The Fighters by C. J. Chivers

Author:C. J. Chivers
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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It would be difficult to trace a more direct route from childhood to the grunts than Robert Soto’s. He was ten years old on September 11, 2001, sitting in social studies class in Middle School 118 in the Bronx, when his teacher unexpectedly left the classroom. She returned and told the students that an aircraft had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. Soto was not sure what this meant. Then came news of another aircraft, and of a second burning tower.

The rest of the morning was a slow-motion evacuation in a rising nervous pitch. Parents streamed to the school. Name by name, Soto’s classmates were announced over the intercom. Soto’s turn came after most of the others had left. His father, who had spent nearly a decade in the National Guard, was in the corridor. The man was his role model, a rock of stability. His parents had never married and lived apart. Soto’s mother was mostly not present in his life—she was a “dancer,” he would politely say. He saw her only occasionally. His father had custody of him and his brother, and worked as a doorman at the Milford Plaza hotel in Midtown Manhattan. He and Soto’s grandmother held the family together. They were examples of clean living and hard work. Now his father sat in the car, explaining that the United States had come under attack. Soto knew his father had served in the Army, a background that added stature to the man. But he sensed fear, something he had never seen in his father before.

A few months later, Soto took the subway to Manhattan to visit the pile of rubble where the towers had been. It was an overpowering sight, this mountain of concrete, ash, and steel. Soto felt solemnity in the air. He listened to a man who stopped passersby for impromptu tours, telling them how tall each tower had stood, the square footage, the number of windows, detail after detail of symbols destroyed and lives lost. Soto felt a desire to participate in whatever the United States was doing to prevent another attack. He made up his mind while standing at Ground Zero. When he was old enough, he would enlist.

The neighborhood outside his home was rough. During adolescence Soto watched friends drift into crime. By thirteen they were smoking marijuana. Some joined the street gang Dominicans Don’t Play, or DDP. Their local crew was in a bitter rivalry with another Latin gang, the Trinitarios. The two sides clashed with fists and knives.

Soto kept his friends. They’d grown up playing Wiffle ball together, and over the years he had eaten many meals in their homes. Loyalty mattered. But his father and grandmother were strict. He did not want to disappoint them. He was not interested in gangs or drugs.

He began at the Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan in September of 2003, not long after the United States invaded Iraq. He majored in drama but was disoriented, not part of the school’s mainstream.

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