Remembering the (Late) (Former) Lieutenant General Owen Renly Hart
by Arland Ward for the Correlate Press
I interviewed the late Lieutenant General, Owen Hart, more than two dozen times before his recent death. As his posthumous trial gets underway--in which Mr. Hart has been charged with a dozen or more offences the highest of which is treason--I wanted to publish my impression of the man, as I knew him while he held the office of Lieutenant General.
Mr. Hart, having been recently buried by his wife and children, has no voice to defend himself in the aforementioned proceedings. While I do not purport to speak for him, I have stories, other than those being circulated as a part of the legal circus, about him that need to be told during this time.
When I first asked for an interview with the late Lieutenant General Hart, he had recently been appointed to the position but had yet to be pinned. His correspondences were funneled through a Ms. April Monroe who managed transitioning officers in Central Command. A mousy young woman with bottle-cap thick spectacles, Ms. Monroe politely directed me to a bland personnel press release and informed me that the soon-to-be Lieutenant General would not speaking to the press for interviews or any other reason.
Mr. Hart was pinned and signed to the office of Lieutenant General on a sleepy evening in late August. The pinning of any officer to a central command position is typically a media spectacle and involving an elegant supper and a ball at which the new officer and their family becomes acquainted with the other central command officers, families, and individuals of interest.
The somber pinning ceremony was interrupted by the new Lieutenant General’s young daughter, who, it seems, escaped her mother’s arms and ran towards the stage calling, “That’s my daddy!” She called this out to a chorus of stuffy and uncomfortable laughter. The stern line of Owen's lips cracked and he smiled affectionately down at his daughter and waved with his fingers before the child was gathered by her mother. The call of that little girl identifying the stoic man on stage as her father seemed to humanize him. A necessary characterization for a man who was a controversial choice for Lieutenant General.
The timeline of events leading to his pinning have recently become a matter of interest in his posthumous trial. In early July, Mr. Hart found himself facing a closed congressional inquiry lasting a historically long sixteen consecutive hours of questioning. The subject of this panel was said to be resolving issues surrounding certain classified military operations that Mr. Hart was apart of, in addition to probing his known relationship and marriage to a sitting monarch of a neural country, the Queen of Veridian. These files have been declassified for the purposes of entering into evidence in the ongoing proceedings.
I spent many hours sitting outside of his office at headquarters waiting to catch him as he came and went. In the weeks preceding his pinning, I watched the birth of Hart’s administrative entourage. At one point Ms. Monroe took pity on me and informed me that Hart worked almost exclusively from his home office and that in large part his bustling office at headquarters was a subterfuge. The entourage of administrators and advisors were an illusion of his presence.
Needless to say I stopped waiting for him there but I kept sending my card and bottles of aged single-malt scotch to his office. After a time I received a handwritten note from the Lieutenant General on a half of a sheet of handsome embossed cardstock. Admittedly, his handwriting was difficult to discern. I later learned was attributable to some fine motor function loss in his left arm due a service-related injury with nerve damage. He wrote:
I showed up at his office everyday for a week after that but Lt. Gen. Hart never appeared. Ms. Monroe apologized graciously and sent a fruit basket to my office. And I received a second note the following month which was written by Ms. Monroe:
I interviewed him for the first time that day.
There was something about him. He always walked with an erect posture and a gait that was strong but was paradoxically either sauntering or systematically precise. His cane swung in a tight, seemingly well practiced, arc above his left boot and jabbed at the ground punctuating every step. He projected this overpowering menace like a man used to calling the shots.
He appeared to be a sort of lone wolf in the leadership who had succeeded by doing as he saw fit whether that meant compliance with regulations and orders or not. A lot of men who served under him were taken in by that image. It was suspected that his persona was one of the reasons he was promoted to such a high office - that it was a morale booster. But that’s a theory circulated by some of the same individuals who, perhaps, would have liked to have been Lieutenant General themselves. Despite his lack of pedigree - it is well known that Hart did not graduate high school or attend college -- my impression of the man was that he was more refined than others seemed to give him credit for.
After I came to observe Mr. Hart closely, I could tell that his behaviors and words were highly calculated. He was like a chess player seeing multiple moves ahead. He was also careful to draw a line and never stray beyond it. He was, granted, a high-strung man whose more outlandish behaviors and ways of being were mostly for show.
I suspect that Mr. Hart had this neurotic attention to detail that mingled with an intense level of paranoia. He personally performed a bodily search on me every time we met alone. He was never perfunctory with the search and had little regard for respecting the privacy of my genitals. That is not to say that his search could be mistaken for playing but he was thorough and wholly unembarrassed to ensure his personal safety at the expense of patting down another man’s testicles. I imagine he would have searched the pubic area of Snow White herself if he were to grant her a personal interview.
