According to the customary recipe for a war story—baked with facts but leavened with bullshit—I ought to say that he and I were close, that he was the finest soldier I knew, a friend whose loss drew all of us who knew him closer together. In truth I neither liked nor disliked Mike Donahue. He was a coworker, a good soldier as far as I could tell. He spoke of being a father and I believe he was good at that, too. I knew him well enough to be confident volunteering to ride in his vehicle, not well enough to confide in him or ask much about his life back home.
So why was his death the casualty that affected me the most? I saw General Greene more often, admired him for his down-to-earth style, and was as shocked as anyone when he was shot and killed during a graduation of Afghan troops at a training academy. I knew Senior Chief Hockenberry much better than either of them, and, having talked with her earlier about things ranging from Navy life to her teenage son, I could vividly picture the lifelong impact of the serious gunshot injuries she sustained in that same incident. So why was the loss of this almost casual acquaintance the one my mind couldn’t stop turning toward?
Perhaps it was the timing, the knowledge that the war took him just as I left it behind. Amid the drawdown, I left a few days earlier than originally planned. Otherwise I would have heard the explosion, so close to our quarters—assuming I was not out on a convoy myself. That must have been it: as different as he and I seemed, and as little as I really knew him, I could very much picture myself in his place. He drove vehicles around Kabul, just as I did. That day, he would have put on the same kind of body armor, waved goodbye to the same gate guard, signaled a turn onto the same road. So he died the way I probably would have, if I hadn’t made it: the brutal luck of being chosen by an IED, never knowing who or what hit you.
Visiting the forest of white markers in the Afghanistan section at Arlington is not just for honoring the individuals lost there; it is a place to seek some reason why they should be under the headstones while the rest of us walk around on the grass. I was sorry about his loss. But my real purpose visiting his grave site and the others at Arlington is to confront the dictatorship of chance, which compounds the cruelty of loss by allocating it for no clear reason at all. To die taking a hill is one thing, but a soldier hit by an IED is basically the victim of an assassination. Like an assassin, the bomber is out to destroy a symbol, who happens to be a human being, without really knowing or caring about the most important qualities of his victim.
Looking back, I see no good reason that can be confected for why one person and not another should die at random on a routine mission. For a mind that can’t come to rest around that question, the only way out is to construct a reason going forward. You resolve to build a life that is somehow worthy of emerging on the better side of luck’s absurd equations, because you know that by definition your luck is something you don’t deserve. Nothing that had happened during the deployment would justify the pattern by which I returned safely and some of the others did not, but I had the rest of my life to try to repay whatever debt I had incurred by coming back in one piece. It all might sound superstitious, but the search for justification was an inescapable imperative for me, and another element of propulsion for my work at home. Not that it would really be possible to ever feel like I had settled this account. But it was clear that I would have to work harder than ever to make myself useful, after these reminders of the precariousness of existence not just in war zones but in general. If this loss had happened while I was still deployed, it might have propelled me to try even harder, perhaps dangerously so, to make gains for my vanishing unit. But my war was over. If I wanted somehow to earn the luck that had brought me home safe from Afghanistan, I would have to do it from home, in South Bend.
I MAY GO MONTHS WITHOUT THINKING about the day I came home, then some event will bring it all back, like the Vietnam Welcome Home event at a smoky dive bar called Catch 22. Nestled between houses on a residential block on Fourth Street in Mishawaka, Catch 22 is a true neighborhood bar of the old school. Even though it’s lunchtime, today I find it full to capacity, which means about thirty guests, taking every seat at the bar, the handful of high tops, and even the pool table, which has been covered for the occasion. Other than Mishawaka’s mayor Dave Wood, and a couple staff members, a reporter, and me, just about everyone is between sixty and eighty years old, wearing a ball cap or some other clothing identifying him as a Vietnam veteran.
After Mayor Wood says a few words of appreciation, I give my little speech, something like this: “Four years ago today I landed in Afghanistan. And at the end of my tour, the reception couldn’t have been better. At Baltimore Washington Airport, people lined up to shake our hands, waving flags. When I got home to South Bend, people were waiting with balloons and gave me hugs.”
A little choked up, I continue to the point. “Many of you did not get that welcome home. And it’s a shame. These days, as a society, we have learned how to separate how we feel about a policy from how we treat the men and women sent overseas to serve. That wasn’t true for Vietnam veterans. . . . I’m sorry that not everyone got thanked properly. I’m sorry that this is coming late. But on behalf of the city of South Bend, I hope you’ll forgive . . . that this message is coming late but maybe not too late: thank you. And welcome home.”
Recognizing Vietnam Veterans Day has only begun in the last few years, but it quickly became another occasion for me to see how important a symbolic act can be. Some of the vets’ eyes water. It’s clear that to them the honor, however late in their lives, is meaningful. One of them tells me he was eighteen when he went, says he’ll never forget the things he saw, but dwells on the ways in which he feels luckier than others who came back unable to move on. “They called me a baby-killer when I got back,” he says, staring into the distance.
I try to picture what coming back from war was like in the 1960s and 1970s, without the benefit of email or Facebook or cell phones, your family perhaps not sure even what day to expect you until you could reach them from a pay phone on your way back. One vet describes a friend whose reunion with family happened at this very bar; he returned one afternoon, found his family’s home empty, and knew that they must be at this tavern across the street.
BY THE TIME I WAS on my way home forty years later, Big Navy had learned some things about the art of preparing a service member to return. Somewhere in between Vietnam and now, the Pentagon had realized that the day after you leave a war zone is not the best time to reunite with your family. So we were given three days’ interlude at a little base in rural Germany that amounted to a kind of no-frills resort. There was ample time for working out and sleep, and they even organized little trips into town. It almost felt like tourism, but the intent was to watch and help you respond as elements of normal life were gradually restored around you. As we wandered in small groups around the market square of a small city nearby, someone from the command was always on hand, to keep an eye on each little “first” of reintegration. They were normal things from home that we hadn’t experienced in a while, things we might not be able to handle as easily as we expected. First walk through a crowd. First time in the presence of children. First drink.