The Designated Marksman

Now that our job was over, we were back from the desert and drinking beer and a good quantity of Canadian Club at the canteen. A huge guy from another outfit came over. There’re a lot of guys with a chip on their shoulder, with something inside them that they’re trying to get out, but they don’t know how. This guy walked up and pushed my shoulder. It didn’t matter to me, but to the SEALs sitting around me, that was a bad career decision.

Tee stood up. “Touch him again and I promise you, I’ll stuff you and all your buddies into a knothole.”

The guy said something like “Why, who’s the old man?”

“It doesn’t matter to you who he is,” Tee said.

Some of the other guys were there. Belmont and Hector and L’Heureux. I’m not exactly sure. I was getting pretty obliterated. But they didn’t get up. They would have gladly watched Tee dismantle the guy and all his buddies, and probably figured that Tee deserved a little fun since he’d been saddled with me for the last ten days.

Wisely, the guy did not accept Tee’s invitation. He backed away and did not touch me again.

The next day, our team met in a trailer and had our debriefing. I was highly hung over. The SEALs seemed fine. A high-ranking officer was there. He wore a trident. He said, “Everyone enjoy your outing?”

We responded together, “It’s a fine navy day, and we’re proud to be here.” In the navy, that’s something you sometimes say sarcastically, but that day we meant it.

For the most part I stayed out of the debriefing. I thought I might be called down, but I wasn’t. I heard them say something. I can’t remember what — something-something and my call sign: Sandman. In general, when I heard that word, it meant someone was .8 to 1.6 seconds away from dying. That was all. I also heard just enough to realize how little I knew.

You see, during my time in country, behind the lines and moving along with the SEAL team, I knew nothing — nothing. I was totally in the dark. And if you spend enough time in the dark, like I have, you learn something very important: that the brain is a very active muscle and a hungry one. Deprived, it will make the most out of what it gets. So it was with me.

Tactically, I didn’t need the Cyclops. I had my thermal detector and light enhancement on my scope. That’s all I needed, because that was all I was going to be used for. Before we left, the CO said they would look after me as if I was an expensive piece of equipment. I don’t fault them for anything. They got me out of there alive.

And I didn’t need information either. I didn’t have the training those guys had. I didn’t know how to respond if we were captured. For the safety of the team and the mission and the larger world — because we were responsible for that, too — I knew nothing. I was just a tool, and I had only one purpose.

Still, a man is not a tool. So if I say that maybe I was a little crazy, and that I thought we were somewhere we weren’t, or that I had a special purpose when really I didn’t, I hope you will understand. Walk in the desert in the dark night after night, as I did; follow shadows in the dark.

After the debriefing, I met with a shrink. I would not tell him what I knew, the small piece of knowledge that my hungry brain had gleaned, because that shrink had only one purpose too: he wanted to take that knowledge away from me. We sat in straight-backed metal chairs. He was a sharp little man, and he slouched down and leaned back in a way that he must have learned in shrink school.

“So, tell me about your experiences,” he said.

I looked out the window and calculated the distance to the next trailer, and then I looked farther off and calculated the distance to the next trailer, and I did that until I reached the hills, where I saw something just about half a centimeter high — which would be the size of a man at five hundred meters.

In country I’d paid attention only to longer distances, leaving the immediate distances to the SEALs, and this was the case when we were leaving Mosul, where we actually were, and not Baghdad, as I’d thought. We’d been in town for the bombing the night before, and in the predawn, with the bombing over, we were on the move.

Though I trailed the group, I was the first one to see the machine-gun barrel emerge from a side street. The man carrying it was followed by a group of children and what looked to be several women. The women wore head scarves and were round and formless. I turned to Tee and pointed, and then I was high-tailing it to cover even before Tee could grab my shoulder. As I darted out of the man’s sight line, I saw him taking a position at the corner. That position pinned the SEALs who were at point into doorways some two hundred meters from the man, but the man hadn’t seen them. The children didn’t seem to be there for any purpose other than that they were interested in guns, like children are, but they served another purpose just then: they stopped the SEALs from moving in and wasting everyone.

Tee was listening to the headset. “Can you take a shot?” he asked me. I leaned my rifle out of view and looked around the corner. I could see only the children.

“Not from here,” I said.

