We all eventually find our seats amidst a packed house and sit down. I attempt to explain who some of the acts are, but it seems to go over Michael’s head, until Little Jimmy Dickens comes out. He is the oldest living member of the Opry, a country music legend (he’s a member of the country music hall of fame), and stands barely five feet tall. He truly is a living legend and I explain all of this to Michael; in fact I make him rise to his feet out of respect when Jimmy comes onstage. Michael seems genuinely entertained by Jimmy’s show. I mean, who wouldn’t be? Jimmy proceeds to sing songs and make jokes about how he “looks like Mighty Mouse flying by” in his traditional rhinestone outfit. He’s pretty much the perfect person for us to be watching that evening. It’s really an honor to be there, especially because the place was entirely flooded less than a year ago. Nashville really does have a strong community and the place looks as good as new.
For whatever reason, I had not been informed that DIERKS BENTLEY was the final performer of the evening. I love Dierks Bentley and begin to scream when he and his band take the stage.
“Who is that?” Michael yells over the screams.
“I’ll explain it later, but he’s huge!” I yell back.
Dierks comes onstage, looking very sexy with his country swagger, and begins to sing a variety of his hits, every word of which I know. I stand up and sing along to them, including my favorite, “What Was I Thinkin’.” He is fantastic on that stage and I can’t believe we are so close. After Dierks sings his last song and takes a bow, Stephie leans over and asks me what I thought of his act.
“Stephie,” I say, “your new mission as our tour manager is to find out the name of Dierks Bentley’s scruffy, long-haired bass player. He looks like my future ex-husband.” I’m half serious. Dierks Bentley is a sexy man with a sexy bass player. Country musicians are typically really sexy. It’s just how it is.
Fort Campbell,
Kentucky/Tennessee
Shoot/Don’t Shoot
Michael:
One of our original ideas when mapping our itinerary was visiting a military base. Obviously, Meghan’s family has a long and distinguished history of service, but my father and grandfather both served too. They weren’t la-dee-da
admirals
like Meghan’s grandfather or whoop-de-doo
fighter pilots
and
war heroes
like her dad, but both did their parts. In fact, one of my treasured mementos is a photograph of my father’s basic-training graduation: Second Brigade, Eighth Battalion, B Company, Fourth Platoon. He’s standing in the second row of five, arms straight at his sides, looking hard-eyed just off camera. He’s twenty-one years old. It’s March of 1967, seven months before Meghan’s dad would be shot down and captured over North Vietnam.
My dad never saw combat. He never even went overseas. In fact, he enlisted in the Indiana Army Reserves specifically to minimize his chances of being sent into harm’s way. It worked. His reserve unit remained in Indiana throughout the war. Dad died when I was twelve, so I never got the chance to talk to him about his service, but I suspect his attitude was more or less that he did what he had to do to avoid getting shipped to Vietnam; I’m glad he felt that way.
Growing up, my mom’s attitude about the military was pretty well defined. She used to say to my brother and me, “If there’s a war, I’m sending you two to Canada.”
When I ask about my grandfather and his time in the navy during World War II, she tells me she thinks he enlisted. “Everybody did. It was a very popular war.” I ask her where he served and she laughs. “Rio. Can you believe that?”
I was wondering if her attitude about the military had changed at all over the years, so I asked her about it in a recent phone conversation. I reminded her that she used to talk about sending us to Canada. She said, “I still feel that way. I’ll drive you there myself. And my grandchildren too. I just think this country invents too many wars.”
I hate to say it, but I agree.
The military base we chose to visit is Fort Campbell, sixty miles from Nashville. It’s a sprawling 106,700 acres on the Kentucky/Tennessee border, home of the famous 101st Airborne Division. Fort Campbell bills itself as “the nation’s premier power projection platform,” which “possesses a unique capability to deploy mission-ready contingency forces by air, rail, highway, and inland waterway.” It’s also where that photo of my father was taken, forty-five years ago.
