The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Page 20

  I heard more thank-you’s for my service than I had the first year, but I wasn’t sure what to make of the gratitude. For one, I hadn’t earned it. While I sipped chardonnay at college garden parties, my classmates were gearing up to deploy to Afghanistan, the “graveyard of empires” that the BBC kept emphasizing. Thinking of Bill and Trent, training their men for war, I wondered again whether I belonged at Oxford. Was this experience relevant to the responsibilities I would soon have?

  MY SISTER BRIDGET JOINED me during my second year at Oxford to study history as part of a study-abroad program. On a Christmas trip we took to Rome, I had many long conversations with her about Meena. My father, eager for us to enjoy our sibling trip, put us in touch beforehand with Matt Glover, a coworker’s son in seminary at the Vatican. My sister swooned when we met Father Matt, a tall, dark-haired Romeo. “How could a guy like that take himself off the market?” she asked. Father Matt took us to Mass with the other seminarians. I had never been to a church before with so many clerical collars. We had a personal tour of Saint Peter’s and Father Matt shared his favorite restaurant with us, a small nook hidden away in an alley near the Pantheon. In the back of my head I was already contemplating having Father Matt officiate at my wedding. If Meena had known that I was asking a priest about hypothetical interfaith ceremonies, she would have killed me.

  On the train ride from Rome to Vicenza, where we would spend Christmas with Bill Parsons, I read a book that Meena had given me before the trip.

  “What are you reading?” Bridget asked, curious at the notes I was making in the book.

  “The Ramayana.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s a key Hindu scripture. Meena gave it to me.” It was actually an engrossing story, although I needed an index to keep track of the names.

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Can I make an observation?”

  “Sure.”

  “You, my brother, are hooked.”

  “I am.” I smiled. Whether stepping on her toes in a Viennese waltz or channeling Matt Humbaugh’s exaggerated dance moves at a club, I had no inhibitions around Meena. I gave her my journal, and she read it from cover to cover. Handing it back to me, all she said was “I love you.”

  Bill had bulked up in the year since I had seen him. He was already in command of an infantry platoon. Our roles might just as easily have been reversed. Making dinner on Christmas Eve illustrated what each of us had learned since leaving West Point. Bill answered the hundred questions I had about being a platoon leader. How did you decide what to train? How is your role different from your platoon sergeant’s? What’s your relationship with your company commander? His answers were thorough, but I didn’t have the sense to take notes. On the other hand, Bill was of little use making dinner. After buying groceries and laying them out on the kitchen table, I asked Bill for a cutting board and knife. All he had was a pocket-knife. I even had to show him how to turn on the stove. Over a bottle of wine, our discussion turned to religion.

  “Is Meena Christian?” asked Bill.

  “No. She’s Hindu.”

  “Isn’t that a problem?”

  “We haven’t really talked about it yet.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  The subject came up when Meena and I rendezvoused in Slovenia over New Year’s. Our dinner conversation wandered from my impressions of the Vatican to a discussion Bill and I had had about whether Jesus represented the only path to salvation.

  “What do you think?” Meena asked.

  “I think so,” I began, but my translation of what I had discussed with Bill came out all wrong. Meena’s eyes bored straight through me. For me it had been a theological debate. For Meena it was personal.

  “But if Jesus is the only path to salvation, then all non-Christians would go to hell, right?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. . . .” It was too late, though. Meena left the table and returned to the room.

  “If that’s what you believe,” she announced when I entered, “fine. But we shouldn’t be together if you think our religions are incompatible. I don’t make judgments about you. Don’t judge me.”

  I tried to wrap her in a hug, but she squirmed away.

  “Just think about it,” she said.

  Nothing was clear anymore—neither the faith I had grown up in nor the career I had trained for. I stayed awake all night thinking. There were only two things I knew for certain: I wanted to serve my country and I wanted to spend my life with Meena. How could I do both? I walked downstairs to the hotel lobby, weary but sleepless, and slumped in a overstuffed armchair by the fire. All that remained were a few dying embers. I asked the receptionist for stationery and set my thoughts to paper. I wrote and crumpled a dozen sheets of paper, tossing each at the fireplace where they flared up and turned to ash. By morning I had composed a four-page letter. What I wrote is between Meena, God, and me.

  WITH SIX MONTHS REMAINING at Oxford, I lived in two worlds: Oxford’s circuit of costume balls and drunken revelry and the Army’s implied pressure to prepare for war. My men wouldn’t give a damn whether I was a Rhodes scholar. All that mattered was whether they could trust me not to get them killed. I did my best to prepare for that responsibility while savoring Oxford’s charms.

  I enrolled in a course on South Asian history. Meena had given me a book about the Indian fight for independence that had sparked my interest. How, I wanted to know, had religious differences escalated to the point where neighbors hacked one another to pieces in massive communal riots? Nearly half a million people were killed as British India was partitioned into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. I read as much as I could, drawn to the region for both personal and professional reasons. When I could get Meena away from her research, she began teaching me more advanced Hindi. Its linguistic cousin, Urdu, was spoken along the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where I would find myself two years later. There, the language training would pay unexpected dividends.

