On the night her father finally reappeared for a family supper, Cass’s mother said, as she passed the mashed potatoes, “Frank, there was a question on the financial aid application: ‘How many aircraft do you own? If needed, list on separate sheet.’ How many do you have at this point?” That was the end of Mom and Dad’s conversation at that happy supper. Her father stormed off into the night, muttering on about how he was killing himself for the family and what thanks did he get? A few hours later, Cass got an e-mail from him, manfully explaining that he used the Cessna “exclusively” to fly to business meetings. In fact, it was deductible as a business expense. Indeed, he managed to make it sound as though selling his share in the plane would be tantamount to economic suicide. The family would be out on the street, eating potatoes that fell off trucks. Irish ancestry is a reliable provider of poverty metaphors.
A few days later, Frank Cohane was waiting for Cass outside her high school. In his Beemer. That, too, he explained sheepishly, was a “deductible business expense.” He took her to Starbucks, where, according to a recent survey, 92 percent of Americans now hold their significant conversations.
“Sug,” he said, “have you ever given any thought to, uh…”
“Religious orders? No, Dad.”
“The military.”
She stared. She had, as it happened, not given any thought to the military. She supposed that she was as patriotic as any seventeen-year-old American girl. She’d grown up in the backyard of one of the country’s biggest defense contractors. Everyone here was patriotic. But her adolescence had been focused intensely on AP French, AP English, AP history, 1585 SATs, and a 3.95 GPA so that she might actually get into-you know-Yale. Hello? Perhaps he’d noticed?
“Hear me out,” he said, suddenly animated, as if he had just had a category 5 brain hurricane. “I did some calling around. Turns out if you go into the officers training program-and hell, you’d be a cinch with your scores-and give ’em a few years, heck, they’ll pay for college.” He made it sound like the bargain of the century.
What was his deal? He’d done “some calling around”? On his fancy new cell phone? In the BMW? Or had he jumped into the “deductible” Cessna and flown down to the Pentagon in Washington to talk it over personally with the Deputy Undersecretary for Recruiting Kids Whose Dads Have Blown the Tuition Money? He couldn’t actually be serious.
“How many years?”
“Three. And get this-if you give ’em six years, they basically pay for everything. You get all kinds of bennies.” He leaned forward. “I called Yale. They said they were expecting you in the incoming class and started to give me some hoo-hah about it, until I said, ‘Whoa, whoa-you’re telling me you’re gonna renege on accepting a patriotic American woman who wants to serve her country?’” He grinned. He did have a winning grin, her father. “Did they ever back down fast. So you see, I fixed it. They’ll defer admission until you’re discharged from the army. Or navy. Whatever you-”
“You told them-as in Yale-that I wasn’t entering this fall? As in the place I have been working my butt off to get into the last four years? You told them that?”
“Well, seeing as how we don’t have the money…Geez, Sug, do you know it’s over thirty grand, and that’s without a dining plan.”
“I could always, like, not eat for four years.” Her head was spinning. “Did you…have you discussed this with-Mom?”
“No. No. I wanted to bounce it off you first. Naturally. Sug, when this IPO goes through, I’ll buy Yale University a whole new football stadium.”
Frank Cohane went on talking, but Cass had stopped listening. She was trying to calculate how many people she’d told about getting into Yale. Fifty? A hundred? Let’s see, everyone in her Yahoo! address book…plus everyone on her Hotmail address book…everyone in the senior class knew…relatives…plus she’d stopped by the Martin Luther King Jr. Center where she spent that broiling summer as a tutor. They’d all hugged her, said how proud they were of her. Say, two hundred people?
Cass became aware that her father was still talking.
“…I never went into the military myself. And to be honest, I always kind of wished I had. Not that I wanted to go to Vietnam. Jesus, no one in my generation wanted to go to Vietnam. That was completely screwed up. Anyway, we’re not at war now. So really if you think about it, it could be kind of a good experience.”
Chapter 3
And so, the following January, when Cass would have been heeling the Yale Daily News or attending a master’s tea with some visiting eminence, she instead found herself at Camp Bravo (an ironic name, given the enthusiasm level of its occupants) at a place called Turdje-the “d” was silent, though acutely felt-in Bosnia, formerly Yugoslavia, formerly Austro-Hungary, formerly the Ottoman Empire, in the company of several hundred troops, part of America’s apparently endless (and certainly thankless) commitment to keeping Europeans from slaughtering one another.
“Sir,” she asked one of her superior officers after one especially depressing day, “why are we here?”
A naive question, perhaps, but legitimate enough, inasmuch as she was asking it five years into America ’s “temporary” deployment in the region. Without looking up from his papers, the officer replied, “To keep World War One from breaking out again.” It was said without irony.
Cass had gone through combat basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. She had always been an outdoors girl. She didn’t find the training particularly grueling. Her drill instructors were impressed by the zest with which she bayoneted dummies and subdued men twenty pounds heavier than her in hand-to-hand training. Having spent some time in the Connecticut woods with her brother shooting squirrels with a.22 rifle, she took to the shooting part and obliterated the heads and vital organs of targets with her M-16. One of her shooting instructors even suggested that she apply to sniper school. She contemplated it, then decided against it on the grounds that being able to kill at one thousand yards was-thankfully-not a skill in huge demand in the civilian afterlife. She did, however, having passed basic with flying colors, apply to Ranger school with every expectation of acceptance.
So in due course she found herself assigned, by the army’s invisible hand-more powerful, even, than Adam Smith’s-to Public Affairs. Some functionary deep within the bowels of the Department of the Army in Washington, D.C., while processing her application, saw that she had been accepted to Yale University. Be a total waste to have this one rappelling out of helicopters. No, she was needed-desperately, immediately-in the slushy gray snows of Bosnia, escorting VIPs, issuing press releases, and putting on goodwill coffee-and-doughnut grip-’n’-grins with indigenous locals.
Cass was in one of the trailers that served as the headquarters for the 4087th Public Affairs Battalion (“Spinning Eagles”), 12th Regiment, 7th Division, 4th United States Army, putting the finishing touches on another homeric press release with a stop-the-presses headline-674TH ENGINEER BATTALION COMPLETES PAVING AT GRZYLUK FORWARD AIR BASE-when Captain Drimpilski summoned her.
Captain Drimpilski was in his late thirties, with thinning hair and thickening waist. He, too, had entered the army with dreams of rappelling from Blackhawks into fields of fire, only to find himself plucked by the invisible hand and dropped into fields of paper.
His single triumph over this adversity was that he had not (yet, anyway) become so embittered as to make life intolerable for those under him. He liked Corporal Cohane. She was efficient, good-natured, and easy-very easy-on the eyes. He was, of course, physically attracted. Any male of standard-issue testosterone level would be. But Captain Drimpilski had thirteen years in and seven to go until pension time, and he was determined-repeat, determined-not to end up dishonorably discharged on a sexual harassment charge. A two-star general with a chest full of fruit salad had just ended his career because of an “indiscretion” with someone under him (in both senses). Captain Drimpilski sublimated his ardor for Corporal Cohane by means of an exaggerated emphasis on protocol and the grammatical expedient of the third-person pronoun.