570 Her Brother Mocked Her Call Sign at His Marine Promotion Party — Then the Gunnery Sergeant Came to Attention

My mother had buried Dad in the same kind of clothes she would wear for the next twenty years.

Marceline Marchetti was sixty-seven now, a woman who had once been a hostess at a Holiday Inn in the Lehigh Valley and had spent forty-one years pressing the same kinds of uniforms over and over again.

She had folded the flag at the cemetery and held it on her lap during the drive home.

She had said almost nothing to me at the wake.

She had said a great deal to Dominic, who had been five years old and had not understood most of it.

He had understood the part where his mother pressed his small face to the brass of his father’s belt buckle one last time and told him he was the man of the house now.

I had been seventeen.

I stood at the cemetery in a black dress I had borrowed from a girl at school whose grandmother had died the year before.

I had not cried.

My father had told me the spring before he died that I would not cry at his funeral because I was made the way he was made.

He had been correct.

I have not in eighteen years found a way to disagree with him on that point.

I had decided to fly when I was twelve.

I had decided to fly the A-10 specifically when I was fourteen, after a magazine article in a doctor’s waiting room and a documentary on a Saturday afternoon.

I had not told my mother.

I had told my father in the garage the year before he died. He had wiped engine oil off his hands with a rag and looked at me for a long minute.

Then he nodded.

Then he said the only thing he ever said to me on the subject.

“If you fly the airplane shaped like a bathtub, you fly it for the men on the ground. You do not fly it for yourself.”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

He let it go at that.

After he died, my mother became a woman who organized the family’s pride around the man she had buried.

The dress blues went into a glass case in the living room. The Korea ribbon his uncle had earned went into a frame on the hall wall. The folded flag from the cemetery went into a triangular wooden case on the mantel.

The conversation became slowly a conversation about Marines, about the brother being raised to follow his father, and about the daughter who had elected to do an easier thing.

My commissioning ceremony at Penn State in May of 2008 was on a hot Saturday morning in a gymnasium that smelled of varnish.

I stood in dress blues that were not Marine dress blues, the Air Force kind, and I raised my right hand and swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

My mother came.

She brought a pound cake.

She hugged me afterward and said she was proud of me.

She said it the way she would have said it if I had graduated from cosmetology school. She said it the way she did not say it three weeks later when Dominic, who was nine, won a youth ribbon in the regional spelling bee.

I had not believed it was malice.

I had believed it was geometry.

The geometry was simple. My father had been a Marine. Dominic was going to be a Marine. The space between them was where she had decided to keep her pride, and there had not been room in that space for an Air Force daughter.

I had not corrected her.

I had not corrected anyone.

I had taken my training in Oklahoma, my fast-mover ride in Mississippi, my A-10 training in Arizona, and I had gone to Afghanistan twice. I had stayed on station when men on the ground needed us, and I had come home and said almost nothing about any of it at the kitchen table in Allentown.

In the bar in North Carolina, with Hulkcom’s coffee spreading into the boot mat, I felt the kitchen table in Allentown the way you feel a bruise that is not finished forming.

The Marines were sitting again.

The room had begun to remember it was a room.

I felt the weather of it settle on me.

It was not the joke that had hurt. It was never the joke. The joke had been Dominic. He was a boy who had been taught to make the joke by the women in his family.

The geometry had told him to make it.

The geometry was what had hurt.

I picked up my glass. I took a small sip of beer. I set the glass back down on the table where my hand had been.

“Dominic,” I said, “I am still happy for you tonight.”

He could not look at me.

He looked at the rim of his glass.

I let him.

Hulkcom sat down with both hands flat on the table. His knuckles had whitened. He turned the foam cup right side up on the deck mat with the toe of his boot, the kind of gesture that buys a man two seconds.

Then he brought his hands together.

He looked at me.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I am Gunnery Sergeant Reed Hulkcom. In March of 2013, I was a corporal in Bravo Company, First Battalion, Third Marines, Third Platoon, Second Squad. My platoon sergeant was Staff Sergeant Iverson Reyes. My platoon commander was First Lieutenant Hugh Tarlton. Our radio call sign that night was Bravo Two-Two.”

He said it the way Marines say things when they want the record straight.

He said it the way a man says it when he has been carrying names for thirteen years and has not had a place to put them.

“Hulkcom,” I said. “Bravo Two-Two. The tree line on the south bank of the wadi.”

His eyes filled.

He did not let them spill.

“Yes, ma’am.”

I do not know what I would have said next.

There is no Air Force standard operating procedure for a moment like that. There is no doctrine. There is only what is in the room and what is in your hand and what you have already chosen to be.

Pace had been on his phone outside the bar’s back door for three minutes.

He came back in with his face pale in the way a man’s face becomes when he has heard his wife’s voice say something he cannot yet say out loud.

He had not put the phone in his pocket.

He held it in front of him in both hands like a thing he was carrying.

He came to the table and stopped behind Hulkcom’s left shoulder.

“Ma’am,” he said, “my name is Corporal Devon Pace. My sister is Rosalind Pace Wexler. Her husband is Staff Sergeant Aaron Wexler. He is stationed at Quantico. He was a sergeant in March of 2013. He was in the wadi that night under the lip of the ditch with an urgent injury. He was the third man you were given as a casualty on the radio.”