A Journal for Jordan

One
Dear Jordan,
If you are reading this book, it means that we got through the
sorrowful years, somehow, and that you are old enough to understand
all that I am about to tell you.
You are just ten months old now, but I am writing this for the
young man you will be. By then, you will know that your father was
a highly decorated soldier who was killed in combat in October
2006, when a bomb exploded beneath his armored vehicle in Iraq.
You were six months old.
You will know that he left a journal for you, more than two hundred
pages long, which he handwrote in neat block letters in that hot,
terrifying place. What I want to tell you is how the journal came to be
and what it leaves unsaid about your father and our abiding love.
Before he kissed my swollen stomach and left for the war in
December 2005, your father, U.S. Army First Sergeant Charles
Monroe King, had been preparing for the promise of your new
life and for the possible end of his own. Even before he boarded
that plane headed for danger, I worried that he would be killed. So
I gave him a journal. I hoped he would write a few messages, perhaps
some words of encouragement to you, though you were not
yet born, in case he died before you knew each other.
We did a lot to prepare for the possibility that your father
would miss out on your life, including finding out if you were a
boy or a girl before he left; he was thrilled to have an image of
you in his mind and kept your sonogram pictures in a pocket in
his uniform the whole time he was in Iraq.
And then there was the journal. Writing it would be a way for
your dad to help guide you through life if he did not make it home
to us. He wanted you to know to pick up the check on a date, to
take plenty of pictures on vacations, to have a strong work ethic,
and to pay your bills on time. He wanted to tell you how to deal
with disappointment, to understand the difference between love
and lust, to remember to get on your knees and pray every day.
Most of all, he wanted you to know how much he loved us.
So, late into the night in Iraq, after he had completed dangerous
and often deadly missions, your dad returned hungry and exhausted
to the relative calm of his room and wrote to you before he
slept. His grammar was not perfect and his handwriting at times
suggested that he was tired or rushed. But he put so much thought
into the beautiful messages he wrote, things like:
Be humble about your accomplishments, work harder
than the man next to you, it is all right for boys to cry.
Sometimes crying can release a lot of pain and stress.
Never be ashamed to cry. It has nothing to do with
your manhood.
Your father mailed the journal to me in July 2006, shortly after
one of his young soldiers was killed in an explosion eerily similar to
the one that would claim his own life. He was so shaken after
pulling the young man’s body, piece by piece, out of a bombed
tank that he sent the journal to me, unfinished. He had more to say,
but that would have to wait until he came home on a two- week
leave to meet you, six weeks before he died.
I read the journal in the calm of night on the day it arrived, with
you sleeping next to me, and fell in love with my gentle warrior all
over again. He was the most honorable man I have ever known,
and the most complex. I do not want to portray your dad as a saint
whose example you could never live up to. He was not. He was
gentle, benevolent, and loyal, but he could also be moody, stubborn,
and withholding. He would brood for days over a perceived
slight, like the time I spent my birthday with my sisters and girlfriends
instead of with him. He put his military service ahead of his
family.
I also want you to understand me— an imperfect woman who
deeply loved her man but struggled during our long courtship to
accept him as he was. We were together for the better part of a
decade, half of which he spent waiting for me to fall in love with
him. Truth be told, every girl has an image of the man with whom
she will walk down the aisle one day, and he was not the groom I
had imagined. He was excruciatingly introverted, a procrastinator,
and got his news, God forgive him, from television instead of the
New York Times, where I have worked as a journalist for more than
eleven years.
I am loquacious, assertive, and impatient, which mostly
amused your father but sometimes annoyed him. I am also obstinate
and impulsive. My weight fluctuates when I am stressed. I
curse in traffic.
I had a demanding career as a reporter when I met your father,
while he was away for months at a time in the wilderness, training
young men for battle. A former drill sergeant, he had a strong senseN
of duty. He was so devoted to his troops, many just out of high
school, that he bailed them out of jail, taught them to balance their
checkbooks, and even advised them about birth control. I learned
to live with his long silences and ambivalence toward newspapers.
But I struggled to understand what motivated the man who had for
so long dreamed of your birth but chose to miss it because he believed
his soldiers needed him more. He refused to take his leave
from Iraq until all 105 of his men had gone home first.
