UNLESS IT’S A SUCKING CHEST WOUND
When the call wakes me and I see the name “Kevin Boylan” glowing in the middle of my phone, I don’t want to answer. I’m still in that half-dream state, and I’ve got this sense that if I pick up it won’t be Boylan on the other end of the line, but Vockler, which is impossible because Vockler is dead. And when I do pick up and hear Boylan’s voice telling me he’s coming into town, it throws me even further. With a guy like Kevin Boylan, captain in the USMC, it’s not just an old friend calling. It’s my old gods.
“I’m coming to New York to get blacked the fuck out,” he slurs into the phone. “Prepare yourself.”
I should mention that Boylan has a Bronze Star with a combat distinguishing device for valor. My old gods have their idiosyncrasies.
“When?” I say.
“All I know is I’m coming,” Boylan proclaims. “I just got back.”
He means from Afghanistan.
“I just got a job offer,” I say.
“Sweet!” he says. “How much they gonna pay?”
Not the sort of question I’m expecting, but it’s Boylan, so I answer. “A hundred and sixty thousand dollars,” I say. “Plus bonuses.” Before he called, I’d been depressed about the job. As soon as I name the figure, though, I’m suddenly delirious, saying it, but also feeling like a schmuck because anybody with an Internet connection can find out exactly how much Boylan—an O3 with no dependents and six years in—is making. Hint: Less.
“Dude!” he says. And I’m smiling, because it’s a big deal to him and because my fellow law students at NYU couldn’t give two shits. Most of them are heading to the same sorts of firms, most of them knowing how much they’ll hate it because they’ve already done the summer associate thing.
There’s a pause and then he says, “One hundred sixty… whoa. I guess you made the right choice getting out, huh?” And there it is—the least hint of approval from a real Marine and I’m swelling with pride. Though I’m not even sure he actually approves. There was a German zoologist, Jakob von Uexküll, who claimed a tick would try to feed off any liquid at the temperature of mammalian blood. Law school has left me starving, and I’ll take what I’m offered.
I ask Boylan how he’s been and he tells me, “Afghanistan’s not Iraq, dude,” which makes sense but probably needed to be said, because Iraq’s what I’m thinking—the sound of his voice sending me nostalgic, as if I’m missing Iraq. I’m not. What I’m missing is the idea of Iraq all my civilian friends imagine when they say the word, an Iraq filled with honor and violence, an Iraq I can’t help feeling I should have experienced but didn’t through my own stupid fault, because I went for an MOS that wouldn’t put me in harm’s way. My Iraq was a stack of papers. Excel spreadsheets. A window full of sandbags behind a cheap desk.
“They kept changing the mission on us,” he’s telling me. “War’s end is a weird, weird time to be at war.”
We talk a little more, and when we hang up I stay motionless for a while, sitting in my bed in my dark room with the curtains drawn against New York, still huffing that same old glory in the air, the taste like that first time I got popped one good in the face during training and didn’t back down while my inner lip bled past my gums. That time. So I get up and go to my computer, where I’ve got my whole life in pictures and files, and I pull up Deme’s citation. “For extraordinary heroism while serving as a Rifle Squad Leader, Company K…” I tear up a little, like I always do. It was when I got choked up the first time that I knew I’d nailed writing the thing.
See, our unit had one no-shit hero. Hero like you read about, like you see in the movies, and that hero was Sergeant Julien Deme, and that sergeant was good, and that sergeant was brave, and that sergeant is dead, but most important, that sergeant was Boylan’s, and he’s the whole reason Boylan and me are tight, and why at two in the morning, drunk off his ass but full of plans to continue to drink away his deployment money and his demons, Boylan is calling me.
That’s Boylan’s motivation. I never knew Deme, so Deme is not why I’m answering the phone. James Vockler is why I’m answering the phone.
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I’d been 3/6’s adjutant, on my second deployment to Fallujah. Of all the lieutenants in that unit, Boylan was my favorite. Not the greatest at writing FITREPs or awards or doing any of the things that would bring him to my office—on a purely professional basis, he was a pain in the ass—but still, he was sweet. Sweet in that way that gentle giants sometimes are. Boylan had wide ears, a round, expressive face, and a stooped posture that seemed to be perpetually apologizing for the sheer monstrous size of him—arms thicker than my thighs, thighs thicker than my torso, a neck thicker than my head. Also, thicker than his own head. Boylan’s pride at the time was being able to do a quick six faster than any other officer in the battalion, sucking down beer quicker than I can drink water. He belonged more to the frat house than the battlefield, the ideal dudebro and the sort of guy who made girls feel comfortable because he’d always give the skeezy ones a good talking-to. He was also the only officer who never seemed to think that, because he was in the infantry and I was an adjutant, there was some huge penis differential between the two of us.
