Thankfully, I wasn’t the one who had to break it to him. My dad pulled him aside and told him privately. Alan was pretty stoic about it, which was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was that the ramifications of my dad’s news had completely changed in the time it had taken us to drive to Pendleton. When those nineteen martyrdom-loving motherfuckers flew four planes into three buildings and a field in Pennsylvania, Alan’s issues were no longer just about overcoming cancer. They now included the suddenly urgent question of whether or not he’d be able to deploy with his unit and fight for his country. And if Davis got deployed without Alan—because he was in the middle of a chemo cycle or a radiation regimen—that would have been what we Best brothers like to call a real kick in the dick.
We hung around Pendleton for a couple days until finally they conducted the graduation ceremonies on the fourteenth. This was now obviously different from any other boot camp graduation in years or even decades, maybe ever. As I looked around, I could see the tension on the parents’ faces, knowing that their kids were more than likely going to war. It was such a stark contrast with the young Marines who were graduating. Their expressions signaled some anxiety, of course, but also their excitement. You could tell they couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of there, go to SOI (School of Infantry), and then deploy as fast as they could to blow these motherfuckers off the planet. I’ll never forget that look on their faces. It seared itself into my memory. It was actually a big part of the shift that was beginning to take place in my head—from emo dork to future soldier.
That afternoon, after commencement ended and my brothers said their goodbyes to their friends, we all piled back into the car for the drive back to Santa Barbara. All of us. My brothers in the window seats, me sitting bitch. There wasn’t much talking. It was just like the drive down a few days earlier, except now the radio wasn’t spewing speculation and panic. It was painting a picture of a villain most of us had never heard of: Al-Qaeda.
* * *
—
In the days and months following Alan’s return to Santa Barbara, do you want to guess what he did? I’ll tell you what he didn’t do: He didn’t fucking complain. Alan tackled cancer the way he approached everything in life—head on. He followed the protocols, he ate as much as he could, and he tried to stay in shape. I would see him come back from chemo looking pale and green but still in high spirits. We would be watching TV together, and he would quietly get up, throw up in the bathroom, and come back as if nothing had happened. He treated treatment like a duty, and as a reward, we treated him like nothing had changed. Translation: We fucked with him constantly.
There were a lot of “Hey, Alan, can you stand next to the microwave and heat this up for me? You have cancer already, so what’s the difference?” If we picked him up from the hospital, we’d take back roads and tell him that we were looking out for him by avoiding cellular towers. I’m not sure how much he enjoyed it at the time, but I know he appreciated it when he got older, because he understood, just like I eventually would, that having a fucked-up sense of humor is probably as important to keeping a soldier alive as his weapons or his armor.
In March of 2002, seven months after Alan’s diagnosis, the doctor declared him cancer-free. Six weeks after finishing treatment, with only thin patches of hair having grown back, he went to SOI. The doctors told him it would be two years before he would be considered full duty and deployable. Alan had a few things to tell them, too.
* * *
—
By a roll of the dice, my brothers’ unit hadn’t gotten the call to deploy to Afghanistan in the first months of fighting after 9/11. But in early 2003, eighteen months after their graduation, they were told that they were headed to Kuwait for the pre-stage of the invasion of Iraq. By this time Alan had been cancer-free for eleven months. The problem was, the military required you to be free and clear for twelve months in order to deploy, plus the notes on all his charts indicated that they thought he would need an extra year of recovery. So close, and at the same time so far.
Did Alan complain? C’mon, I think you know the answer to that by now. He handled his fucking business. The first thing he did was go through the standard military process, filling out paperwork, getting signatures, getting approvals to try and become deployable. Of course, since this was the military, things took forever, and it wasn’t until the day before his and Davis’s company was slated to leave that he found out it had gotten all dicked up and he had been denied. When he got the news, he tried another tack, making an appointment for a pre-deployment physical the next day to try to secure clearance through medical channels before his company’s plane took off from Pendleton Airfield.
“Sir, I gotta be with my platoon when they deploy today,” he told the military doctor.
The doctor nodded, seeing the eagerness in Alan’s eyes. “All right. Stand up, let’s have a look at you.”
As the doctor ran his exam, Alan passed everything. Then came the standard check of the lymph nodes, which is a dead giveaway for Hodgkin’s patients, even ones whose cancer is in remission. The doctor put both hands on Alan’s neck, lightly pressed on the lymph nodes, and promptly stopped the exam.
“How do your lymph nodes feel? Swollen? Sore?”
“Not at all. They feel good. I feel great.”
“Uh-huh. Because to me they feel swollen,” the doctor said in a serious tone.
“Well, I’m not sure what you mean. Like I said, I feel great. I was around a couple fellows who were smoking cigarettes last night, though. Maybe their secondhand smoke briefly polluted my lungs—”
“Son, that shit isn’t going to fly. You’re a recovering cancer patient, and your lymph nodes are swollen. I’m afraid I can’t medically clear you to deploy. I’m sorry.”
“But I’ve been done with chemo for eleven months—”
“It’s for your own good. I’m sure you’ll be fine for the next deployment.”
“Yeah, but my unit is leaving tonight.” Alan was persistent.
“My hands are tied. Sorry, son. Don’t worry, the war isn’t going anywhere.” He patted Alan on the shoulder with the maximum allowable amount of sympathy for an E-3 at the bottom of the Marine Corps food chain. Which is to say, none. The doctor walked out, leaving Alan momentarily dejected, then pissed. This was an “official” military determination that would get reported to his unit commander, which meant there was no way to get his name on that activation order or his ass on that plane.
For the ordinary person, this would have been the ballgame. But Alan isn’t ordinary. He is a master bullshit artist. He is the fucking Michelangelo of feces painting. In the parking lot outside the medical building, he called the civilian oncologist who had cleared him for SOI eleven months earlier. Alan explained the situation—well, a situation: He was about to leave on a “training exercise” that was only going to be “three weeks” as part of a “temporary deployment” to a place that was absolutely 100 percent not in a war zone, and he needed to get a physical because his military doctors wanted a second opinion in order to clear him. It made sense to the oncologist, as all good lies do to all people, and he agreed to see Alan that afternoon.