The copier in the hall at Eielson jams if you look at it wrong. I know because I’d fed it my own lineup card at 5:40 that Thursday morning, one copy, and it ate the first sheet like a goat.
So I folded the good one into my left sleeve pocket and went into the auditorium at 6:10 with nothing on my chest. No name, no rank, no patches. Plain green and a zipper. Eighty-four pilots were already in the tiered rows with coffee between their boots, and nobody spared me a glance. I settled into the rear corner. Not being noticed pays my bills.
Then Damian came in the side door with our father’s jaw and my freckle under his left eye.
Our births in Ohio were eleven minutes apart. Dad framed his F-15E photo for the mantel. For nine years he told everyone, at Thanksgiving, at our cousin’s wedding, at our 30th birthday while I held the cake knife, that I did office work.
Damian found me in about two seconds and laughed the laugh he uses to turn a room.
“Wrong room, Syd. This brief is for people who actually fly.”
The whole place went. A guy in the third row beat his kneeboard on the desk. Damian climbed up to me with burrito on his collar and the aftershave he’s worn since tenth grade, and he said Dad says I’m great at the office stuff, so go make forty copies of the lineup card, sweetheart. Somebody yelled double-sided. Somebody yelled collated.
I told him he had four minutes and should sit. He held up his phone with DAD on the screen. I told him Dad would be at the hardware store by now.
At 6:14 the front doors swung open. “Room, attention.” Eighty-four chairs scraped. Major General Troy Burnett, two stars, fifty-seven, walked up the center aisle, past row four, past my brother, all the way to me.
I saluted. He returned it.
“Good morning, Banshee One,” he said, and Damian went the color of copy paper.
Row four, 6:15
The general held out his hand, palm up.
I knew what he wanted. I unsnapped the sleeve pocket, took out the folded card, and gave it to him. It was warm from my arm. A little bent at one corner where it had been pressing into me for half an hour.
He didn’t open it. He just held it.
“Take seats,” he said to the room.
Eighty-four people sat down like somebody had cut their strings. Nobody touched a coffee cup.
General Burnett turned and walked back down the aisle, and I walked behind him, because that was the plan and because my knees had decided that walking was easier than standing still. Row eight. Row six. Row four.
Damian was staring straight ahead. His ears were red. When we were nine he got caught with a bottle rocket in his sock drawer and his ears did the exact same thing, and Dad grounded me, because I was the one standing closest to the drawer.
I didn’t look at him. I wanted to. I wanted to lean down and say, Collated? I kept walking.
The general went up on the stage. I stopped at the bottom of the steps.
“Some of you have been asking all week who’s leading the Red side,” he said. “You’ve been flying against her since Monday. You’ve been losing to her since Monday.”
A few people laughed, the wrong kind, the nervous kind. He waited for them to stop.
“Major Talbot is the Red Force mission commander for this exercise. Call sign Banshee. She’s spent the last nine years in an adversary-tactics program I am not going to describe to you, so don’t ask her about it at the bar, because she won’t tell you and you’ll look stupid.” He held up my card. “This morning’s Red lineup. She’ll brief the rules of engagement for both sides. Then she’ll go fly and try to kill all of you. Major.”
He came down. I went up.
The clicker was on the podium where I’d left it at 5:30. I picked it up and the blue slide went to my first one, which said RED FORCE in plain white letters and nothing else, because I don’t do clip art.
I looked out at the room.
Here’s a thing nobody tells you. When eighty-four fighter pilots realize they just laughed at the person who’s been shooting them down all week, they don’t look ashamed. They look interested. Like a dog who just found out the cat can open the fridge.
Except row four.
Row four looked like somebody had told him his house was on fire and he’d left the stove on himself.
“Morning,” I said. “Brief’s simple. First go is at 8:40. Blue’s escorting a strike package north into the range. Red’s defending. That’s me and five friends.”
The kneeboard guy, third row, put his hand up halfway. His tag said KIRK. He looked about twenty-eight and like he regretted every choice he’d made since birth.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Sorry about the, um.”