So when Deme died, Boylan came to me with the hopelessly shitty citation he’d written, begging for help. Deme had been shot trying to pull injured Marines out of an ambush, the sort of thing that, if he’d survived, would have certainly been Silver Star worthy. With Deme dead, the unit as a whole was talking Medal of Honor. More important, so was the battalion commander.
“I know it’s no good,” Boylan told me, clutching the citation. The two of us were alone in my office in Camp Blue Diamond, right outside of Fallujah but effectively in another universe from the violence Boylan lived and breathed every day. “I’m no good at these.”
It had been only a few days. There still wasn’t a clear account of exactly what had happened, and I had a distraught Boylan looking ready to go to pieces with only a thin plywood door separating us from the junior Marines who worked for me. It wouldn’t do to let them overhear an officer breaking down and weeping in my arms. That happened later, stateside, and it wasn’t pretty.
“You’re better than most,” I said, skimming the pathetic write-up. “You care.”
Therapist is not part of the adjutant’s responsibilities. I was supposed to handle the battalion’s paperwork: casualty reports, correspondence, awards, FITREPs, legal issues, et cetera. Difficult work, even if you don’t take into account that most infantry guys didn’t join the Corps to do paperwork and tend to suck at it. But mental issues—guilt, terror, helpless anxiety, inability to sleep, suicidal thoughts—that was all for Combat Stress.
“Most lieutenants,” I said, “when they get into their first firefight, they write themselves up for the Combat Action Ribbon immediately. I get it before the dust has settled from the IED.”
Boylan nodded his huge head with its large, childlike eyes.
“Their men,” I said, “that comes later. When they get around to it. But you’re the only guy, in either of my deployments, who ever put in all your men and forgot to write up yourself.”
“Deme has two kids,” Boylan said. He paused. “They’re too young to remember him.”
We were getting far afield. “The citation…,” I said, looking it over again. “A lot of what you write here… it’s beside the point.”
Boylan put his head in his hands.
“Look, Kevin,” I said, “I’ve edited a million citations. Some of them for valor. And the point is not what a wonderful guy Deme was. I’m sure there’s plenty of wonderful guys in your unit. I think you’re a wonderful guy. Should we give all of you the Medal of Honor?”
Boylan shook his head.
I turned to my computer and clicked through my folders. At random, I pulled up a citation from my last deployment. It was for a Corpsman who’d treated Marines injured in an IED despite having a ballpoint pen–sized piece of shrapnel stuck a centimeter below his groin, barely missing his balls and a hair away from his femoral artery. “Displaying the utmost courage…,” I read, “with complete disregard for his own injuries.” I closed the file and opened another. “Decisive leadership,” I read, “fearlessly exposing himself to enemy fire… great personal risk… with complete disregard for his own safety.” I opened another one. “Displaying the utmost courage… bold leadership… wise judgment… his courageous actions enabled…” I looked up. “You get the idea.”
Boylan’s face let me know he didn’t.
“We don’t give awards for being a great guy,” I said.
“He was a great guy,” Boylan said.
“No shit. That’s pretty fucking clear. But you don’t use a citation to describe the richness of all his humanity and blah blah blah. He’s got to measure up to every other Marine who did ridiculously brave shit. And there’s a lot of ridiculously brave Marines. Really. It’s ridiculous. So it’s not about Deme. Or rather, what it’s about is how Marine he was, not how Deme he was. You’ve got to fit him into all the right categories.”
Boylan didn’t seem to be listening.
“Hey,” I said. He looked up. “There’s good news. Decisive leadership, check. Rapidly organized his unit to provide suppressive fire, check. Complete disregard for his own safety, check. Utmost courage, check. I could go on. I don’t know the full details, but there’s a lot to work with here.”
Boylan smiled. “It’s good talking to you,” he said. “There’s no chicks here. But I can talk to you.”
I sighed. “Great,” I said. “How about I write the damn thing?”
Boylan nodded happily, one small weight among many lifting off his shoulders.
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