“Then from where, for Christ’s sake? I’ll get you there.”

I looked around. Across the street was a low, flat building no higher than ten feet or so. That might be good enough. I pointed, and we went.

“We should go around,” I said, meaning we should go around the block and cross the street farther down. We were already about four or five hundred meters away; another hundred and the man would never make us out.

“We are not separating from the team,” Tee said. “If we have to fight our way out of here, we have to be together.”

We got down on our bellies and crawled across the street. I matched Tee’s speed, which was slow.

On the other side of the street, behind the building, Tee gave me a leg up. I crawled up the side of the building and onto the roof. Tee handed up my rifle. “This is your signal.” Tee held two fingers together and then spread them apart. “Open up,” he said. “Got it?” I gave an OK sign.

I set the bipod on the other side of the roof, facing down the street. The women and children were still crowded around the man. He was now crouched even lower and finding his position behind the weapon. I wasn’t high enough to get an unobstructed shot. I looked over my shoulder and saw Tee’s hand above the edge of the roof. His fingers were spread: “Open up.” But I didn’t have a shot. Moving to tell Tee that might mean losing an opportunity. I looked down the scope again. The man settled himself, cross-legged, behind the machine gun. A woman sat next to him to feed the ammunition belt. I placed the cross hairs on the man’s cap and calculated my elevation. I was below my zero and had a drop. My scope was fixed and didn’t adjust by way of clicks. From that elevation, and at that distance, just under five hundred meters, my arc would flatten, and I had to put the cross hairs even lower. I couldn’t bear to look at the sight picture that way, though I knew the reality of the bullet’s trajectory was not what I saw: the cross hairs fixed on the backs of those children. This might be something the SEALs wouldn’t have understood, but the rationalist shooter in me would have argued, if I’d had the time, that confidence is the greatest gift of the marksman, and that analysis of this shot precluded shooting. I didn’t feel confident looking into the backs of these children, their dirty necks, their black hair strung thick with dirt like my own, no bigger than my own son, thin arms swinging like sticks from soiled T-shirts. Nothing, nothing could be worse than a parent surviving his child. I remembered when Buzz had slipped in the tub, and my fear and grief, even though he had only broken his orbit bone. This was already after Delia had run out on me. But Buzz falling hadn’t been her fault. I was the one there. I was the one responsible.

So if there was a benefit for me to having those children there, it was this: I hated the machine-gunner for bringing children into a field of fire and figured the world would be a better place without him. In fact, I relished the idea of killing him just for this reason.

I looked back over my shoulder. Tee’s hand jerked urgently.

And then the man did something that endeared him to me. He waved a hand at the children, first kindly, and then, when they didn’t respond, with more anger, and his mouth grew wide and his brow narrowed. He wasn’t furious, but he wanted to get his point across. Sometimes it’s necessary to put a little fear into a child to get her to move, to realize the gravity of a situation. I had yelled at Patsy, my oldest, the day Buzz fell in the tub, because I needed her to look after Ruby, the baby. I had to rush Buzz to the hospital. Patsy started to cry. I yanked her by the arm and said, “Do it now.” So when the machine-gunner crouched down and swatted the shoulder of the boy in my cross hairs, a heavy thump that moved the boy’s shoulder, I thought that was all right. And the children moved down the side street from which they’d come. Now the machine gun was manned by just the man and the woman. Maybe you’d call her a girl. I couldn’t really tell, she was so wrapped up.

She blocked my shot too, but then the man jerked his head. He’d heard something down the street. The SEALs who were pinned down might even have planned it that way. When he heard whatever it was, he stood up to get a better look. I had no time to hesitate. That was my shot. I squeezed the trigger.

When I shoot, nothing is left to chance. I calculate all aspects of a shot: meteorological conditions, wind speed, elevation. I know the fine points of target acquisition, psychology, and body language. I know the nuances of internal, external, and terminal ballistics, though with the .50 caliber bullet I was working with, nuance might not be the right word. Designed for hard-target interdiction, the .50 caliber destroys people.

To the shrink, I said, “I’m not sure what to tell you, Doc. We went in and did our job.”

