The story you are about to read is not entirely fiction. The names are invented. The numbers are real. There are 134 million households in America. This could be any one of them.

It could be yours.
Today.

Have a Nice Day!

The Volunteer

ACT I

“The Circled Paragraphs”

A Wednesday morning. The war is four weeks old.

(Lights up on the kitchen. PHIL sits at the table with the newspaper open. He is circling something with a pencil. He has been doing this for some time. There are many circles. DORIS is at the counter, drying a mug. She watches him.)

DORIS: How many is that?

PHIL: How many what?

DORIS: Circles. You’ve been circling things for twenty minutes.

PHIL: I’m counting.

DORIS: Counting what?

PHIL: Reasons.

(Doris sets the mug down. She comes to the table.)

DORIS: Reasons for what?

PHIL: The war. I’m counting the reasons they’ve given us for the war.

(He holds up the newspaper.)

PHIL: Monday it was nuclear weapons. They said Iran was two weeks from a bomb.

DORIS: They said that.

PHIL: Then the Director of National Intelligence went to Congress and said Iran wasn’t close to a bomb.

DORIS: Same week?

PHIL: Same week. So Tuesday it was missiles. Ballistic missiles that could hit the United States.

DORIS: Can they?

PHIL: The Pentagon says no. But that was Tuesday’s reason. Wednesday it was regime change. The president told the Iranian people to take over their government.

DORIS: How are they supposed to do that while we’re bombing them?

PHIL: That wasn’t addressed. Thursday it was the navy. We’re sinking their navy.

DORIS: Why?

PHIL: Because it’s there, apparently. Friday the Secretary of Defense said our goals haven’t changed since day one.

DORIS: Which goals? The Monday goals, the Tuesday goals, the Wednesday goals, or the Thursday goals?

(Phil looks at the newspaper. He counts the circles.)

PHIL: I’ve got six. Six different reasons in four weeks. And a senator went on television yesterday and said the objectives have changed four or five times.

DORIS: Which senator?

PHIL: Warner. Intelligence Committee. He said he doesn’t know which objective, if we achieved it, means we’re done.

(Long pause. Doris picks up the pencil. She writes on the legal pad.)

DORIS: Phil.

PHIL: Yeah.

DORIS: If the chairman of the Intelligence Committee doesn’t know what we’re trying to do, who does?

(The doorbell rings.)

PHIL: I’ll bet you eleven billion dollars it’s the government.

DORIS: That’s about what they spent last week.

ACT II

“The Binder”

(JANET COLFORD stands in the doorway. Gray suit. Reading glasses on a chain. Leather binder under her arm. She is pleasant in the way that people are pleasant when they have been trained to be pleasant in difficult situations. She has been trained extensively.)

JANET: Mr. and Mrs. Dalton?

PHIL: That depends on what you’re selling.

JANET: I’m not selling anything. I’m from the Office of Strategic Communication. Janet Colford. I’m here to answer your questions about Operation Epic Fury.

DORIS: We have questions.

JANET: That’s why I’m here. May I sit down?

(She sits. She opens the binder. It has colored tabs. Several tabs have been crossed out and relabeled in pen. One tab has been crossed out twice.)

DORIS: What happened to your tabs?

JANET: I’m sorry?

DORIS: Your tabs. They’ve been changed. Some of them more than once.

(Janet glances at the binder. She closes it slightly.)

JANET: The information environment evolves rapidly in a dynamic conflict.

PHIL: The tabs were wrong.

JANET: The tabs were updated.

DORIS: How many times?

(Beat.)

JANET: I’m here to discuss the objectives of the operation. Would you like me to walk you through them?

PHIL: Please.

(Janet opens the binder to the first tab. She reads.)

JANET: The primary objective of Operation Epic Fury is to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capability.

PHIL: The Director of National Intelligence told Congress last week that Iran wasn’t in a position to make a bomb.

(Janet turns to a different tab.)

JANET: A secondary objective is the degradation of Iran’s ballistic missile infrastructure.

DORIS: Wasn’t that the primary objective on Tuesday?

JANET: The objectives are complementary, not sequential.

PHIL: What about regime change?

(Janet turns to another tab. This is one of the tabs that has been crossed out and relabeled.)

JANET: The United States supports the aspirations of the Iranian people for self-governance and freedom.

DORIS: Is that a yes?

JANET: It’s a statement of principle.

PHIL: The president told the Iranian people to take over their government. He said it would be theirs to take. That sounds like regime change.

JANET: The president expressed confidence in the Iranian people’s capacity for self-determination.

DORIS: While bombing them.

(Pause.)

JANET: The bombing is targeted at military and security infrastructure.

PHIL: Janet. I’m a Navy veteran. I spent six years on a destroyer. Can I ask you a direct question?

JANET: Of course.

PHIL: What does done look like?

(Silence.)

JANET: I’m sorry?

PHIL: Done. Finished. Over. What does the situation look like on the day we stop? What are the conditions? Who signs what? When do the planes come home?

(Janet looks at the binder. She turns several tabs. She turns back. She looks at Phil.)

JANET: The operation will continue until its objectives are achieved.

DORIS: Which objectives? You’ve given us four. The senator says there have been five. My husband counted six in the newspaper this morning. Which one is the one where we stop?

(Janet closes the binder. She folds her hands on top of it. She speaks carefully.)

JANET: Mrs. Dalton, I understand your frustration. Strategic ambiguity is sometimes necessary in a complex operational environment.

DORIS: Strategic ambiguity.

JANET: Yes.

