The Waiting Hours

Three Hours

Three hours was the only thought on everyone’s mind, especially mine.

I sat in a molded plastic chair at McChord Air Force Base and watched the clock on the far wall tick toward a number I didn't want it to reach. In three hours, I would board an aircraft bound for Iraq. The terminal smelled like burnt coffee and gun oil. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, harsh enough to make everyone look a little sick. Duffel bags and rucks were stacked in uneven towers between the rows of chairs, weapons cased and leaning against them, body armor piled on top like sandbags. Somewhere behind me a vending machine rattled and gave up a bag of chips nobody had ordered. Soldiers slept sitting up, chins on chests, boots still laced.

It was such an ordinary room to be waiting in for something that was not ordinary at all.

Thirty years old. Nine years in the Army. Cleveland born and raised. Married four years now, to a woman patient enough to love a Soldier. A father for the first time; my son wasn't even old enough yet to know my face was leaving. This was my second deployment. Somalia had been the first, a long time ago, when I was somebody else.

I'd left my wife and son that morning in a doorway I couldn't make myself walk away from fast enough. She held it together until the very last second, and then she didn't, and I told myself I wouldn't remember her crying. I was right. What I remembered instead was smaller than that; my son's hand, barely bigger than my thumb, wrapped around my finger like he intended to keep it.

He would be different when I saw him again. Bigger. A stranger's version of the boy I knew. If I saw him again.

I caught the thought and put it down hard, the way you're trained to strip a weapon you don't trust.

When.

The Team

I looked across the terminal at the three Soldiers whose lives had, in ways none of us had chosen, become mine to carry.

Second Lieutenant Jacob McCoy paced instead of sitting, twenty-two years old and freshly minted out of West Point, checking his gear for the fourth time in twenty minutes though nothing about it had changed since the third. He talked about Iraq the way some men talk about a big game; like it was something you could scout, prepare for, win. I remembered he'd played linebacker at the Academy. It showed. The lieutenant still believed preparation guaranteed the outcome.

He crossed over to me at some point and asked, casual, like he was asking about the weather, "Sergeant, what was Somalia really like?"

"Hot," I replied.

He laughed. I didn't.

I was a private in Somalia, young, half-formed, hungry the way McCoy was hungry now, expecting something like the stories the older guys told in the barracks. I didn't see much. I saw enough. Enough to know that nobody who has actually been shot at goes looking for a second helping. In Somalia, I had only ever been responsible for myself. That was a small, manageable weight. Now three men would look to me when things fell apart, and that thought scared me a great deal more than Iraq did.

Eighteen

Private Daryle Woolridge sat apart from the others, off by the window where the runway lights bled orange across the glass. He was barely eighteen years old and practically fresh off the bus from Basic and AIT. He joined the Army immediately after graduating high school in Chesapeake, Virginia. His gear still had the stiffness of things that had never been used; the ruck straps hadn't broken in yet, and the boots hadn't taken the shape of his feet.

I sat down next to him.

"I'm good, Sergeant," he said, before I'd asked anything.

I knew the lie because I'd told it myself once, in a different terminal, to a different sergeant. I let the silence sit there until he couldn't stand it anymore.

"Sergeant, can I ask you something?" he simply inquired.

"Go ahead," I responded with genuine sincerity.

"Were you scared? The first time?" he asked trying to hide his own fear.

I could have given him the answer NCOs are supposed to give. Instead, I told him the truth.

"Hell yes." I answered.

He looked at me like I'd handed him something heavy and unexpected. I told him that fear wasn't weakness; fear was just your body doing its job, keeping you sharp, keeping you alive. The dangerous Soldier isn't the scared one. It's the one who's convinced nothing can touch him.

Woolridge admitted, quiet, that he'd joined for the GI Bill and wanted to attend college after his enlistment was up. He couldn't afford it any other way. He'd never lived a night away from his family before shipping off to Basic. Now he was going to Iraq to fight for his country.

I did the math without meaning to. He was closer in age to my sixteen-year-old brother, Kenneth, than he was to me.

Something in how I saw him shifted right then. Not as another private on my manifest, but as somebody's son.

You Don't Know Yet

2LT McCoy found me not long after, still running hot with the same restless energy, talking now about finally getting to use what four years at the Academy had built in him; leading men, making the calls, becoming the officer the manuals described. I felt my patience thin and made myself hold onto it anyway.

"What's the most important thing I need to know?" he asked, and he meant it.

I gave him the practical answer first. Listen to your NCOs. Don't make a decision just to prove you're the one in charge. Always know where your Soldiers are. Check their equipment yourself; don't take a man's word for it. Never assume everybody in the room understood the plan the same way you did.

He nodded along, filing it like a checklist.

Then I gave him the real one.

"These three stripes on my chest and that gold bar on yours; they mean the same thing when it counts," I said.

"What do you mean?" he inquired.

"Somebody's trusting us to bring their kid home," I replied, “and that alone is the most important mission we have as leaders, Sir.

He didn't have anything to say to that. For the first time since I'd met him, I watched McCoy go quiet in a way that wasn't performance. Something in his face settled; command wasn't a scoreboard. It was people.

The Promise

Specialist Miguel Bordon walked over the way he did everything, unhurried, squared away, twenty-four years old and four years into an Army career he never made complicated. He was the easiest Soldier I had. Disciplined without needing to be told twice. Dependable in a way that had stopped surprising me a long time ago. Bronx-born, but he'd built his whole life somewhere else, around a wife and two kids who were, as far as I could tell, the entire reason the man got out of bed in the morning.

"Think we'll get another call in before we board?" he asked.

"Probably," I replied.

