Thank You for Your Service (19 page)

Finally, there was the statement of the victim in the case, who was his thirteen-year-old daughter. “I know that my dad was not himself, like someone had taken over him because he would never done something like this,” she told investigators, according to the court file. “He was always the one who protected us from things like this. When he had gotten back from Iraq wounded he has not been the same person.”

The charges all had to do with sex with a minor. Counts One and Two: “lewd fondling or touching of.” Count Three: “sexual intercourse.” The testimony, if the case had gone to trial, would have included what the daughter also told investigators, that while her father was in her bed, he kept calling her by the name of his wife. And the evidence included “a brown blanket and a Spiderman blanket” that were returned to the family after a plea deal was accepted on one charge of aggravated indecent solicitation of a child.

The terms of the deal were counseling, five years probation, and no contact with the family until the daughter’s therapist said it would be okay. That permission had come fairly quickly after the plea deal, and now the entire family was back together and the most heartbroken woman in Junction City has come to Patti’s office to tell her how things have been going.

“Come in! Give me a hug!” Patti says, and listens as the woman says
of her husband, “He’s doing good. He knows where he is, who he is, all the time.”

“What made the difference?” Patti asks.

“Meds,” the woman says, and then starts telling Patti about what a long road it has been, about the choking, about his running red lights, about his stopping in the middle of intersections and not knowing where he was. “He still keeps to himself,” she says. “He doesn’t go in any stores or anything like that. He keeps himself away from crowds. He doesn’t do crowds.”

“What was his home unit?” Patti asks, jotting notes.

“Two-sixteen.”

“What company?”

“Oh, that’s a long-time-ago question,” the woman says, almost dreamily. She thinks about it for a moment but can’t remember and mentions instead that even though he was shot, he never got any medals or awards.

“I am so so sorry,” Patti says.

“Yeah,” she says.

“So so sorry.”

“Poor guy,” she says.

“Regardless of what he did when he came home, he earned what he earned,” Patti says.

The woman leans toward Patti. She takes a breath and sighs. “It never happened,” she says.

Patti looks at her in confusion, wondering if she just heard what she heard.

“We told them about him trying to kill me in my sleep,” she says. “They did nothing. We told them about him getting rough with the kids. They did nothing—”

“So he did not molest your daughter?” Patti interrupts.

“No.”

“I thought he did.”

“No.”

“So you said this—to get help?”

The woman begins crying. Not loudly. Worse. Without sound. “I got the idea from
Law & Order
,” she says after a bit, and now Patti can barely
hear her as she says that her husband was having constant migraines, his worst ever, and his doctor wouldn’t give him an immediate appointment, and she remembered a TV show where some people couldn’t get anyone to pay attention to them until they concocted a story about child molestation, so she called the doctor back and said her husband may have touched their daughter. She did it out of desperation, she says, and it all of a sudden got out of control.

The doctor told her to take her daughter to the hospital right away, the hospital took swabs, the police took statements, the blankets were confiscated, her husband was arrested.

And it didn’t matter that the blankets were clean, the swabs showed nothing unusual, and the daughter later said none of it was true, she says, because her husband was being told that he might never see his family again unless he took a deal.

So, she says, he took the deal.

Patti is dumbstruck. Could this be right, she is thinking—does this make any sense?—and then she realizes it makes no difference. He pled guilty. It’s fact. Just as it’s fact that he went to war and came home different, and he has a daughter, now sixteen, who whether she was or wasn’t molested is suffering lately from crushing headaches, and he has a wife who when she’s at work receives texts from him thirty or forty times a day.

“Do the kids have school today?” he texts. He has already texted this. She has already told him no.

“No,” she replies.

He texts about the children, about the weather, about dinner. Now that his medication is helping, she is allowing him to use the oven again, but she has to guide him through every step. Look in the refrigerator, she texts. Take out the box that says Stouffer’s. Turn on the oven to four hundred. Remove the covering on top. Put it in the oven.

