The Revisionists (10 page)

“Hey, Jill,” she said to her coworker, “read through these and tell me what you think.”

She and Jill had attended GW Law together, had crammed and quizzed each other and consumed far too much espresso together, had uproariously celebrated each academic and then professional milestone with nights of dancing at Dream and the Eighteenth Street Lounge. They’d interviewed at the firm the same day and for the past two years had served as each other’s bodyguards and shrinks as they tried to survive the long hours and intense pace.

Jill read the e-mails, Tasha guiding her through them chronologically.

“I think this isn’t material,” Jill finally said. “Nothing about the subcontractor or the dispute.”

“I know. But, Jesus.”

The e-mails were linked to cost-benefit analyses and noted that GTK could save millions of dollars on shipping if it delayed the processing of one of the government’s orders by a few weeks. Tasha knew from other research that the shipment in question consisted of bulletproof vests, ammunition, and other matériel. There was even a tidy back-and-forth between two midlevel executives, one of them positing the theory that it might be unethical to delay items deemed essential by the grunts in the desert, the other exec assuring him that this was a simple business decision, and if the dollars made sense, the company should do it.

“We gotta focus, Tash. I want to be home in time for the Skins game.” Jill handed back the files.

“You can’t tell me you don’t think this is wrong. People probably
died
because of this.”

She felt her throat tightening, and Jill looked at her. “Sweetie, come on.” Jill put a hand on her friend’s arm, squeezed it. “I know what it makes you think. But we’re stressed as hell and you’re connecting dots you shouldn’t. You need to put that away now, and keep your mind on this, okay?”

All she could do was nod.

“Maybe you should get lunch, clear your head a minute.”

They were surrounded by boxes and stacks of paper, and at the far end of the conference room four other associates were reading and scribbling, oblivious to this drama. Tasha felt herself nodding as she floated toward the elevator, dazed.

She made it only three blocks before she felt her emotions loosening again. She needed to hide, couldn’t risk one of her colleagues on lunch break seeing her crying in public. She was near the almost ridiculously fortified White House, at the messily trapezoidal intersection of Penn and 14th and E Streets, when she noticed a set of stairs ascending a gentle slope of landscaped grass, a hilly miniature island in the convergence of all that asphalt. Where had that come from? It seemed a miracle that it existed, that she’d never noticed it before. She walked up the steps, grateful for the hiding place that God seemed to have rearranged earth and stone to create just for her.

The stairs crested the hill and then descended to a long stone walkway. Before her was a wall upon which maps of Germany and France were etched. The lines and arrows represented military fronts, the movements of armies. She stepped back and saw the sign declaring this the World War I Memorial. It was protected from the view of pedestrians and traffic by the slope of the hill and the trees planted around it. A small copper-stained fountain burbled, and strewn on some benches were the homeless men whose collective knowledge of safe places to crash constituted the only human awareness that this spot existed. Tasha thought of all the fanfare and press and Hollywood stars surrounding the dedication of the World War II Memorial, and of its prime location beneath the Washington Monument, and she was struck and saddened by the contrast with this place. A memorial that hardly anyone knew existed, not even a lifelong Washingtonian who had spent countless hours writing legal briefs only three blocks from here. She sank onto a bench that was not currently occupied by a derelict and she cried. She had often wondered what kind of memorial would be built for soldiers like her brother—a trivial and petty concern, but what Washingtonian wouldn’t at least wonder this, surrounded by the damn things?—and the sight of this place, its utter forgottenness, the way it existed outside memory, outside anyone’s real life, outside any curious tourist’s itinerary, broke her heart.

Eventually she wiped at her eyes and tried to read the etchings in the stone, the facts about this war, the staggering number of dead. No bouquets were laid here. These men had all died, and what descendants were left had gone on to fight other wars and forget about this one.

