Thank You for Your Service (15 page)

“This is so sad,” she wrote. “Makes you realize our husbands really need to suck it up. They have it pretty good.”

She stayed in the truck until she heard Adam’s excited voice drift through the open window. “Ohh, I think you got one,” he was saying to Michael, and at that, she got out of the truck and balanced her way across the rocks. Michael tried to reel in the fish on his own by propping the pole between his legs and clamping it with his thighs, but Adam saw it wasn’t working and reached over to steady the pole. It was a nice-sized bass. Adam took it off the hook, handed it to Michael, took a photo, baited
the line, recast, and handed the pole back to Michael, who immediately got another fish.

“I can hold it up,” Saskia said when she saw the pole bend, hurrying over, and this time she was the one who helped.

And so went an afternoon. At some point, Saskia took a seat on the rocks, ignoring the old beer cans and fish skeletons in the crevices. That night, they cooked some of the fish for dinner, and now, as Adam picks up Michael’s suitcase and helps him out of the hotel, Saskia is waiting in the car.

Michael sits up front. Saskia sits behind Adam and can’t see him as he discreetly tucks some chewing tobacco in his mouth, but she can hear it when he quietly spits into a water bottle he’s holding, and that’s all it takes.

“Do you have chew in your mouth?” she asks.

“No,” he says.

“Then why are you spitting in a bottle?”

“I have a bad taste in my mouth.”

“That’s disgusting,” she says. “Your teeth will fall out and you’ll get lung cancer.”

“That’s what I’m going for,” he says, trying to not lose his temper.

The first night Michael arrived, when it was just Michael and Adam at dinner, one of the things Adam had asked was what it was like to be divorced.

“I kick myself every day. She’s the best woman I’ve ever been with. I’d run back to her in a second if I could,” Michael had answered, and suspecting the reason for the question, said, “Don’t give up on your wife.”

So Adam takes the chew out of his mouth and says to Saskia, “I love you.”

“I love you,” he says again.

“Nothing?” he asks.

“Not today,” she says.

“Tomorrow?” he asks.

“We’ll see,” she says.

They are on the highway now, a carful of wounds with a long way to go till the airport. “You all be good to each other,” Michael will say when
they get to the airport. “We will,” Saskia will say. “Be easy on him,” Michael will say to her. “Yeah, I’m broke,” Adam will say, laughing.

For now, though, everyone in the car is silent, uncomfortably so, until Adam sees a truck pulling a boat on a trailer.

“That’s like my old boat,” he says, more to himself than anyone in the car, but Michael, who hears him, and who knows better than anyone what a man sounds like when he is so lonely that he could bite his own wrist, tries to swivel to see it without losing his balance.

“Where?” he asks.

Eleven days later. Another fight. This one begins on the drive home from the VA hospital, when Adam mentions the PTSD program, the one that Tausolo Aieti had gone through. Maybe it would help, he says. Maybe it would, Saskia agrees, but it would mean seven weeks of no work and no pay. That’s two missed house payments. Car payments, too. Electricity. Gas. Phone. Groceries. She reminds him that they have no savings. She imagines the graduation speech: “Congratulations for conquering PTSD. And now you’re fucked.” And it escalates from there until they are home and she is telling Adam to move out and his mind is whirling and his thoughts are out of control and he is throwing some things in a duffel bag and she is digging through the duffel bag to see what he has packed.

Some clothing.

His helmet.

His dog tags.

Doster’s dog tags.

Their handgun.

“What the hell do you need that for?” she says, holding up the gun.

“If I need money, I can sell it,” he says.

She stands with the gun, shaking her head no. It is the middle of the afternoon. Jaxson is a few feet away, in his room, napping. Zoe is at a friend’s. Adam disappears into the master bedroom, and when he comes out he is holding a loaded shotgun against his forehead.

“Pull the fucking trigger,” he says, walking toward her, thrusting the butt of the gun at her, now pushing it into her stomach, trying to goad
her.
“Pull the fucking trigger,”
he yells, and what surprises her is how much she wants to do it. She wants to pull the fucking trigger and end his life and end her misery and clean the walls afterward and be done with it, all of it. The years have caught up at last.
“Pull the fucking trigger,”
he says, and she wants to pull it, reload if she has to and pull it again, but instead she spins and walks away from him. “Be a man” is all she can think of to say, and then she goes onto the front porch, slams the door behind her, and stands with her back to him so he can’t see her shaking and trying to catch her breath.

