We found a corner table with a small red lamp. After he was done charming our middle-aged waitress, spitting chew into a beer glass, and tilting back his well-rolled baseball cap to ask for a double Jack Daniel’s neat—“Cuz I’m an Amurican,” he said in a fake hick accent whose layers of regret and self-mockery were lost on her—Alex surprised me by lurching into a new, grave register, his blue-gray eyes intent on mine for understanding.
“The way I conveyed it to my mom was, ‘What if Jesus Christ came down and told you to do the same exact thing?’ Look at all these cults. The people in that Jim Jones cult, they weren’t so crazy. They were just at a point in their life where they needed someone to look up to. For Christian people, it’s Jesus Christ. For me it was the Rangers. I never did drugs, I hardly drank, I always kept my body pure, because that’s what Rangers do. Whenever I was at a party I was always the one who looked out for everybody, because that’s what Rangers do. And then finally the one thing happened, and it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, this is wrong.’ It was like, ‘If this is wrong, then everything I believe in is wrong.’”
The one thing happened … Amid his white polo shirt and clear skin, Alex’s new tattoos flashed like false eyes on moth wings: a dotted line with the all-caps instructions CUT HERE across the left wrist, his prison bar code on the belly of the right forearm.
“What’s up with those?” I asked.
Alex explained their meanings with an exaggerated enthusiasm that made me suspect he had been getting some pretty ambivalent reactions. They reminded me of the jokes he had been telling for a year at family gatherings: “Felon coming through! Hide the knives!” When he first got out of prison these jokes had cracked us up. Way to own it, Alex! was the general sentiment. Don’t let some label get you down! By now, with the mounting grimness of his job prospects impossible to ignore, the jokes sounded increasingly off. I worried about the tattoos. I knew how seductive it could be, when your personal heroic narrative broke down, to try on its opposite for size. I had gotten tattooed myself while he was in prison, at a parlor on the second floor of a minimall where I would eventually get a job as a bookstore clerk, having befriended a bunch of musicians, actors, and writers who made careless disregard for the future seem revolutionary and fun. Back then I had seen the tattoo as a promise to myself to stop practicing math professionally. I knew that if I were ever to climb into a hot tub full of world-class researchers at some conference somewhere with this dumb, romanticizing thing on my chest—a twelve-sided polyhedron called a snub disphenoid that I had loved and sort of identified with as a kid—I would never be taken seriously again. Since then my views on it had grown more complex. The flamboyant ex-con persona seemed pretty out of character for Alex, but maybe this was just how character formed: by groping whims we had no choice afterward but to commit to as ourselves.
I asked about his favorite army books. Alex told me he had given them all away, $5000 worth, after he got out of prison.
“I was kind of the weird kid in high school. During off periods I would read the army handbook. I knew all the standard operating procedures before I went to basic. Everybody was proud of their acceptance letters to college, and I carried around my Airborne Ranger contract because I was so proud of that. That’s all I was known for. I mean, it was everything. It was my life. I saved every piece of newspaper on the Iraq war to the point when I joined up. I got all of Opa’s stuff from Oma.”
Opa and Oma were the names we had always used for our grandfather and grandmother, an homage to their German ancestry. Family lore had it that Opa had written a memoir of his World War II service, but I had never laid eyes on it.
“The shrapnel they took out of him,” Alex ticked off, “his German cross … oh, this is funny. Well, it’s not funny. It’s kind of ironic. Opa killed a German at the point where we were pushing them back into Germany, this blond fourteen-year-old kid from the Hitler Youth. He got his papers. The kid’s last name was Becker. Then Opa married Oma—Beverly Beck.”
He raised his eyebrows at me. Our grandfather, a New York Jew, killed a teenage Nazi in the country his people left behind, then married a blond Texan Protestant who almost shared the boy’s name? I wanted to give Alex the response he was looking for, but I was honestly not sure what I thought of this piece of family trivia. I didn’t share his simple fascination with war. I’d never known that deep manly camaraderie he experienced in the army, that unity of violent purpose, although in my own way I’d longed for it.
I realized to my surprise that he was on the verge of tears. Before I could respond, he broke eye contact to look over my shoulder at the TV above the bar, where we had both been glancing periodically at the Broncos game.
Blums love their football. During his coaching days, my father once explained that what looks like a brawl to the unpracticed eye is in fact a complex strategic interplay of formation and counterformation amid a fog of feints and reverses. Big college coaches are as prized as star professors not just because of the fund-raising dollars involved but because the required blend of analytical prowess and charismatic machismo is vanishingly rare. The coach is the general. He has to persuade a group of very tough, opinionated men to put enthusiastic effort into acting against almost any sane measure of self-interest.
I’ve since learned that the war/football analogy goes only so far. Ever since machine guns and precision artillery blasted close infantry formations apart in the late nineteenth century, armies around the world have had to find new ways to maintain discipline and motivate troops without recourse to the mass choreography that makes football so comparatively precise. How to get soldiers in thousands of private hiding spots to decide, each independently of the others, to leave cover and apply the strategically desirable quantity of violence in situations where the more natural human response is to run away or go murderously insane? This is the problem of battle command. It is a much harder job than coaching. Even leaving aside the vastly higher scale, vastly higher stakes, and vastly denser fog of miscommunication induced by all the explosions and killing and fear, there is also an essential difference between the players on the field: by the standards of professional or even college athletics, war is fought by laughably unpracticed amateurs. Every player on a university team, from the quarterback to the nose tackle, has been staring for years into the eyes of opposing formations through the grilles of their facemasks, learning subtle nuances of stance and shift to draw on instinctively in the grunting crush of a game. In the early years of World War II, by contrast, the average newbie infantryman received only seven weeks of drill on his rifle, none of it against real opponents. In the American Civil War many men went to the front lines with no training whatsoever. Wars back then were fought by teenage farmers, blacksmiths, shopkeepers, and teachers, as clumsy as Little Leaguers forced onto the team by their dads. Now, when most American soldiers enlist directly after high school without first learning a trade, wars are fought by basketball jocks and cheerleaders, by skaters and emo kids, by Harry Potter fans and stoners and jazz band clarinetists. At an age when many parents hesitate to trust children with their own cell-phone accounts, we trust our young soldiers to follow complex rules of engagement in determining when they are supposed to kill.
“Another thing,” Alex said, looking back from the game. “When the Iraq war started, I was sitting by the fire in the living room. The power was out. I remember seeing the bombs go off in Baghdad on this little battery-powered TV. I was so happy that we were invading Iraq, because I knew I’d get to go to a combat zone when I joined the army.”
While Alex was in prison,