Fifty-five minutes later: Take it out, and turn off the oven.

A few minutes later: Did you turn off the oven?

Those are her days.

As for her nights, because he needs to hold her to get to sleep and she
worries that he will choke her, she has learned to sleep with his arms around her waist and her own arms wrapped around her head.

She demonstrates this.

“Are you getting counseling?” Patti asks.

“I did.”

“Now?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because they’ll keep digging,” the woman says, “and the more they dig I’ll break down, and I don’t have time to break down.”

They’ve been talking for more than an hour now.

“Well,” Patti says, at a loss.

The woman thanks her for listening.

They’re done.

Now it is Patti’s husband, Kevin, who comes to see her after he called her and sounded so upset that she told him, “You need to take a breath. You’re a mess.” She hung up, gave him time to take that breath, called him back. “You still sound pissy,” she said. “You sound so incredibly discouraged that you’re breaking my heart.”

He comes into her office and stands by the window, all fidgety, even though there are two empty chairs. He is tall and solid and handsome, if a little lopsided. Somewhere in his sealed-up eye socket is his eye, a useless raisin of a thing, but enough time has gone by since the explosion for him to have adjusted to that. “Everyone can get better. It’s all up to them,” he likes to tell people, and as proof he offers his own example: wounded, just about dead, a coma, surgeries, recovering, better. The tremors that move through him from time to time: he deals with them. The pill he needs to take to get to sleep: he takes it. The two miles he used to run for his PT test: he walks them. The guilt he feels about the two soldiers of his who died: he feels it, but not to the point of shame. The images he continues to see of the one who was twenty-two years old and came from a town called Pleasanton and got hit and took two steps
forward before falling: he can will those two ghost steps away. The anger he feels coming on sometimes: he takes deep breaths, as many as necessary, until it is gone.

He is the resilient soldier the army likes to talk about. Just not right now.

“I am fucking pissed,” he tells Patti. “For him to chew your ass? For something you were asked to do for me?”

The “him” is an army major who wrote something about Kevin for his pending retirement, which in itself is one more accommodation he is making to the war.

He doesn’t want to retire. He has been in the army for twenty-three years, the only thing he’s ever done. But it has become clear to him that the army doesn’t have a lot of use for him anymore, so he will get out with one final hope, that he will receive some award at his retirement ceremony, some acknowledgment of what he has sacrificed, anything official, so that he won’t just be the lopsided guy standing up there with the weird eye. To that end, paperwork was submitted, and that’s where the army major came in.

In support of the award, the major wrote a narrative testifying to the greatness of Kevin Walker. Not that he knew Kevin. He was a recent arrival to the unit Kevin was now in. But he was assigned to write it anyway, and when Kevin and Patti saw what he had come up with, they asked one of Kevin’s previous commanders to write something instead. That commander did know Kevin. He was in charge of the tank unit that Kevin was part of when he got injured, and he had thought so highly of him that he would describe Kevin in the most flattering way possible among tankers, as nothing less than “a tanking motherfucker.” The narrative he wrote about Kevin for the award was so moving that it brought Patti to tears. But, as she would soon find out, it also violated army regulation 600-8-22, section 3-19, paragraph r, which she had never heard of until it was rejected and returned. “Narrative should be prepared on 8½-by-11-inch bond paper and is limited to one double-spaced typewritten page,” it states, and the new narrative went on for a page and a half. Patti’s solution was to take some of what he had written and mix it in with some of what the major had written. One page, typed,
double-spaced, bond paper. Perfect. But when the major learned of what had been going on without his approval, he came into her office roaring.

And now Kevin is in her office, trying not to. He is clenching his jaw, grinding his teeth, furious. He takes some breaths. In. Out. In. Out. And meanwhile, Patti is getting more and more upset. “I am so
stressed
,” she is saying.

In. Out. In. Out.

“This is so
stupid
,” Patti says.