She remains outside.

He remains inside.

They were fighting more and more now, every day it seemed, at home, in the car, in front of the kids, even in text messages when Adam was at work. “Look at our life! Not only have we had to start completely over but our marriage is failing in the process. We have nothing and cant even count on each other 4 support,” she had texted him a few weeks before. “If you honestly see this workin I stay, if not I go.”

“Well what would u like to do, i’ll try anything at this point, so tell me what u want and i’ll do it,” he had written back.

“I just wish u would show me some emotion and that you really do love me and think bout how I feel,” she had written.

“Well, u know I love u, if not then maybe we do need to split …”

That fight was bad, but as Saskia stands on the porch shaking, she knows that this one feels different. Scarier. Worse. She gathers herself and goes back inside.

Adam is nowhere in sight. The duffel bag is still there. So is the handgun. The shotgun is gone. She looks in the bedroom. He’s not there. He’s not in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the bathroom, or Jax’s room. He’s not in the backyard. She opens the door leading to the basement and starts down the stairs.

She hates it down there. Twelve creaking steps, and at the bottom is a hallway that leads to the laundry room, a bathroom, and finally Zoe’s room, a little room with a low doorway and a couple of small basement
windows that allow in smudges of daylight. For her next birthday, Zoe wants to paint one half of the room pink and the other half black and arrange everything in the room accordingly. Her pink toys will go on the pink side and her black toys will go on the black side. The bed she has been wetting now for three weeks in a row will go on the pink side and the spiders she finds sometimes will go on the black side. The space heater that keeps the room warm in the winter will go on the pink side and the TV that accompanies her to sleep will go on the black side. Still to be figured out is what she will do with the flimsy wall made of louvered doors that Adam put up to separate her room from the rest of the furnace room it had originally been part of. That room, the furnace room, is the worst room in the house, and Saskia goes there now.

It’s a room of dimness and shadows. The bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling is unlit, and what little light is leaking into the room feels gray and dirty. Adam is in the middle of the room, seated on a folding chair. He is faced away from her and holding the shotgun against the underside of his chin. His thumb is on the trigger. The safety is off. To his right is the furnace. To his left are shelves filled with old appliances and the letters he and Saskia wrote to each other when he was in Iraq. In front of him is a taxidermy stand with a faded fish skin on it, onto which he recently had glued a realistic-looking rubber eye.

So this is where he will die, then. Not in a Humvee like James Doster. Not in the war, but here in the furnace room, next to the room his daughter wants him to paint, under the room where his son is asleep, and a few inches from his terrified wife.

She asks him to put the gun down.

He doesn’t.

She approaches him, leans over and gets a hand on the gun, but before she can pull it away he takes his free hand and pinches her arm until she lets go.

He moves the barrel of the gun from his chin to his forehead.

His thumb is still on the trigger.

He moves the barrel back underneath his chin and starts crying so hard that the barrel becomes wet.

Later, Saskia will say that she has no idea how long this went on.
Fifteen minutes? A half hour? She will remember the minutes as motionless as she pleaded with Adam to give her the gun. She will remember that as much as she had wanted to pull the trigger a few minutes before, now she wanted no such thing.

She will remember saying, “Zoe’s going to be home soon.”

He says something now, something about wishing he had died in Iraq. More things come out. About guilt. About being a bad husband, a bad father, a disappointment; about being twenty-nine and feeling ninety; about being a disgrace. His mind is roaring, and meanwhile his thumb is still on the trigger, the safety is off, the gun remains loaded, and Saskia stands next to him begging and waiting for the sound of the gun and for him to explode.