I had a furlough in London for a week on my way back to the States. Everything was arranged ahead of time. All I had to do was show up. As a security measure I wore civilian clothes — a blue suit that I’d bought when I’d been an air-conditioner salesman; not little ones, but big commercial units — and I took a C-141 troop transport to Spain and transferred to a commercial airliner to London. By the time I arrived, I was too drunk to do much more than push the papers I carried at the taxi driver. I lay back, my shirt pulling from my trousers, but I didn’t care. Sometime during the ride I became aware that the driver was dark skinned.

“We’re really whipping your fucking ass over there,” I said. “You know that?”

The driver seemed not to hear. He looked straight ahead and merged into a traffic circle. If he was any man at all, he’d have thrown me out of the car and hammered me into the sidewalk. Kicked my teeth in. I resented him for not being more of a man, and I swung my fist around and hit his seat back. The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror. I reached for a cigarette, found one in my front pocket. On the dashboard was a sign that said, No Smoking. I slapped my pockets for a few moments, looking for matches, checking my front pocket and my pants pockets again and again. Finally I just seemed to lose steam. I laid my head down.

When we arrived at the hotel, the bellman put my duffel on a brass cart, and the driver came around and opened my door and pulled me out. I felt myself passed to the bellman, a thick man in a red overcoat. The bellman pinched my arm just above the elbow. That straightened me up, and we walked together through two large brass doors.

“This way, sir,” the bellman said.

“I work for a living,” I said.

I seemed to slide along the polished marble floor and through the singsong English chatter. To my right was a large red velvet settee and, around it, small marble tables on spindly iron legs. A few couples sat and drank tea or held highball glasses in their hands. One young woman was dressed in a navy blue cape with two large black buttons. Her brown hair was pinned back, and a long curl of it hung over one shoulder. She strode toward a blond child, who was wandering into a dark, oak-paneled restaurant. Where was I? I felt somehow that they were putting on a show for me, that this couldn’t possibly be real.

“The buffet is excellent, sir. Service begins at seven.” The bellman released my elbow and left me facing the concierge, who had been tending to a pair of overweight Americans, a man and woman with identical flattop haircuts and pastel polo shirts: his teal, hers peach. The man had a small towel around his neck and was flushed. The concierge wore a name tag and had a funny name: Mr. Turnbull. He turned and faced me, his upper lip folded over the lower. I handed him my papers. Mr. Turnbull looked over the papers, and I felt a tap on my shoulder. For a nanosecond, I thought I’d been taken. But it was the American man who had touched me.

He said something. I watched his mouth move and his large face swell, the teeth extend and the lips widen. I was moving far away, and the man’s face was still there, a full view, at least a half meter wide in all directions, a perfect circle. I don’t know how he knew I was military, except that it’s a bearing you have, and you can tell.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Thank you, sir.”

“It’s not like we see it on TV, is it, son?” he asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” I said.

And the two of them, the man and the woman, he in teal and she in peach, drew themselves up to their full heights, stiffened, and brought their hands sharply to their foreheads. Then the woman said something about marching her husband off. They smiled and waved so long. I turned back and stared at Mr. Turnbull.

“Mr. Stacey, sir?”

An incredible weight developed, like a load inside my forehead, and pushed against my eyes. I was doing everything I could do to hold it back.

“Mr. Stacey?” Mr. Turnbull asked again.

The weight was enormous. I felt my face pinched up tight. “Sandman,” I whispered.

“Pardon me, sir?” Mr. Turnbull said.

In just about two seconds I was going to reach out and grab hold of Mr. Turnbull’s larynx and shake him like a chicken. The fingers of my right hand were already crooked for the purpose. “Just give me the fucking key,” I said.

That night, I ordered room service. I forced myself to eat the prime rib — “Always eat” was our motto in the field. Then I threw up and lay with my head resting against the cold porcelain of the toilet for a long time as tears wet my face. The first time I shit, I shit deep and ugly things, and the water blushed with the color of my blood. I tried watching the television, but it enraged me so much I was afraid I would kick the tube in. I didn’t even know for sure what was bothering me. Outside of Mosul, when the team had gathered for a moment, the CO must have seen something in my expression. He yelled at me, his breath hot on my face, “Get over it. It happens.” OK, that’s true. But often, in the hotel room, I felt unmanly and had to hold myself in check. Just deal with it. But then my mind would start to slip, free-associate into recollection, and what I recollected gave me peace: the sanity of calculation, the adjustment of elevation, the consideration of wind speed, the calm breaths, the smooth trigger pull.