Your father was bound to the military not only by a sense of
duty, but because it had expanded his world. The soldiers he
trained, and trained with, came from coal mining towns in West
Virginia, the Bronx in New York City, seaside villages in Puerto
Rico. He met former surfers, men who shared his love for the
Bible, and women he revered for excelling in a male- dominated institution.
He traveled through Europe while stationed in Germany.
He practiced his Spanish while working with Cuban
refugees at Guantanamo Bay. He wrote in the journal:
Enlisting in the army was one of the best decisions I
had ever made in my life. God blessed me above all
I could imagine. Like anything, you have some
challenging days, but when I look back I have no
regrets. The army even recognized my artistic abilities.
I also met a lot of great people. It’s been an awesome
experience. Thanks, God.
But those were peacetime experiences. The military had also
introduced Charles to killing and death. The sight of blood gave
him flashbacks. Chemical sprays he received during the First
Gulf War left permanent splotches on his arms. For years he
was haunted by images of combat, unable to speak about them
even to me.
During his final tour of duty, he experienced loss of the worst
kind. His goal was to bring every one of his men home alive;
he even made that promise to many of their wives. It was a vow he
could not keep. Still, he never questioned the rightness of a single
mission. For Charles, the war was not about “weapons of mass
destruction” or an “axis of evil”; I never heard him speak those
words. It was about leading the soldiers he had trained by example,
about honor and dignity, and about protecting a country he loved
from enemies real or imagined.
I am proud of your dad’s honor and dignity— even of the way
he died. Son, all of us will leave this world, but so few die a hero’s
death.
Still, the would- be wife and new mother in me are angry
at times that he left us so early, at the age of forty- eight. Was it
heroic or foolish that he volunteered for the mission that killed
him?
As the daughter of an army veteran, I grew up on or near military
bases and after I left for college wanted no more of that life.
So for years I resisted getting deeply involved with your father,
and much of our long- distance romance involved him chasing
me and me pushing him away. We dated other people at times, me
out of a fear of committing to your father, him out of frustration
with my dithering. Ultimately, it was his steadiness, his character,
and his sureness about who he was and what he stood for that
won me over, something you will get to know by reading the
journal.
N
Listen to your first thought. You will figure this out on
your own. Never second- guess yourself. When your
heart is in the right place, always go with your first
thought. Work hard at things and follow your instinct.
Since you were born, you have always been alert. That
means you will be very perceptive about things. Believe
God and trust yourself. Keep the faith, Jordan. You
will be fine.
Your dad wanted so badly for you to know him that he revealed
himself in the journal in a way he rarely did in person. He told you
things about himself that I never knew. He wrote that he wanted to
see the Great Wall of China and to take guitar lessons. He went
into detail about his love of art, his religious faith, and his childhood
in Cleveland. I laughed as I pictured my soldier wearing
stack- heeled shoes and bell- bottom pants in junior high school.
My favorite stack- heeled shoes were bought from a
shoe store called Thom McCann. They were black
patent leather with a suede heel. Now Grandma King
would always say stack- heeled shoes were no good for
your back. I guess I had to learn the hard way. I was
walking downtown and glanced over at my reflection
in a department store window. I was walking hunched
like an old man. I had to throw them away.
Until I read the journal I did not know that your father sang in
the youth choir at his multicultural Methodist church, was a lifelong
Cleveland Browns fan, and had his first kiss in the eighth
grade with a girl named Denise.
I walked her home after school and she thanked me by
giving me a kiss. I was a little taken back by it. Being
in the eighth grade, it was a big step for me. All the
girls were always smiling at me and joking around.
I remember buying a brand- new baseball jacket.
I took it to school and let all the girls sign it and put
their phone numbers on it. I had the jacket in my room
and Grandma King grabbed it thinking it was dirty
and washed it. I rushed home from school, anxious to
read my jacket, when I saw Grandma King hanging
up my clean jacket. Grandma laughed. I was on my
knees crying.
Your dad was an extraordinarily disciplined man. He believed
that sweating on a five- mile run was the best way to shake a cold.
He picked the skin off chicken, would not drink more than one or
two beers in a night, and did not allow himself to binge on the pastries
he loved because he so closely watched his diet.
Despite his regimented manner, there was so much depth to
your father’s character. He had a mind for war strategy but drew
angels bowed in prayer. He spent hours sculpting a taut body, even
starting his days in Iraq in a gym at 5 a.m., but he loved my morethan-
ample curves and had the softest skin I have ever touched. He
gave away copies of his art to soldiers he respected but would
shout his throat raw when they made mistakes in training that
could cost them their lives in combat. “When he yelled, you
moved,” one of the officers he served with said in a eulogy at his funeral.
