Thank You for Your Service (20 page)

“I know.”

“Okay?”

“It’s nice to think about, though,” Adam says.

“Are you running?” Patti asks.

“Running?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“No, I’m not running,” Adam says.

“Yes, you’re running,” Patti says. “You’re running.”

“I’m not running,” Adam says.

“Are you trying to get back what you left?” she asks.

“Trying to get back what I left?”

“Because you left mid-deployment?”

“No. Oh no. No. Because there’s no way this would make up for that,” Adam says.

“You sure?”

“Maybe if I had gone back to Iraq or something like that. But this? I’ll never get that back. Short of a time machine showing up here and actually taking me back to ten minutes before I made my decision, there’s nothing that’s going to change that.”

“Okay.”

“Unless there
was
a time machine—” Adam says.

Patti sighs one of her big sighs as his phone rings. It’s a special ringtone he downloaded just for Saskia’s calls.

Love—it’s a motherfucker
, it says.

Love—it’s a motherfucker
, it says again.

Love—

“Hello?”

She watches him sag. She knows things about soldiers and families. That some of them get better and some of them don’t.

“Sorry,” he says when he hangs up.

“So,” she says.

“I’ll have to think about it,” he says.

“Love you much,” she says, standing up and offering him a hug.

“Thank you,” he says.

He’s not getting better. She knows this. He needs help. A program, she thinks. Topeka. And if Topeka is full, Pueblo. And if Pueblo is full, she’ll find somewhere else.

Maybe the pheasant hunt didn’t work out. But she’s not ready to wish Adam luck yet.

A few doors down from Patti Walker’s office is the office of Tim Jung, who is in charge of new arrivals at the WTB. The wide-eyed, the nervous-eyed, the closed-eyed, the dead-eyed, they all start out with Tim Jung, a friendly, gum-chewing, boyish-looking sergeant first class who one day, without telling anyone, goes for a drive by himself into the Kansas countryside.

Fifteen miles from the WTB, he pulls into a dirt parking area next to the Big Blue River. It’s late afternoon and not many people are around, but just to be sure he won’t be interrupted, he decides to go to the far side of the river. He climbs an embankment and starts across a long train trestle. If a train comes, there won’t be much he can do, but at this point it hardly matters. He has plenty of sleeping pills with him and blank paper on which to write letters to his children. His plan is simple: write the letters, swallow the pills, wade into the river, and let the water take it from there. It’s hard to say what has brought him to this point. Probably, like so many cases he’s seen at the WTB, it’s not one thing in particular but an accumulation of everything.

On the far side now—no train, he’ll have to do it himself—he walks south along the river’s edge until he finds a place to sit. The air has that damp, moldy smell of mud and ripe leaves, but he doesn’t mind it. He takes out the paper and a pen and wonders in his life’s last moments what to write of all that has happened. A life of soldiering. A long marriage that failed. A period of cancer treatments. Any one of them could be its own letter, but what he chooses instead for his final words are the thoughts of a father who is proud of his children and knows absolutely
that they will go on to accomplish great things. He writes for a while in the stink of the river until he is sure he has written something okay for his children to read and reread in a lifetime of trying to drown out the noise of what he’s about to do, and then he gets the pills ready and takes a look around the spot he has chosen. This is his furnace room, his parking lot next to the Dumpster, his garage behind the house of his mother, his table to stand on and then kick away. He is looking west, into a setting sun, that seems to be lighting the river on fire.

Train trestle across the Big Blue River

It is beautiful, he allows himself to think, and as he keeps looking he takes notice of the river’s current, which strikes him as beautiful, too. He watches some water bugs skimming along the surface and some birds riding the late-afternoon drafts. There are crickets, also, pining away in the grasses and weeds, and whereas a few minutes ago he was hearing and seeing none of this, now he sits, with pills in hand and letters next to him, transfixed. The crickets keep singing. The water keeps moving. The sun keeps dropping. It’s beautiful, he keeps thinking, and in that little bit of hesitation something inside of him turns, or recedes, or cracks open, or does whatever happens when someone no longer wants to die, because when he at last stands up it is to go gratefully away from the river, back across the trestle, back home to hide the letters in a desk drawer, and back to the WTB, where the new arrivals keep coming, and coming, and coming, all of them headed to the river, including one day Tausolo Aieti.