In fact, many times I interviewed with Mr. Hart while he was undergoing physical therapy treatments in his office. A few years prior he had suffered a traumatic crush injury to his left leg in a car accident that was an attempt on his life. His time at the Covenant headquarters was limited and precious so he often had me interview while he cringed through therapy. He never complained about the pain from the therapy and endured it rather stoically. I believe he liked interviewing then to keep his mind from the painful stretches, exercises, and massages.
His therapist, Ms. Candace Huntington, was a sprite young lady who Mr. Hart subjected to searches every time. I remember the first time I spoke with him when he had a session scheduled. Mr. Hart performed the same thorough bodily pat down I was familiar with.
He also searched the vinyl duffle bag the therapist carried which contained implements for her therapy. On that first day she also had what appeared to be a small make-up bag, Mr. Hart opened it and emptied the contents which included several tampons and sanitary napkins. I was astonished to find him unabashedly weighing each object in his palm as if to deduce whether its weight was appropriate to the item it purported to be. He placed each item back and respectfully handed the case to the therapist.
“This must seem very crass to you Arland. However you should know Ms. Huntington receives a generous remuneration for her services. You have to understand that her work involves manipulating my body including my leg to and from which very important arteries flow. My bodily safety is priceless to me and is not something I am comfortable entrusting to others. As a preface, I was once assigned to bring in a very dangerous woman who was wanted for questioning. Being the gentleman that I am, I confiscated everything dangerous from her but left her with two seemingly harmless tampons which she had in her pocket. It was a rookie mistake because she ended up stabbing me in the neck with a deadly sharp little blade hidden in one of those tampons -- and by luck missed everything important. Needless to say that was the day I stopped being bashful about women’s sanitary products.”
I never knew what Owen believed about anything. (For the remainder of this memorial, I will refer to Mr. Hart as Owen, because that’s how I came to know him). He always spoke in circles.
“Come on Candace, ready to make me feel alive?” Owen had asked Ms. Huntington once when she came in during the first part of one of our interviews.
I asked him what he meant by that and he answered: “I suffer therefore I am.”
Ms. Huntington asked him, “Do you really believe that?”
“No not really,” he said, “You know some people say suffering is the universal language.”
“Yes and some say love is,” Ms. Huntington countered. During this day, the interview went more like a conversation.
“That’s true,” Owen agreed.
“And what do you believe, Owen?” I asked him
And he said: “Neither or both. All I’ve figured out is love is the purest form of suffering.”
So I asked him, “What do you think your wife would say about that?”
“Oh she knows she makes me feel alive.” He was laughing while he said it.
“So you mean to say she makes you suffer?” Ms. Huntington trying to clarify.
He had a funny little grin on his mouth. “Exquisitely, yes.”
So you see, I was never too sure what Owen believed about anything.
There seemed to be a softness about him that I kept uncovering. It was there under the surface, in the ways he expressed himself when he opened up to me and in the ways others talked about him. I once interviewed a man who had been in the same convoy with Owen when he was a mere marksmen in the Special Reconnaissance Corps.
He said about Owen:
“He could be this really funny guy at times. One time we were in this convoy that was completely backed up and hadn’t moved more than a mile in an hour. And Owen was always this impatient kind of guy. A real bastard when he didn’t have something to occupy his mind. You know? And he would do shit to entertain himself so that day he just starts humming that song ‘Tennessee Whiskey.’ Do you know that song? And the rest of us start to get into it. And so he switches to singing it. And he’s really getting into it. I mean really getting at the vocals. And anyway then he pushes the radio and broadcasts himself belting the chorus over the coms. And we’re cracking up dying laughing at him trying to sing this song soulfully.
I asked whether Owen had a good singing voice.
“Not bad really. I honestly could picture him being the kind of person to sing to the radio or in the shower or something. You know? It was really a remarkable thing to watch him.”
“First you described the event as ‘funny’. And now ‘remarkable’ can you explain that?” I asked.
“Well sure, he’s a very serious guy a lot of the time. Especially on assignment. So him singing like that to the whole convoy was hilarious. And he said afterwards, ‘never waste an audience, boys,’ like he’d given us an example of something important for our careers.”
“You speak very fondly of him.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” He looked away from me then and asked not to speak of Owen anymore. This was two days after Owen’s funeral.
The suddenness of Owen’s death, then, still hung heavy in the air. It seemed that to everyone he’d left behind that it came as a shock. An earthquake unseen that left rifts in the world he’d created around him. And yet, in my conversations with him, Owen struck me as a man who remained acutely aware of his mortality.
“You know Virgil?” Owen once asked me, musing off topic. “He wrote ‘Death twitches in my ear, / ‘Live,’ he says,/ ‘I am coming.” Owen quoted from memory. “Virgil was talking about me."
“You seem like a well read-man.” I observed.
“I appreciate that insofar as it’s complementary, Arland. I do enjoy books.”
“There are rumors that you’d like a stab at chief command,” I suggested to bring him round to topic again.
