“But if I’d waited a little longer, thought a little harder…”
“There are the thinkers and there are the doers, Sinclair. The thinkers sit around in their libraries talking in circles about what is morally required or permitted — you can’t judge a person without considering his actions, and you can’t judge actions without considering consequences. But consequences can’t be predicted with any accuracy, so you talk about intentions — and where does all that mumbo jumbo leave us? It leaves us exactly where we are. Someone has to be out here on the front lines doing something about all the shit in the world, and that’s us. We’re the doers, Sinclair. We don’t have the luxury of waiting until we’ve got the theory all worked out. While those guys are trying to come up with answers — and don’t forget, they’ve been trying for thousands of years — life is happening all around us.”
“And death,” said Penn.
“Which is a really lousy part of life,” said the colonel.
“It’s not really part of life,” Penn started to say, but he wasn’t sure of his ground, so he stopped.
The colonel got up and poured himself another cup of coffee. He looked at Penn and then past him at the scratched plastic window and the yard where groups of soldiers had started to move about, their faces glowing in the morning light as if lit from within. “To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing,” he said.
“Aristotle?” asked Penn.
“Elbert Hubbard, whoever the hell that is.”
The colonel rose and moved toward the door. The morning light hit the crevices of his face, but when he turned, his features were erased by shadows. “I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, Sinclair. I don’t much like confessions.”
“Sorry sir.”
“Do you know why I don’t like them?”
“No sir.”
“They create problems is why. And I think you’ll agree we’ve got problems enough.”
“Yes sir,” said Penn, gesturing toward the pages Falwell was holding but hadn’t read. “Anyway, it’s all in there.”
“Which computer did you write this on?”
“My personal computer, sir.”
“Are there other copies?”
“No sir.”
“Good.” Falwell walked to where a waste receptacle was nestled in a corner of the room. He put the pages in the receptacle and lit a match, and they both watched as the paper burned. “You didn’t email this to anybody, did you? You didn’t save it on a disk?”
“No sir.”
“See that you don’t. You go delete that file and then you empty the trash bin on the computer and then you never mention this to anybody again. And when the incident report is written up, make sure it’s routed through me.”
“Yes sir,” said Penn. Then he added, “I think I cared too much about the school. And I cared too much about how I looked to the other officers. I let those things overshadow my duty to my men. That’s the thing I can’t forget.”
“You sent some troops on a mission that might or might not have been poorly timed, which had the side benefit of letting some hotheads cool off. The orders changed and you adapted the best you could according to the information you had at the time. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, Sinclair. But I’m glad you told me about this. I’ll write a press release. We’ll inform the next of kin.”
Penn said, “Yes sir.” He moved the untouched coffee from his knees to a table.
“You’re like me, Sinclair. The army needs us, but we need the army too.”
As Penn left the hut, the weight that had been pressing down on him since the afternoon before left his shoulders, but it settled somewhere deep inside his rib cage. When he got back to his quarters, he deleted his confession, but only after emailing it to his civilian account and only after enclosing a printed copy in an envelope and addressing it to himself care of his mother, who would recognize the handwriting and wonder vaguely why he was writing to himself. Then she would carefully sort the envelope from the bills and invitations, and the next time she went upstairs, she would put it in the top drawer of the antique chest that stood in the hallway underneath the Sinclair family crest with the rooster on it and the words they repeated at holiday gatherings but otherwise forgot: COMMIT THY WORK TO GOD. She would recognize his handwriting, but she wouldn’t open the envelope the way Louise would open it if he sent the letter to her.
4.11 Gordon Falwell
I should have been a priest,” said Falwell before the door closed. “I should have been a fucking priest.”
He’d been told to cancel all logistics missions until after the meeting at HQ, which he had done. But now he had five casualties to explain in an incident where supplies were being skimmed off for an unauthorized school and who knew if that was just the tip of the iceberg as far as the supplies went, not to mention that certain road patrols had been temporarily pulled, which is a detail he had known but hadn’t passed on in a timely fashion because he’d thought canceling the missions was enough. If he had, though, Sinclair would have made a different decision when it came to disciplining his men, and this rat fuck could have been avoided. It was ultimately his fault. Something like this could stall his career. Now he’d have to change the date on the incident report. Or fudge the time line. Hell, he’d figure it out. At HQ he’d talked to combat commanders, and all of them had reported that insubordination among the troops was on the rise, as were visits to mental health personnel, as were IED attacks, as were demands on soldiers to do things for the Iraqis that the Iraqis should be doing for themselves, as was the belief in counterinsurgency of exactly the school-building kind, and as was the inability to tell who was the enemy or where he was hiding. The war was 360 degrees with surround sound, so how were he and his officers supposed to make good decisions when either way they were fucked.
“Lessons learned” had been the catchphrase of the meeting, and now Falwell had to submit yet another after action report that would be scoured for useful observations, information, and lessons — OIL. The report would trigger still other reports and analyses that would be sent up the command chain, where new policies would be crafted and handed back down with the hope that past mistakes could be avoided. Ha!
He winced at the AARs already littering his desk — the one where the lesson learned was about keeping engines from overheating in this blast furnace of a country and the one where it was about destigmatizing mental health care and the ones about combatting complacency and up-armoring cargo trucks and conserving water and building trust and preventing rape and recognizing likely ambush points. And now the one about how the light footprint strategy had been a — well, people had started to use the word “fiasco.” Just thinking about the piles of paper and analyses one more incident would spawn was enough to make him weep.
And yet, the optimism he had brought back with him from HQ hadn’t completely dissipated. There was something about tragedy that strengthened resolve and annealed the soul, and there was something about the surge that spelled “Fresh Start.” A new strategy always conjured up in his mind a pristine set of pages, ones with that fresh-ink smell and the lines not yet filled with fuck-ups and confusion. He called his CSM and said, “Everyone in the DFAC in thirty.” Then he spent a few minutes pondering the HQ briefing and deciding what to pass on to the troops. He’d keep it short. In war, only the simple succeeds, he told himself, quoting Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. He liked the words “simple” and “focused” and “decisive.”