Tactically I’d never made a mistake, unless you count the one time I had to take two shots in a row and had forgotten to breathe. That time the pressure blow-back from the muzzle-break had burst the blood vessels in my eyes. Still, I’d killed both targets, a radio man and a driver, and with the driver the bullet had continued through him and into the engine block and disabled the vehicle he was driving. Of course, if you count the last shot in Mosul — but that wasn’t a tactical mistake. Maybe I should have used the infrared to calculate the distance — but I never used the IR. Or maybe I should have taken a head shot — but I never took head shots. Why aim for the head when the .50 destroys people? A marksman is pragmatic. My job is to kill with one shot. Nothing fancy. I have nothing to prove. A chest is twice the size of a head.

I looked around the room, at the heavy flowered drapes, the two ashtrays overflowing with butts. I wouldn’t let the staff clean the room because I didn’t want them in there with me. That probably suited them fine too. There was a mirror. I stripped down in front of it. I was emaciated, my ribs sticking close to the surface, my hipbones pointy, but I also looked strong, every muscle lean and taut: my arms now in comparison to the thinness of my waist — I looked like a welterweight, my legs like steel cables. My hands and face were dark red, like a mask and gloves on my pale body. I drank Scotch and watched my arm flex as I did so. I could see the split muscle of the biceps and the ripple of muscles in my forearm. I cupped two hands, as if holding an infant, and flexed my abdominal muscles.

I was naked, but it wasn’t just the lack of clothing; it was the absence of a load-bearing harness, my equipment, and the .50 caliber rifle I carried, a rifle as heavy as Buzz when I’d carried him soaking wet from the tub and rushed him to the hospital.

I raised my hands up as if I were shooting a rifle off-hand, and imagined how the .50 would have flattened me if I’d shot it that way, while the bullet — the bullet would have passed through the wall and into the next room and through the next wall and room, however many there were, and through the exterior of the building, concrete and brick notwithstanding, and into the building across the street.

I laughed and noticed my glass was empty. I looked for the bottle of Scotch. It too was empty. I called room service. The woman’s voice was very polite. Twenty long minutes later I heard a knock at the door. I slid a tip under the door and said to leave it there. I waited a minute or two and then opened the door and took the bottle. I didn’t know for sure whose idea this furlough was, but it certainly was a potent version of hell. At the same time, my only real fear was that it would end.

Two days later there was a knock at the door. I didn’t know how long whoever it was had been knocking before I noticed it. I didn’t even know if I’d ordered something or not.

“Just leave it there,” I said.

The knock came again, harder this time, and I struggled to remember the date and how long I’d been there. Maybe I’d overstayed, and they were kicking me out. “Come back later,” I yelled. I was having trouble standing up straight and pitched around the room as I walked to the door. I leaned against it. The knock came again, and now I was sure it was a hallucination. I said, “There’s no one here.”

“There’s a friend of mine in there,” I heard through the door.

“Go away,” I yelled. And then I thought about what the voice had said. Who would say something like that? I had no idea. I opened the door a crack. The safety latch was still on.

Outside was a big guy in civilian clothes. It took me a second to recognize him, it was so crazy that he should be there. It was Mac, an old friend of mine from the San Diego ICP. “I’m here to bring you home, buddy,” he said.

I took off the safety latch and opened the door all the way. There were probably a lot of things I wanted to ask him, why he was there and such, but I was in shock. I was standing there naked, for one thing, and didn’t realize it. He came in, looked me up and down, and didn’t say anything, though his face told me plenty.

Then he took me in his arms and held me. He was sturdy and fat, and I didn’t realize I’d been cold until I felt that he was warm. I thought this would be a good time to let something out; I thought about it just like that, but there was nothing. And then I thought about Mac, holding me like that, wanting to achieve something and failing, and I thought that he was truly a strong man and a great one.

Then he let me go and went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. “Get in there,” he said. “And then put some fucking clothes on.”

As the hot water pounded my head, I heard Mac on the phone with room service. I stayed in the shower, not because it felt good, but because I knew that when I came out I’d have to talk, and I didn’t feel like talking.