Finally, calmer, Kevin tells Patti what they have to do. They cannot afford to have an officer mad at her. They need the income from her job. He is retiring with no job waiting for him, and there’s no way to know whether his TBI will worsen over time, leaving him increasingly incapacitated. So they have to write a letter to the major saying that Kevin is to blame, and it has to be a letter of apology.

He’s right. Patti knows it. The thought nauseates her. But as Kevin paces, she sits at her computer and begins typing, knowing what she wants to say:

That her husband was in Iraq, on a mission in a Humvee to find some missing Marines, looking out his window.

That when the bomb exploded, a piece of shrapnel, maybe an inch by an inch, according to the doctors, came straight at his face, sliced into him just on the side of his nose, angled back behind his left eye, and went into his brain.

That in those first seconds, he would remember screaming “Shut the fuck up” to the gunner, who was howling because his eardrums had exploded.

That just before passing out, he heard the code word his medics would use for saying an injury was serious and a guy needed to be undressed and realizing the guy was him.

That when he woke up for the first time several weeks later, a doctor asked him if he knew where he was. “A factory,” he said.

That the first time he saw himself in a mirror, he tried to shut the one eye he had left and go back to sleep.

That once he was a tanking motherfucker and now he is a hurting motherfucker, and that he is loved and adored by a son who has learned
to look him in the eye socket, a daughter who dyed a patch of hair for him, and a wife who would rather be doing anything other than writing this fucking letter.

Instead:

“Please allow me to apologize,” she writes, and when she gets to the end and doesn’t know how to wrap up, Kevin tells her.

“Again, I was only doing …” he says.

“Again, I was only doing,” she types.

“What I was asked,” he says.

“What I was asked,” she types, “by my husband.”

She reads it back. Here come the waterworks. Her phone has been ringing, and she needs to get back to her forty-nine.

“Thank you for your service,” she says, hitting the send key on her computer. “Not.”

Now it is Adam who comes to see her.

“I had a few calls today that may change the course of everything,” he says, after taking a seat.

“What do you mean?” Patti asks.

“Two job offers,” Adam says.

“For you?”

“Mm-hmm,” he says.

“Where?” she says. She’s surprised. When she called him and asked him to stop by, she expected they’d talk about the usual subjects. His job. His marriage. His children. Maybe the pheasant hunt, although she’d already told him about the earful she had gotten when he left without telling anyone. She hadn’t expected this.

“One’s actually back in Iraq. It’s a contractor,” he says, and when he sees the look on her face, he quickly adds, “I’m not gonna do that one. Don’t worry about it. There’s no way in hell I would do that.” He takes a breath and tells her about the second one. “And then there was a guy in two-sixteen, he was our company medic, now with a company out of San Antonio, they do private security, and they just get on the ships in the
shipping lanes in the Horn of Africa just to provide protection as they go to and from, and it’s like three hundred bucks a day.”

“Wow,” she says.

“You’re gone for thirty days, and then you’re home for as long as you want and you go again.”

“What do you think about that?” she asks.

“It sounds pretty good. Because me and my wife, we got along so much better when I was in the army,” Adam says.

“What does
she
think?” Patti asks.

“Oh I don’t know. She doesn’t really want me—it’s not that she doesn’t want me to do it, she doesn’t think it’s legit. Like I would do it and end up just getting fucked somehow. But the company’s very reputable. Their website, I checked it out.”

“I would hate to see you get screwed, too,” Patti says. “But if that’s something you want to do—”

“I miss it,” Adam says. “Holding a gun, and being with a group of guys. It probably sounds really homosexual, but—”

“You know what? Not really.”

“I miss that—”

“Camaraderie.”

“Yes. Being a team, and working together.”

“My husband has told me that more than once,” Patti says.

“Yup. If I just had a group of buddies living around me, even if we could just sit out back and smoke dope or fucking cigarettes, or drink some fucking beers—”

“You’d be content,” she says.

“Do that for a couple of years, and everything will be paid off, and—”

“Slow down.”