Thank You for Your Service (10 page)

It went on for three pages, and as he walks down the hall with Sascha, he has his journal with him, wondering whether to show it to her and wondering whether she’ll be the wife who says “I’m so sorry.”

They duck into a visitation room stocked with some worn books and board games and sit at a table. They begin a game of Scrabble, and at some point Nic decides. He’ll tell her. If she really wants to know what the war was like, he’ll tell her what the war was like. He slides the journal to her, opened not to the story about the bloody girl but to what he wrote next, about a search for a high-value target.

“Baby,” it’s titled.

“I loved owning the night,” it begins.

She starts to read, and as she does, he looks down at the table and starts rearranging some of the Scrabble pieces.

“I don’t remember what time of the year it was but it had to be cold outside,” he has written.

Sascha finishes reading that and turns the page, but there’s no more to the story. She doesn’t say anything. She just looks at Nic as he continues to rearrange the Scrabble pieces. He lines up five tiles in a row. He takes five more tiles and lines them up in another row. He takes the tile holders and lines them up in between.

He keeps at it with more tiles and holders, and now Sascha can see a grid. What Nic is seeing, though, is Humvees and houses, and now he says that that house right there—he points to one of the tile holders—is where he threw the man down the stairs. He can see it clearly, as clear as he saw the bloody girl, and apparently he can hear it, too, because what he says next to Sascha is the part of the story he has yet to write. That there was a baby crying. That there was a woman screaming. That he got to the bottom of the stairs and saw the screaming woman holding the crying baby and that the baby was wrapped in a blanket and the blanket was covered in shards of stained glass. And it took him a
moment, but then he got it, that the baby had been sleeping by the door he had kicked open using his two hundred pounds of momentum, and when he ran in, he had just missed stepping on it, squashing it, crushing it, killing it.

His scary movie, then. Here’s the soldier kicking in the door, and cue the sleeping baby, and here’s the squish, and here’s the blood, and now the screams, and even though he has seen it three times, ten times, many more than ten times, he has yet to get even remotely bored. As for what actually happened, he sees that movie, too, the man he threw down the stairs, the old man he had by the throat, the screaming woman, the crying baby, the blanket covered in glass shards, the soldiers filing out, and then the lieutenant saying to them once they’re outside, “This is the wrong fucking house.”

“The wrong fucking house,” Nic says to Sascha now. “One of the things I want to remember is how many times we hit the wrong house,” and then he waits for her to say it. “I don’t feel sorry for you.”

“But you did get the right house sometimes” is what she says.

And is this how his habituation begins? Right then? With those forgiving words?

“So how has this taken a toll on your marriage?” a counselor asks Nic a few hours later as Sascha sits next to him.

“I’m afraid to tell her stuff,” Nic says, wanting to tell her everything, breaking down. “I don’t want to tell her about the dreams I have. I don’t want to tell her about the nightmares I have. I don’t want her to know that her husband, the person she married, has nightmares about killing people. It just makes me feel like a monster.”

“The nightmares? Or that she’ll look at you like you’re not understood?” the counselor asks.

“That she’ll hate me,” Nic says. “What kind of person has dreams like that?”

“I don’t hate you,” Sascha says.

“So do you feel like a monster?” the counselor asks.

“I feel like a monster,” Nic says, turning to Sascha.

“It’s not your fault,” the counselor says.

“I know it’s not my fault,” Nic says, and then when no one says anything, not the counselor or Sascha, he says, crying harder now, “Oh fuck.”

Two weeks later, released from Pueblo, Nic gets on a plane and makes one last entry in his journal:

And then he is home with Sascha, who knows now about one day of the war.

Four hundred more to go.

At 6:35 in the morning every house on the street is still dark, including the little house with the swinging kitchen door hanging cockeyed on its hinges. Somewhere inside, Adam should be tiptoeing around by now, slipping into a shirt and tie while trying not to wake Saskia, but that’s never the way it works out. Every night he sets his alarm for 6:30, hoping to get to work on time, but once again in the middle of the night Jax was howling, and then Zoe wet her bed yet again, and now Saskia is mentioning very loudly that the goddamned alarm has been ringing for five minutes. He gets up, stumbles into the shower, and falls asleep under the spray. He throws on an old shirt and the jeans he was wearing last night when he was out fishing, with traces of fish guts and blood smears on the legs, and by the time he walks out the front door, the sun is coming up. Late again.

Oh well.

He’s got his antidepressants in one hand and a sack lunch with a Walmart enchilada and a Mountain Dew in the other. He swallows his pills as he turns onto the highway and passes by Geary Estates. He exits at Fort Riley, clears security, parks outside of an old limestone building, smokes a last cigarette as if he’s about to be blindfolded and executed, and heads toward a work cubicle that is just outside the sight lines of his boss, who is hopeful about her new employee: “I hear him on the phone. He sounds very confident. He’s really picking up fast.” She adds, “If you don’t have compassion for people, you probably won’t make it in a call center.”

