Hero of Our Story
The Thief turned away from the fruitless discussion, knowing the adversary was on to the party, that their subterfuge had failed. The Cleric moved closer, afraid of the consequences of a failed deception, as the Ranger shifted position to get a clear line of fire. All eyes turned to the Hero, the soldier of fortune ready to leap into combat to retrieve the errant Thief, the Hero who was…
Who was asleep. “Aww, man, somebody wake up Prince.” Grumbles from lanky boys still finding, or not finding, their way in college, the brown tile of the dorm room and the cheap metal of the beds set off by brightly colored cast-off carpet leavings. Dice were thrown, clattering down about the head of the sleeping Hero. He rose with a start, rolling his own twenty-sided die with a smooth catch before his eyes were even fully open, coming out a natural twenty, a critical success.
“Sombitch!” he yelled, smiling, and nestled down happily down into the crook of his arm, eyes drooping heavily once again. And before even rolling damage, he’d nodded off again, to the groans and guffaws of the rest of the party and a heated argument about whether that counted…
Prince was more tired than the rest of us. In all honesty if it hadn’t been the last game of Dungeons and Dragons we would have together, he’d probably have bowed out already. It was finals week, and there were essays to write, advanced biology and chemistry and physics and calculus exams, required courses we had to pass to stay in the program. Anyone taking class seriously could be forgiven for not having the time to stay up all night for Dungeons and Dragons, but of the five of us, he was the only one taking class seriously. Two were already out, failing out before the second semester and due to return home. A third was transferring, unable to deal with this kind of class load any longer. Only Prince was still fighting with all he was worth, and fighting for education all day left him with little enough to fight monsters at night. He still had our backs, though, despite it taking more than anyone could expect of him.
That was the kind of guy Prince was. Prince played the Hero in our games just as he played the Hero in real life, always standing up for the downtrodden in both game and classrooms. He was the only one of us that was friends with every circle and clique, and thus the only one that could stop things when the bullying became too much. When we couldn’t fight, he’d fight for us, and nine times out of ten the simple power of him standing up for what was right would shame the strong into ignoring the weak and wounded, ending our school-day culling with his relentless, friendly righteousness. In games, we could play the Hero, if we wanted. Or we could even play the tormentor ourselves for a laugh. But he could never be comfortable being anything but good or doing anything but right. So he kept the rest of us in line in our games, just as he kept the jocks and the preps in line at school, taking our worst and making it better.
It wasn’t a surprise to anyone when he went on to Howard, nor that he was going ROTC and getting a commission. And when I went myself into the Army as an extended gap year after graduating, I knew that I was playing at what he’d do for real. We all knew he’d do grad school, a term or two in the military and a couple of well-deserved medals, then politics. We knew he meant it when he said he would serve his country. He was training to be the old-school Hero we’d grown up hearing about. And he was in his training montage.
That wasn’t me, or any of the rest of us. But after all those years of him stepping up, I also couldn’t pretend that ‘hero’ was an empty word either. I might dispute with his politics and objectives, argue that what he was willing to sacrifice his life for what could be accomplished by other means, but I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t a sincere sacrifice. And I knew that if I was going to spend my limited political capital arguing against what he was willing to fight and die for, I’d have to pay the entrance fee. So I knocked out my term like a prison sentence, eager to step up onto the next and more selfish stage. Came the reunion, in the summer of 2001, I was looking forward to seeing Prince, learning what he’d become.
But Prince would not be there. Prince was dead. They’d killed him.
In grad school and before his commission, an undercover narcotics officer with no particular reason for it had gunned him down blocks from his daughter’s home. He’d been hunted across three states in a case of mistaken identity, guilty of being a young Black man in a nice car late at night in a good neighborhood. Trying to trick the unknown threat following him before leading him to the place where his daughter slept, he’d made a sudden turn, pulled into an empty driveway, turned off his lights. He knew he was being hunted and knew not why. He was as determined to avoid an unnecessary fight as he was to protect his child, just as he was in the game. But for once the dice didn’t roll his way, and a man paid to look like a drug dealer blocked him in. He stepped out of the car in the early morning with a pistol in hand, and drew down on Prince. Prince tried to drive away, and he was unloaded into, his body and the back of his Cadillac riddled with bullets. Once they turned up nothing on Prince, that he’d done nothing and had just been coming home from his after-hours job at the gym, the cop said he’d been looking for another Black man in a black SUV, and that was enough to justify deadly force. The officer was Black, as well, in a police department with enough Black brass to defuse accusations of explicit bias and targeting, but no one pretended that it would have happened had Prince been white. Just something that happened, happening to the same people things like that happened to.
It was a shock, but only to those that knew him. To his classmates, friends, colleagues, it was the world turned upside down. To those that had spoken to him, been protected by him, or been dissuaded from our own worst impulses by him, it was unthinkable. To the rest of the world, it was just an ordinary tragedy. To someone looking at demographics, it wasn’t unthinkable, just unmentionable.
