She had loved those moments when he’d teach her how to swing a hammer properly, how to measure and saw and chisel. She would tell him that she wanted to be a builder when she grew up, and he’d nod and say that was a good idea. But he stopped taking her to his workshop in the shed to make things together, and there was no explanation.
Then he started going out in the evenings. At first, Mom would ask him when he’d be back. He’d look at her like she was a stranger before closing the door behind him. By the time he came home, Kyra and her brothers were already in bed, but she would hear shouts and sometimes things breaking.
Mom began to look at Dad like she was afraid of him, and Kyra tried to help with getting the boys to bed, to make her bed without being asked, to finish her dinner without complaint, to do everything perfectly, hoping that would make things better, back to the way they used to be. But Dad didn’t seem to pay any attention to her or her brothers.
Then, one day, he slammed Mom into the wall. Kyra stood there in the kitchen and felt the whole house shake. She didn’t know what to do. He turned around and saw Kyra, and his face scrunched up like he hated her, hated her mother, hated himself most of all. And he fled the house without saying another thing.
Mom packed a suitcase and took Kyra and her brothers to Grandma’s place that evening, and they stayed there for a month. Kyra thought about calling her father but she didn’t know what she would say. She tried to imagine herself asking the man on the other end of the line what have you done with Daddy?
A policeman came, looking for her mother. Kyra hid in the hall so she could hear what he was telling her. We don’t think it was a homicide. That was how she found out that her father had died.
They moved back to the house, where there was a lot to do: folding up Dad’s uniforms for storage, packing up his regular clothes to give away, cleaning the house so it could be sold, getting ready to move away permanently. She caressed Dad’s medals and badges, shiny and neatly laid out in a box, and that was when she finally cried.
They found a piece of paper at the bottom of Dad’s dresser drawer.
“What is it?” she asked Mom.
Mom read it over. “It’s from your Dad’s commander, at the Army.” Her hands shook. “It shows how many people he had killed.”
She showed Kyra the number: one thousand two–hundred and fifty–one.
The number lingered in Kyra’s mind. As if that gave his life meaning. As if that defined him—and them.
Kyra walked quickly, pulling her coat tight against the late fall chill.
It was her senior year in college, and on–campus recruiting was in full swing. Because Kyra’s school was old and full of red brick buildings named after families that had been wealthy and important even before the founding of this republic, its students were desirable to employers.
She was on her way back to her apartment from a party hosted by a small quantitative trading company in New York that was generating good buzz on campus. Companies in management consulting, financial services, and Silicon Valley had booked hotel rooms around the school and were hosting parties for prospective interviewees every night, and Kyra, as a comp sci major, found herself in high demand. This was the night when she would need to finalize her list of ranked preferences, and she had to strategize carefully to have a shot at getting one of the interview slots for the most coveted companies in the lottery.
“Excuse me,” a young man stepped in her way. “Would you sign this petition?”
She looked at the clipboard held in front of her. Stop the War.
Technically, America wasn’t at war. There had been no declaration of war by Congress, just the president exercising his office’s inherent authority. But maybe the war had never stopped. America left; America went back; America promised to leave again some time. A decade had passed; people kept on dying far away.
“I’m sorry,” Kyra said, not looking the boy in the eyes. “I can’t.”
“Are you for the war?” The boy’s voice was tired, the incredulity almost an act. He was there canvassing for signatures alone in the evening because no one cared. When so few Americans died, the “conflict” didn’t seem real.
How could she explain to him that she did not believe in the war, did not want to have anything to do with it, and yet, signing the petition the boy held would seem to her tantamount to a betrayal of the memory of her father, would seem a declaration that what he had done was wrong? She did not want him to be defined by the number on that piece of paper her mother kept hidden at the bottom of the box in the attic.
So all she said was, “I’m not into politics.”
Back in her apartment, Kyra took off her coat and flipped on the TV.
…the largest protest so far in front of the American Embassy. Protestors are demanding that the U.S. cease the drone strikes, which so far have caused more than three hundred deaths in the country this year, many of whom the protestors claim were innocent civilians. The U.S. Ambassador…
Kyra turned off the TV. Her mood had been ruined, and she could not focus on the task of ranking her interview preferences. Agitated, she tried to clean the apartment, scrubbing the sink vigorously to drive the images in her mind away.
As she had grown older, Kyra had read and seen every interview with other drone operators who suffered from PTSD. In the faces of those men, she had searched for traces of her father.
I sat in an air–conditioned office and controlled the drone with a joystick while watching on a monitor what the drone camera saw. If a man was suspected of being the enemy, I had to make a decision and pull the trigger and then zoom in and watch as the man’s body parts flew around the screen as the rest of him bled out, until his body cooled down and disappeared from the infrared camera.
Kyra turned on the faucet and held her hands under the hot water, as if she could wash off the memory of her father coming home every evening: silent, sullen, gradually turning into a stranger.
Every time, you wonder: Did I kill the right person? Was the sack on that man’s back filled with bombs or just some hunks of meat? Were those three men trying to set up an ambush or were they just tired and taking a break behind those rocks by the road? You kill a hundred people, a thousand people, and sometimes you find out afterwards that you were wrong, but not always.
“You were a hero,” Kyra said. She wiped her face with her wet hands. The water was hot against her face and she could pretend it was all just water.
No. You don’t understand. It’s different from shooting at someone when they’re also shooting at you, trying to kill you. You don’t feel brave pushing a button to kill people who are not in uniform, who look like they’re going for a visit with a friend, when you’re sitting thousands of miles away, watching them through a camera. It’s not like a video game. And yet it also is. You don’t feel like a hero.
“I miss you. I wish I could have understood.”
Every day, after you’re done with killing, you get up from your chair and walk out of the office building and go home. Along the way you hear the birds chittering overhead and see teenagers walking by, giggling or moping, self–absorbed in their safe cocoons, and then you open the door to your home. Your spouse wants to tell you about her annoying boss and your children are waiting for you to help them with their homework, and you can’t tell them a thing you’ve done.
I think either you become crazy or you already were.