“There are rumors about lots of things.”
“Would you like to be Commander?”
“Are you an ass-kisser or a complete idiot, Arland?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.” I said, unsure how I’d provoked him
“Just now you were complimenting my intelligence. Now you ask me a question to which an affirmative response would be akin to treason. Machinations for the commandership are not spoken of out loud, Arland. So you were either kissing my ass earlier about being intelligent and think I’m an idiot who’d be distracted by my ego enough to incriminate myself. Either that, or you’re an idiot yourself.”
“Lieutenant General,” I said paying my respects, “you haven’t answered the question. Would you like to be the commander?”
“I serve subordinate to and at the behest of the honorable commander, may he out-live me.”
“What are your career goals?”
“Actually, I would like to retire, someday.”
“And what would you do in your retirement?” I asked.
“Read. There are so many things I’d like to read before I die.” Owen said.
“You speak as if death is soon,” I observed.
“Death is a possibility for any one of us at any moment. Haven’t you been paying attention to anything I say?”
“You’ve led an active life and career and I am to believe that the only thing you’d like to accomplish is retirement for the purpose of reading?” I pushed him.
He laughed, “Yes of course. I think my wife would put me under house arrest if I did anything else. She would be very pleased to find me reading every day and occasionally going outside to check the mail or take her car to the gas station for her.”
“It sounds as if your wife has a lot of influence on you,” I suggested.
He leaned forward with a twinkle in his eye, “Just between you and me: she let’s me off my leash because she knows she’s got this dog trained to come crawling right back to her.”
It took me a long time to get Owen to speak of personal matters, particularly to speak to me of his marriage and wife. He opened up to me once about his relationship. The following is a transcript of that conversation:
A: So your wife.
O: Is there a question there, Arland?
A: People want to know, what’s your story? How did you meet? How did you fall in love?
O: Well, that’s a very long story.
A: We have plenty of time.
(Owen sighs and leans back in his chair. The room is silent except for leather groaning. He picks up a scrap piece of paper and fiddles with it. He’s rolling it and rolling it between index and thumb)
O: I first met Julianna, well, I should say, we reconnected again in the summer just after the start of that conflict over in Morocco, you remember?
A: Yes. I do. You say you reconnected?
O: Yeah. Yeah that’s the right way to put it. We had a history.
A: A history.
O: Yeah.
A: Can you elaborate on that?
O: No. No, I won’t talk about that.
A: Okay. Did you two have a prior relationship?
(Owen stopped rolling and cut me off with a slash of his hand in the air)
O: Arland, no. Stop. Just let me tell it. We reconnected again in the summer. I put an ad out for an executive assistant and she answered it. There’s nothing about that day or that moment that should stick out to me. But I remember everything clearly. Its funny. You know? You don’t give a damn about the moment in the moment but I can remember everything about it. Every feeling, every thought, the way she looked to me, the words we said to each other. It’s just burned in my mind.
A: So she got the job
(He laughs nodding and picks up the paper again to fiddle with it while he speaks).
O: Yeah, she got the job.
A: Was it love at first sight?
O: No! Oh no. It wasn’t anything like that. I mean that isn’t to say I didn’t notice how beautiful she was. I did. I definitely did.
A: Do you think it was love at first sight for her?
O: No. No. I don’t think so. I was - well - very high strung then. I think I intimidated her a little bit. And, you know, we had this history sort of looming over us. I think … I think we were both afraid to confront it, but we knew we would eventually when we were ready.
A: That sounds tense.
O: Yeah, yeah it was. For a while, but we got used to each other pretty quickly.
A: What did you talk about together then?
O: I can’t really recall anything specific. You know? Nothing special but we both continued to avoid any mention of the past.
A: What was it like?
O: Working closely with a beautiful woman?
A: Yeah. Sure.
(Owen laughs again and shakes his head).
O: Painful. Very painful. (He swivels in his chair and I can tell he wants to say more, so I hold further questions). You know back then she loved office supplies.
A: Office supplies?
O: Yeah, I know it’s weird right? She had all these multi-colored pens. All the colors in the rainbow. And then some. Little stickies all shapes and sizes. And these paper clips in the shape of cats. I remember her so clearly this way. She was always scribbling and doodling in this planner journal thing of hers. She’s Veridian, you know, so she has the feline traits. Her ears would always twitch when she got a little bit excited or interested in something. They would fall down on her hair when she got embarrassed. And her tail was always doing something too. I just - the more I observed her. The more I came to like her.
A: So when was your first date?
(He stares at the ceiling, frowning at it as if the answer wasn’t clear).
O: Well our first date, I suppose we can call it a date. I’m not sure of a better word for it...was this night at my house. She was teaching me to dance for the annual Christmas thing here.
A: She taught you to dance?
