There were all the stories, the strange, compelling stories that were adjacent to the films I was working on – and then there were all the films, the interesting ‘promising’ films that were never made or never saw the light of day. One of those was based off a 9/11 TV special I had worked on. We were interviewing a whole string of Air Force generals and commanders who had been active in some capacity on 9/11. They were the easiest interviews I ever had to arrange – these retired brigadier generals and major generals sitting around in their homes doing nothing but talking about what they did on 9/11. They were invited up to New York, with the airfare and a night in a hotel paid for, if they asked they were allowed to bring along their wife. They were given a list of Broadway shows to choose from – the production company had a subscription with available discount – and they all chose Escape From Margaritaville, the Jimmy Buffett musical.
One of them, the first one to show up, was Quilty, a major general from Tennessee. The office was used to documentaries about artists and community activists, was a bit intimidated by a guy who’d commanded bomber fleets, who at one time was in charge of the Air Force command with the nuclear arsenal, and he had thoroughly charmed all of them. “He’s so nice, why is he so nice?” one of the assistants said to me – she really looked genuinely confused, like maybe we’d invited the wrong person. He was a grinning older man on the smaller side with a syrupy country accent, wasn’t even as excellently postured as I would have imagined, looked as rosy-cheeked and mischief-minded as anybody’s ideal grandfather. His wife was very small and serious, tucked in at his side, she looked around with beady, questioning eyes while Quilty discoursed. He was talking mostly about Escape From Margaritaville, and what an unexpectedly interesting story that had been, and he was eventually lured by the executive producer into the interview room and talked for at least four hours straight about 9/11 and the Bush Administration, taking a break only when the executive pleaded that he really had to go to the bathroom, and the other producer and I, listening on headphones from the other room, kept bobbing our heads up and down, like yes, that’s a great bite, that’s gold, wow, we didn’t think anyone would say that so cleanly, and when he’d finished he stood in the elevator passageway, at last deigning to take a water and a granola bar, and continued chatting – he seemed as eager as a touring politician to say nice words about the places where he was, told the story of how he’d been invited to throw out the first pitch at a Mets game and what a great crowd that had been, told the story of how he’d presented lanyards – pulled from bombs dropped in live combat – to various borough presidents and dignitaries and, like an uncle pulling a quarter from behind an ear, he handed a lanyard to each of the producers and assistants grouped around him. At last, his wife shoved him into the elevator. The rest of us went to the executive’s office to have a drink and debrief. We were all in a professionally ecstatic mood – Quilty had given us pretty much our whole show. “I thought in the Air Force they were supposed to be laconic and practice radio discipline,” the executive said. The liberals were still bothered by it, there was some grumbling about a couple of swaggering things he’d said, and it was hard to argue with that point of view. “If you’re in Afghanistan, minding your own business,” I said, “and suddenly bombs start falling out of the sky, somewhere on the other end of that is Bill Quilty telling his lanyard story.”
A couple of weeks later the executive, Appel, called me into his office, asked me to shut the door. He looked very excited. “You know what you said about Quilty?” he asked. “Well, it was one of those things – that gave me an idea and suddenly I started googling around and look at what I came up with.” He was sitting very close to the computer reading about Quilty’s one hundred combat missions in Vietnam, about Quilty’s role in Honduras and tangentially in Iran-Contra, about Quilty’s spearheading of the Kosovo airstrikes, about Quilty’s oversight of Iraq and Afghanistan. “That’s a half-century of American airpower,” Appel was saying, “and if he talks like that about one day when he was shuttling the president around, think about how he’ll talk about Nam and Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Appel was at a stage in his career when he was getting Errol Morris fantasies. He couldn’t let a talker like Quilty show up in his office – a talker who’d once held the nuclear codes – and not point a camera in his face for as long as Quilty could stand it. I called up Quilty to thank him for his trip to New York and to see if he’d be open to more filming – a whole documentary, actually – and Quilty said that would be ‘a fine idea.’ So I did a couple of pre-interviews with him in which he talked my ear off and Appel scurried around and secured funding and then Quilty didn’t pick up the phone the next few times I called him and then the phone was disconnected and Appel, who had a bit of a paranoiac streak, made me tell him everything I had said in our pre-interview to see if maybe I had scared him off – or else if it was that he’d mentioned the project to one of his national security buddies and they’d quickly squashed it. Eventually, I dug up a home phone number, Appel and I called it together, and the prim sour wife from the New York interview said that Quilty had had a massive stroke, died in his sleep.
