The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Read online

  During our travels, Hayden introduced me to photography. Handing me his bulky camera in Prague, he pointed at one of the spires on St. Vitus Cathedral.

  “What do you see when you look at that spire?” asked Hayden.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look through the camera. Shut everything out of your field of view except your one small frame. What do you see that you didn’t before?”

  I put my eye to the viewfinder and panned across.

  “The clouds are stacked in the same horizontal pattern as the stones,” I said.

  “Good,” he continued. “What about texture? How do you think the stone would feel to touch? Use the zoom. Get closer.”

  I twisted the zoom with my right hand. With my eye pressed to the camera, I had the sensation of flying toward the cathedral.

  “It looks smooth, like the wind has worn down the rough edges.”

  “Okay. Where would you place the spire in your picture?”

  “In the center,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Doesn’t the subject always go in the center?”

  “Not necessarily. What if you put the spire on the right side?”

  He was right. It was an entirely different picture. Now my eye was drawn toward one gargoyle, strutting out from the spire toward the clouds. It was a winged lion, and at the center of the photograph, I imagined it lifting off the spire and soaring into the clouds.

  “Take the shot.”

  I paused at the end of my exhalation and squeezed, just as I had learned to do with an M16. The shutter opened and closed, but there was no recoil.

  After that photograph I saw everything differently. It was like turning up the volume on my eyes. From the one gargoyle I never would have noticed, I began observing a hundred details for every one I had before: the curve of rice terraces, swirling clouds at sunset, a man selling baklava from the trunk of a car. Photography was an act of possession, claiming a moment as uniquely mine, as only my eyes had seen it. Before, my guidebook had told me what to look for. Now, at Oxford and abroad, I was my own guide. I lingered. I zoomed. I focused and panned at my discretion. In short, I learned to see with my own eyes.

  AT TIMES, THE WORLD Mark Twain had described in Innocents Abroad, a record of his nineteenth-century “Grand Voyage,” seemed to be disappearing overnight. Where were the spice-laden caravans and eager carpet merchants? My journey featured a world in flux, struggling to preserve local tradition while the future unfolded at the speed of the Internet. No matter how rural the village, we were almost always able to find an Internet café. Every kid we met, from an eight-year-old Jordanian nomad to those Thai monks, wanted to trade email addresses with us. Satellite dishes were more common than water tanks on the roofs of Cairo slums. Will Smith was a bigger star in Turkey than in America. Other global brands were as ubiquitous as English signage. I could have circled the world without ever eating in a place other than a McDonald’s or Starbucks.

  It was certainly harder now to find one of Twain’s Turkish baths, but Matt, Hayden, and I looked for one just the same during our trip to Istanbul. It was hidden in a narrow alley skipping down the hill toward the Sea of Marmara. We walked in through its creaky door, paid two dollars each, and moved to rickety wooden stalls to change. I emerged wearing a thin towel loincloth-style.

  “You guys look ridiculous,” I said. With Matt and Hayden’s height, the towels looked smaller than saucer doilies.

  “On a scale of . . .” Matt began to calibrate how small the towels were but was interrupted by a three-hunded-pound masseur who grabbed his forearm. He had a long handlebar mustache and a bald scalp. Hayden and I followed through a tunnel of sweating marble. Inside the caldarium, daylight pierced a hundred star-shaped holes in the roof, and a raised marble octagon stood in the center of the room, bathed in dim, speckled light. Around the perimeter were a half-dozen faucets and benches. The masseur took us each in turn. I watched with a wince as he scrubbed Matt’s back with a glove that looked as if it was made from Brillo pads. When I stepped up to bat, it was as painful as I had imagined. My skin rolled off in clumps. He body-slammed me onto the central marble slab and twisted my left arm behind my back to touch the sole of my right foot.

  I paid money for this, I said to myself while my body was bent like a human pretzel. I winced as the masseur yanked my bad right shoulder out of its socket. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” now had new meaning. I was being stretched, both literally and figuratively. Like others before, a full passport gave me self-reliance of a different sort than what I had developed at West Point. Travel was a continual confrontation with the unknown, each journey the mental equivalent of leaping out of a helicopter. Later, my intuition would prove correct. Comfort in ambiguity would be as essential to leading in combat as the ability to plan. West Point, an institution with instructions on folding underwear, was poor preparation for chaos. Bangkok and Istanbul were perfect.

  The masseur’s knee dug into the small of my back and cracked my spine. When the torture ended five minutes and three dislocations later, I slowly regained motor control. We returned to our rickety cabanas, swallowed aspirin, and lay down for a nap, satisfied that vestiges of Twain’s world still lingered. Twain had found the bath as odious, the masseur as satanic, and the whole experience as much a “malignant swindle” as we did. Lying down, swaddled in thick towels, I thought of what I would tell my grandchildren—like the stories my grandmother had told me—about the umbrella-shaped mosque in Malaysia, the teenage monks, and the smell of a three-hundred-pound Turkish masseur.