He is sitting on a couch outside of Tim Jung’s office, holding a folded quilt, because a few minutes ago, a woman passing by noticed him and asked, “Do you want a quilt?”

“Why not?” Tausolo answered, shrugging, which seemed in keeping with what had happened so far in his first day at the WTB. He had shown up early for orientation and been given a list of thirty-nine WTB offices he would have to visit and get signatures from to prove that he had been there. He’d gone first to human resources, where the door was shut and locked and no one answered his knock even though the sign on the door said
OPEN
. He’d gone to the mailroom, where the guy working there
had screamed over the music he was playing, “Are you a fast-tracker?” “A what?” Tausolo said. “A fast-tracker,” the guy yelled, and added a little ominously, “You’d know if you was.” He’d gone to the chaplain, who wasn’t there. He’d gone to the security office to get an ID badge, where the person he handed his orders to said with irritation, “These are your
thirty
-day orders. We need your
ninety
-day orders. You have to go see your S-1.” He had gone to see his S-1, who wasn’t there. He’d gone to the army career office, where the woman said, “Mondays are
crazy
,” handed him a brochure, and asked, “Do you have any aspirations, dreams, desires, or hopes to do college?” “Uh, yeah,” he replied. He’d gone to see his military family life consultant, who explained that MFLC may sound like AFLAC but it’s really more like behavioral health, except “we keep no records, none whatsoever.” “Okay,” he said. “Very nice to have met you,” she said. “You too,” he said. He had paused to look out a window at another soldier in front of the WTB who was on a cell phone and spinning around in agitated circles. He had gone back to the chaplain, whose assistant handed him a brochure. He had gone to see Tim Jung, who would be his new commander, and was directed to wait on the couch, where he was in the midst of counting up the signatures he had collected so far when the woman passed by and asked about the quilt.

“Here you go,” she said, returning from somewhere with a lovely quilt that was hand-sewn by a volunteer who wanted to do something for wounded soldiers.

“Okay, thanks,” he said, taking it, and now he sits looking at it. “What the hell is this?” he says quietly. He feels like he’s been given a baby blanket.

A sergeant passes by, sees him, sees the quilt, and looks at his name tag. “What the hell’s going on with you, Aieti?” he asks.

“Good,” Tausolo answers.

“Good?” the sergeant says, confused by this answer. “Good?”

Tausolo sighs. He’s up to six signatures. He has been given a quilt, a piece of candy, a pen, two brochures, and a certificate for a turkey.

“You!” he hears now.

He looks up. It is Tim Jung, motioning Tausolo into his office. Tausolo knows nothing about him, other than he will be his commander
and is looking in puzzlement at a form on his computer screen. “Well, I don’t understand,” he says as Tausolo sits across from him. “I get this in last week and you are only a moderate. But …” He keeps reading. It is an assessment of how much of a risk Tausolo is to himself. “They want to put you on the high-risk tracker. Are you aware of that?”

“No,” Tausolo says.

“You’re not?”

“No.”

Now it is Tim Jung who sighs. He is as aware as anyone of how difficult the army can make things. But he is also aware of the hidden ways of human beings, and so he works down a list of questions in order to assess how Tausolo has been doing.

Nightmares?

“Yeah,” Tausolo says.

Recurring?

“Yeah.”

Racing thoughts?

“No.”

Reliving past events?

“Yeah.”

Problems in sleeping?

“Yeah.”

“Okay. High risk is not a bad thing,” Jung says. “It means we’re going to pay particular attention.”

He hands Tausolo a form and tells him that he has to sign it and read it aloud. “It is important you remember this is not a punishment,” he says.