Meghan:
If you know one thing about my family’s history, the first thing that comes to mind is probably their extremely long and distinguished history of military service to the country. My grandfather and great-grandfather on my father’s side were both decorated four-star admirals in the navy, and my father is a famous war hero. Entire books and movies have been dedicated to their pivotal and historic roles in our nation’s wars: My great-grandfather who was in World War II, my grandfather and father both of whom were in the Vietnam War.
My brother Jack is currently a lieutenant in the navy and graduated from the US Naval Academy in 2009. My other brother Jimmy is a former marine who enlisted while in high school. My family history of serving this country goes as far back as the American Revolution, when my ancestor John Young served on General George Washington’s staff.
A naval air station in Meridian, Mississippi, is named in my great-grandfather’s honor: McCain Field. Also named after my great-grandfather was a guided-missile destroyer, the USS
John S. McCain
(DL-3), which was later decommissioned. Another destroyer, the USS
John S. McCain
(DDG-56), was named after both my great-grandfather and grandfather; when I was a child in 1992, my mother christened it with a champagne bottle in Bath, Maine. My entire family was there and celebrated.
The McCain men are all known for being of a smaller build, using profane language, and liking to drink and gamble. They are also all known for being natural leaders. All the men in my family love and serve their country. You know that part in
Forrest Gump
where Lieutenant Dan has his family history explained and it shows the flashbacks of each of his ancestors fighting in every American war? That’s kind of like the men in my family. I am most proud of this long legacy of service, and although I never served, if in some way I was called to, in a draft or a crisis, I would be the first one in line. I thank God for the men and women who serve this country to keep me safe. I get to go on road trips with crazy comedians and wax poetic about the future of American politics in gorgeous television studios for one reason alone—because men and women fight for my freedom to do so. The men and women who elect to fight for and serve our country are truly the best of the best of the best. We don’t celebrate their service enough these days, and they all sacrifice so much.
Michael
: I’m a little apprehensive as we drive onto the base. I just don’t have much experience with soldiers or military culture. Spending time with Jimmy and his friends in Prescott helped, but that was on civilian turf. This is where soldiers come to learn how to jump out of airplanes and rappel from helicopters. This is where people learn to kill other people. I’m afraid they’re going to make me crawl under barbed wire or yell at me to polish my Crocs or make me peel potatoes. God forbid I’m asked to do a single pushup. Because I will cry.
We’re met at the Public Affairs Office by a trio of minders: two civilians and a staff sergeant. They ask that our visit be “off the record,” meaning they do not want us to quote anybody directly. Nor are we allowed to videotape or make audio recordings of anything we see. They don’t explain why and we don’t press the issue. It sucks, but okay.
The thing I’m about to learn over the next six hours about the military is how good they are at being the military. These people, and everybody we meet, are so adept at promoting their own culture and ethos that it’s kind of amazing. Every soldier we meet is working from the same playbook, all marching in perfect metaphorical lockstep. The experience is so scripted, so spit-shined and perfect, that it’s impossible to believe, the way a reality show is impossible to believe. Yes, both undeniably have moments of reality, but the entirety is so heavily edited that it’s difficult for me to fully buy any of it.
The experience reminds me of our Zappos tour in Las Vegas. In the case of Zappos, the weird corporate culture was an enforced cheeriness. Here at Fort Campbell, it’s a steely, strident professionalism. They seem to be attempting to project an aura of invincibility, which I guess is what you want in an army. Both environments have an artificiality to them that I find difficult to reconcile with the way people actually conduct themselves in the real world.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe an army needs to believe itself to be superior in order to survive. What unnerves me about being among these guys, though, is the sense of otherness that I feel: a feeling of detachment among the soldiers, as if they are somehow removed from the society they are sworn to defend.