But Prince wasn’t the only one of my schoolmates to be hunted by the police. Across the hall was another who died a fugitive before our reunion. Our Dungeon Master lived in the same dorm room as we did, having de facto moved out of the one assigned to him because he couldn’t stand his roommate. Squatting in our room as a cramped plus one was better than living more comfortably with the hectoring of the other assigned student in his own space. That roommate, Daniel Fling, had been the other type of student to excel at the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science. He was driven, convinced of the righteousness not just of his opinions but of his place in the world, the kind of kid so used to being the smartest kid in the room he no longer bothered to check who was in there with him. He knew D&D was degenerate fantasy at best and actively dangerous at worst, little better than the drugs that the low-life players of such a game would inevitably be using. In a school full of the socially inept, Fling stood out for an exact mirror of the reason Prince did. Prince acted like a hero but never thought himself one, able to set everyone at ease and comfortable in any circle. Fling knew himself a hero but never acted like it, setting everyone’s teeth on edge and creeping out even the creepiest of us. He was as convinced of his political path as Prince was, but in the opposite direction. And in 1998, jealous of the affections of his law school study partner, he was accused of knocking on the door of her boyfriend with a shotgun. Porsecutors said he murdered the man he saw as a rival, then fled to the Utah wilderness to escape justice. And while Prince was hunted across three state lines for the crime of looking like another Black man in an SUV, Fling was white, of a good family and prospects. He escaped, above suspicion, and it wasn’t until four years later that his remains were found.
Fling had days to go back home and prepare for his life as a fugitive, and he was sure enough of his skills in the wilderness to evade capture indefinitely, he thought. But in the end, his remains were found only miles from where he’d abandoned his truck, with signs he’d killed himself with the same shotgun maybe used to kill a man who probably never knew his name, executed for the crime of being in the way of Fling’s ambitions. There’s a certain symmetry there, an encapsulation of two visions of the all-American hero. On the one hand Prince avoided every fight he could but never backed away from the defense of others, killed by a cop playing at being a criminal. He had done nothing but look like someone, and was shot in the back six times. Fling, on the other hand, knew exactly what he wanted and was sure of his right to do anything to get it. Hunted for killing a man he’d presumably never met, and spent days or weeks on the run, convinced of his own ability to fight the whole world and win. In the end, lost and on foot in the wilderness, he took his own life rather than face failure.
And within a year of Prince’s death, America found itself choosing which type of hero best represented her abroad, the one willing to get his hands bloody to get what he wanted, or the one willing to accept any risk if it meant the chance to avoid someone getting hurt.
And we chose. We were represented abroad by the man that killed Prince, undercover narcotics officer and Army Reservist, who found himself with a sudden unanticipated deployment that kept him from being compelled to testify in a civil trial. The criminal charges were, unsurprisingly, dropped. He went to represent us in Afghanistan in place of representing himself in court, and served honorably. Progressed through the ranks. Now he’s retired, having served at the highest rank an enlisted man can aspire to, leading and mentoring hundreds of soldiers who themselves represent us abroad. He retired from the police, has kids and grand-kids, a pension or two, decorations to show his deployments and plaques to honor his service. Four times he deployed in our name, all after he killed for us. Because make no mistake, he killed Prince in our name just as much as he led those young soldiers into battle later on. He represented us at home before he represented us abroad.
I don’t know what he was like as a soldier. Don’t know how he represented us, whether he was more like Fling or like the man whose life he’d taken, don’t know which side of the hero coin he showed. I don’t know how many times he had to decide whether to shoot or not shoot, what choices he made or what lessons he imparted to the soldiers he taught. I don’t know what kind of hero the undercover cop turned out to be in his old age, if he was the same young cop so sure of himself he’d block in a suspect without badge or backup, the man he was before the war. Or if he showed mercy and restraint and, like Prince, learned to talk his way through conflict before firing.
But I know that he served with me, was my peer. Is my peer. I know that I can find him on the veteran’s only website, see there his ribbons below his call-sign. I can find his official bio and find pictures of him promoting young soldiers about to go abroad themselves.
And I can remember finding out he was the Senior Enlisted Advisor for a reservist I worked with day in and day out in her civilian job. In the hallway of our office I asked her if she knew him, her long brown ponytail cascading down from a brow wrinkled by trying to place an unfamiliar name. Safety posters and reenlistment exhortations were pinned behind us to a gray flannel cubicle, while dog-eared orders forgotten behind Plexiglass were right around the corner. She said what unit she’d been assigned to, and, remembering, I asked if he was her First Sergeant. She said he was now Sergeant Major, promoted again, and wondered how I knew him. I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to tell her he’d killed my friend unjustly twenty years before. To this day, I can’t decide if that restraint was the mercy that Prince had always taught me, the willingness to give the benefit of the doubt even when every fiber of my being told me not to, or if it was just professional courtesy.
To this day I can’t decide what kind of hero I ended up, but I suspect I’m somewhere in the middle, much like the undercover cop turned soldier. Not willing to kill for no reason, but not willing to risk my life to avoid an unjust shot. “Better tried by twelve than carried by six,” as we’re prone to say. Except now that phrase rings hollow, knowing that sometimes you can avoid being tried at all, so long as you can still be of use. So long as you’ll represent us.
I wonder now at how I can represent myself before the mirror, knowing who stands at my shoulder. And I can only pray I remembered at time to hear the voice of Prince on the other shoulder, teaching me to hold fire.