People laughed, gently, and James stood up, and his knees informed him that he was eighty-two, and he informed them that he knew, and he walked to the lectern with the program folded in his pocket and nothing written on it because everything he had tried to write in the past three nights had come out sounding like a speech, and these men had not died for a speech.
He looked out at the chairs. He looked at the wall because it was easier, and then he made himself look at the chairs again because easier was not the assignment.
"I'm not going to tell you about the day," he said. His voice came out rougher than he wanted through the microphone. He moved a fraction closer. "There are reports that tell about the day, and they're accurate the way a list of ingredients is an accurate description of a meal. Colonel Ortiz's father could tell about the day, and even he mostly didn't, and Miguel Ortiz could talk about anything. So instead I'll tell you about the men, some of them, the way you'd want to know them if they'd gotten to be old and boring like me, because they were not symbols to us. They were a pain in the neck, most of them, in the specific ways of young men, and we liked them in those exact ways."
He paused. Nobody moved.
"Danny Whitaker was nineteen and he wrote poems in a notebook he kept in a plastic bag so the rain wouldn't take them. They were not good poems." A breath of laughter, surprised, from the Whitaker rows. "I want to be honest here because Danny would be furious if I stood up at a wall with his name on it and lied about the poems. They rhymed 'heart' with 'apart' about every third page. But he wrote one every Sunday for his girl back in Ohio and one every Sunday for his mother, and he never mixed them up, and when he was scared β which he was, we all were, he was just the only one with the manners to admit it in verse β he'd write faster. The notebook came home with his things. His sister has it. She told me last year the plastic bag is still on it. That's Danny. He protected the poems better than he protected his own socks, and his feet paid for it, and Paul Mercer knew it, which brings me to Paul."
"Lieutenant Paul Mercer was twenty-four, which made him an old man to us and a child to everybody in this grove today, and he carried extra socks. Not a pair. A system. He had dry socks in a bag for whoever's feet had gone white, and he did foot checks like a mother, and he took more teasing for it than any officer I've ever known, and he never once pulled rank about it. He'd just say, 'Harris, a man can't fight on ruined feet,' like he'd read it in a manual, when in fact I think his mother had said it to him about his father in Korea. Paul Mercer died with, I believe, three pairs of other men's socks in his pack. Two hundred years of military writing about leadership, and I can sum up the best of it as a lieutenant who knew whose feet were wet. There are officers in this grove who know I'm talking to them."
Daniel, standing at ease by the wall, smiled down at the grass like a man being accurately described by proxy.
"Henry Okafor was our radio operator, and Henry sang. He sang while he worked on the set, he sang under his breath on patrol until I made him stop, which took approximately one order per patrol for eleven months, because Henry believed β he told me this, seriously, the night before the worst night β that a song you stopped singing just because conditions were bad was a song you didn't actually believe. He sang hymns his grandmother taught him and he sang Motown and he sang them in the same set list without noticing there was a difference, because to Henry there wasn't. When the radio was hit, Henry kept working on it and kept, very quietly, singing, because the men could hear him on the net and a voice that isn't panicking is worth more than a voice with information. I have believed that all my life since. It's why we're all so calm today." Laughter again, wet this time. "Henry was twenty-one. He had a voice like a good road, you just trusted it to get you there."
He had meant to do three. He found he owed one more, because of what was in his pocket.
"Sammy Ruiz was our mechanic, twenty years old, from a town in Texas where his father fixed trucks, and Sammy could fix anything except, apparently, the Army's procurement system, about which he had opinions that would have ended his career in peacetime. Sammy could listen to an engine the way Henry listened to a radio. And in the evenings, when there was nothing to fix β there was always something to fix, so I mean when he chose to ignore it β Sammy worked on pieces of brass. Souvenirs, he said. Ashtrays nobody used. A cross for a man whose name isn't on this wall because he lived to be seventy-nine, and who sent me a card every Christmas saying the cross was still on his dresser."