She walked away and reentered the world, running from all that history. Yet she carried it with her, like the photo of Marshall she kept in her wallet. Her memories of the Marine Corps marching band strutting down Eighth Street on the Fourth of July, of the grainy images she’d seen so many nights on CNN, of the fog and wail of Marshall’s memorial service. She carried these with her as she walked not back toward the office but south, past clusters of tourists snapping shots framed by the White House’s manicured lawn and its rooftop snipers. Soon she could hear the commotion; something was happening on the Mall.

Something was always happening on the Mall. On weekdays, the grass looked sickly and dead from having been trampled by this march or that rally over the previous weekend. Tasha had stumbled on NRA rallies, gun-control rallies, Impeach the President rallies, Support the President rallies, rallies for peace, rallies for war. So much conflict, so much disagreement, so many ways to disrupt traffic. She’d once seen a Recognize Taiwan rally, a group of happy Asian youths waving unfamiliar green-white-and-red flags at the curious onlookers, the passersby smiling at them, and something about the demonstration’s complete irrelevance to her own life had made it both comical and wonderful.
Yeah, go, Taiwan!
That had been a few years ago, before everything seemed relevant to her life and nothing seemed comical or wonderful.

She knew what today’s rally on the Mall was. She’d seen the articles in the paper warning residents which streets to avoid. She told herself she had not gone on this walk so as to stumble upon it like this, but maybe she had. Her subconscious was doing crazy shit lately. She was confused, not really making decisions for herself. The events of the world were what they were, and she followed.

Followed them here, past Constitution, in front of the Museum of American History, to stare at this, history in the making. Or maybe a refutation of history, an insistence that we stop history, redirect it. The marchers were chanting and singing, waving signs, carrying banners that sagged over their heads.
END THE WARS. SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. BRING THEM HOME.

She was against the war and said so when talking with her like-minded friends, but she’d kept silent about her opposition when talking to Marshall and her parents. She knew he had been excited, though nervous. He didn’t need to hear her criticism of U.S. foreign policy. She loved her brother, even though they had lived such different lives. She hadn’t tried to change his mind about anything. And she would wonder for the rest of her life how things might have turned out if she had.

She was the big sister, for God’s sake. She was
supposed
to offer guidance. She was
supposed
to tell her little bro what she thought. But she’d been afraid to. She’d let him down, and he was gone.

Who was she kidding? You couldn’t talk Marshall into or out of anything. All she would have done was piss him off. Maybe this was the toughest thing to admit: that she’d had no impact whatsoever on his fate. She was a tiny, insignificant footnote in another person’s story. Insignificance felt even worse than guilt.

She didn’t trust the official and very abbreviated story the army had provided her family. Things didn’t add up, and she couldn’t get anyone from his unit to talk to her. Why had a regular e-mailer like Marshall (amazingly regular, considering the responsibilities he had) stopped sending his family messages a week before his KIA date? And why had his blog been taken down six days before his KIA date, as opposed to afterward? She’d heard that soldiers could get in trouble for posting certain things. After the army banned soldier blogs, he’d taken down his old blog, but then he’d launched a new, anonymous one—he’d mentioned the link to Tasha on one of their rare calls, but in an offhand manner, as if he knew people were listening. Had he gotten himself in trouble with the army or with someone else?

Maybe she was just grasping for something to be angry at. Maybe she just needed an enemy.
We all do, don’t we?
she thought.

She wished the firm didn’t demand all of her waking hours (and more). With what little free time she had—usually at two in the morning, when she couldn’t sleep—she had started the project of finding and compiling all of Marshall’s old e-mails and blog entries and journals, trying to shape them into some kind of memoir or book in his name. Which meant she needed more detail from the army about what had happened to him. She knew her parents didn’t fully believe the official story either, but they were hesitant to push. Well, she would push—that was a big sister’s job, even if she wasn’t really a big sister anymore. She vowed as she stood there watching the march that she’d find out what exactly had happened, even if she had to call every press office in the armed services, even if she had to track down every soldier in Marshall’s platoon.

She needed to have an effect on something. She stood there as the ex-hippies and college kids marched past, some of them chanting as they tried to merge themselves into something greater. Over to her right a smaller group of Support the Troops boosters waved American flags, holding their own signs and mocking the “Commies,” telling them to go back to old Europe, decrying their misguided rage and weakness.