O: Yeah, so I wouldn’t embarrass myself. You know I don’t have the same pedigree as the other officers. I had to learn some of this extra stuff by the seat of my pants. But Julianna. She taught me to dance. At first it was all about the steps. It was serious. Professional. Strictly business. But we kept dancing after I learned all the steps I needed to know. Neither of us were concerned to be so close to one another and casual with one another. (He smiles, he’s not even speaking to me directly anymore, but just speaking as if to himself from memory.) I was real smooth when I kissed her. I knew, I knew she was a little bit… I guess nervous that I might? Or maybe the tension I sensed in her was anticipation. It was such a relief though. To finally be with her like that, even if for just a moment. We cooked dinner together, afterwards. Well she cooked for me, while I hung around her in the kitchen. I was drinking Scotch while she cooked. We ate together at the breakfast nook. It’s a booth, so, of course, we sat together. It was a good night.
A: So what happened after that? You kept dating each other?
O: Oh no. My girlfriend at the time walked in on us. It wasn’t like that. We were still eating dinner. I think twenty or so more minutes and she would have found us somewhere else.
A: So, you were in a relationship with another woman?
O: Yes. Yes at the time I was.
A: What happened with the other woman?
O: Well, obviously we broke it off.
A: Right then and there?
O: No. Not immediately. We hung on for a little while longer. But it was doomed.
A: Hm.
O: Yeah, I uh, I’m not proud of myself for the way I was with her then. My girlfriend then.
A: She just wasn’t the one?
O: No. I enjoyed sleeping with her. But she ultimately...she didn’t move me the way Julianna did. The way Julianna does. You know?
A: Sure, sure. Of course. So, did you know you were in love with Julianna then?
O: Um, yeah, yeah I think I knew. I think I knew something momentous was happening to me. And she was responsible.
A: That’s an interesting way to characterize falling in love.
O; Well that’s how it was with us. Nothing short of momentous.
A: So why not break it off with your girlfriend and be with Julianna?
O: I don’t know.
A: You don’t know?
O: Well, I was afraid. Of her. Of myself. Of hurting her. There’s no way to describe what I felt then.
A: So -
O: Well, look at it this way. It was a little bit before this dancing date night whatever you want to call it. Just a little before that, Julianna and I ended up somehow walking around downtown and looking at the holiday lights they do. You know? I just remember her shivering. It was so cold then. Unseasonably cold that year. So I offered her my arm. And she clung to me. She really clung to me. Shoved her hand down in my pocket and walked pressed against my body. I remember feeling so guilty. So guilty.
A: Because of your girlfriend?
O: No! Not at all. I felt guilty on account that I wasn’t the man Julianna needed me to be and I knew that. I wasn’t the one she should have been coming to warmth for. I didn’t have the warmth she needed. But I knew, I knew, the way she held onto me then that she was trying to convey how she felt about me. I remember we’d look each other in the eyes and say a bunch of meaningless stuff that way. No words, just looking at each other in a helpless sort of way. And I just - I couldn’t step up for her, then. And that’s how I felt for a very, very long time.
A: Even after you got together?
O: Oh yeah, oh yeah. I still feel that way sometimes. A crippling sort of why me? Why did she pick me? When will she wake up and realize what a big mistake she made investing so much of herself in a man like me?
A: That’s...what you conveyed here, do you feel like that’s a low way to see yourself?
(Owen looks down at his hands. His eyes look glassy for a moment.)
O: I don’t know. But you can’t publish any of that.
A: Why?
O: It’s off the record. It’s too... it’s too personal.
A: You don’t want your wife to know this stuff?
O: Yes. No. I - I don’t know. But you just can’t publish any of it. It’s too private. I shouldn’t have said any of it.
He told me it was too private and that I couldn’t publish any of it. I must go against his wishes now. Many things in these days that are ‘too private’ are being said about about him.
Whether he betrayed the Covenant or not in a professional sense, Owen Hart deserves also to be remembered as a man that one a little girl was proud to yell out in a room full of over serious adults, “That’s my daddy!” As a man who fell in love with a woman who liked paper clips in the shape of cats.
by Arland Ward for the Correlate Press
I interviewed the late Lieutenant General, Owen Hart, more than two dozen times before his recent death. As his posthumous trial gets underway--in which Mr. Hart has been charged with a dozen or more offences the highest of which is treason--I wanted to publish my impression of the man, as I knew him while he held the office of Lieutenant General.
Mr. Hart, having been recently buried by his wife and children, has no voice to defend himself in the aforementioned proceedings. While I do not purport to speak for him, I have stories, other than those being circulated as a part of the legal circus, about him that need to be told during this time.
When I first asked for an interview with the late Lieutenant General Hart, he had recently been appointed to the position but had yet to be pinned. His correspondences were funneled through a Ms. April Monroe who managed transitioning officers in Central Command. A mousy young woman with bottle-cap thick spectacles, Ms. Monroe politely directed me to a bland personnel press release and informed me that the soon-to-be Lieutenant General would not speaking to the press for interviews or any other reason.