This was really getting to be a niche for me, working on projects about old people, trying to get everything in it just before they croaked. We’d just made it under the wire with Bregman the physicist, but with Quilty we were out of luck. We had the New York interview and a few bits of archival and that was it, but Appel had been having the Errol Morris thoughts too intensively, he couldn’t break away now. I was dispatched to Tennessee to rummage around, see if I could dig up some buried treasure – whatever it was, Quilty rattling away into a tape recorder, home movies in the VCR drawer.
But it was a hail mary, and we both knew it. For it to work, everything depended on Joelle, Quilty’s wife. She would have to be cooperative with us, take us on tours of storage units, that kind of thing, and she would have to be enthusiastic about the project; in the absence of Quilty, we would have to rely on her for long reminiscences. And there were a handful of encouraging signs – when I mentioned I’d be interested in material from Vietnam, she said, “Oh the napalm missions?” When I said something about Iran-Contra, she said, “Oh god, I thought everybody forgot about that clusterfuck.” She was salty, straightforward. Everything with General Quilty had been garrulous, roundabout, dipped in Southern front porch charm. Everything with her was clipped, disapproving, honest. She was, of all things, a Jewish woman from the South Bronx, had run away from home as a teenager – she’d been infuriated by the Vietnam War and the draft but most of all she’d been livid at how safe and closed-minded her parents were, how they didn’t know anything, so she’d hitchhiked southwesterly, with some idea of becoming a beach bum in golden California, with some idea of joining freedom marches in the South, but never reached either – settled with the ‘real people,’ in her arch phrase, found her way to Tennessee, to Quilty, the handsome young airman, spent most of her life on military bases, of all the crazy places to end up, but still with the Bronx twang. She was interesting – it was hard to imagine how it had all worked out exactly. And, cautiously, Appel and I were optimistic. “Just keep her company,” he told me and put through payment for a motel and rental car in Knoxville. “Get her chatting.”
But the expected opening-up didn’t happen. She was perfectly civil. I’d come over to her place on the pretext of going through Quilty’s papers and she’d throw a few extra grits on the stove, add an extra cup of coffee to her machine. She chatted, she was far from discursive but she had an old lady’s rambling tendency to touch on all kinds of unexpected topics. I got different pieces of her and Quilty’s life, how she passed through her hippie phase, become a ‘Jesus freak,’ how that had gone down when her conversion was relayed back to the Bronx, how she’d become a completely different kind of person on those windswept Air Force bases out in Texas and Utah. “The first time you’re out there and the car is shaking so much you think you have a flat tire or something and it’s just the wind blowing it from side to side,” she said, “and you think where have I ended up, did I pass completely out of civilization.” And the incredible loneliness of these places, how the wives started to hope for news of someone dying, not their husband, someone else – not that anybody talked about this – just something to break the monotony.