She stepped forward and joined the flow of protest, let it carry her. She didn’t want to be alone for this anymore. She didn’t know if marching did anything at all, but she would try it.

The day had started cloudy and was only getting grayer as it aged; the Capitol dome seemed to glow in contrast. Tasha marched with the crowd to the steps of the Capitol, read the pamphlets that were passed out, and ignored her cell phone as it buzzed and buzzed at her. She listened to the speakers, some of whom were inspiring and some of whom ranted about the environment and racial inequality and every other conceivable grievance of the Left, totally irrelevant to the war except within the tangent-happy interrelatedness of the orators’ minds. People were bringing whatever of themselves they could into the cause. The cause was enormous, sprawling; it contained multitudes. It was as ugly and yearning and flawed as human nature, and at times she felt embarrassed to be a part of it. But at least she was a part of something. As her outraged cell phone continued to buzz as if it had its own violent opinion, she stood there, sublimating herself to this unnamed thing, this unified hope or harmonic rage, and tried to stop thinking about those GTK files.

A few nights later she found herself at a meeting of antiwar activists. According to one of the pamphlets at the march, the activist group was hosting a meeting to “channel this weekend’s energy toward concrete and comprehensive goals.” Tasha was down with concrete goals. Part of her trouble since Marshall had died was the lack of goals, the lack of energy, the plain not knowing what to do with herself.

The name of the group was Peace Now and Forever. That sounded rather utopian to Tasha, but maybe she was wrong to disparage those with lofty aspirations. So many people settled for the easy win these days, you had to tip your hat to those aiming higher, even if you knew they would miss.

The meeting was held at a small, damp Sunday-school room at the Baptist Holiness Church in Shaw. Yellow Rorschach stains from water damage decorated the ceiling, and the windowless white walls were adorned with religious drawings from the local child artists: the sun rising on the empty cave Christ had fled, multiplied fishes and loaves heaped on picnic tables, Saint George decapitating a dragon with one mighty stroke.

The different speakers told the audience about opportunities to volunteer for this letter-writing project or that PR campaign, to sit in on and possibly interfere with congressional hearings on the war, to screen documentaries at local apartments, to organize teach-ins and “spread the truth about the administration’s global goals.” Then a couple of “visiting economics professors” (likely unemployed) gave a long, meandering lecture about “world capitalism’s master plan for the subjugated people of the Middle East.” Tasha tried not to fall asleep as she sat there listening to old white men discuss how the free marketeers had deliberately seeded chaos in Baghdad, just like they did in New Orleans after Katrina and in South Asia after the tsunami; even supposedly random events like meteorological disasters were ascribed to a nefarious cabal’s master plan. If the making of legislation and sausage were two things you just did not want to witness, Tasha thought, the same seemed to be true of world peace. This was some seriously tedious shit.

After the fortunately not endless (it only seemed that way) lecture, the two profs sat down. Then, to Tasha’s surprise, she found herself looking at one of her college boyfriends.

The new speaker was T.J., a veritable supernova from her freshman winter and spring. They’d lasted nearly a semester, hooking up during a snowstorm in February and breaking up on a lily-speckled quad in May. He’d transferred that summer, and she’d never heard from him again. Now here he was, taking the stage like he owned it, telling the audience about his own related group. They were conducting an anti-recruitment project, in which activists would visit high schools and “hit kids with the truth about being a soldier,” the things that military recruiters would never tell them. For every recruiter who tempted teens with stories of honor and dignity and getting a good education, T.J. explained, an activist needed to tell America’s impressionable youth about the prevalence of PTSD among returning soldiers, about the squalid conditions at VA hospitals and the army’s lack of interest in its wounded veterans, about the human cost of militarized murder. And of course they had to tell kids about “the real reasons for the wars,” which, he said in such an offhand way as to defy even polite disagreement, were gravely immoral indeed. Tasha tried to imagine what Marshall would have thought about an appeal like this.