“Contract for Safety,” Tausolo reads aloud. “I, Aieti, Tausolo, know that I am in a difficult state and may look for a way out by harming myself or others. I will not intentionally harm myself or others and if I have thoughts about harming myself or others I will contact my Chain of Command immediately. I agree to take these precautions and stay safe because I know that my life and the lives of those around me are worth holding on to.”

He signs it and looks down at his folded hands as Jung explains to
him that high risk means he can’t drink, can’t be around guns or knives, will have to check in with his squad leader every morning and night, and can be given only a week’s worth of medications at a time.

“I need to know what meds you’re on.”

“Zoloft. Trazodone. Lunesta. Abilify. Concerta. And ibuprofen,” Tausolo says, listing his medications to treat depression, anxiety, insomnia, attention deficit, and knee pain. “I think that’s it.”

“PTSD?” Jung asks.

“Yeah.”

“Depression?”

“Yeah.”

“Adjustment disorder?”

“Yeah.”

There is a look that Tausolo gets sometimes. He had it in Iraq when he found out that Harrelson was dead. He had it just this morning when he woke up after dreaming yet again, despite everything, of Harrelson on fire asking him why he didn’t save him. And he has it now.

Jung sees it. He puts the paperwork aside. He waits until Tausolo meets his eyes and says with a level of intensity that catches Tausolo by surprise, “The good thing is you’ve recognized it and want to get some help for it. And we can do that.”

A few minutes later, Tausolo is standing outside, holding his quilt and checklist with thirty-three more signatures to go.

High risk.

“Wow,” he says, hanging his head.

There are times that he wonders what that day was really about, other than a mission to go from here to there after a mission that had taken him from there to here. Later, others in the convoy would disagree over how high his 12,000-pound Humvee was blown into the air. Ten feet. No, idiot, ten
yards
. No, jackass, thirty feet. No, dumbshit, thirty feet
is
ten yards. Whatever, the rise was violent, the landing hard. He got the door open. He got out with that broken leg and then on that broken leg turned back. He pulled out one guy and helped pull out another as the Humvee
burst into flames and rounds began cooking off, and later, some of the guys who were there that day said he deserved the Medal of Honor for what he had done, certainly a Silver Star, or at least a Bronze Star with Valor. He was told once that paperwork had been filled out for something or other and subsequently lost, but he has no idea about that. He did get a Purple Heart out of it, and he’ll forever have a bum knee, and PTSD, and TBI, but it is the guilt from that day that he carries most of all, so much so that when he was at Topeka after destroying his apartment, he wrote a shaky letter to a fellow soldier named Drew Edwards, who was the gunner in the Humvee.

“How you dealing with life bro?” he had written. “I’m going through treatment for PTSD at the VA hospital in Topeka. Been struggling with anger at times but getting this treatment has helped me out a lot. I just wanted to ask you if you remember anything from that IED incident in Iraq? I remember helping you out from that truck. What I’m trying to get at is if you remember it like I do, do you hate me for helping you out? You don’t have to answer back if this gives you flashbacks. Much luv to you brother and be safe.”

Edwards, who was up in the gun turret, did remember it, of course. He remembered having his foot on the radio mount between the seats, his heel shattering and his ankle breaking in half. He remembered all of it, right down to the light flash that has been part of his life since, along with the shrapnel still in his face, another piece still in his eye, bad dreams, anger problems, memory problems, pain meds, sleep meds, and after almost two years of trying so hard in rehab, the decision by doctors to give up and amputate his leg. None of which he mentioned in his reply to Tausolo, just as he didn’t mention being back in school and married and starting a family and being grateful to be alive except for the times he isn’t grateful and has to be away from everyone and everything in complete isolation. “Not at all man, I have nothing but respect for you guys” is what he wrote back. “To be honest I didn’t go into shock at all and remember it vividly. I have some anger issues too. If it was an option I would re-enlist and get back after it. I am living up in KC but will be back down at Riley soon to see you guys. Miss you man. Later.”