chapter 2
Dominic’s arm was still around my shoulders. It went heavy on me. It had not stopped moving, exactly. It had stopped being a thing he was doing on purpose.
Pace was the one who stood up next.
He stood slowly. He set his beer down on the table without looking at it, and the beer foamed over the lip of the glass and ran down the side.
He did not seem to notice.
He was looking at the Gunny, then at me, then at the Gunny again.
He drew a breath as if he were about to say something specific.
Then he said it.
“Major.”
He had not been told.
He had read it off the Gunny’s face.
“Major, my sister’s husband was in Third Platoon, Bravo Company, March of 2013. You are the reason he came home.”
A young Marine at the far end of the table, whom I would learn was named Tate Connelly, said the word “Sangin” under his breath.
I heard it.
I did not look at him.
I did not look at any of them.
Dominic’s hand was still on the back of my chair. It had stopped moving.
There is a sound an A-10 makes when its cannon fires that is not the sound the movies give you.
The movies give you the long buzzing roar, which is correct as a sound but wrong as a feeling. What you hear from the cockpit when you press the trigger is a low hum felt more than heard, because the plane is built around that sound the way a violin is built around music.
The thirty-millimeter cannon is the structural reason for the aircraft. The wings, the engines, the pilot, the cockpit, the titanium tub I sat in; all of it is a delivery system for seven barrels arranged around a single bore.
When you press the trigger, the plane settles.
The plane gets serious.
The men on the ground who hear it, who have been told it is coming, do not cheer. They do not move. They put their cheek against the dirt and listen to the long low hum, and they pray.
I had pressed that trigger many times in my career.
I had pressed it for the first time over a training range in southern Arizona in 2011. I had pressed it for the last time over an Afghan riverbed in 2013, and the aircraft had gone quiet after the third pass.
The lead pilot of my flight, a man with the call sign Hammer Two-Six, who had been my flight lead since the schoolhouse, had said over the interflight frequency that he was Winchester also.
We had been Winchester together.
The plane is built to stay even after it has spent what it carried.
I had been built to stay, too.
That was the discipline. That was the thing I had taken into the Air Force at twenty-two years of age. The thing I had learned in a chair in front of a man with a clipboard who did not let me look out the window.
You learn to be the loudest thing in a fight without ever raising your voice.
You learn to put the rounds inside the line the troops in contact have given you. You learn to put them inside that line under fuel pressure and weather and your own fear, because the men on the ground do not get to leave the way you get to leave.
You go.
I had filed the citation away in a sock drawer in the apartment I rented near my squadron at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia.
I had not framed it.
I had not shown it.
I had pinned the ribbon on once at the ceremony at Davis-Monthan in the fall of 2013, where a one-star general I had never met before read three paragraphs of careful language about an action in Helmand Province, and where my squadron commander had clapped me on the shoulder afterward and said quietly, “Sticky, you do not have to put it in a drawer.”
I had put it in a drawer anyway.
I had been twenty-seven years old. I had a brother who was fifteen and a mother who had stopped picking up on the second ring after my father’s funeral. I had not believed the ribbon belonged in the conversations we were having.
In the bar that night, with Hulkcom’s salute still warm in my returned hand, I felt the drawer in Georgia six hundred and forty miles away and the metal in it.
I felt my own breath against the lining of my throat.
The composure I had spent eighteen years building was holding.
The hand I had set flat on the table was steady.
The Marines were waiting for me to say something. They were not pressing. They were waiting in the way of men who had been trained to wait at attention while a senior officer worked something out.
I said, “Gentlemen, sit down, please.”
They sat.
Hulkcom sat last.
He did not sit until I had taken my hand off the table.
My father had been a gunnery sergeant.
Daniel Augustine Marchetti, United States Marine Corps infantry, retired with twenty-eight years in 2001 and died of a heart attack two years after that at the age of fifty-one.
He had grown roses in a small bed against the back of the garage. He had read the obituaries first in the morning paper. He had taught me to fold a flag at the age of nine on a Sunday afternoon with a triangle of practice cotton, his big hands over my small ones.
He had not lived to see me commission.
May you like
He had not lived to see Dominic become a Marine.
Dominic had not been born to be a Marine. Dominic had decided to be a Marine sometime around the fifth grade, after a man at our father’s funeral had knelt down and told him he had his father’s face.