And what saves him is another sound, that of Jaxson. His crying comes through the floorboards, sudden and insistent, like it was when he rolled off Adam and fell to the floor. That time Adam had awakened when Saskia crawled across him; this time he does it on his own. Like coming up from underwater, he will say later. It’s a faraway sound he hears, familiar enough to jolt him out of wherever he is, and then it is louder, and then he is breaking through the surface and hearing everything: Jaxson crying, Saskia saying she needs him and the kids need him, him crying.

She gets her hands back on the gun, pulls it away, leans it against a wall.

He stands. Saskia wraps her arms around him, and he doesn’t resist.

Jaxson is in full wail now, and his needs take over the house. They walk out of the furnace room, toward the stairs. “You go first,” Saskia says.

By coincidence, at the very same time they have been in the furnace room, Peter Chiarelli has been in another meeting, this one framed by the unfortunate news of four fresh suicides at Fort Hood, Texas.

On the video screen is the general in command of Fort Hood, who is telling Chiarelli that every one of his 46,500 soldiers is being reviewed to see who might be high risk. “We stand prepared to lead them through this difficult period,” the general says with a general’s determination.
But he also says what is rarely heard at these meetings, that “ninety-nine percent of the soldiers, as you know, tens of thousands of soldiers, every day, at Fort Hood, Texas, and throughout the army … are doing fine. They’re working through the issues, they’re dealing with the stressors, they’re using the programs, and they’re moving on throughout their careers learning, growing, maturing, developing more resilience, and succeeding.”

That’s the question, then, always the question, the why of it, why most are okay and others are not, and of all the answers offered this day, the simplest one, given by another general explaining another suicide, seems the truest. “His pressing guilt. That’s the only way I can put it,” the general says, and meanwhile Adam is feeling better with every step up the stairs.

He unpacks. The dog tags and helmet go back on display in the dining room, and the guns go back in the bedroom. For the rest of the day, he and Saskia are too raw to fight, or even to talk very much, but after a week of no arguments, and then, amazingly, two weeks, Saskia tells Christina that their marriage is the best it’s been since Adam got home. “The tension’s gone,” she says. “I have no idea why. I wish I knew.”

Even in the basement things are better, at least in Zoe’s room, where she now has company at night, a new puppy named Eddie that Adam and Saskia brought home for her when they decided she wasn’t getting enough attention. That makes for three dogs and four people jammed into the little house, but somehow it’s working better than it ever has, right up until the moment when the biggest dog in the house sits on the puppy and breaks its leg.

In the parlance of a Pentagon suicide meeting, this would be a stressor. Or an issue.

In Kansas, though, it is a veterinarian saying it will cost $1,100 to fix the leg, and Adam and Saskia realizing that if they had $1,100 they would have used it toward the mortgage and car payments so Adam could go to the Topeka VA’s PTSD program.

But Zoe loves the puppy.

But they don’t have $1,100, and they’ve only had the dog a week.

But since his arrival, Zoe hasn’t wet her bed even once.

But they don’t have $1,100.

But just before the dog arrived, they were at a birthday party for one of Stephen and Christina’s children and Zoe ran around a playground singing at the top of her lungs, “My daddy almost killed himself.”

But they don’t have $1,100, and they don’t have a boat to sell, and Adam has already sold two of his three hunting bows, and Saskia has already sold the Coach purse she bought when she first got to Fort Riley and saw that all of the wives seemed to have them, and it’s not like anyone would want the aluminum skiff.

But years after, Adam still thinks sometimes about what an Iraqi policeman did to a dog’s Achilles tendon, and so he tells Saskia what he thinks they ought to do about Eddie.

“Just do the pistol,” Saskia says.

“No. I’ve used the shotgun three times in three years,” Adam says.

Almost four times, Saskia keeps from saying.

It’s decided then. They call Dave, across the street, who says he can help.

“How r things goin?” Saskia texts Adam later in the day.

“Good,” he writes back. “Vet called and said eddie looks good. U sell the guns?”

“Don’t know,” Saskia writes back. “Havent talked to dave since he took them.”

A little later, she writes to him again.

“Got the money. When u gonna b home?”

“Bout 10 min.”

She waits for him in a house that two weeks before had a handgun hidden in a duffel bag and a shotgun with a trigger that she wanted to pull. “They’re both gone,” she says, astonished at how this has turned out. “Thank God.”