The office phone on Hicks’s desk jangles. After three rings, Hayley goes to the desk.
“Charlie Hicks’s office,” Hayley says into the phone.
“Oh my gosh. Hayley Chill? Is that you?” The voice of a middle-aged male possesses the same sort of twang of the Southeast shared by so many of the US military’s members. It is the accent that Hayley will ease back into after a few too many shots of tequila. From Hicks, though, there is a brittle edge. Fear creeps in from the corners of his voice.
“Yes, sir. This is Hayley. Am I speaking with Charlie Hicks?”
“Yes, Hayley. I’m sorry. Something called me away from my office. And I… I didn’t have your cell phone number on me. Truly, I couldn’t avoid this. I’m really very sorry.”
“Are you in the building, sir? I can come—”
“No, Hayley. I’m sorry. I can’t even talk long here on the phone. Maybe if we reschedule another time? I’m really sorry about this mix-up. I was really looking forward to meeting Tommy’s daughter, all grown up. And working at the White House! My gosh, that’s really something!”
How else is it possible to make the dead tangible again but through their offspring? Cognizant of the fact she is her father’s surrogate, Hayley allows for Hicks’s emotionalism.
“I can wait a bit, if—”
“Gosh darn it. I’m going to be hung up here, on another floor. Just a ton of paperwork, as you can see. Now you know where old Marines go to die!” he says, too brightly.
“Not all of them,” Hayley says with flat intonation. She doesn’t care if he suffers from survivor’s remorse. Fuck that. What about her survivor’s remorse?
The silence over the phone line is abruptly mournful. She has struck a nerve.
“Your father was a good man. Saved plenty of lives over there. Tough-ass Marine.”
“Thank you, sir…”
“Please, everyone calls me Charlie.”
There isn’t a chance of that. “I hoped you might help me out with something, sir.”
“Oh, man, I only have a few more seconds here. So sorry, really.”
She retrieves the snapshot and studies it. “The photo I emailed you, sir. Where was this taken? Do you recall?”
His voice regains some strength. “Sure, I do! Camp Fallujah. The Eighty-Second Airborne took it from the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq in 2003 and the First Marine Expeditionary came in a year later, in 2004.”
“Okay…” She doesn’t need a history lesson.
“Gosh, Hayley, I’m sorry but I really gotta be going…”
“Can you identify the other two men?”
“Of course, I can. Ernesto Miranda, my sniper team partner, is one. And Eugene Davis. He was in Tommy’s company and probably your dad’s best buddy. Good Marine.”
Hayley jots down the names in a small notebook. Over the phone, Hicks continues talking, unprompted and somewhat nervously. His agitation seems beyond his control. As he talks, Hayley considers a strong possibility the combat veteran suffers from post-traumatic stress.
“Ernesto and me were assigned to Tommy and Eugene’s unit, Alpha Company, First Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment. We were pretty popular, to tell you the truth. Everybody likes a sniper team on overwatch, know what I mean? We saw some shit in Anbar, excuse my French.”
“I was in the army, sir,” Hayley says, dismissing Hicks’s flimsy attempt at decorum.
“You never thought about joining the corps?”
“I wanted to serve in combat arms, and the Marines seemed a less likely opportunity for that.”
“No longer the case!” Hicks says with pride.
“Do you know where I can find Mr. Davis or Mr. Miranda now, sir?”
“Both in Arlington, I’m sad to say. Gene was killed in action less than a month after Tommy. Ernesto, car crash about two years back, in Oklahoma City.”
Hayley nods, taking a beat before asking her next question. “Can you tell me about the day my father died?”
“The day he died?” His voice sounds distant, as if he’d lowered the phone away from his mouth.
“Yes, sir.”
“What do the brass hats have to say about all of that?”
“I’m curious what you have to say, sir. And I’m having trouble hearing you now. Can you—?”
Hicks’s voice is louder and more emphatic. “Did you read the battle report? Did they give the family that much?”
Hayley files away Hicks’s use of “the” rather than “your.”
“Yes. I’ve read the report. Years ago, when I was at Fort Hood. There wasn’t much to it. Second Battle for Fallujah. The date. Contractor Bridge. KIA. That was about it.”
“That’s all, huh?”
She can feel the rush of blood under her skin. A quickness of breath. The anger. There has always been that. And Hicks’s brittle evasiveness is doing nothing to mollify it.
“You were there, sir. You must know something more than what’s in the official battle report.”
“Hayley, I really wish I could help. But I wasn’t there. Ernesto and me were tasked to a different unit that day. We were all on the same operation, infiltrating the city, sector by sector, gunning after fleeing enemy forces. By mid-November, it was mostly a mopping up exercise. Almost every day we would stumble on pockets of resistance. It was a hot mess, ya know? Lotta confusion. After ten days straight of fighting, we were all bone tired. Tommy’s unit was sweeping a block just to the west of our unit. I heard the explosions. We all did. By the time we got over there, well…”
“Yes?” Hayley asks impatiently, pressing.
“A lotta guys… lost a lotta good guys.” The inelastic tone of his voice suggests Hicks is struggling for composure.
“Yes, sir. Including my father.”
“I don’t even know who else was with Tommy when… when all of that happened. Like I said, after ten days of hard fighting, things had kinda busted down. You could be a hundred yards away from a unit, might as well have been on another planet. That place, I tell you, that place was just hell on earth.”
Hayley didn’t need Hicks to tell her how bad it was there. As an eight-year-old, she learned firsthand the destructive power of war. Unable to accept the truth of his death, she broke into the funeral home where Tommy Chill’s casket had been deposited the day before. Prying open his government-issued coffin, the child bore witness to her father’s obliterated remains. Was it IED or RPG? Was her father’s unit under attack or on the offensive? Had other Marines in his unit been killed at the same time? Who was with her dad when he died, someone who might provide firsthand knowledge of the incident? She has so many questions that demand answers. Despite the years that have passed since her father’s death in Iraq, Hayley becomes enraged all over again. How many more times will she experience this explosive dread?
“But other men in my dad’s unit survived. They walked out of there. Didn’t they report anything about what happened?”
Over the phone line, she hears the former Marine mumble to himself, his words garbled and indistinct. How could she have pressed him like this? The man is a ruin, obviously having ducked meeting her in person because of his debilitation. Their phone conversation has revealed the former sniper’s cluttered, little office in the Pentagon is more a spider hole than cushy retirement gig.