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The decision about whether or not to take the bonus was a hard one to make, and Ross and I took as long as we possibly could with it. Saying yes would commit us to another four years, at which point Ross would have accrued fourteen years of service, just six shy of the magic vesting point of twenty years, when the government promises a pension and continued health care. We spent months piling up facts and asking questions. Who’s gotten out and where did they find a job? Who’s staying in and are they happy? I nearly went cross-eyed poring over an Excel spreadsheet Ross had created that laid out his entire career thus far and possible forks in the road ahead. Evaluation periods, possible raises and promotions, chunks of years with deployments and chunks without, moves and potential destinations—they were all laid out, beautifully color coded, along a timeline showing Ross’s age, potential rank, and salary, all the way up to the twenty-year mark. Beneath this line, I sketched in the ghost script of my own age and the ages of our boys, when elementary school started, when I’d like to go back to work, when they hit the rapids of junior high and high school, and where we might be when they got ready to leave us. I stared at all of these intersecting and overlapping lines, trying to see the various futures they laid out. I knew Ross was well positioned for a successful active-duty career if that was what we chose, but I also couldn’t see any way out of him missing large chunks of the boys’ lives.
One mid-September evening when Ross and I were still weighing our decision, I gazed idly out my kitchen window while finishing up the supper dishes and watched as Connor and Emma, neighbor kids two and five years old, trotted out in their pj’s to check the mail. On that particular day, their mom, a new friend of mine, had woken to the news that her husband’s squadron, en route to its destination for a ten-month combat deployment and conducting a training exercise, had lost a jet, one of two that went down in the Pacific after a midair collision. One pilot, the one from her squadron and not, thank God, her husband, had ejected and been recovered. He was in fair condition. The other pilot was still missing, later to be confirmed dead.
I stood in front of my kitchen window and watched as the sun caught their hair, and I thought, “Their dad is okay, thank God for that,” but it was like I had watched a target level over these two little kids, playmates of my own children, and then move on. There were roughly fifteen pilots in their dad’s squadron, and training flights like the one that had gone wrong that day launched all the time. I’d spent the morning in the Starbucks on base trying to write, only to abandon the effort after eavesdropping on the conversation of some nearby wives and, embarrassed but unable to stop myself, intruding with, “Wait, I’m sorry—did you say there’s been a crash? Do you know which squadron?”
It feels like an X-ray, this thing that passes over us all when the news of a crash starts to spread. A friend I passed on my way out of the coffee shop just stopped me without a word and gave me a hug. This is when all the walls in our community come down, when everyone looks each other in the eye and doesn’t have to say a thing. I had no idea what I would say to my friend as I threw my stuff into the front seat of my car and headed to her house—I just knew I had to see her. I wonder about the effect of this beam of awareness coming over us, testing the soundness of our bones, our organs, the heart of our faith. Is it damaging us, this radiationlike scrutiny and awareness of our own mortality? Or are we more alive to the reality of the world than our more insulated civilian counterparts?
It was at moments like this one, standing at the kitchen sink and feeling a sudden and crushing tenderness for someone else’s kids who had no idea what just narrowly passed them by, that I felt a confused sort of rage, a wave of heat and electricity that told me I had found one of my boundaries.
CHAPTER 23
Over the course of many long, difficult conversations in the following months about whether or not to take the bonus, Ross and I hammered out our “hard noes,” points in the negotiation on which each of us was unwilling to compromise.
“I’m open to changing the job,” Ross said, “but not the business of tactical flight. I don’t want to fly commercial airliners—I can’t be a bus driver. And I think a desk job might kill me.”