I was getting married, getting a used car, getting divorced, extending my lease. When the largest protests happened I was probably in my library carrel, a place of dust and brown-painted metal so cold that I wore a hat and scarf as I typed. When the “surge” began, I was at the exact midpoint of writing my dissertation. I think I remember the arguments and justifications. Things were bad, they went, and a change of tactics was certainly necessary and a different strategy should be deployed, but the first thing, the most important thing, was to add more of everything, because more would, if not manage something right, prevent the worst of the wrong. I watched a news program in an airport bar, a barrage of numbers: over 100,000 civilians killed in Iraq, nearly 4,000 American troops, and over 28,000 soldiers wounded; in Afghanistan, over 500 troops killed, over 1,500 wounded, thousands of civilians, but no one even knew because the tracking was spotty. Over $125 billion spent by the United States in Afghanistan, $450 billion in Iraq, about $6,000 per second. I was on my way back from a conference at which I gave a paper to four others, all of them students waiting to give their own papers. I ordered ginger ale because I couldn’t afford alcohol. Ginger ale was the soda I hated least. Numbers are impossible to assimilate after a certain point, impossible to credit. Everyone knows that. I opened my laptop next to the glass so I could continue to work. “We need to get beyond the facts and figures of our military actions,” the panelist was saying at the war symposium, “to think about people.”
He pushed up his glasses. His remarks were introductory, exhortative. “We owe it to the generation that fought these wars.” Generation made everything less human, but the importance, this speaker urged us, was humanity. We owed human understanding, human attention. We ought not to remove ourselves in a false purity or false guilt. We are a democracy, he reminded us, with civilian control of the military, yet it was too easy for too many not to know anyone who had been through war. This is why the Mitchell Center was embarking on a longer initiative about leadership across military and civilian organizations. He sat down. The connection to leadership remained unclear to me, but another figure had come to the podium to agree on the contemporary problem of civilian ignorance: Such ignorance could lead to a faulty condescension toward soldiers, or maybe a faulty reverence, an unthinking support for more military action, or an unthinking opposition, a general horror of war, or a general ardor for it. I looked up from my program and realized that Mark was on this panel.
Actually, in that bar, in early 2008, I had opened my laptop to read a story about Mark. The story was written by one of the embedded journalists offering readers on-the-ground experience. This one followed a platoon in Anbar Province; Mark was in Fallujah, commanding a team that patrolled for high-level Al-Qaeda operatives. They swept streets and buildings in the green glow of their night-vision goggles. The embedded journalist had been out in these goggles. He spent a few sentences on the officer’s background, the Weatherfield, swimming, his hometown. He was naturally interested in how a young man of such bright and infinite promise had chosen war. “I had to be part of this.” That was the quotation from Mark. “I knew it was the most important thing. I knew this was what I had to do.”
At the war symposium Mark looked exactly the same. Maybe slightly more relaxed than I remembered, more comfortable in the reserved power of his large, lean frame. It was as if the previous ten years hadn’t happened, though of course if they hadn’t happened he wouldn’t have been on the stage of the Mitchell Center in a symposium about war. He had worked so hard to get this far.
Actually, when I returned from the conference where I gave my uninteresting paper to four other uninterested students, Renata said I should take a break from work. “Read something else,” she wrote on a chapter draft; “you’re not thinking well right now.” So I spent a few weeks seeking out more articles and books about the experience of war. Even at that point there were plenty; I could read right into the experience—the ugly, ad hoc density of sandbags and concrete and concertina wire; the pall of settled dust and old sweat; the smell of sewage tanks and burning rubber and gasoline and decomposing flesh; the texture of sandstorms and the patterns of tracer fire and the sound of a mortar attack. The feel of body armor in one-hundred-degree heat. I read about the tense watchfulness of a gunner in a convoy, the spikes and valleys of adrenaline in a team clearing buildings, the madcap valor of a grunt kicking trash piles for IEDs. I read about instant coffee lumpy from too much hot cocoa mixed in or MRE chocolate bars spread with MRE cheese product. I read about skulls in ditches and corpses in muddy culverts. I read about a quick-clotting compound that hardens into a fresh wound and sometimes prevents a person from bleeding out. I learned that a soldier in the street should avoid standing in one place for too long to prevent a possible sniper from lining up their shot. I read “hearts and minds” and “weed out the weak” and “head of the snake” and “clear-hold-build” and “human terrain teams” and other phrases I forgot to define; I read about speedballs and go pills, MRAPs and TICs and FOBs and COPs and other acronyms I forgot to decode. I gave all of this a lot of what you maybe could call human understanding, human attention. And then I stopped reading and went back to my dissertation.
Before I read, I thought it logical that humans would need the most extreme reasons to adopt as their work the task of violence against other humans, that the choice to kill should be the most viscerally difficult one we make. After the surge ended I submitted my dissertation and began application letters for jobs I would not get. After the surge ended Mark left the Marine Corps with a Bronze Star and started law school and then came here, to the Mitchell Center, where at the war symposium someone was laughing and handing the mike down the row of chairs onstage and it was his turn to answer something.
I meant to leave right away at the noon break. But I was trapped for a moment by a group talking over their reactions and unconcerned about the fact that they were blocking the route to an exit. When the clump of idlers eventually moved off and I picked up my bag again, quickly, I saw Mark notice me. He was several groups of conversation away, near the stage. Recognition passed over his face. He made a small “Excuse me” gesture to those around him. I pressed myself back into a folding seat as the others passed toward the aisle.
“Sorry,” I said to them.
“Laura.” Mark was there.
“Hi.”
“I had no idea you’d be at this thing.”
“I know. Me, neither!” I sounded inane. I didn’t know what to say. In never deciding to come I had overlooked what might happen if I did.
“But it’s great,” Mark added in a hurry. “It’s great to see you.”
“You, too.”
“I guess I knew you were here for your degree,” he said. “I thought you’d finished, though.”
“I have,” I said. I left aside more explanation. I said, “It’s my last day in town.”
“Right on.” He nodded. “And what’s next?”
“Back to my mother’s, for now.”
He narrowed his eyes in concern. “Is she okay?”
“She’s fine.” I smiled. I think it was a smile. “And you? Where are you?”
“Here for a few months.” He made a gesture at the wall, where the full name was stenciled: The Mitchell Center for International Peace. “A fellowship.”
“Fellow again.”
He laughed. “Yeah, well.” He looked away.
“Congratulations.”
“We should get together, though. Before you go. You have anything tonight? I have dinner with—” He tilted his head at the rest of the room, emptier now. “But after? A drink?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll call. Give me your number.” Someone was already saying his name near the stage.
Mark’s remarks at the symposium were brief. He was there to listen and learn as much as to offer any opinions, he said. What he did have to offer was just what everyone had mentioned already: the fact of experience. And if his experience had taught him anything relevant to this particular conversation, it was definitely the connection; there wasn’t one thing of value he learned in the military, he said, that wasn’t useful to him in civilian life, too. “And probably vice versa? Yeah, I would say vice versa. And I’m not just talking about courage. I’m talking about all of it. Decisions, empathy, people.” He passed the mike back.