“The desk?” I said. “It’s fine. It’s government property. It’s had worse.”
That got a real laugh. The good kind. Kirk put his hand down and studied the ceiling.
I went through the airspace, the floor and the ceiling, the training rules, the knock-it-off calls. I went through it in the same voice I use every morning, because the voice is the job. Flat. Exact. Nobody dies in Alaska on my watch because I was cute in a brief.
Then I put up the Blue lineup slide. Call signs, times, positions. Every four-ship in the package.
Fourth line down: VIPER flight. Lead: CAPT TALBOT, D.
I didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t have to. The name was ten feet high on the screen.
“Viper’s your lead escort,” I said. “You’ll be first in. Viper, any questions?”
Damian stood up. He had to. When the mission commander asks your flight a question, you stand.
His face had some color back. Mostly pink.
“No questions,” he said. Then, because he’s Damian and he can’t leave a thing alone, he added, “Ma’am.”
He put a little twist on it. Just enough for his three squadron guys to hear.
One of them snickered. Just one.
General Burnett, standing by the wall, turned his head and looked at that man for maybe two seconds. The snicker died somewhere in the man’s chest and never came out.
“Good,” I said. “Then I’ll see you at 8:40, Viper. Brief’s over. Step on time.”
People started standing. Kirk let everyone go past him and then came up the aisle against the traffic to the stage. He held out his kneeboard to me like an offering.
“Would you sign this?” he said. “My wife won’t believe it.”
“No,” I said. “But tell her I said you have a good slap.”
He went off grinning.
At the bottom of the steps, the general handed me back my card. He leaned in.
“Your brother,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Fly the plan.”
“I always fly the plan, sir.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s what worries me for him.”
I tucked the card back in my sleeve. Out in the hall, the copier was blinking its little orange light. Still jammed. Nobody had fixed it.
Damian was standing next to it with his phone in his hand.
He didn’t call anyone. He just stood there, looking at the screen that said DAD, at 6:52 in the morning, with Ohio long awake and nobody to tell it to.
Viper flight, 9:30
I’m going to tell you what I’m allowed to tell you, which is not much, and then I’m going to tell you how it felt, which is the part that matters.
We stepped at 8:40. Six Red jets against a Blue package of twenty-something. On paper, Blue wins that every time. That’s the point of the paper. My job is to make the paper wrong, so that when it’s real, the people on Blue have already been wrong once and lived.
Viper came in first, just like the lineup said. Four F-15Es, low and fast, Damian out front.
He flew well. I want to say that, because it’s true, and because in about four minutes I was going to stop being nice about it. He flew like Dad taught us both to drive, back when Dad still taught us both things. Smooth. Confident. A little too sure the road was his.
That was the hole.
He was so sure where Red would come from that he looked there the whole time.
I came from somewhere else.
“Banshee One, kill, Viper One,” I said on the radio, at 9:14, flat as a grocery list. The range controller confirmed it. Damian’s jet was dead. On the exercise, dead means you leave, fly to the regeneration point, and think about your life.
Viper Two lasted two more minutes. Three and Four went together at 9:21, because they’d lost their lead and were trying to rebuild the plan in their heads instead of flying the airplanes.
By 9:30 the whole four-ship was off the board.
I’d like to tell you I felt triumph. I felt my right calf cramping. I felt like I needed to pee. I felt, very small and very far back, about nine years old, standing next to a sock drawer.
Then I flew the rest of the mission, because there were twenty other people who still needed to be wrong once.
The tape, 2:00
The mass debrief was in the same auditorium at two in the afternoon. Same eighty-four seats, same tiered rows, a lot less coffee. You could smell the jet fuel on everybody’s flight suits and the sweat underneath it.
General Burnett sat in the front row this time, on the aisle. Not on stage. That’s a choice a general makes when he wants everyone to know he’s watching the stage.
I walked in the front door, not the side one.
Nobody laughed.
