This was 2200 Zulu, according to military clocks, which in Afghanistan meant it was the dead middle of the night. Most of the rest of the world carried along, at daybreak or nightfall or anywhere in between, while uneasy quiet settled on the desert.
Michael Mastrangelo arrived at the base earlier that day, freshly released from Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, a strong contender if you’re looking for the most dangerous place on the planet. It was his first stop en route to midtour leave, 18 days at home after about eight months of deployment.
Mastrangelo had plans. This being a bigger base, it had television reception. So in the thick of the night, he sat in the cafeteria with two fellow servicemen. And he visited with an old friend.
Half a world away, the Notre Dame basketball team played Syracuse on a national broadcast. During one feature segment, cameras fixed on a thumb-sized rectangle of tin dangling from a beaded chain worn by an Irish player.
The dog tag’s block-letter stenciling detailed a blood type, a religion and a Social Security number that, as it happens, was one digit off. There was also a name.
MASTRANGELO, MICHAEL J.
The other soldiers went crazy. Mastrangelo himself hardly could believe it. He’d see Kyle McAlarney soon enough, and tell him how much it meant to him.
Building a friendship
Notre Dame begins Big East tournament play on Thursday in New York. Somewhere in Madison Square Garden, combat medic Michael Mastrangelo of the 173rd Airborne will hunker down and watch his best friend play college basketball in person for the first time.
“I’m so happy that he gets a chance to be home for a while, that he gets a chance to be away from all that,” McAlarney said. “They never gave him a timetable. He could have been over there for two years and not even come home.
“He’s missed so many holidays, missed a lot of time with us. It’s a feeling of joy, just happy he gets to come home.”
They have not seen each other since Christmas 2006. And now McAlarney winds up back East for, perhaps, five of those 18 days Mastrangelo is on U.S. soil. Two homecomings bottleneck into a reunion.
“Sometimes you wonder if it’s fate that it worked out that way,” said Terry Mastrangelo, Michael’s mother. “It would be almost impossible to arrange that, you know? It’s absolutely perfect.”
Some ethereal force, some thread of predestination, figures to be back at work. McAlarney and Mastrangelo attended different grammar schools and drew close only after matriculating at Moore Catholic High School, even though their families had known each other for years and less than a mile separates their homes on Staten Island.
But once under the same high school roof, they became complementary energies. McAlarney was temperate, focused. Mastrangelo was, well, crazy.
“Crazy, like the first one to throw a punch,” McAlarney said. “You don’t want to mess with him.”
Said Mastrangelo: “I did a lot of off-the-wall things, so he was always the one making sure it never got too out of hand.”
McAlarney tugged Mastrangelo into responsibility. For Moore Catholic’s predawn practices their junior year, McAlarney issued the wake-up calls every morning. Mastrangelo might have never made it otherwise.
“I think Mike would have given it up,” said Artie Mastrangelo, Michael’s father. “[Kyle] pushed him to come and kept him going.”
Those workouts, and others, solidified the friendship. McAlarney was the superior talent — when Mastrangelo blocked his shot, he heard about it for weeks — so Mastrangelo assumed control of, ahem, physical training.
McAlarney would dribble the length of the court while Mastrangelo raced alongside and relentlessly walloped his friend with a football blocking pad. McAlarney would shoot jumpers while Mastrangelo ran into him at full speed, putting the drill in shooting drill.
“I had a better time with it than he did,” Mastrangelo said.
Their link was the value they placed on loyalty, on the unyielding trust forged in the gym or driving around those nights in Mastrangelo’s dilapidated green Saturn, the one with the back door that didn’t open.
Without prompting, they tell the same favorite story: At a baseball game between Moore Catholic and Monsignor Farrell High School, one of their mutual friends began jawing with a Farrell fan. The Farrell fan then escalated matters with a shove.
Before another half-second passed, Mastrangelo leaped in and decked the guy.
In McAlarney, Mastrangelo saw an athletic star who had every excuse to act aloof or entitled but instead lashed himself to humility.
In Mastrangelo, McAlarney saw someone who, without compromise or better judgment, defended what he believed to be right.
United by written word
The Korengal Valley is a wretched, mountainous region, rife with insurgents, festering with woe.
Vanity Fair embedded reporter Sebastian Junger labeled it “the most dangerous valley in northeastern Afghanistan.” A New York Times Magazine piece described it as “a lonely outpost of regress.”
Michael Mastrangelo’s appraisal is less lyrical.
“It sucks,” he said.
As he patrols one of the worst places in the world, Mastrangelo hands out rice and beans and clothes. If the soldiers can win over hearts and minds, then maybe the people will tell them where the bad guys are.
“It’s starting to turn around a little bit now,” Mastrangelo said. “But fighting season will be the judge of that, because that’s coming up pretty soon.”
McAlarney prefers not to dwell on his friend facing something called “fighting season.” He believes Mastrangelo is smart enough not to be a hero when it’s not necessary, but he also believes Mastrangelo was meant to do this.
In the summer of 2006, Mastrangelo began training in Germany, shipping to Afghanistan a year later. Gradually, McAlarney grew infatuated with the war and politics. Absorbing the news brought him closer, gave him a faint notion of what Mastrangelo endured.
“I have to deal with it all the time,” said forward Ryan Ayers, McAlarney’s roommate. “We’re always watching CNN or some politics talk show.”
In the Valley, e-mail and phone calls are scarce. Mastrangelo prefers letters anyway, which is understandable. The comfort is tangible, less fleeting.
So McAlarney writes. More than anyone save Mastrangelo’s wife, Carolyn.
He writes about games. He writes about practices, because Mastrangelo likes to hear about them. He writes about which former classmates are dating, which are fighting. He writes about celebrity gossip; McAlarney, in fact, broke the news that Jamie-Lynn Spears was pregnant.
“It’s nice to know people haven’t forgotten,” Mastrangelo said. “If you’re doing this, if you’re in that country, deployed all the time, everything is Army, Army, Army. At some point you just want to sit down and not think about everything that’s going on around you.
“And to get a letter like that, about how his practice was or how good he’s doing, it’s refreshing. It’s something new to hear. It makes you feel like everything maybe isn’t so bad after all.”
Inspired by true hero
A year ago, as McAlarney, now a junior, idled at home, suspended from Notre Dame after a marijuana possession arrest, his best friend called from Germany and told him not to let the punishment get the best of him.
Now, McAlarney is a first-team All-Big East guard for a 24-win team that will play in the NCAA tournament. Now, he returns to New York at the same time his best friend trades a war for home.
“Karma caught up to me,” McAlarney said.
Watch him this week during the national anthem. In a line of wandering eyes and blank stares, McAlarney’s head bows forward. His eyes close.
As the anthem plays, McAlarney soothes his nerves by thinking of soldiers overseas. He thinks about veterans the Irish met on a January tour of Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. He thinks about his best friend. It all delivers a restful perspective.
“I really know what the national anthem means now, because of him,” McAlarney said.
When Mastrangelo had those extra dog tags made, mainly for his wife, he also dispensed some to friends. Years later, in a military base cafeteria, he would see that Notre Dame-Syracuse game and the glint off a sliver of metal half a world away.
Unbelievable, he thought.
“When he gave it to me, it wasn’t as special as it is now,” McAlarney said. “At that point I was like, ‘Oh, this is cool. I’ll just wear it around my neck.’ Now it’s to the point where I really never take it off, unless I’m playing or lifting. It’s become motivation. It’s very inspiring. I’ll never stop wearing them.”
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bchamilton@tribune.com