  Finally, I tested my progress by taking a trip to India, hoping that my capacity for chaos had increased since my journey to Southeast Asia. Meena was in the final stage of writing her thesis and couldn’t join me. After I offered to buy her flight, my sister Bridget, ever ready for an adventure, agreed to go, as did another American couple, Tim and Jada. I had known Tim at West Point, where he had been an exchange midshipman in my cadet company.

  Tim Strabbing was more normal than normal. He had a flat Michigan accent and a flat crew cut. As a Marine, Tim was a walking, talking recruitment poster: intensely patriotic, tough, and smart. Tim and Jada arrived in India a week before us. Tim, however, hadn’t yet learned what I had during my trip to Asia with Rob and Dave: What you see isn’t always what you get. Within hours of arriving in Delhi, Tim fell into a classic tourist scam and bought a one-way flight to Kashmir from an “official tourist officer.” When Tim and Jada joined Bridget and me in Jaipur, Tim still wouldn’t acknowledge how precarious their situation had been. After Colombia, the disputed territory of Kashmir had the second-highest kidnapping rate in the world.

  “Oh, come on, guys. Who would kidnap a Marine?”

  Mark Twain had been entranced by India when he visited in 1897, calling India “the one land all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.” Three weeks wasn’t enough time to see even a sliver of India’s riches, but we made it as far as our small budget allowed. I forced the group to sit through a Bollywood film that was more entertaining for the active crowd participation than the movie itself. Against Meena’s advice, we ate street food and lived to tell about it. We dodged a salesman who tried to sell us American quarters for a dollar each and feared for our lives driving through the mountains on one-lane roads.

  By coincidence, we were able to see the Dalai Lama drive by in the small Himalayan town that served as the Tibetan capital-in-exile. Combined with visits to the Sikh Golden Temple, the Taj Mahal, and
the holy city of Rishikesh, our Indian travels gave us glimpses of four major faith traditions. I could have read a dozen books without learning as much. There was no substitute for watching prayer lamps float down the Ganges at sunset, spinning Dharamsala’s Buddhist prayer wheels, or joining Sikh pilgrims in a communal lunch. I began to understand how cultures could accommodate one another, how it was possible for a country with thirty-five official languages and twenty-two thousand dialects to function. I returned to Meena with a suitcase of saris and a new appreciation for her heritage.

  Time moved more quickly as our return to the United States approached. By now our paths were more certain. We had chosen our next steps with the objective of minimizing the distance between us. Before beginning her economics Ph.D. at Oxford, Meena had already completed part of medical school. Now, with the Ph.D. nearly done, she still had three more years of medical school to complete at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. After four months of infantry training in Benning, I would go to the 10th Mountain Division in upstate New York. Meena liked that it was only a half day’s drive from Philadelphia. She didn’t like that in the 1990s the 10th Mountain had deployed more than any other unit in the Army. That spring the battalion I hoped to join was engaged in a vicious battle along a ten-thousand-foot mountain range in eastern Afghanistan. I wasn’t sure how it would all work out.

  Katie Larson, the woman who had stood with me at Lincoln’s gate on the first day, sent me a long note to lift my spirits. She had spent two years apart from her fiancé. “Long distance is hard. You have to trust that as you each change on your own, your relationship will also change along with you. It takes hope, good humor, and idealism. It takes a massive dose of courage to protect the relationship at all odds. It is hard, but worth it. You’ll both be stronger as a result.” I kept Katie’s note and thought of it often when my courage flagged.

  JUST BEFORE LEAVING OXFORD, I took one last morning row down the Isis. I borrowed the boathouse keys from Sue the porter and jogged past Christ Church meadow and its herd of cattle munching dew-glazed grass. At the boathouse I grabbed two oars and placed them by the dock outside. I dipped my hand in the river and sifted the current with my fingers. The water was cool velvet. I returned to the boathouse, lifted a one-seat scull out of the rack, walked back with it to the dock, and lowered it into the water. After securing the oars in their locks, I slipped into the scull. A duck from the opposite shore sent the only ripples across the water. As I glided toward dawn, the rhythm of my arms and legs pulsed with my heart. I pulled at the oars, and they swept past my sides like a swan’s wings. As I moved, the cool air dried the sweat on my neck.

  Every once in a while I turned an eye to check that I wasn’t heading for the bank. Most of the time I stared past my feet, down the long length of the stern, watching the tiny ripples of new strokes join my wake. Kierke- gaard said that life could only be understood by looking backward but that it had to be lived forward. Balanced between water and sky, I skimmed past the drooping willows and into the fog.

  16

  From Athens to Sparta

  “He’s an Oggsford man.”

  “Oh.”

