"So tell me Sangin," he said. "Not the family version. The real one."
I wrapped both hands around the mug. "The real one was mostly a room with no windows. An operations center. Cinder block, plywood desks, a wall of radios and screens that never matched each other."
"A wall of nets," he said.
"That is exactly what it was. One net for air, one for the battalion, one for medevac, one that only worked when it felt like it. My job was to sit in the middle of all of them and keep them talking to each other."
He nodded, the way he would in a brief. "Who did you work for?"
"The air support element. I was a captain. I coordinated air support and operational communications. If a unit on the ground needed aircraft, or needed to know where aircraft were, or needed a message relayed because their own radio could not reach battalion, that came through us."
"Did you task aircraft?"
"Not by myself. I passed requests up clean and fast, with the location, the situation, what the ground commander was asking for. The decision makers decided. I made sure they had what they needed to decide, and I made sure the answer got back down without getting lost."
"That is not how Mom tells it."
"I know."
"What does coordination actually mean? Night after night, I mean. Not the definition."
"It meant listening to three conversations at once and knowing which one could not wait ten seconds. It meant writing down a grid someone read too fast and reading it back until we both believed it. It meant telling a pilot to hold because the picture on my screen and the picture on the ground were not the same picture, and I could not pretend they were."
"Were they ever the same picture?"
"Never once," I said. "The pictures never added up to the whole ground truth. I had a map with markers that were already old when I placed them. I had voices. I had reports that stopped halfway through a sentence. I never saw what they saw."
"What could you hear?"
"More than I wanted to, some nights. Breathing. Wind hitting a handset. A young voice trying very hard to sound calm while he read numbers. Sometimes long stretches of nothing, and the nothing was worse, because you did not know if it was quiet or if the link had died."
"And what could you not hear?"
"Everything that mattered most. I could not hear how tired they were until it got into their voices. I could not hear what was happening twenty meters to their left if nobody said it. If a unit went off net to handle something face to face, they were just gone until they came back. I sat there staring at a speaker, willing it to crackle."
"What happened when the picture was wrong?"
"Then I said so. Out loud, on the net, so everyone working from my picture knew it was wrong. I corrected what I could, I flagged what I could not confirm, and I kept the request moving with the best information we had. What I did not do was dress it up to sound certain. False certainty helps nobody."
"Who had authority when it got bad?" he asked. "On the ground, I mean. If a Marine company commander and your people saw it differently?"
"The ground commander had his ground. Always. I did not command Marines, Nico. I never made decisions for the units out there. That was not my place and it was not my rank and it was not my training. My authority started and stopped with the net and the information moving across it."
"So if you could not decide, what was the point of you?"
I smiled a little. "The point was that frightened, exhausted people stayed connected. A platoon that could still reach battalion was not alone. A commander who got a clear, honest picture, even an incomplete one, could make his own call. If the link dropped, all of that stopped. So I did not let it drop."
"That is where the call sign came from."
"One bad night, one link that kept dying, and I kept bringing it back until the traffic was through. Somebody said I stuck to it like glue. Sticky Six. It stuck too."
"No rifle."
"No rifle," I said. "No glory. Just a headset that hurt my ears by hour six, and a notebook full of times and grids, and a net that could not be allowed to go silent while people were counting on it."
He nodded slowly. "Keep going," he said. "I am not done asking."
Chapter 19: What I Never Told Him, Part Two
He waited until the waitress had refilled our coffee and moved on.