Page 83 of The Husband Hour
“What was your first impression of Rory Kincaid?”
Pete Downing smiled.
“I expected Rory to be a typical arrogant jock. Full of himself. But he wasn’t like that at all. He was confident but humble. He kept his head down. He came in as a private, which in civilian terms is basically a nobody. I don’t think he found it easy to take orders. Far more than it was for most of us, this was a challenge for him but he did the job he came there to do.”
“Did he display leadership qualities?”
“Rory had an inner drive and focus,” he said, looking thoughtful. “It gave us all more confidence about what we were doing.”
“Would you describe him as just one of the guys?”
“Yes and no,” Downing said. “There’s a locker-room atmosphere when you’re over there. Rory was kind of above all that.”
“Did that ever make guys resent him?”
“Just the opposite—we looked up to him. And let’s put it this way: I went in for selfish reasons. I wanted money for college. I wanted to feel like I was somebody. But Rory already had money. He already was somebody. He was there because he wanted to be there, in service of something bigger than himself.”
“Can you tell me what happened on December 28, 2012?”
Downing nodded. He sat back in his chair, adjusting his tie. He took a minute before saying, “It was an ordinary day. Routine patrol looking for IEDs. We delivered water to a neighborhood near Route Irish.”
“And Route Irish is?”
“A twelve-kilometer stretch of highway connecting the Green Zone to Baghdad International Airport. It also connects other areas. So, like I said, it was a routine mission. There were two vehicles working in tandem. I was teamed up with Corporal Kincaid for the day, but toward the end, one of our guys in the other group got sick. I was sent to join that group to make sure they had enough hands on deck.”
Lauren knew this part of the story. Pete had said that he hadn’t wanted to leave Rory, that being around Rory always made him feel safe. She wished he hadn’t told her. The irony was painful.
“After ten hours, we had instructions to head back. Corporal Kincaid’s vehicle was a few meters ahead of ours. The light wasn’t great—we rolled out a little later than we should have. We hadn’t been driving more than ten minutes when the IED went off. I don’t remember the moments directly after the explosion. But at some point we got out of our vehicle to help, ah…to see what happened up ahead. I saw right away…Corporal Kincaid on the ground. There was a lot of blood. It was clear that, uh, he had been killed.”
Lauren stood up. Matt paused the footage.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You wanted to hear—”
“I know, I know,” she said. “It’s fine. This is not news to me. Pete was with me a lot in the days following Rory’s death. I asked him a million questions. I kept thinking that if I heard every detail, it would somehow make sense. I guess I’m still waiting for it to make sense. It never will.”
“Lauren, there aren’t any answers from his time in the military. If you’re looking to make sense of it all, you have to go back.”
She looked at him. “Back to what?”
Matt closed the Pete Downing interview and pulled up a new file. Lauren sat down.
A skating rink filled Matt’s computer screen. In the foreground, a blue-eyed, thirty-something-year-old man.
Matt turned to her. “This is John Tramm, former assistant coach to the Flyers. Current coach of the Villanova men’s ice hockey team.”
Matt pressed Play.
“There was no hard-and-fast protocol for players who took a hit to the head. So they’d sit on the bench and the team trainer would evaluate them. And there is the expectation for the player to just shake it off. Nothing overt, of course. But hockey culture demands resilience. Guys feel pressure to prove their toughness, and, frankly, they know they can be replaced. Especially the rookies.”
Lauren closed her eyes, suddenly back in Rory’s first apartment in LA, his rookie season. “Are you sure you don’t have a concussion?”
“Jesus, Lauren. Now you’re a doctor?”
Matt, on audio, said something, snapping her attention back to the screen. “I understand there’s a class-action lawsuit by about a hundred retired players.”
The coach answered, “Yes. The lawsuit is in light of the new research about CTE. One of the first to be studied was one of our guys, Larry Zeidel. He was a Flyer. Nickname was Rock. A great guy—everyone loved him. Then he retires and suffers from debilitating headaches. Starts having a bad temper, gets violent, makes crazy financial decisions. Impulsive decisions. His entire life fell apart.”
Lauren nodded, tears sliding down her face.
