Evelyn looked out her second-floor window and watched the Main Street traffic go by. It was rush hour in Fallbrook now, which meant an orderly line of commuters headed out of town in each direction, and plenty of moms and dads, Brian among them, taking their children to school. Pendleton Marines and employees were stacked up westbound for the base. Main Street would be quiet again by nine o’clock. Back when she was a girl there was maybe one-fifth of this traffic on Main at rush hour, which meant almost none. But she liked the way that her little town had grown to a whopping 30,000 citizens. In her opinion, it was every bit as good a place to live as it had ever been. A real Main Street kind of town. And she knew that without such growth she might not have been able to begin her professional career here. It was a vibrant little city and it had let her stay and become a part of it. She saw one of her campaign posters, wondered if she should have just skipped the picture and used text and colors instead. Not far away was a poster for Walt Rood and she had to admit he had an open and likable face.
She turned back to her notepad and calculator, backing out the debt on the Norrises’ condos from the value of their home and property, projecting income tax on pension disbursements, coming up with an estimated net worth of $1.3 million. At sixty-six years of age, Archie was drawing social security, but not much. Caroline was only forty-six. They were both healthy so far as Evelyn knew. There were two universal variable life insurance policies in place but they had borrowed against them, gutting the cash-surrender values, and the death benefits were about to lapse.
If by “living well,” Larry Williams had meant selling at market value, paying off their debts and buying a small home for $300,000 — and drawing down the remaining $1 million over, say, the next ten years of Archie’s life, and the next twenty-five of Caroline’s — then yes, they could do it. But if you figured inflation at even 1 percent a year, plus medical costs, and basic necessities, it was a pretty thin lifeline. A million dollars over twenty years was fifty grand a year. Out of that they’d have to pay taxes and utilities, supplemental health insurance, food, clothes, and cars. They might want to go see their sons and grandkids. Maybe take a vacation. Fifty grand a year was not much money to do all of that, after a lifetime of work, she thought. Hard, hard work. Sell it all and live out your days, frugal and limited, looking over your shoulder? Things could be worse, and in fact they were worse for many. No wonder Caroline Norris had looked so intensely worried yesterday, Evelyn thought. No doubt she’d run these same figures herself since the fire. The latest purchase offer from the Newport Beach doctor really was low — ironically, bitterly low — $1,300,000. Just enough for the Norrises to pay their debts, walk away, and begin their third act in life with a few pennies of the many dollars they’d earned.
Chapter eleven
Patrick stood at attention and looked down at the sprawling tan hills of Camp Pendleton. The October day was warm and the Pacific was a silver prairie in the distance. Around him stood the surviving men of the First Marine Division, Third Battalion, Fifth Regiment. In the grandstands before them were their families and friends, and those of the twenty-five Marines killed during the Three-Five’s most recent Afghanistan deployment. This “Dark Horse” battalion had taken the highest casualties of any Marine battalion in the war. Looking into the grandstand Patrick saw that many of the Gold Star family members — those who had lost sons — were quietly sobbing, dabbing their faces, trying to comfort one another. His parents and brother and Iris Cash sat near the front.
The battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel, told them that these Marines had done what Marines always do. “They took the fight to the enemy. And they won.” He spoke through a microphone and the hilltop breeze snatched his words from the speakers.
Patrick clearly remembered arriving in the Sangin District of Helmand Province. It looked like nothing he’d seen before, a strange combination of Arizona desert, Utah badlands, and the moon. Distances were great and deceiving. The stars and planets were wrong. The creatures were a puzzling mix of the familiar and the exotic. The spiders were impossibly huge and the little saw-scaled vipers were mean and poisonous.
His unit was greeted by desert and the river and acres of corn that would become poppies later in the season. Sangin schools were closed by Taliban order, the marketplace was almost completely unused, and Taliban flags flew everywhere he looked. The villagers were furtive and distrustful, clearly afraid to signal anything like cooperation with the Americans or the Afghan National Army. The roads were already studded with hidden IEDs. Patrick and the Dark Horses arrived to mortar fire whistling down on them, a Taliban welcome. And snipers. The bullets made a snapping sound when they went by his head, and only later did he hear the distant report of the gun. Sometimes he saw smoke up in the rocks and sometimes shooters far, far away, unreal in shimmering heat. The whole place was crawling with the enemy — the Taliban, “hajjis,” “skinnies,” “ragheads,” “woolies” — it didn’t matter what you called them because all they wanted was for you to be dead. The next day Patrick’s platoon got into a firefight not ten minutes into its first patrol.
The lieutenant colonel continued: “And nine months later, after hundreds of firefights, Sangin is secure. The schools are open. The Taliban has fled. The marketplace is busy. Your sons, and brothers, and husbands are heroes. You already know this, and now the world does, too.”
Patrick looked at the men mostly standing to either side of him and he saw that all had solemn young faces, few of them more than thirty years old. Many had been flown in from military hospitals around the country. Some had tears in their eyes and some were missing hands and fingers and feet. He saw amputees and double and triple amputees. There were wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs gleaming in the sunlight, and rebuilt faces and men with only one good eye and men with no good eye, and there were tears in eyes both good and bad, flesh and glass alike. Patrick saw brain-injured men who could not easily process what they were doing here or fully control their bodies, and those so severely wounded they could no longer care for themselves.
Patrick also knew that many of the men sitting around him carried scars and damage that few could see, except maybe for the people who loved them most. They carried anger, distrust, boredom, frustration. They bore flashbacks and sleepless nights and fits of temper. They wondered why their countrymen knew so little about what they had done. They were embarrassed and angered by the sudden effusive thankfulness they received from strangers — the applause, the beers bought, the meals on the house — and the uneasy silence that always followed. They wondered why the civilians used their freedom to spend hours at malls or in front of televisions and monitors watching insipid entertainment and playing games. They wondered why there were no bond drives or food drives or rubber drives to aid the war effort, like in the past. They wondered why it was all up to them, why the war felt like some bizarre excursion that only they were asked to take. They worried about how they were going to handle growing families and mounting debt with skills so often viewed as inappropriate for civilian work. They wondered how to make employers see that not every ex-fighter was a ticking bomb. They wanted something they could do and do well, something specific that had meaning. Most of them wanted, deep down in their burdened young hearts, Patrick knew, to go back and fight again, because war was by far the greatest excitement they had ever known and it was honest and selfless and brought meaning to some.