The Fortunate Ones - Ed Tarkington

Prologue

Casualty Notification

The mother was standing behind the screen door when we stepped out of the car. She knew what we were there to do. This was my third such trip in a month. Fort Campbell had averaged about one a week since the surge. Casualty notification assignments were supposed to rotate, but Command kept giving them to me. Mike told me I was too well suited to the task.

“You’ve got a sweet face, Charlie,” he told me. “A sad face. They feel better when they think you’re sad.”

“I am sad,” I said.

“We’re all sad,” Mike said. “Some people just don’t know how to show it, that’s all.”

He was talking about himself.

Mike and I got on well, perhaps because he was always game for a few drinks afterward. The Protestant chaplains were all teetotalers. I hadn’t been out with the rabbi. Mike Bailey, however, liked his Irish whiskey. And he had no interest in counseling me. “Find us a nice, quiet spot, Charlie,” he would say when it was over, and before long, we were someplace dark where you could still smoke inside. Catholics understand the healing power of a stiff drink.

The dead boy’s parents lived in Bellevue, at the end of a quiet, shady street lined with red brick ’50s ranch houses and split-levels with well-kept yards. There were kids throwing balls and riding bicycles, elderly women sitting on front porch chairs and lawn furniture, a few men riding mowers. Manicured flower beds resting at the bases of mailboxes decorated with eagles and flags. Pickup trucks and minivans and motor homes and pontoon and bass boats on trailers parked at the ends of the driveways. America the beautiful, forever and ever, amen.

“Didn’t you grow up around here?” Mike asked. “You and this kid’s family might know some of the same people.”

“I doubt it.”

“Come on. You Southerners are all cousins, right?”

“And I assume you’re related to the Kennedys.”

A trio of old men congregating around an ancient Ford pickup turned from their conversation to watch our car roll past. They exchanged a few words and dispersed, heading toward their respective homes, no doubt to inform their wives of our arrival.

“There they go,” Mike said. “Tuna casserole, on the way. I’ll bet you a hundred bucks the first one shows up before we leave.”

I couldn’t say whether or not Mike Bailey was a good priest. He was a product of one of those big Irish Catholic families, the kind with a dozen kids, most of which give at least one son to the Army and one to the church. Mike had somehow managed to satisfy both requirements. I got the sense that he’d opted into the chaplain thing when he was still young and romantic, maybe under the influence of a charismatic Jesuit who’d filled him with dreams of emulating the heroic missions of Saint Ignatius and his followers. His idealism did not seem to have survived Fallujah.

I slowed to a stop in front of the appointed address, and the dread came on.

I reached back for the folder I’d set on the rear seat before we left. I looked up at the house, and there she was, standing behind the screen door, as if she’d sensed we were coming, as if she’d felt the life she’d brought into the world go out of it from thousands of miles away, and we were just there to confirm what she already knew.

“Let’s not keep her waiting,” I said.

She opened the door before we even reached the front porch steps. Her eyes were damp.

“Hello, ma’am,” I said. “Are you the mother of Private First Class Cody James Carter?”

“His daddy’s in the back,” she said.

We followed her through a small entry hall into a dim wood-paneled living room. On the wall over a gas-log fireplace hung a large flat-screen TV tuned to Fox News.

Mr. Carter stood when he saw us. He picked up the remote control and pressed mute. Maybe he was afraid he’d miss something.

Mrs. Carter came to her husband’s side. They stared at us, their faces anguished, waiting. In the language of the Casualty Notification Officer Module, I informed them that their son was dead.

Mrs. Carter’s face slackened. She drooped to the couch. Her husband sat down and wrapped his arm around her but remained rigid, his eyes fixed on some point between the television and the fireplace as I finished reciting the script.

Mike sat down next to Mr. Carter. I rounded the coffee table and sat close enough to touch the mother.

“Did he suffer?” she