When I turned off the water, Mac handed my blue suit to me. I put on the trousers and a T-shirt. Mac had made the bed — more or less — and moved the bottles and garbage around so that most of it was on the table and the long dresser in front of the mirror.

Two room-service guys came up, and Mac met them at the door. He brought in the coffee tray, tossed the garbage bag on the floor, and set an ironing board up against the wall. Mac poured coffee.

I nodded in the direction of the ironing board. “What’s that for?”

“For your whites,” he said.

“I don’t need whites,” I said.

“You will.”

I stared into the coffee.

“You got out all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “We walked through a killing field at the end, Mac. A whole battalion of dead. Those stories are true.”

“I know they are,” he said.

Mac poured me another cup of coffee and one for himself.

“They were all dry and wasted,” I said. “They were all moving in the same direction.”

“You don’t have to tell me about it,” he said.

Mac thought I was telling him the worst of it. I wasn’t.

After we’d drunk some more coffee, Mac got me out of my chair: we were going out. I was in no mood to go out.

“Still, you’re going,” he said. First he wanted me to iron my whites. I didn’t 100 percent understand the purpose. I was still special duty and was to wear civilian clothes. I didn’t have the energy to argue when he pulled my white uniform from a pack that I’d put together before I’d left. The pack had miraculously found its way from Coronado, to the Gulf, to the C-141 and into the cab and to the hotel. When I’d packed my whites, I’d thought I would be buried in them. He threw them on the bed. Then he took the garbage bag and started to throw away the empty bottles and old food and everything else he could find. There was nothing for me to do, so I picked up the shirt and looked at it. Then I opened the ironing board and began to iron, working the hot metal over the dense white cloth and watching as the wrinkles disappeared.

“I think I’d like a haircut,” I said.

“In short order,” Mac said.

Mac called the hotel barbershop for an appointment. We drank another cup of coffee and took the elevator to the lobby. If you have ever sat in a barber chair after a war, you will know how I felt. I don’t know how I got through it exactly. Afterward I felt the kind of relief you feel after a terrifying ride is over. The barber used a mirror to show me the back of my head. I looked at myself, the hair shaved around the sides and slicked down at the top, the skin of my cheeks and chin gleaming with after-shave, the red face, and the eyes: dark sockets and burst vessels.

Mac and I ate at the buffet. Mac had the prime rib, and I had fish. We drank beer. The next day we caught a flight back to the States.

Mac flew with me all the way to Dallas. We mostly didn’t talk, but somewhere in there he brought up the girl from what seemed like so long ago, back on Coronado, the one he was going to fix me up with after my divorce. I’d met her once. Her name was Sarah.

“She’s still interested, you know,” Mac said.

“Maybe sometime,” I said, but I knew I was lying. I’d done a strange thing as I’d marched along in the dark, and she’d been part of it. I’d fantasized about her as I walked. Nothing sexual, just simple things, like sitting in church together. I knew I’d never want to see her now.

In the Dallas airport, Mac handed me my bag and told me to go into the bathroom and put the whites on.

“I don’t think I want to do that,” I said.

“I didn’t ask you,” he said.

“It’s an order, then?”

“If it has to be,” he said.

I went in and stripped down and put on the whites I’d folded so carefully. Then Mac walked with me to where I had to catch a shuttle bus for my connecting flight. He took my shoulders in his two hands. “This is it, buddy,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

On the little plane I took to Fort Smith, Arkansas, I had too much time to think. Even a second was too long. A second is how much time it takes a .50 caliber bullet to travel six hundred meters, and what a lot of people don’t know is that there is a momentary ghost image as the bullet disrupts the air in the focal plane above the target. It’s just science, but I could see it through the scope, and it looks like a soul, a soul that departs the body before the bullet strikes.

I’d gotten in the habit of not using the IR because IR can be detected, and I’d never needed IR before. And with the man and the woman kneeling there behind the machine gun, I couldn’t see anything straight to set the split image on. She was so lumpy. Still, I used the split image. But what did it matter? I was going to shoot the man in the chest. I’d gotten in the habit of shooting men in the chest. If the .50 takes a shoulder, the man still dies from the shock. A .50 caliber bullet is more powerful at six hundred meters than a .460 Weatherby Magnum is at the muzzle. The Weatherby is an elephant gun. The .50 caliber blows men apart.