  15

  Balanced

  Surprise: to strike the enemy at a time or place or in a manner for which he is unprepared.

  U.S. ARMY OPERATIONS FIELD MANUAL (FM I00-5)

  “HAVE YOU SEEN THE NEWS?” ASKED AN ELDERLY CLERK in a rural New Zealand convenience store as I approached the counter with a carton of eggs. “No,” I said. I hadn’t watched the news in the month it had taken me to reach New Zealand via South Africa and Australia. It was September, and I was near the end of an around-the-world summer vacation between my first and second years at Oxford.

  “Are you American?” he asked, tipped off by my accent.

  “Yes. Why?”

  He looked down at the floor and then back up at me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center.” He motioned with his eyes toward a small television on the wall behind me. “I’m so sorry.”

  The towers crumpled to the ground in a cloud of dust and debris. My God.

  I walked out of the store, returned to the hostel, and gave the eggs to someone else. Another student helped me find the TV room, already thronged at 9 a.m. with dozens of bedraggled backpackers. I was the only American. On the screen, the planes crashed again and again and again.

  I spent the rest of the day on the tour I had already paid for, an afternoon “zorbing.” We drove to a large hill and walked up to the top where a white inflatable ball twenty feet across sat. The ball was hollow on the inside. I crawled in, and the operator poured a bucket of soapy warm water over my head. He released the rope holding the ball in place, and I began rolling down the hill. I flipped inside the plastic orb as the suds sloshed around me, as if I were inside a washing machine. When my zorb slowed and stopped, my internal gyroscope was still spinning.

  When we returned to the hostel, the manager asked whether I wanted to use his phone to call home. I dialed Meena’s number.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “Okay. How are you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  Did she? Did she realize everything had changed for me? For us? Although I knew I wouldn’t be recalled from Oxford before completing my degree, 9/11 directly impacted the path my career would take after I finished my studies. A week later, while I camped on a small island near Fiji, the tribal elders invited me into their thatche
d hut to watch CNN with them.

  “What will America do?” they asked.

  I had been asked about the military before on my travels, but my answers had always been academic. Now it was personal. It was apparent the moment President Bush promised to hunt down the perpetrators. I knew in my gut that this wasn’t going to mean a cruise missile strike. There would be boots on the ground—one day, my boots.

  THREE MONTHS BEFORE, MEENA and I had begun a conversation about our future. We were sitting in my flat. Meena was reading a book, and I was on the phone with Major Nagl talking about where I should go after Oxford. After our call finished, I reached to my desk and grabbed a yellow legal pad. I turned it on its side and drew two parallel lines, one for each of us. Next, I made hash marks for each year for the next five years.

  “Here’s where I go to Benning for training. Here’s where I arrive at my first unit. I’ll be there for a year and a half, and then I’ll go back to Benning for more training.”

  Meena’s face was blank.

  “Now, on your line, this is the last two years of medical school, and then”—I looked up at Meena—“I need your help. What are your next—”

  “What?” Meena interrupted. “Why do you need to know?”

  “So that we can coordinate our careers.”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing? We just started dating.”

  Her expletive caught me off guard. Meena never swore. I meekly replied, “It’s been five months.”

  “Who knows where we’re going to be?”

  “It’s just that—”

  “No. We’re not having this talk. Not now.”

  At that point, with a year left at Oxford, I was already thinking about how to make our relationship work after leaving England. I had already decided that I wanted a life with Meena. And, as I had learned at West Point, I was attempting to fill in the details. I wanted to know where the parallel lines would cross. Meena, on the other hand, was more tentative.

  I had first introduced Meena to my West Point world at a friend’s wedding in Germany. We were driving back from the reception with Trent, the snub-nosed Iowan. We were lost, Trent was at the wheel, and I cringed in the backseat as Trent described the tempo of his training. How, I wondered, would I find the time to make a long-distance relationship work?

  Trent turned abruptly to Meena and threw his compass at her. “Give me the cardinals.”

  “The what?”

  “You know, the cardinal directions,” Trent barked. “North, south, east, west.”

  Meena laughed at Trent and his scowl evaporated. “I have no idea.”

  “North is off to the right,” I said from the backseat. Meena and I clearly had a different sense of direction.

  I met Meena’s family for the first time a month later in New Jersey. Meena picked me up from Charlie Hooker’s house nearby and told me the ground rules as we drove to her house.

  “When we arrive, call my mother ‘auntie’ and my father ‘uncle.’”

  “But—”

  “It’s an Indian thing. Trust me,” she said. “And don’t forget to take off your shoes.”