  “He went to Oggsford College in England. You know Oggsford College?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby

  WALKING WITHOUT AN UMBRELLA WAS A PLEASANT change. I had been back in the United States for a week, and it hadn’t rained once. It was good to be home, I thought to myself, even as enormous civilian Hummers whistled past me on Route 95 and made me wonder what else had changed in the year since I had last been home.

  Meena and I were in the process of a convoluted road trip to Fort Benning, Georgia, where I was due to begin a final bout of infantry training before reporting to the 10th Mountain Division. Beginning in Rhode Island, I picked up the new car my father had chosen for me and bought with the money I wired him. He left it in the driveway, washed and topped up with fuel. In the trunk were jumper cables and an extra battery, “in case you leave the lights on by accident—again.”

  We drove north from Rhode Island to the lake cabin in Maine where my family stayed for a week every summer. My brother, Gary, and I grappled for hours until I ended up thrown off the dock into the lake.

  “Oxford made you soft,” he taunted from the dock.

  “You just got lucky,” I shouted back from the water.

  Gary was much stronger now, and taller. I first noticed how much taller when he visited Oxford that spring. I bought him a Guinness at the pub, his first beer. When we stood up to leave, it was as if he had sprouted an extra six inches. He now had me by three inches. I couldn’t believe he was already a senior in high school. He would soon be the same age I was when I dropped my bags in front of Arvin Gymnasium.

  I woke up early in the morning so I could join my father reading the paper and drinking coffee.

  “When was the last time you saw this side of sunrise?” my father asked me. The flecks of gray in his beard matched the pattern on his flannel pajamas. He had more wrinkles now.

  He handed me a mug of high-octane coffee and sank into the nearest camp chair, reading glasses perched on his nose, red from the cold. I missed the routine we had shared before I left for West Point. Every day I would leave the house with him at 5:30 a.m. so that he could drop me off at high school on his way to work. He wore the same thing every day—work boots, dark blue jeans, and an orange gas company sweatshirt. Driving in, my father never said much. We would listen to 98.1 WCTK, the only country station in Rhode Island. He never sang along or tapped his boot with the music, but I did. Sitting in the passenger seat, I must have looked ridiculous to him with my nose in an algebra book humming along to Alan Jackson. Looking at him now, I wondered whether the early morning schedule was finally wearing him down.

  With a full trunk that made the back of the car sag visibly, Meena and I headed south from Maine to New York City. Like most visitors to Ground Zero, I gasped at the size of the hole. A chain-link fence separated tourists from the workers bulldozing earth and twisted steel below. Friends and relatives had pinned laminated photos to the fence. Their edges were curled and frayed from time and weather. It had been almost a year. Until that moment the collapsed towers had been an abstraction. I had been on the other side of the planet on 9/11, and even in England there had been a gaping distance between my life and the tectonic shifts taking place in the United States. We exited the opposite end of the walkway and pushed past impromptu souvenir stands. Whatever had changed in the United States didn’t include its entrepreneurial spirit. But, my God, who would buy a World Trade Center snow globe? Eleven months wasn’t enough to turn tragedy into comedy. A customer picked one up and shook it. Debris swirled around the miniature buildings. Just as it settled, he shook it again.

  The war in Afghanistan had begun to drift further and further from the front page. The first units had barely returned from Afghanistan before a new war loomed on the horizon. The United States was pushing for weapons inspectors to reenter Iraq. Debates at the United Nations dominated the news, and for the first time in my life I was intimately connected to foreign affairs. The drum roll for war had begun, and I stood a good chance of deploying if those negotiations failed.

  Meena and I stopped in New Jersey to spend a week with her family. There was a distinct difference from the summer before when I had first met them. The lighthearted banter was gone, replaced by politeness. I doubted now whether Meena’s mother was still intent on turning me into a South Indian. They knew that Meena and I weren’t just “friends,” although we still avoided even the slightest hint of affection for each other. Their questions were pointed.

  “Craig, will you deploy to Iraq?”

  “Tough question,” I responded. “I don’t think so. I doubt Saddam Hussein will evade another ultimatum.”

  “But, Craig, if we went to war, would you go?”

  I ducked the question. “Depends on what units are used. I think it will probably
be armored units, but I’m going to an infantry division.”

  I was conscious that Meena’s mother would remember exactly what I said. I had never met anyone with such perfect recall, although Meena was a close second.

  “How much time do you owe the Army after Oxford?”

  “Roughly five years,” I said.

  “What will you do then?”

  I blanked, wondering how I could get out of answering the million-dollar question.

  “Well,” Meena’s mother said, abruptly changing the subject, “how about lunch? I made masala dosa and pearl onion sambar.”

  I decided that I needed a wooing offensive for Meena’s parents. In the kitchen, while Meena’s mother stirred the sambar simmering over the stove, I tried out my Hindi by singing to her the song Meena told me was her mother’s favorite, “Tujhe Dekha To Yeh Janaa Sanam.”