When I got off the plane, there was a crowd waiting for arriving passengers, and when they saw me come down in my dress whites, they parted and let me walk through. No one knew what I’d done. They were just showing respect for the uniform. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I started and drew back a fist. It was my father.

“Son,” he said. He must have seen the tears in my eyes. “Let’s get you home,” he said.

The familiar streets looked bizarre, like places I’d known in a dream. My father drove his new car — a Japanese model that must have set everyone to talking. “What did they have you on to over there?” he asked.

I probably shouldn’t have said, but I remembered something that had happened a long time ago. This was after Buzz’s accident, after I’d come back with him from the hospital in Dallas, where we’d gone to see a special plastic surgeon, and after I’d lost my job selling AC units. My father called me one day and said he had a problem with his plumbing. He met me outside his house. He took the grate from the foundation and climbed into the crawl space. I handed him the toolbox and followed. We crawled along, ducking the joists. He led with the flashlight. I brought along the tools. I noticed we passed the bathroom, but I only got suspicious when we passed the kitchen at the north end of the house. Finally he got into the far corner and rolled onto one elbow.

“We’re not here to fix the plumbing, are we?” I said.

“Son, what are you going to do?”

“About what?” I asked. I really didn’t know what he was talking about.

“About your life.” He laid the flashlight down, and its light faded into the dark corner of the house, and all at once I saw that he was exactly right.

“I’ve already talked to your mother,” he said, “and we would be willing to take the kids.”

He’d been in the navy, and he recommended ships.

So it wasn’t as if I couldn’t tell him. The road was flat and straight, and we were passing barren fields. “They had me on to killing people,” I said. He turned the car, passing a stop sign that had for so many years of my childhood been the boundary of my world: the end of our street.

We were getting close to home, and he slowed the car. “I’m sure you done us proud,” he said.

“I think so,” I said.

We pulled into the driveway and up to the closed garage door. My father made no move to get out. I didn’t either. We stared at the yellow garage door.

“Your mother’s not going to want to know that,” he said.

“Yes, sir. I know.”

“I’ll tell her something. Don’t you worry about it.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

We stepped out of the car and walked to the door. My mother’s face showed in the window for a second, and then I knew she was moving toward the door.

No one knows how long a second is better than I do. A lot can happen in a second. A .50 caliber bullet can travel six hundred meters. My mother can stand up and look out the window. A woman can stand up. I’d become a student of psychology, because I had to be able to anticipate movements. What will the target do? I need to know what will happen in that second, you see, as the bullet speeds toward its target at three thousand feet per second, carrying with it more than five thousand foot-pounds of energy concentrated on a single point. When the man behind the machine gun heard the sound down the street, the noise made by the SEALs pinned in the doorways, he did just what he was supposed to do: he stood up to get a better look. That made total sense, even though it ended up being really stupid for him. I didn’t hesitate. He stood up, and I was happy he did. I had a job to do.

And in the time it takes to be smashed by the recoil and to realign optical relief, a woman can stand up, a girl who was only a lumpy shape before, and just as the bullet disrupts the air in the focal plane above her, I can see her face.

I had every tactical imperative to look through that scope. There was no imperative for her to stand up. That was a lack of training. She had no good reason to stand up. At least, I don’t think there was a reason.

Then I heard my mother opening the locks on the door. If you want to talk about a situation in which I didn’t know what would happen next, this was it. It was like dying might be — that’s all I can think of. You don’t have a choice. The soul leaves the body, and you just do it. You just walk on through the door and see your family there, sitting around waiting for you: Buzz, who I let fall, getting up and standing at attention, like my father told him to do; and Patsy, who I yelled at, looking so much like my ex-wife, Delia, and wondering what the big deal is, and put off, maybe, because I’m getting all the attention; and Ruby, my baby, so big — so big already. My mother smooths my shoulder and says, “Well, don’t you just look fine.” I can’t look at her. And aside from her, no one is coming close. My children keep their distance.

“Well, leave him alone, then,” my father says. “He’s awfully tired and would like to get cleaned up some.” And then he turns. “Buzz,” he orders.

Buzz comes out and stands front and center to me, his left eyelid sagging where the scar tissue restricts the movement of the lid, that one eye hanging more open than the other as he looks up at me and says, “Welcome home, sir.”