“The Covenant Central Command today announced the appointment of Major General Owen Renly Hart to the office of the Lieutenant General. Mr. Hart is expected to formally accept the position and the coronary service will be announced. The youngest individual ever appointed to the office of the Lieutenant General, Mr. Hart will be responsible for development and execution of military strategy at the Central Command level. As Lieutenant General, Mr. Hart will function as the liaison and delegate unifying the four branches. Mr. Hart is expected to head the Covenant’s Special Task Force for emergency and classified operations.
“I trust in Mr. Hart’s experience as a strategic visionary evidenced by his decorated career in the Special Recon Division. With a proven track record for executing successful large and small scale operations, Owen’s expertise and leadership skills are needed at an executive level to drive the Covenant’s broader mission,” said Commander Sullivan Barnette.”
“I trust in Mr. Hart’s experience as a strategic visionary evidenced by his decorated career in the Special Recon Division. With a proven track record for executing successful large and small scale operations, Owen’s expertise and leadership skills are needed at an executive level to drive the Covenant’s broader mission,” said Commander Sullivan Barnette.”
Mr. Hart was pinned and signed to the office of Lieutenant General on a sleepy evening in late August. The pinning of any officer to a central command position is typically a media spectacle and involving an elegant supper and a ball at which the new officer and their family becomes acquainted with the other central command officers, families, and individuals of interest.
The somber pinning ceremony was interrupted by the new Lieutenant General’s young daughter, who, it seems, escaped her mother’s arms and ran towards the stage calling, “That’s my daddy!” She called this out to a chorus of stuffy and uncomfortable laughter. The stern line of Owen's lips cracked and he smiled affectionately down at his daughter and waved with his fingers before the child was gathered by her mother. The call of that little girl identifying the stoic man on stage as her father seemed to humanize him. A necessary characterization for a man who was a controversial choice for Lieutenant General.
The timeline of events leading to his pinning have recently become a matter of interest in his posthumous trial. In early July, Mr. Hart found himself facing a closed congressional inquiry lasting a historically long sixteen consecutive hours of questioning. The subject of this panel was said to be resolving issues surrounding certain classified military operations that Mr. Hart was apart of, in addition to probing his known relationship and marriage to a sitting monarch of a neural country, the Queen of Veridian. These files have been declassified for the purposes of entering into evidence in the ongoing proceedings.
I spent many hours sitting outside of his office at headquarters waiting to catch him as he came and went. In the weeks preceding his pinning, I watched the birth of Hart’s administrative entourage. At one point Ms. Monroe took pity on me and informed me that Hart worked almost exclusively from his home office and that in large part his bustling office at headquarters was a subterfuge. The entourage of administrators and advisors were an illusion of his presence.
Needless to say I stopped waiting for him there but I kept sending my card and bottles of aged single-malt scotch to his office. After a time I received a handwritten note from the Lieutenant General on a half of a sheet of handsome embossed cardstock. Admittedly, his handwriting was difficult to discern. I later learned was attributable to some fine motor function loss in his left arm due a service-related injury with nerve damage. He wrote:
“Arland--- It’s not so much your quiet persistence but rather my curiosity about your desperation to interview me that is eroding my will to continue evading you. Thanks very much for the scotch --- how did you know? Try again at my office next week. I will try to be as interesting as you think I am. Yours in service, Lt. Gen. Owen R. Hart.”
I showed up at his office everyday for a week after that but Lt. Gen. Hart never appeared. Ms. Monroe apologized graciously and sent a fruit basket to my office. And I received a second note the following month which was written by Ms. Monroe:
“Dear Mr. Ward, Please accept this invitation to attend the Commander’s Press Conference to be hosted by the Lieutenant General this afternoon at 4 in the HQ press room. Afterward the Lieutenant General will grant you a private audience. Sincerely, April Monroe, executive transition manager to the Honorable Lieutenant General Owen Renly Hart.”
I interviewed him for the first time that day.
There was something about him. He always walked with an erect posture and a gait that was strong but was paradoxically either sauntering or systematically precise. His cane swung in a tight, seemingly well practiced, arc above his left boot and jabbed at the ground punctuating every step. He projected this overpowering menace like a man used to calling the shots.
He appeared to be a sort of lone wolf in the leadership who had succeeded by doing as he saw fit whether that meant compliance with regulations and orders or not. A lot of men who served under him were taken in by that image. It was suspected that his persona was one of the reasons he was promoted to such a high office - that it was a morale booster. But that’s a theory circulated by some of the same individuals who, perhaps, would have liked to have been Lieutenant General themselves. Despite his lack of pedigree - it is well known that Hart did not graduate high school or attend college -- my impression of the man was that he was more refined than others seemed to give him credit for.