A few people nodded. One woman in the second row, the one whose shoulders had been shaking that morning with her hand over her mouth, sat up straight like she was in church. Her tag said CHANA. She didn’t meet my eyes and I didn’t make her.
I put the tape up.
That’s how a debrief works. Everything is recorded. Every radio call, every turn, every shot. Nobody’s feelings make it onto the tape. The tape is the only honest person in the building.
“Viper,” I said. “Let’s start with you, since you went first.”
Damian was in row four. He stood up. He had changed his flight suit. The burrito crumb was gone.
I ran the tape to 9:08.
There was his jet, a little green triangle, coming north. There was mine, a red one, coming from the west, low, in a valley I’d picked on Monday.
“Viper One,” I said. “What were you looking at here?”
“East,” he said. “Threat axis was east.”
“Who told you the threat axis was east?”
“The intel brief. And the last three days.”
“The last three days,” I said. “So Red came from the east on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He opened his mouth. Shut it.
The room was very quiet. Kirk, in the third row, had his kneeboard on the desk and both hands flat on top of it, like he was holding it down so it couldn’t do anything stupid.
“Because I wanted you to think it was east,” I said. “Three days of east so you’d stop looking west on day four. You did exactly what I told you to do, Viper, and I never said a word to you.”
I ran it forward.
On the tape, the red triangle came up out of the valley behind him. My voice came out of the speakers, a little tinny: “Banshee One, kill, Viper One.”
It sounded like a woman reading a lineup card.
“Time of death, 9:14,” I said. “Viper Two.”
Viper Two stood up, a big kid with a farm-boy neck, the one who’d snickered that morning. His tag said JADEN.
“Viper Two, where was your lead when he died?”
“Ma’am, I was supporting—”
“You were eight miles behind him and looking at the same east he was. Sit. You’re fine. You’re learning. Viper Three, Four.”
I took them through it. Every turn. Every second they spent looking for a plan that had already died instead of flying the airplanes they still had.
It took nineteen minutes.
Nobody laughed at any point in those nineteen minutes.
When I got to 9:30, the board was empty where Viper used to be. I froze the tape on it.
“That’s Viper flight,” I said. “Questions?”
Damian was still standing. Nobody had told him to sit.
His jaw was doing the thing Dad’s does. Mine probably does it too. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never seen myself lose.
“Yeah,” he said. “One question.”
“Go.”
“How long?”
Eighty-four heads turned to look at him. He didn’t care. He was looking at me.
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Nine years,” I said.
“Dad said—”
“I know what Dad said.”
“You let him say it.” His voice came up, the big voice, the turn-the-room voice, except now it cracked in the middle like a teenager’s. “At my wedding. At Thanksgiving. Nine years you let him tell everybody I was the one, and you sat there, and you let me—” He stopped. He looked around the room. Every pilot in it was looking back. “You let me do that this morning. You let me say all that in front of everybody.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because you said it,” I said. “I didn’t make you.”
That was it. That was the whole answer. He stood there with it.
General Burnett got up out of the front row. Slow, like his back hurt, which it probably did.
“Captain Talbot,” he said.
Damian came to attention so fast his heels clacked.
“This morning you told a field-grade officer in this room to go make copies.” The general didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. “You called her sweetheart in front of eighty-four aviators, some of whom will be on her staff next year, some of whom will be on yours. You want to know how long she’s been doing this. I want to know how long you’ve been doing that.”
Damian said nothing.
“I’m going to tell your squadron commander about the copies. That’s all. Not the flying. The flying was fine for somebody who didn’t know where to look. The copies were not fine. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is there anything you’d like to say to the major?”
The room held still. Chana, in the second row, had her hand over her mouth again. Nobody’s shoulders were shaking this time.
Damian turned. He looked right at me. For a second he was eight, losing at checkers, mouth twitching at the corner.
Then it went away and he was thirty-four, standing in front of everyone he’d wanted to impress.
“I’m sorry, Major,” he said. “I was wrong.”
“Noted,” I said. “Sit down, Viper.”
He sat down.