In a way, then, she was very open. My experience of military families was that they were endlessly supportive, tight-knit, there were these rote team-oriented answers that they’d programmed themselves to give to any prying outsider – talking to them was like trying to get honesty from athletes in a post-game press conference. I could only assume that that was all the more true of the families of commanding officers, who had had to spend their careers attending various banquets and functions, who’d come across any number of security secrets, whose principal responsibility was to be discreet. And that was not at all the issue with Joelle née Miriam who absolutely would tell you anything you asked her, if it was what she’d really thought of Reagan or how secure the nukes actually were – “a bunch of bozos, corn-fed Nebraska bozos guarding those things,” she said, “it’s just because our ‘enemies’ are even stupider than we are that we haven’t had any kind of an accident.” The issue was that she didn’t volunteer, she didn’t fill in pauses, tender offers to help, didn’t add anything to what you asked her directly or what she touched on in her occasional rambly monologues. There was no suggestion of a storage unit that we might be interested in, no ‘that reminds me of’ or ‘here’s something you might like.’ There was, in fact, no activity. I’d never seen her leave, or heard her mention leaving, the house. There were no guests, no projects. The car, with the backseats filled with mysterious boxes, looked as if it were planted in the driveway like some kind of art installation. Her needs seemed to be completely met by a Fresh Direct order that was dropped on her doorstep every third day. The house was neatly organized and in good order so probably there were handymen, lawnmowers, but I never saw any – it was probably just that nothing was ever ruffled or disrupted that there was no way that the house could become dirty. Other than cooking, chewing thoughtfully on her meals, indulging her one vice – the endless cups of black coffee, the habit of which had stayed with her all the way from the Bronx – I had no idea how she spent her time. There were plenty of books in the house but they were mostly thick Air Force histories and I never saw her reading anything. When I first visited her in my vulture-y task, there was a pile-up of newspapers, both national and local, on the front step and kitchen table, but it seemed, after a little while, that the subscriptions were all canceled. “Well, can you bear to read the news?” she asked very sharply when I said something about it. That was a surprise – for a while, it had been hard to get any kind of a rise out of her at all.
I assumed, with my crude ideas of military people, that this kind of subsistence life she was in must have been something that she’d developed in the prairie-like, hollowed-out state of mind she’d been in on the Air Force bases, a kind of terminal boredom in which all existence constricted itself to the bare minimum. That was Appel’s assumption too. “God, that sounds so sad,” he said. Although it wasn’t somehow when you were there, it felt like being in some tidy machinist’s shop, everything exactly in the place where it was supposed to be and, in the background, just the faint hum of Joelle going about her tasks, what was needed to keep alive and no more. The feeling was that the sliver of hope we had had to make an interesting documentary was slipping away, even at cut-rate prices the motel and car were adding up, and Appel urged me to action. “What you need to do,” he said, “is to hit on Quilty’s legacy – legacy, that’s the key. This is her husband and he headed STRATCOM and the 8th Air Force all the way through Iraq and he knows everything there is to know about U.S. military reach – and loves to talk about it, lives to talk about it. We couldn’t get him into the elevator leaving the office he was so eager to tell tales and now we’re giving him the chance: the story of the United States Air Force, Vietnam, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, all as seen by General Quilty.”
It was pep talk – Appel liked speaking in pep talks – and I knew enough about Joelle by this point to know that it wasn’t going to work, but Appel was my boss and he was the one paying for my motel room. So I went over to Joelle’s, had grits and a large cup of coffee, gave the speech pretty much exactly as Appel had dictated it to me. She looked away the entire time. I was a bit nauseated by my own voice, my hollow patriotism. A clock was ticking up above the kitchen counter. I had to make a real effort to deliver the whole message, didn’t falter away.
“Bill was a war criminal,” she said at last. “He did horrible things, killed a lot of people that didn’t deserve to be killed.” She wasn’t looking at me as she talked, she’d chosen a spot off to her right, occasionally she brushed away crumbs from the tablecloth. “It was never his fault, always things he was ordered to do – he was a simple soldier and then a simple officer and a simple general – but he did do them. And I was there, with him all the way, because I was a runaway and didn’t know better and because I was a Jesus freak and for some reason being a Christian made it all alright and because I was a military wife and had a role to play and then because I was too far along for anything else. Bill was a beautiful man, a kind man, but that’s what he was – and I stuck to him all through his life but not any longer. It was terrible what we did, that whole way of life, and now that I have some say I’m packing it in as much as I can.”
There was no anger in how she talked. I’d asked a question – I’d been tiptoeing around it before, whether or not she’d participate, but never asked directly – and once I did she, as always with her, answered it as simply and honestly as possible. It was a nice neighborhood, nice house, nice atmosphere, nice everything, it was hard to picture anybody being radical, anybody being mutinous here, but there was – it was all rotten to her, always had been, she was winding it all down, with as little noise, as little waste, as possible.
Very interesting to read the mix of fiction and non-fiction. Curious how they work together for you.