Or maybe it’s just my own boyish insecurity among these men that’s making me feel that way, a quiet shame that I haven’t done my own part in protecting America. Maybe it’s just an inborn suspicion of the military left over from my upbringing. Whatever the cause, I’m unable to ever fully relax for the duration of our visit.
Meghan, of course, is right at home among these guys. She’s twittering at them about this and that, asking questions, flirting a
little bit. They seem to like her a lot more than they like me. I don’t blame them. As we make our way across the base,
I
like her more than me too.
Meghan
: I talk with everyone, ask them about their time in the military, tell them about my brothers; just lots and lots of small talk trying to make them feel at ease. They’re all extremely friendly and accommodating. It feels a little second nature; I am around men in the military all the time.
The first place we are taken is the ELS training simulator, where soldiers prepare for combat. After making pleasantries, we are ushered into a giant simulator screen with a bunch of guns connected. It’s pretty crazy. Stephie, Michael, and I go in and watch the men train for a few minutes. The simulator is extremely loud and lifelike. As weird as that sounds, because it is a screen and fake guns, the soldiers are all lying on their stomachs with another guy touching them to signal when someone should shoot and where. The entire room is filled with screaming and blasts of rounds going off. It even takes me aback a little.
After they’re done, their kill scores and reaction scores are tallied and they are told the results. When the lights go on, I can’t help but notice all the men look like versions of Captain America. They are all built, handsome, and looking good in their camo. I have to force myself to concentrate on the task at hand; I had almost forgotten how hot men in the military look in fatigues. They ask us if we want to give the simulator a try. All of us want to. So me, Stephie, and Michael pick up fake M4s and the instructors show us how to shoot. Except that the simulator guns are a little lighter, it’s pretty much like shooting an actual M4, which I have done a few times.
We all take the same positions that the soldiers did and start going through the same scenario that was just on-screen. We are in a desert town filled with insurgents and it is our job to shoot at anyone who opens fire on us. Everything starts happening really quickly—a man jumps out and starts shooting at us and I make an
attempt to shoot back at him. The instructors start yelling at us where to aim and who is coming out and my heart starts racing. One of the insurgents falls to the ground, my gun jams; I am doing all of this wrong and it is freaking me out. This does not feel like a video game; it feels like the actual thing. The simulation ends, the lights go on, and I can see that Michael’s brow is damp with sweat. My heart is still racing. Stephie looks like she might pass out. Michael looks more freaked out than me; in fact, Michael looks like something might be wrong. So I do all the talking.
“Hot shit!” I say. “And that is why America has the greatest military in the history of the world, baby!” All the guys like this. I tell them how amazing this training is, and I mean it. I can’t imagine doing this in real life.
Whenever Michael laughs at me when I say that freedom doesn’t come free, this scenario right here is what I am talking about, soldiers in situations where they are forced to kill.
Michael:
This simulator is crazy. It can transpose any conceivable environment onto a large video wall. Soldiers then monitor the environment for hostilities and take appropriate action. In other words, the simulator teaches them when to shoot, who to shoot, and most important, if to shoot. To my ears, it sounded like a high-tech video game, which it is. Except that it’s not. For one thing, the M4 weighs about as much as a Great Dane, and is about as easy to lift and shoot. For another, when the lights go down and Iraq comes up, no video game has ever freaked me out like this. Not even Super Mario Bros.
When the first simulation ends, I am out of breath and close to tears. There’s an unexpected weight in the middle of my chest, a kind of adrenalized dread, as if I’ve just narrowly avoided a bad traffic accident. I am completely unprepared for this reaction. After all, I’ve spent countless hours in front of television screens shooting burglars and aliens and killer robots and never felt anything more upsetting than annoyance at having to repeat a level. But something about this experience is different—some combination of the huge,
immersive wall, the barely modified weapon in my hand, the concussive popping of the gun, the soldiers yelling beside me. Something about it leaves me disoriented and upset. Neither Meghan nor Stephie seem to be having the same reaction as me, and I don’t say anything because I don’t want anybody making fun of me.