He nodded, and then, quieter he said, "My youngest doesn't really get why I'm leaving. Just knows Daddy's not gonna be there." He shook his head and continued, "Worried they're gonna forget me a little. Twelve months is a long time when you're that small."

I said something about how kids remember more than we think. I don't know if I believed it. What I was really thinking about was his wife.

At the send-off, before we'd loaded the buses, she'd held onto him a long time and then she'd come and found me. She knew who I was; knew I was Miguel's team leader, the one who'd have him in Iraq when she couldn't. She looked at me with the particular steadiness of a woman who has decided not to fall apart in public.

"You'll look after him. Right?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am," I answered with confidence.

She didn't let it go that easy. "Promise me you'll bring him home," she demanded.

I remember the hesitation. Barely a second. Long enough that I felt it and hoped she hadn't.

"I promise," I hesitantly responded not realizing the depth of the promise I just made.

Standing in that terminal now, looking at Bordon checking his rifle sling for the hundredth unnecessary time, the promise came back to me, and it felt like something I had no right to have made. I could train him. I could lead him well. I could put good decisions between him and danger, and I could put my own body between him and danger if it came to that. What I could not do was control a bullet, an IED buried in a road, an RPG fired by someone I'd never see. I could not control fate, and fate doesn't honor promises made in a parking lot to a frightened wife.

I made a promise no man had the power to keep.

Husband, Father, Leader

I stepped away from them to get coffee I didn't particularly want, mostly for the excuse of a few minutes alone.

I thought about Cleveland. About the young man who'd enlisted nine years ago because the recruiter's pitch sounded better than anything else offered at the time, and how little that young man resembled the man standing at McChord now. I thought about my wife, and the questions started coming the way they always do at three in the morning in places like this; who fixes the leak under the sink, who gets up with the baby at 2 a.m. when he won't settle, what happens if he spikes a fever and she's alone with it, what happens if she needs me and I am not there to be needed.

And then the question I wouldn't let myself finish; what happens if two Soldiers in dress uniforms knock on that door instead of me.

I took the photo out of my wallet. My wife, tired and glowing, holding our son an hour after he was born. I studied it longer than I needed to.

I wanted, badly, to go home. Just that. Nothing complicated about the wanting.

Nine years ago, I couldn't wait to deploy. Now I'd have given almost anything not to, and for a second that felt like a failure in me somewhere. It wasn't. It just meant I finally understood the actual cost of what we were about to do, instead of the idea of it.

One Hour

The announcement cut through the terminal that boarding would begin in approximately one hour, and the whole room changed its posture at once. Sleeping Soldiers came awake. Bags got zipped. Weapons got checked one last time, out of habit more than doubt. Helmets got clipped on. Whatever had felt abstract about deployment collapsed, all at once, into something close and immediate. You could hear the deadening silence throughout the terminal.

I gathered my three men and preceded to the assembly area.

McCoy still carried his confidence, but it had gone quieter, steadier, less a performance now than something he might actually grow into. "Sir, remember what we talked about," I told him.

"Take care of the men," he said back.

"Take care of our men," I replied in a manner not to correct him, but rather remind him that we were a team.

He nodded like he understood the difference.

Bordon had everything exactly where it belonged. Of course, he did. I told him to get his wife on the phone one more time before we lost the chance.

Woolridge's hands were shaking, just slightly, as he fought with a strap that wasn't cooperating. I didn't make a thing of it. I just reached over and fixed it myself, like it was nothing.

"Stay close to me," I told him.

"Yes, Sergeant," he replied with a sense of confidence that I would be looking out for him while deployed.

I don't think he quite understood yet how much trust he'd just handed me.

The Line

The final call came, and Soldiers began forming up toward the gate, hundreds of boots against tile, duffel bags over shoulders, no different, from a distance, than any other line of travelers at any other airport. No music. No speeches. No one waving flags. Just tired people walking toward a plane, which somehow made the whole thing feel heavier than if it had been dramatic.

McCoy went ahead of me without looking back, already somewhere in his head rehearsing the officer he meant to become. Bordon followed, steady as ever. Woolridge hesitated at the edge of the line, glancing back toward the terminal entrance the way a kid looks toward a door his mother might still walk through and tell him he doesn't have to do this.

I put a hand on his shoulder.

"You ready?" I asked.

"No, Sergeant," he said, and at least he was honest about it.

I looked past him, toward the aircraft lit up on the tarmac.

"Neither am I," I informed him.

He looked at me like that wasn't allowed, like sergeants weren't supposed to say things like that. I gave him the closest thing I had to a smile.

"Come on." I instructed as we made our way to the plane.

The Promise I Could Keep

I couldn't promise Miguel's wife that I would bring her husband home. Not really. Iraq didn't care about promises made in a parking lot, or anywhere else.

But as Woolridge climbed the stairs ahead of me, I finally understood what I could promise.

I couldn't know if my wife and son would be all right without me. I couldn't know whether McCoy would make the right call the first time it mattered, or whether Woolridge would freeze the first time the shooting started, or whether Bordon would walk off that plane in twelve months the same man who walked onto it. There were no guarantees waiting for us over there. There never had been.

What I had was this; I would watch over them. I would teach them everything nine years in this uniform had taught me. When they were afraid, I would stand next to them instead of above them. When they couldn't see the way forward, I would find it, and if it ever came down to one of them choosing between his life and mine, I would do everything in my power to make sure that choice never had to be made.

I stood in the open aircraft door and took one last look back at the lights of McChord.

Somewhere beyond them were my wife and my son, asleep, not knowing yet how long this year was going to feel.

Somewhere ahead of me was Iraq.

I stepped inside.

Three Soldiers were counting on me to look after them.

That was the promise I could keep.