Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter Page A

house; he’s invited them for beers, but most take Cokes. MasterChief sits at his piano. It is a beautiful instrument, an ebony Steinway grand, a gift from someone at the Department of Defense, or so the story goes. He can really play. The rumor went around that he’d turned down Juilliard for the chance to make the Teams. Another rumor went that he’d been court-martialed after inviting Bobby Seale to speak on counterinsurgency at Quantico, in the 1970s. He played music familiar to most of them, Brahms, Beethoven, and Mozart; he knew the canon. But he knew Bob Dylan, too. He took requests when the class had had a good day. When Jason landed his boat crew on the rocks in a nasty rainstorm, he requested “Queen Jane, Approximately,” a song Sara loved.
    This night, their last night, he plays the song that has become theirs, a song that would serve for the rest of their lives as a reminder of what they’d been through these last six months. Phrases from it would stand as code in later years when they would meet classmates in unexpected places, allowing them to recognize one another. Only this night Jones sang a slightly different version, with lyrics they hadn’t heard before. The guys sing along with the chorus once they get a handle on the words. It goes like this:
        
I’ve seen the bright lights of Beijing
        
And the Chairman Mao Hotel
        
And underneath the streetlamp
        
I met an Asian Belle
        
Well she took me to the River
        
Where she cast her spell
        
And in that Chinese moonlight
        
She sang her song so well:
        
“If you’ll free my Dixie Mission
        
I’ll free your Tokyo lamb;
        
And we can sleep together
        
Down in old Ya’nan”
    Dixie Mission, more formally called the United States Army Observation Group, was an Allied outpost in China during World War II. Jones tells them the story: how the “missionaries” were actually CBI Theatre experts sent there to observe and report. They were the first post-OSS team to go into China, and the rumor was that their name came from the presence of so many southerners in their midst. Critics keen to flame the fires of Communist fears demonized the Mission’s men; they claimed the real mission was Red sympathy. But when the young envoys’ reputations were shredded and they were individually stripped of roles at State and elsewhere, they took their case all the way to the Supreme Court to prove their innocence and won.
    It was a story of uninformed fears, panic, and blame, of how intelligence collection and things in the category of “classified” are inherently controversial. It was also, Jones tells them, a story of wartime intelligence operations in their infancy. That story continued, in some ways, with Vietnam’s Studies and Observations Group, or SOG, America’s first joint unconventional force. The first frogmen were there then, and they were meant to be warriors, but they were also trained as witnesses and as interpreters—not of speech but of actions. They were trained to see things, remember them, and report them back home. Time on target (“at the objective,” as they say) was preceded by time spent studying the opposition. Everything they did then entered the collective memory banks of mission histories, histories later locked up in places with very few keys.
    *
    Jason’s class has begun the work, but they are not yet warriors. They have proven their ability to do certain things and to withstand others, but they have not yet experienced the hardest parts of the climb. They have not yet been forced to choose whether to take a life. They have not yet been confronted with the delicate task of lying to a loved one in order to protect her. They have not yet held a colleague’s broken body in their arms. “The Strand is only a beginning,” Jones said that last night, referring to San Diego’s Silver Strand State Beach. This was their beach. Its name came from the