DORIS: You know what I call that? I was a bookkeeper for forty years. When a client told me his books were strategically ambiguous, it meant he didn’t know where the money went.

(Phil leans forward.)

PHIL: There was a Prussian general named Clausewitz. Wrote a book about war two hundred years ago. He said the one thing you have to know before you start a war is what you intend to achieve and how you intend to achieve it. One sentence. Wrote it in 1831.

JANET: I’m familiar with Clausewitz.

PHIL: Then you know we’re violating his first rule.

(Janet stands. She picks up the binder. She tucks it under her arm.)

JANET: Mr. and Mrs. Dalton, I appreciate your time. I want to leave you with this.

(She places a single sheet of paper on the table. It is a one-page summary titled “Operation Epic Fury: Objectives and Progress.” Phil picks it up. He reads it. He turns it over. The back is blank.)

PHIL: Janet.

JANET: Yes?

PHIL: This says the objectives are nuclear prevention, missile degradation, naval superiority, proxy disruption, and support for the Iranian people’s aspirations. That’s five objectives.

JANET: Correct.

PHIL: How many of those can you do from the air?

(Janet adjusts her glasses.)

JANET: The military component is one element of a comprehensive strategy.

PHIL: Which elements are the other ones?

(Pause.)

JANET: I’ll have someone from the interagency follow up with you on that.

(She walks to the door. She turns.)

JANET: Thank you for your engagement with this process.

(She leaves. The door closes. Phil and Doris sit at the table. The one-page summary joins the pile.)

PHIL: Doris.

DORIS: Yeah.

PHIL: She was the most senior person they’ve sent.

DORIS: I know.

PHIL: And she couldn’t answer the question.

DORIS: I know.

PHIL: It’s not that she wouldn’t answer it. She couldn’t. She doesn’t know. The binder doesn’t know. The tabs don’t know. The senator doesn’t know.

(Doris picks up the legal pad. She writes one line and underlines it twice.)

DORIS: Nobody knows what we’re trying to do.

(Phil nods slowly.)

PHIL: And that’s why it won’t stop. You can’t finish something that was never defined. You can’t win a war when nobody can tell you what winning looks like.

ACT III

“The Table”

(Phil and Doris sit at the kitchen table. The pile has grown. The prospectus. The charts. The pamphlet. The legal pad. The manila folder. The one-page summary. Phil picks up each document, one at a time.)

PHIL: Elmer brought us the prospectus. That was the sales pitch. Invest in the war, he said. Guaranteed returns.

(He sets it down.)

PHIL: Karen brought us the escalation chart. The war was expanding. That was normal, she said. Part of the process.

(He sets it down.)

PHIL: Tyler brought us the pamphlet. The war was costing us at the grocery store and the gas pump and the pharmacy. That was temporary, he said. Grow vegetables.

(He sets it down.)

PHIL: And Janet brought us the objectives. Five of them. Or four. Or six. Depending on the day and the tab and which page of the binder was still current.

(He sets it down. He looks at the pile.)

PHIL: Four people from the government have sat at this table, Doris. Not one of them could answer the same question.

DORIS: What question?

PHIL: What are we doing? That’s the question. Not how much does it cost. Not how long will it take. What are we doing? What is the point?

(Doris opens the manila folder. She pulls out a newspaper clipping.)

DORIS: The president said two or three days.

PHIL: That was four weeks ago.

DORIS: He said no ground troops.

PHIL: There are twenty-five hundred Marines in the Gulf.

DORIS: He said unconditional surrender.

PHIL: From who? The government is still there. The missiles are still flying. The Strait is still closed.

(Doris closes the folder. She sets it on the pile. She looks at Phil.)

DORIS: Phil. Johnson knew Vietnam wasn’t worth fighting for. He said so. On tape. A year before he sent the troops.

PHIL: I know.

DORIS: In Iraq, they settled on weapons of mass destruction because it was the one thing everyone could agree on. The weapons didn’t exist.

PHIL: I know.

DORIS: In Afghanistan, they finished the job in ninety days and then spent twenty years not knowing what the new job was.

PHIL: I know.

DORIS: It’s the same mistake. Every time. They don’t know what they’re doing before they start.

(Phil nods. He looks at the pile on the table. Then he looks at the audience. Directly. For the first time in the play.)

PHIL: You want to know why the bill has no final number?

(He taps the pile.)

PHIL: Because the war has no final objective. It never did. Not in Vietnam. Not in Iraq. Not in Afghanistan. Not now.

(Doris turns to the audience.)

DORIS: You can’t finish what was never defined. That’s not strategy. That’s bookkeeping without a ledger.

(Phil picks up Janet’s one-page summary. He holds it up so the audience can see it.)

PHIL: Five objectives. No end state. No definition of victory. No answer to the only question that matters.

(He sets it on the pile.)

PHIL: The bill is yours. It has always been yours.

DORIS: And it has no final number.

PHIL: Because nobody knows what done looks like.

(Doris picks up the legal pad. She holds it so the audience can see the underlined sentence: “Nobody knows what we’re trying to do.”)

DORIS: Have a nice day.

(Blackout.)

• • •
END OF PLAY
• • •

“The Objective” is the fourth in a series of ten short dramatic works titled “Have a Nice Day!” accompanying the Civic Sage War Series by Charles Cranston Jett. The companion article, “The First Decision Is the Only Decision That Matters,” examines why American wars fail at the moment of the first decision. Previous episodes: “The Prospectus” (Episode One), “Have a Nice Day” (Episode Two), and “The Adjustment” (Episode Three).

Charles C. Jett | criticalskillsblog.com | civicsage.com