After I came to observe Mr. Hart closely, I could tell that his behaviors and words were highly calculated. He was like a chess player seeing multiple moves ahead. He was also careful to draw a line and never stray beyond it. He was, granted, a high-strung man whose more outlandish behaviors and ways of being were mostly for show.
I suspect that Mr. Hart had this neurotic attention to detail that mingled with an intense level of paranoia. He personally performed a bodily search on me every time we met alone. He was never perfunctory with the search and had little regard for respecting the privacy of my genitals. That is not to say that his search could be mistaken for playing but he was thorough and wholly unembarrassed to ensure his personal safety at the expense of patting down another man’s testicles. I imagine he would have searched the pubic area of Snow White herself if he were to grant her a personal interview.
In fact, many times I interviewed with Mr. Hart while he was undergoing physical therapy treatments in his office. A few years prior he had suffered a traumatic crush injury to his left leg in a car accident that was an attempt on his life. His time at the Covenant headquarters was limited and precious so he often had me interview while he cringed through therapy. He never complained about the pain from the therapy and endured it rather stoically. I believe he liked interviewing then to keep his mind from the painful stretches, exercises, and massages.
His therapist, Ms. Candace Huntington, was a sprite young lady who Mr. Hart subjected to searches every time. I remember the first time I spoke with him when he had a session scheduled. Mr. Hart performed the same thorough bodily pat down I was familiar with.
He also searched the vinyl duffle bag the therapist carried which contained implements for her therapy. On that first day she also had what appeared to be a small make-up bag, Mr. Hart opened it and emptied the contents which included several tampons and sanitary napkins. I was astonished to find him unabashedly weighing each object in his palm as if to deduce whether its weight was appropriate to the item it purported to be. He placed each item back and respectfully handed the case to the therapist.
“This must seem very crass to you Arland. However you should know Ms. Huntington receives a generous remuneration for her services. You have to understand that her work involves manipulating my body including my leg to and from which very important arteries flow. My bodily safety is priceless to me and is not something I am comfortable entrusting to others. As a preface, I was once assigned to bring in a very dangerous woman who was wanted for questioning. Being the gentleman that I am, I confiscated everything dangerous from her but left her with two seemingly harmless tampons which she had in her pocket. It was a rookie mistake because she ended up stabbing me in the neck with a deadly sharp little blade hidden in one of those tampons -- and by luck missed everything important. Needless to say that was the day I stopped being bashful about women’s sanitary products.”
I never knew what Owen believed about anything. (For the remainder of this memorial, I will refer to Mr. Hart as Owen, because that’s how I came to know him). He always spoke in circles.
“Come on Candace, ready to make me feel alive?” Owen had asked Ms. Huntington once when she came in during the first part of one of our interviews.
I asked him what he meant by that and he answered: “I suffer therefore I am.”
Ms. Huntington asked him, “Do you really believe that?”
“No not really,” he said, “You know some people say suffering is the universal language.”
“Yes and some say love is,” Ms. Huntington countered. During this day, the interview went more like a conversation.
“That’s true,” Owen agreed.
“And what do you believe, Owen?” I asked him
And he said: “Neither or both. All I’ve figured out is love is the purest form of suffering.”
So I asked him, “What do you think your wife would say about that?”
“Oh she knows she makes me feel alive.” He was laughing while he said it.
“So you mean to say she makes you suffer?” Ms. Huntington trying to clarify.
He had a funny little grin on his mouth. “Exquisitely, yes.”
So you see, I was never too sure what Owen believed about anything.
There seemed to be a softness about him that I kept uncovering. It was there under the surface, in the ways he expressed himself when he opened up to me and in the ways others talked about him. I once interviewed a man who had been in the same convoy with Owen when he was a mere marksmen in the Special Reconnaissance Corps.
He said about Owen:
“He could be this really funny guy at times. One time we were in this convoy that was completely backed up and hadn’t moved more than a mile in an hour. And Owen was always this impatient kind of guy. A real bastard when he didn’t have something to occupy his mind. You know? And he would do shit to entertain himself so that day he just starts humming that song ‘Tennessee Whiskey.’ Do you know that song? And the rest of us start to get into it. And so he switches to singing it. And he’s really getting into it. I mean really getting at the vocals. And anyway then he pushes the radio and broadcasts himself belting the chorus over the coms. And we’re cracking up dying laughing at him trying to sing this song soulfully.
I asked whether Owen had a good singing voice.
“Not bad really. I honestly could picture him being the kind of person to sing to the radio or in the shower or something. You know? It was really a remarkable thing to watch him.”
“First you described the event as ‘funny’. And now ‘remarkable’ can you explain that?” I asked.
“Well sure, he’s a very serious guy a lot of the time. Especially on assignment. So him singing like that to the whole convoy was hilarious. And he said afterwards, ‘never waste an audience, boys,’ like he’d given us an example of something important for our careers.”