That’s what this place is—a call-in center for army retirees who need
help figuring out their benefits, which strikes Adam as comical because if he had gotten better benefits for himself he wouldn’t need to be working here. To keep up with bills, he had found a job at the Fort Riley range, but maybe the daily explosions weren’t the best thing for someone with war-related PTSD. So here he is at the call center, where sometimes he thinks he should call himself, explain his problems, and see if he can get some answers.

General Peter Chiarelli, U.S. Army vice chief of staff

Instead, the first thing he does is what he does every day: turn on his computer, sign on to a website called
militaryhire.com
, and look for another job. He wants to be a forester. He wants to be a park ranger. He wants to work at a golf course if it will pay enough. He wants to be outside. The ringing in his right ear is particularly loud today, but not loud enough to drown out the woman two cubicles away who is driving him absolutely batty. “Right … right … right … right,” she is saying into her headset, like a metronome, like a pile driver, like a car alarm, and Adam fantasizes about picking up his pencil and stabbing her in the neck. Here comes the boss, walking around, and he quickly signs on to e-mail, where the message he happens to open up as the boss walks by is from the guy in the next cubicle. “Gun control isn’t about guns, it’s about control,” it says in big letters. Totally inappropriate. But the boss doesn’t notice, and the guy in the cubicle is laughing, and the woman two cubicles away is smiling, and the realization that everyone seems so happy here makes it even worse for Adam because he feels like he is dying. He is an ex-soldier who wishes he still were a soldier, and instead he is sitting in a cubicle and putting on a rubber fingertip so he can more efficiently sort through the papers of someone who is bitching that his benefits don’t match up with his annual salary of $137,410.

Galling. All of it. And most galling of all? That would be the attitude of the guy down the hall who told Adam about this job.

His name is Calvin McCloy, and back in the war, during Adam’s second deployment, he and Adam were in the same unit together. Poor Calvin, who one day was up in a hatch of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle when a roadside bomb exploded and the Bradley caught on fire. He was thirty-six years old and a platoon sergeant, like Doster had been. He was burned over 40 percent of his body. His back was burned. His backside,
too. His stomach. His wrists. Under his arms. His uniform was burnt off, all of it except for part of his T-shirt and boots. He spent four months in a hospital burn unit undergoing skin grafts and another year in compression clothing. He has PTSD and TBI and a limited range of motion and wears hearing aids in both ears. His brain was bruised and he passes out sometimes, without warning, just slumps and goes down, and a few times has awakened on the ground with his head busted wide open. He went through a guilt phase. He went through a pissed-off phase. He went through a why-me phase. He went through a pills phase, and two years of intensive therapy. “There comes a point when you have to make a decision,” he has told Adam of the point he finally came to, and so one day he made a decision. “It isn’t about what I want to do. It’s about what I have to do. I don’t want to be sitting behind a damn desk. If I had my say, I’d be a sergeant major, training soldiers. But I can’t do that. I’m not going to be able to change the way I think. I’m not going to be able to change my memory. I’m not going to make the brain injury go away. It’s not going to happen. So I have to find ways to live with the injuries I have.” So that was his decision, to be sitting gratefully behind a damn desk, and every night he not only sets his alarm, he lays out his clothing in a certain way in order not to forget anything when he wakes up in a daze the next morning. He hangs his pants and shirt on the bathroom door. He puts his socks and T-shirt on the nightstand. He puts his shoes at the foot of the nightstand and his rolled-up belt in one of his shoes. He puts his cell phone, wallet, and car keys by the microwave. It’s a system for getting by that in his previous life he might have found humiliating but not in this life because here he is, at work, on time, in a shirt and tie and pants free of fish blood, happy to have a job that depends on repetition, which is what he can handle, and happy to have become a man who never gets angry anymore, not even on his birthday when his coworkers decorate his cubicle with a banner while he’s at lunch, and Adam wants to put a frozen can of shaving cream in a desk drawer where it will explode, and the coworkers say that’s not such a good idea, and Adam instead takes several months’ worth of hole punches he’s been saving, thousands and thousands of little dots, and dumps them like confetti onto Calvin’s desk, his chair, his keyboard, everywhere. “In my drawers,
too?” Calvin asks incredulously when he returns, which will be the closest he comes to losing his temper as he starts to clean up.

Why, Adam wonders, can’t he be more like Calvin? Why can’t he get better? “You gotta face reality,” Calvin has told him, and is that all it takes? Making a decision? He sits at his desk. The hours go by. The days go by. The overhead fluorescent lights hum. The copy machine grinds. The water cooler bubbles. The phone lines blink with waiting callers. “Three calls in the queue,” the boss announces over the intercom to a roomful of well-dressed workers wearing rubber fingertips. “Oh my God,” Adam sighs. He switches his computer screen from his work e-mail to a news site. “Army Releases Report on Suicide Prevention” is one of the headlines. “Can the Army’s New Suicide Prevention Plan Really Work?” is another.