Prologue
Casualty Notification
The mother was standing behind the screen door when we stepped out of the car. She knew what we were there to do. This was my third such trip in a month. Fort Campbell had averaged about one a week since the surge. Casualty notification assignments were supposed to rotate, but Command kept giving them to me. Mike told me I was too well suited to the task.
“You’ve got a sweet face, Charlie,” he told me. “A sad face. They feel better when they think you’re sad.”
“I am sad,” I said.
“We’re all sad,” Mike said. “Some people just don’t know how to show it, that’s all.”
He was talking about himself.
Mike and I got on well, perhaps because he was always game for a few drinks afterward. The Protestant chaplains were all teetotalers. I hadn’t been out with the rabbi. Mike Bailey, however, liked his Irish whiskey. And he had no interest in counseling me. “Find us a nice, quiet spot, Charlie,” he would say when it was over, and before long, we were someplace dark where you could still smoke inside. Catholics understand the healing power of a stiff drink.
The dead boy’s parents lived in Bellevue, at the end of a quiet, shady street lined with red brick ’50s ranch houses and split-levels with well-kept yards. There were kids throwing balls and riding bicycles, elderly women sitting on front porch chairs and lawn furniture, a few men riding mowers. Manicured flower beds resting at the bases of mailboxes decorated with eagles and flags. Pickup trucks and minivans and motor homes and pontoon and bass boats on trailers parked at the ends of the driveways. America the beautiful, forever and ever, amen.
“Didn’t you grow up around here?” Mike asked. “You and this kid’s family might know some of the same people.”
“I doubt it.”
“Come on. You Southerners are all cousins, right?”
“And I assume you’re related to the Kennedys.”
A trio of old men congregating around an ancient Ford pickup turned from their conversation to watch our car roll past. They exchanged a few words and dispersed, heading toward their respective homes, no doubt to inform their wives of our arrival.
“There they go,” Mike said. “Tuna casserole, on the way. I’ll bet you a hundred bucks the first one shows up before we leave.”
I couldn’t say whether or not Mike Bailey was a good priest. He was a product of one of those big Irish Catholic families, the kind with a dozen kids, most of which give at least one son to the Army and one to the church. Mike had somehow managed to satisfy both requirements. I got the sense that he’d opted into the chaplain thing when he was still young and romantic, maybe under the influence of a charismatic Jesuit who’d filled him with dreams of emulating the heroic missions of Saint Ignatius and his followers. His idealism did not seem to have survived Fallujah.
I slowed to a stop in front of the appointed address, and the dread came on.
I reached back for the folder I’d set on the rear seat before we left. I looked up at the house, and there she was, standing behind the screen door, as if she’d sensed we were coming, as if she’d felt the life she’d brought into the world go out of it from thousands of miles away, and we were just there to confirm what she already knew.
“Let’s not keep her waiting,” I said.
She opened the door before we even reached the front porch steps. Her eyes were damp.
“Hello, ma’am,” I said. “Are you the mother of Private First Class Cody James Carter?”
“His daddy’s in the back,” she said.
We followed her through a small entry hall into a dim wood-paneled living room. On the wall over a gas-log fireplace hung a large flat-screen TV tuned to Fox News.
Mr. Carter stood when he saw us. He picked up the remote control and pressed mute. Maybe he was afraid he’d miss something.
Mrs. Carter came to her husband’s side. They stared at us, their faces anguished, waiting. In the language of the Casualty Notification Officer Module, I informed them that their son was dead.
Mrs. Carter’s face slackened. She drooped to the couch. Her husband sat down and wrapped his arm around her but remained rigid, his eyes fixed on some point between the television and the fireplace as I finished reciting the script.
Mike sat down next to Mr. Carter. I rounded the coffee table and sat close enough to touch the mother.
“Did he suffer?” she asked.
“We won’t have the full incident report for another day or two,” I said.
The father removed his glasses and set them on the table, his arm still wrapped around his wife. His face went pale, and the tears began to form, but they did not fall, as if he had somehow willed himself not to cry.
“Would you folks like to pray?” Mike asked.
They nodded.
Mike removed a rosary from his uniform pocket and began. Above them, the talking heads on Fox News, silenced by the mute button, felt both comical and profane. While they debated whether this or that multimillionaire Republican candidate was sufficiently conservative, kids like Cody Carter were still dying in a place most Americans couldn’t find on a map. The world had moved on to a new movie.
As Mike finished, I opened up my dossier and explained the protocol for their son’s homecoming.
I have delivered casualty notifications to parents to whom the Army meant nothing at all—people whose sons had joined up because of the GI Bill, or because they played too much Call of Duty on the Xbox, or because they thought it might be fun to get paid instead of arrested for shooting at brown people or just wanted out of their shitty circumstances and away from the very folks to whom I was delivering the news of their death. Some, like me, joined up in the vain belief that the service would afford them the chance to atone for past sins—or, at least, to flee the scenes of our crimes. This was not the case with the parents of PFC Cody Carter. For the Carters, the Army was a calling. I knew without asking that they would go to Fort Campbell, and then to Dover, or anywhere else, to greet the remains of their son. They would leave that very second if they could. The Carters were True Believers.
“As part of the Dignified Transfer,” I said, dutifully reciting the script of the CNO Module, “Cody will arrive in a coffin draped with the flag of the United States of America.”
Dignified Transfer. The sound of it made me feel like a vacuum cleaner salesman. But I knew when I recited those words the Carters could hear the twenty-one-gun salute and see the honor guard folding the flag into a tight triangle and presenting it to Mrs. Carter with the thanks of a grateful nation. Who was I to say or even to think otherwise? So I did my duty.
My eyes drifted over to a wall decorated with family photos. Beneath the pictures stood a bookshelf full of trophies and medals and photographs of Private Carter and his brothers and sisters—the boys in wrestling singlets and baseball uniforms; the girls in choir robes, Sunday dresses, one posing in a pink leotard, another holding a violin. I recognized Cody Carter from his class A uniform portrait. He was the youngest.
“If you’ll excuse me,” I said, “I’ll contact your Casualty Assistance Officer and make the arrangements for you.”
I left Mike with the Carters and walked out into the entry hall and toward the open front door to call the base on my mobile phone. Outside, the old men we had seen were standing in the front yard under a big hickory tree wrapped with a fading yellow ribbon, along with a small group of neighbors, some of them smoking, the lot of them looking back and forth between themselves and the door. I started to duck back into the house, but they’d already seen me. So I stepped out onto the sidewalk and removed my mobile phone from my uniform jacket pocket. One of the old men shuffled over.