“You speak very fondly of him.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” He looked away from me then and asked not to speak of Owen anymore. This was two days after Owen’s funeral.
The suddenness of Owen’s death, then, still hung heavy in the air. It seemed that to everyone he’d left behind that it came as a shock. An earthquake unseen that left rifts in the world he’d created around him. And yet, in my conversations with him, Owen struck me as a man who remained acutely aware of his mortality.
“You know Virgil?” Owen once asked me, musing off topic. “He wrote ‘Death twitches in my ear, / ‘Live,’ he says,/ ‘I am coming.” Owen quoted from memory. “Virgil was talking about me."
“You seem like a well read-man.” I observed.
“I appreciate that insofar as it’s complementary, Arland. I do enjoy books.”
“There are rumors that you’d like a stab at chief command,” I suggested to bring him round to topic again.
“There are rumors about lots of things.”
“Would you like to be Commander?”
“Are you an ass-kisser or a complete idiot, Arland?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.” I said, unsure how I’d provoked him
“Just now you were complimenting my intelligence. Now you ask me a question to which an affirmative response would be akin to treason. Machinations for the commandership are not spoken of out loud, Arland. So you were either kissing my ass earlier about being intelligent and think I’m an idiot who’d be distracted by my ego enough to incriminate myself. Either that, or you’re an idiot yourself.”
“Lieutenant General,” I said paying my respects, “you haven’t answered the question. Would you like to be the commander?”
“I serve subordinate to and at the behest of the honorable commander, may he out-live me.”
“What are your career goals?”
“Actually, I would like to retire, someday.”
“And what would you do in your retirement?” I asked.
“Read. There are so many things I’d like to read before I die.” Owen said.
“You speak as if death is soon,” I observed.
“Death is a possibility for any one of us at any moment. Haven’t you been paying attention to anything I say?”
“You’ve led an active life and career and I am to believe that the only thing you’d like to accomplish is retirement for the purpose of reading?” I pushed him.
He laughed, “Yes of course. I think my wife would put me under house arrest if I did anything else. She would be very pleased to find me reading every day and occasionally going outside to check the mail or take her car to the gas station for her.”
“It sounds as if your wife has a lot of influence on you,” I suggested.
He leaned forward with a twinkle in his eye, “Just between you and me: she let’s me off my leash because she knows she’s got this dog trained to come crawling right back to her.”
It took me a long time to get Owen to speak of personal matters, particularly to speak to me of his marriage and wife. He opened up to me once about his relationship. The following is a transcript of that conversation:
A: So your wife.
O: Is there a question there, Arland?
A: People want to know, what’s your story? How did you meet? How did you fall in love?
O: Well, that’s a very long story.
A: We have plenty of time.
(Owen sighs and leans back in his chair. The room is silent except for leather groaning. He picks up a scrap piece of paper and fiddles with it. He’s rolling it and rolling it between index and thumb)
O: I first met Julianna, well, I should say, we reconnected again in the summer just after the start of that conflict over in Morocco, you remember?
A: Yes. I do. You say you reconnected?
O: Yeah. Yeah that’s the right way to put it. We had a history.
A: A history.
O: Yeah.
A: Can you elaborate on that?
O: No. No, I won’t talk about that.
A: Okay. Did you two have a prior relationship?
(Owen stopped rolling and cut me off with a slash of his hand in the air)
O: Arland, no. Stop. Just let me tell it. We reconnected again in the summer. I put an ad out for an executive assistant and she answered it. There’s nothing about that day or that moment that should stick out to me. But I remember everything clearly. Its funny. You know? You don’t give a damn about the moment in the moment but I can remember everything about it. Every feeling, every thought, the way she looked to me, the words we said to each other. It’s just burned in my mind.
A: So she got the job
(He laughs nodding and picks up the paper again to fiddle with it while he speaks).
O: Yeah, she got the job.
A: Was it love at first sight?
O: No! Oh no. It wasn’t anything like that. I mean that isn’t to say I didn’t notice how beautiful she was. I did. I definitely did.
A: Do you think it was love at first sight for her?
O: No. No. I don’t think so. I was - well - very high strung then. I think I intimidated her a little bit. And, you know, we had this history sort of looming over us. I think … I think we were both afraid to confront it, but we knew we would eventually when we were ready.
A: That sounds tense.
O: Yeah, yeah it was. For a while, but we got used to each other pretty quickly.
A: What did you talk about together then?
O: I can’t really recall anything specific. You know? Nothing special but we both continued to avoid any mention of the past.
A: What was it like?
O: Working closely with a beautiful woman?
A: Yeah. Sure.
(Owen laughs again and shakes his head).
O: Painful. Very painful. (He swivels in his chair and I can tell he wants to say more, so I hold further questions). You know back then she loved office supplies.
A: Office supplies?
