chapter8
“I’m glad you did. I owe your wife a name to put with the call sign.”
He nodded twice.
He stepped back.
Behind him was his wife, Rosalind, in a navy blue dress, holding a small clutch with both hands.
Beside her was a boy of eleven in a clip-on tie and dark trousers, his hair combed flat with water. He held in his hands the back of a Little League jersey folded over itself.
The word stitched on the back of it was the word I had used as my call sign on a March night in 2013.
“Major,” Rosalind said.
Her voice was steadier than I had expected.
“Thank you for coming, Mrs. Wexler.”
“Rosalind, please.”
“Rosalind.”
The dining room beyond the foyer was set for fifty.
Long tables in a U. Candles down the centers. White linen. Sterling silver. The colors at the head of the room.
The Marines in dress blues had been at their seats for ten minutes already. They stood when I came in.
They did not stand for me. They stood because their company commander had given the order.
They stayed standing until I was at my seat at the head table, where Hulkcom pulled the chair out for me and then crossed behind me and stood at parade rest behind the chair next to mine until I had sat.
Lieutenant Colonel Yates was on my right. Major Teresa Sieber, the company commander, was on my left. Sergeant Wexler and Rosalind were across from us.
The boy, who I would later learn answered to Sticky on his Little League team and to Aaron everywhere else, was beside his mother. He looked at me once and then at his plate.
He had been raised to know not to stare at adults.
The mess night opened the way a mess night opens.
The president of the mess, who that night was Major Sieber, called the room to order and read the rules of the mess and led the opening toasts.
To the commander-in-chief.
To the Marine Corps.
To absent companions.
To the Air Force.
She read the toast to the Air Force in a voice that did not stumble.
The dinner was beef.
It was good.
I ate slowly. I drank water.
Lieutenant Colonel Yates ate the way he always ate, which was the way a man eats who has been on too many trips. He talked to Major Sieber about the run her battalion had done at Twenty-Nine Palms in March. She asked him about my squadron’s current operational tempo.
They were warming up.
After the meal, after the port had been brought, Major Sieber rose.
She gave the president’s remarks. They were short. They were Marine remarks: precise, formal, mostly ceremonial.
She thanked her platoon for their conduct over the last twelve months. She named two Marines who had earned commendations.
Then she paused.
“Marines, I would like to invite Lieutenant Colonel Sebastian Yates of the United States Air Force to address the mess.”
He rose.
He nodded to her.
He nodded to me.
He took a folded piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and opened it slowly.
He waited until the room was quiet.
The candles were doing the small wavering thing candles do in a room with a vent in the ceiling.
He read the unclassified portion of the citation aloud.
He read it in the voice of a man who had been waiting nine years to be allowed to say it out loud in a uniformed room.
He read it slowly.
He read the place, Helmand Province.
He read the date, the seventh of March, 2013.
He read the act.
He read the decoration.
He read the name.
He did not look up until he was done.
He folded the paper. He put it back in his jacket. He looked at me.
“Brothers,” he said, “the call sign you carried home is wearing Air Force blue tonight.”
The room did the thing rooms do.
I felt the silence land on my own shoulders.
Yates looked at me again.
He did not need to say the next part.
I knew the next part.
May you like
I stood.
I had not practiced more than the first sentence.
