Outside the Window: June 1, 2009. New York, New York. Cloudless and sunny.

Inside the Book: 2003. Losano Ridge, Afghanistan. A few miles from the Pakistani border. Late summer. Colder during the day. Freezing at night.

            “The unforgiving minute” of Mullaney’s title has arrived. While they rush to protect a patrol under attack, Mullaney’s soldiers trigger two more ambushes. The first kills a young man named Evan O’Neill.

        I wondered a while ago what role “sanitized language” (euphemisms and acronyms) would play in this scene. Would saying “KIA” instead of “killed” lessen the blow? I’d say it doesn’t:

O’Neill had been with the platoon only a few days. We’d shared only a handshake, and yet now I was responsible for his death. All I could remember were those eyes—glacial blue, like my brother’s. There’s no way O’Neill’s dead. This wasn’t a game or an exercise or a movie; there were real soldiers with real blood and real families waiting back home. What had I done wrong? Who’s next? McGurk? Story? Me?

No acronym can make O’Neill’s death a piece of tactical information. Mullaney’s response is emotional rather than cerebral. Disbelief, guilt, and fear overwhelm him in quick succession. Over the next few minutes he recovers his composure and, with the help of helicopters and A-10s, beats the Taliban fighters back across the Pakistani border. Mullaney has already gone on countless missions, a few of them tense and terrifying, but this is the first time he has had to confront a real disaster.

            It is the culmination of his education—though calling it a graduation would be far too trite. He calls it a baptism, but:

Unlike the religious sacrament, we were cleansed not of sin but of innocence. … O’Neill forever eliminated our ability to wish away terror and uncertainty. … Lacking the superficial enthusiasm of the apprentice, I developed a deeper resolve. I accepted that our missions would be dangerous and that our planning and training could shape but never eliminate the risk.

He spent years training to fight, but nothing, it seems, could prepare him to handle its likely consequences. He realizes now that “uncertainty” and “risk” are inevitable; “planning and training,” no matter how good, will never entirely dispel Clausewitz’s fog of war. The last thing he learns is that he can never learn enough.

            That’s not an easy thing for him to accept, especially as a commanding officer. He is, as his teachers have insisted at every step, responsible for his men. The contradiction between this expectation and his human limitations tortures him.

            When I first saw Mullaney’s title, I assumed that the minute was “unforgiving” because, in those sixty seconds, any mistake is final. There are no second chances or corrections. That’s one way to read it, but I think Kipling meant it a little differently. He wrote: “If you can fill the unforgiving minute / With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, / Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, / And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!” The willingness to confront and press through the crisis (filling it with the “run”) is what’s important. Kipling says nothing about success. In fact, the poem is basically an ode to the character-building properties of failure. The passage from boy to “Man” happens not on the first attempt but on the second.

            There’s a third way to read “the unforgiving minute,” though. The minute itself won’t forgive. Or, more precisely, Mullaney refuses to forgive himself for what happened during it. O’Neill’s death clearly haunts him. Knowing he can’t plan away danger doesn’t mean he can accept it. Whether he will or not, I suspect, is the question the rest of the book will answer.