O: Yeah, I know it’s weird right? She had all these multi-colored pens. All the colors in the rainbow. And then some. Little stickies all shapes and sizes. And these paper clips in the shape of cats. I remember her so clearly this way. She was always scribbling and doodling in this planner journal thing of hers. She’s Veridian, you know, so she has the feline traits. Her ears would always twitch when she got a little bit excited or interested in something. They would fall down on her hair when she got embarrassed. And her tail was always doing something too. I just - the more I observed her. The more I came to like her.
A: So when was your first date?
(He stares at the ceiling, frowning at it as if the answer wasn’t clear).
O: Well our first date, I suppose we can call it a date. I’m not sure of a better word for it...was this night at my house. She was teaching me to dance for the annual Christmas thing here.
A: She taught you to dance?
O: Yeah, so I wouldn’t embarrass myself. You know I don’t have the same pedigree as the other officers. I had to learn some of this extra stuff by the seat of my pants. But Julianna. She taught me to dance. At first it was all about the steps. It was serious. Professional. Strictly business. But we kept dancing after I learned all the steps I needed to know. Neither of us were concerned to be so close to one another and casual with one another. (He smiles, he’s not even speaking to me directly anymore, but just speaking as if to himself from memory.) I was real smooth when I kissed her. I knew, I knew she was a little bit… I guess nervous that I might? Or maybe the tension I sensed in her was anticipation. It was such a relief though. To finally be with her like that, even if for just a moment. We cooked dinner together, afterwards. Well she cooked for me, while I hung around her in the kitchen. I was drinking Scotch while she cooked. We ate together at the breakfast nook. It’s a booth, so, of course, we sat together. It was a good night.
A: So what happened after that? You kept dating each other?
O: Oh no. My girlfriend at the time walked in on us. It wasn’t like that. We were still eating dinner. I think twenty or so more minutes and she would have found us somewhere else.
A: So, you were in a relationship with another woman?
O: Yes. Yes at the time I was.
A: What happened with the other woman?
O: Well, obviously we broke it off.
A: Right then and there?
O: No. Not immediately. We hung on for a little while longer. But it was doomed.
A: Hm.
O: Yeah, I uh, I’m not proud of myself for the way I was with her then. My girlfriend then.
A: She just wasn’t the one?
O: No. I enjoyed sleeping with her. But she ultimately...she didn’t move me the way Julianna did. The way Julianna does. You know?
A: Sure, sure. Of course. So, did you know you were in love with Julianna then?
O: Um, yeah, yeah I think I knew. I think I knew something momentous was happening to me. And she was responsible.
A: That’s an interesting way to characterize falling in love.
O; Well that’s how it was with us. Nothing short of momentous.
A: So why not break it off with your girlfriend and be with Julianna?
O: I don’t know.
A: You don’t know?
O: Well, I was afraid. Of her. Of myself. Of hurting her. There’s no way to describe what I felt then.
A: So -
O: Well, look at it this way. It was a little bit before this dancing date night whatever you want to call it. Just a little before that, Julianna and I ended up somehow walking around downtown and looking at the holiday lights they do. You know? I just remember her shivering. It was so cold then. Unseasonably cold that year. So I offered her my arm. And she clung to me. She really clung to me. Shoved her hand down in my pocket and walked pressed against my body. I remember feeling so guilty. So guilty.
A: Because of your girlfriend?
O: No! Not at all. I felt guilty on account that I wasn’t the man Julianna needed me to be and I knew that. I wasn’t the one she should have been coming to warmth for. I didn’t have the warmth she needed. But I knew, I knew, the way she held onto me then that she was trying to convey how she felt about me. I remember we’d look each other in the eyes and say a bunch of meaningless stuff that way. No words, just looking at each other in a helpless sort of way. And I just - I couldn’t step up for her, then. And that’s how I felt for a very, very long time.
A: Even after you got together?
O: Oh yeah, oh yeah. I still feel that way sometimes. A crippling sort of why me? Why did she pick me? When will she wake up and realize what a big mistake she made investing so much of herself in a man like me?
A: That’s...what you conveyed here, do you feel like that’s a low way to see yourself?
(Owen looks down at his hands. His eyes look glassy for a moment.)
O: I don’t know. But you can’t publish any of that.
A: Why?
O: It’s off the record. It’s too... it’s too personal.
A: You don’t want your wife to know this stuff?
O: Yes. No. I - I don’t know. But you just can’t publish any of it. It’s too private. I shouldn’t have said any of it.
He told me it was too private and that I couldn’t publish any of it. I must go against his wishes now. Many things in these days that are ‘too private’ are being said about about him.
Whether he betrayed the Covenant or not in a professional sense, Owen Hart deserves also to be remembered as a man that one a little girl was proud to yell out in a room full of over serious adults, “That’s my daddy!” As a man who fell in love with a woman who liked paper clips in the shape of cats.
Bitch, I'm limited edition.
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