“Because he only yelled when there was good reason.”
This tough guy was the same man who liked to feed me champagne,
popcorn, and chocolate in bed. The man who loved you so
dearly that during the two weeks he had with you that August— the
only two weeks— he barely slept. He preferred to spend that toobrief
time dancing around with you in his arms, taking you to the
bookstore for story time, and simply watching you sleep. He rarely
discussed his personal life at work, but after he died his soldiers
said that they knew that when he was “working” in his office, he
was often gazing at pictures of us.
His imposing presence was really a mask for his shyness.
Simple things brought him pleasure: drawing pictures of me, starting
the day in prayer, summer rainstorms.
Sometimes you get lucky and catch a rainbow.
I never knew the fierce warrior who led those troops, and I was
sometimes a mystery to him, too. He thought I talked things to
death. He read my newspaper stories if I asked him to, but he had
no concept of how I could report and write about something
momentous, a murder trial or a space shuttle explosion, in an
afternoon. He also never understood how I could splurge on a diamond
tennis bracelet but go to three stores to find the best price on
mustard. He thought I sometimes expected too much of him,
which perhaps I did.
Still, we were in love. By the time he received his orders for
Iraq in December 2004, we were finally ready to be a family. We
decided to have you. At forty years old, I got pregnant in one
passionate weekend when your father was on a break from
training.
Then, in the dusk of an early spring day nearly four months
after he left for Iraq, I lay in a hospital bed giving birth to you,
wracked by a pain so intense I did not think my body could endure
it. I could not know that only six months later I would fall to the
floor screaming from a pain more wrenching than childbirth,
when I learned that your father had been killed. That night I
reached for your journal, and I have read it a hundred times since.
I find new insights every time.
Your father had waited a long time for a son and wanted to be
the kind of father you could admire. He had tried to be a good
father to Christina, his daughter from a marriage that had ended
in divorce, and it had always pained him that he didn’t spend
more time with her.
To be a good father I think you have to be a good
provider. That’s not all. You should be a good
communicator who has open views, accepts changing
times. Be around for significant events. Be there to
encourage you in whatever endeavors you desire.
A good father always makes himself available.In 2005, First Sergeant Charles Monroe King began to write what would become a two-hundred-page journal for his son in case he did not make it home from the war in Iraq. Charles King, forty-eight, was killed on October 14, 2006, when an improvised explosive device detonated under his Humvee on an isolated road near Baghdad. His son, Jordan, was seven months old.
A Journal for Jordan is a mother’s letter to her son–fierce in its honesty–about the father he lost before he could even speak. It is also a father’s advice and prayers for the son he will never know.
A father figure to the soldiers under his command, Charles moved naturally into writing to his son. In neat block letters, he counseled him on everything from how to withstand disappointment and deal with adversaries to how to behave on a date. And he also wrote, from his tent, of recovering a young soldier’s body, piece by piece, from a tank–and the importance of honoring that young man’s life. He finished the journal two months before his death while home on a two-week leave, so intoxicated with love for his infant son that he barely slept.
Finally, this is the story of Dana and Charles together–two seemingly mismatched souls who loved each other deeply. She was a Pulitzer Prize—winning editor for the New York Times who struggled with her weight. He was a decorated military officer with a sculpted body who got his news from television. She was impatient, brash, and cynical about love. He was excruciatingly shy and stubborn, and put his military service before anything else. In these pages, we relive with Dana the slow unfolding of their love, their decision to become a family, the chilling news that Charles has been deployed to Iraq, and the birth of their son.
In perhaps the most wrenching chapter in the book, Dana recounts her search for answers about Charles’s death. Unsatisfied with the army’s official version of what happened and determined to uncover the truth, she pored over summaries of battalion operations reports and drew on her well-honed reporting skills to interview the men who were with Charles on his last convoy, his commanding officers, and other key individuals. In the end, she arrived at an account of Charles’s death–and his last days in his battalion–that was more difficult to face than the story she had been told, but that affirmed the decency and courage of this warrior and father.
A Journal for Jordan is a tender introduction, a loving good-bye, a reporter’s inquiry into her soldier’s life, and a heartrending reminder of the human cost of war.