I unfroze the tape and went on to the next flight, because there were sixteen of them, and every one deserved to be told the truth about how they died.
Forty copies
The debrief ended at 4:10. People filed out. A lot of them stopped at the stage to say something. Most of them said “ma’am” and “good fight.” Kirk asked me if I’d come to his squadron’s bar on Friday and tell them about the valley. I said I couldn’t tell anybody about the valley, and he said, “Then just come and not tell us about it,” and I said maybe.
By the time the room was empty my calf was cramping again and I’d been awake since 4:00 a.m. I sat down on the edge of the stage with my boots dangling like a kid on a dock.
The side door opened.
Damian came in holding a stack of paper against his chest.
He came down the steps slow. Not enjoying it this time. He stopped in front of me and held out the stack.
It was my lineup card. The Red one. Forty copies of it.
Double-sided.
Collated.
He had stapled them in the top left corner, every one, a little crooked.
“The copier jammed,” he said. “Twice. I had to get a guy from the finance office to fix it.”
“The finance office,” I said.
“He was lost,” Damian said. “He’d taken a wrong turn.”
I looked at the stack. Then at him. He had a smear of toner on his thumb. He’d wiped it on his sleeve and made it worse.
“These are classified,” I said.
His face went white again, the whole copy-paper thing.
“Kidding,” I said. “That one’s not. The real one never was.”
He let his breath out and sat down next to me on the stage. Not too close. Just close enough. Same jaw, same nose, same freckle. I could smell the aftershave, faint, under the jet fuel.
He took his phone out of his sleeve pocket.
DAD.
It was after eight in Ohio now. Dad would be in his recliner with the TV on mute, the framed F-15E on the mantel behind him, the one he paid extra for.
Damian held the phone up between us, the way he’d held it up that morning for the fourth row. Then he put it on speaker and pressed call.
Two rings.
“Hey, bud,” Dad said. That voice. “How’d you do today?”
Damian looked at me. Then at the phone.
“I got shot down,” he said. “First one in. Whole flight dead by 9:30.”
A silence on the line. Then a laugh, the one that’s supposed to make it okay. “Well, hell. Who got you?”
“Sydney,” Damian said.
Nothing.
I could hear the TV, faint, on whatever channel he leaves it on.
“Sydney,” Dad said. “Sydney’s at a desk.”
“No, Dad,” Damian said. “She’s the boss of the bad guys. They call her Banshee. A two-star general saluted her in front of the whole room and I had to stand up and say I was sorry. You’ve been telling everybody she does office work for nine years, and you got it wrong, and I believed you because I wanted to.”
The silence went on so long I thought the call had dropped.
“Is she there?” Dad said.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Syd.” His voice was smaller than I’d ever heard it. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You never asked,” I said.
Another silence. Then, very quiet: “I’m asking.”
“I can’t tell you,” I said. “But I’ll tell you this much. I fly.”
I heard him swallow, three thousand miles of wire away. “Your mother would have—” he started, and couldn’t finish it, and I let him not finish it.
“Dad,” Damian said. “Take the picture down. The one on the mantel. Or put one of her next to it. You don’t get to have just one anymore.”
“I don’t have a picture of her in a jet,” Dad said.
I reached into my left sleeve pocket. The card was still there, warm and bent at the corner. I took it out and unfolded it on my knee, the one that mattered this morning, the one the general had held in his hand. Under the Red lineup, in my own handwriting at 5:30 a.m., it said BANSHEE 1 — TALBOT.
Damian took a picture of it with his phone. He sent it.
On the speaker, very faintly, we heard Dad’s phone buzz in his hand.
He didn’t say anything for a while. Then: “I’m going to need a bigger frame.”
“Pay extra,” I said.
Damian laughed, the real one, the one from when we were small, and put the forty copies in my lap, and I picked up the first one and signed it for Kirk’s wife.
For more stories about family members crossing the line, read about the sister who showed up in a $6,400 white gown and the mother-in-law who claimed a new baby’s nursery. And for a moving military story, see the boy who carried a wounded Ranger’s note.