  “I know.” Meena had already instructed me in this custom when I visited her house in Oxford.

  “I’m just reminding you.” She continued, “My mother has cooked lunch for us. Eat whatever it is and smile. You’ll have to stop her from refilling your plate at least two refills in advance.”

  “Got it.”

  “And under no circumstances can you reach for my hand, put your arm around me, or hug me.”

  “How about a peck on the cheek? Can I do that?”

  Meena stared back. “Very funny. No, you may not kiss me. Remember—no public displays of affection.”

  “Right.”

  We pulled into a cul-de-sac and parked in front of the house.

  “Ready?” asked Meena.

  “It’s go time.”

  We entered through the garage, and Meena’s mother opened the door.

  “Hi, kannama. Come in.” Her smile was broad and inviting.

  I walked in and took off my shoes. Check.

  “Mom, this is my friend Craig.”

  Meena’s mother offered her hand.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Auntie.” She smiled when I said “auntie.” Check.

  From the background, Meena’s father greeted us. He was the tallest Indian I had ever seen, like an El Greco figure with lanky limbs. Meena had his hooked nose.

  “C-raig”—he pronounced my name as though it had two syllables— “I’ve been reading Tom Clancy in preparation for your visit. Watch out. I might ambush you while you’re sleeping.” He smiled mischievously, a goofy glint of teeth.

  “I sleep with one eye open,” I deadpanned. Meena’s father laughed.

  “Lunch is ready,” said Meena’s mother from the kitchen. “I made lima bean sambar, spinach, and okra curry.” She couldn’t have chosen three vegetables that I disliked more.

  I was directed to a seat next to Meena’s grandfather. A former tax administrator in India, he wore an all-white lungi and had his hair perfectly combed and waxed in a 1920s side part. Ladle after ladle appeared above my plate as Meena’s mother arranged rice, spinach, and okra, and covered the rice with the souplike sambar. She placed a spoon and fork next to my plate. I dug in with dramatic gusto. For love, I would eat okra.

  Meena’s grandfather said something in Tamil to her mother that I couldn’t understand. He glanced at my plate and Meena laughed.

  “What?” I asked.

  “My grandfather is surprised that you are eating like us, with your hand.”

  “Craig,” Meena’s mother said, smiling from ear to ear, “we’ll turn you into a South Indian in no time.”

  RETURNING TO OXFORD IN October 2001 to start my second year, I knew things were going to be different. Hayden and Matt had left for new jobs after their one-year programs concluded. Meena would go into hibernation to write her doctoral dissertation on British health care, and Oxford’s damp attractions would be dull after the initial excitement of being a freshman. Being in England that autumn often felt like an alternate reality. How else to explain, in the wake of 9/11, how the Oxford Union could debate the legalization of marijuana and whether “Englishmen are funnier than Americans.” The guest speaker who drew the most excitement was Jenna Jameson, a porn star.

  In my own life, a note of seriousness intruded on my days where before they had been carefree. My military identity set me apart from both my peers and British society more generally. At one event I made the mistake of wearing my uniform. A British undergrad mistook it for a costume. Corrected, he rudely asked whether I had ever killed a man. “I’m about to,” I responded, and he scurried back to his gin and tonic.

  By now there were a number of military academy graduates at Oxford besides Liz and me, and we became military ambassadors to American civilians. Eventually, we would all go to war. We met to cook elaborate dinners at my apartment, giving us a space to ask one another questions that our civilian peers might recoil at. How do you feel about killing? Would you call an air strike on a village if you were taking fire from it? The new military scholars wanted to know where I was going after Oxford. I was the test balloon; how would I transition to a military at war from a university locked in the fourteenth century?

  Our American classmates were more understanding than the Brits. They approached the officers in our class with questions about military strategy and the ethics of war. They wanted to know how I felt about Kabul being bombed and whether the video footage of children’s severed limbs made me doubt my service choice. The short answer was no. The longer answer I would give after a pint or two was that I, too, found the civilian casualties revolting. Who wouldn’t? But until we found a more humane way to kill or capture their leaders, what choice did we have? After watching those planes crash again and again, I had no doubts about this war’s legitimacy. These men, who had killed thousands of innocent Americans, who had beheaded prisoners
in public spectacles and stoned adulterous women, were no martyrs. Lastly, I had taken an oath at graduation to serve when called—“without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion.”

  While the questions of just means in war were abstract for classmates holding law school acceptance letters, they were concrete for me. I reread Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars and tried to work out how I would respond to a sniper in a mosque or a kid holding a rocket-propelled grenade. Was I allowed to shoot? Did I need to shoot? Would I be able to shoot? Walzer’s answers weren’t always clear, and in that sense I was grateful for the interval Oxford provided to think deeply without the pressure of actual combat. Soon enough I would need my own answers.