Thank You for Your Service (23 page)

March 12: “Jessie says there was a ynegative atomic blast last night—he felt it. Said everything is going to go sour really soon. Said he cut the hard lines of the wire taps.”

March 18: “It’s 3:40am. Jessie hasn’t gone to bed at all yet. I woke up
hearing him searching through my dressor drawer and jewelry box. When he saw me awake, he asked for my keys. He took the Jeep key and key fob. He rearranged my keys. I had one on a single ring—he asked what it went to. I answered ‘the front door.’ ‘the front door to what?’ ‘our house.’ He asked if I had, or had seen the key to his locker. He went downstairs and started a vehicle. The garage door went up/down 3 times, after about 5 minutes he drove off. It is now 3:49am.”

March 22: “For the past two months, Jessie has insisted that I have a bag packed for me and Summer incase we need to blitz. tonight Jessie decided we needed to blitz. He packed the car with my bag, and blankets, baby toys, two coolers, my medications in a false book of War & Peace, a stroller, frozen dinners and sandwiches. His Jeep was packed—crammed full of duffle bags, suitcases, boxes, totes as well as his rollerblades, our home computer, a reciprocating saw. He also took the dog. Jessie insisted that I trust him and just get in the car and follow him. He gave me a walkie-talkie and had us use that for communication. He insisted that the radio/cd player be completely turned off, and cellphones turned off also. He had us stop several times to change the Walkietalkie station that we were talking on. In Topeka, he had us drive around, in circles, random paths, through parking lots to make sure no one was following us. We drove to my parents house and got there late, i think around midnight. They were already asleep, so we came in and I got myself and Summer ready for bed. Jessie said he was going out for smokes to the corner gas station. Around 2:30am there was a knock at the door—the Raytown police asked to talk with me. They said Jessie called them, and they were stopping by to see if I was okay and what was going on. The police asked me if he had a history of mental illness, I replied ‘only suspected.’ They asked why I was in Kansas city, I told them because my husband insisted that we pack up and go. After there questions, the police left and went back to talk with Jessie. (another officer was still with him.) They brought him back to my parents house for the evening.”

March 24: “I found out that Jessie had been voluntariely committed at the VA hospital in Topeka. My brother Randy went with me and Summer to see Jessie. He told me that everything was okay … he was at the hospital for witness protection/safekeeping.”

April 6: “Jessie checked out of the VA and came home. Jessie didn’t sleep.”

April 9: “Jessie took the car to work. Uneventful until evening.”

April 10: “Jessie aressted for domestic battery.”

That was her last entry. She left with Summer soon after. His suicide at that point was three months and nine days away.

More questions that she asks herself: Why did she stay so long and believe he would get better? Why couldn’t he get better? What happened over there?

He told her a few stories when he got home. Volunteering for first truck in convoys. The roadside bomb that hit the truck behind him and the injured sergeant whose skull he held together. The decision that had to be made about who would disarm a bomb—the guy who was leaving for good the next day or his replacement who had just arrived. It was his choice, he told her, but before he could make it, one of the guys volunteered, and when the guy got blown to bits, it was like seeing “a pink mist.” Did that really happen? Did any of it happen? It must have, because how else to explain why her funny, charming husband would come home demanding that the towels be folded a certain way and angrily pack to leave when they weren’t? “I begged him like crazy,” she remembers. “I would do whatever I could to fix it.”

She had been told this happens sometimes. Be understanding, the wives were advised before their husbands came home. Give it time. So she gave it time, even as his anger sharpened and he told her she would have to change if their marriage was to survive. “How?” she asked him. “You have to figure it out on your own,” he said, and then asked her in a mocking tone if she was smart enough to do that.

He had been back for two years at that point, still a corporal (his promotion to sergeant would come posthumously) whose job at division headquarters included summarizing casualty reports. Did that affect him? How could it not, she decided. The next year, his third year back, was when he started throwing things and describing how he was going to kill himself. He was going to hang himself from the deck. He was
going to drive off the Milford Lake dam. He was going to light himself on fire in the shed. He was going to cut his brake lines and go for a drive down a hill. He was going to take off and disappear and she’d never know whether he was alive, dead, far away, just around the corner …

Well, okay, she began thinking.

She wasn’t without fault in all that came next; she understands that. He accused her of having an affair. She hadn’t. He accused her again. This time she had. She stopped it and again found herself begging him like crazy for forgiveness, but this time she had provided him a reason for his rage. They separated. She moved out. Visited. Spent the night with him. Got pregnant. Promised to “stay together and work things through no matter what.” Moved back. Stayed.

Through all of this, she sought no help and confided in no one. As for Jessie, he did get help from time to time, but little of it seemed to make a difference. At one point, he spent three weeks in the Kansas City VA hospital, and Kristy remembers visiting him. “His posture was slumped. It seemed like everything just drooped. His eyes drooped. His cheeks drooped,” she says. “All they did was drug him.”

After that, he was admitted to Fort Riley’s WTB, where just like Adam Schumann and Tausolo Aieti and Nic DeNinno, he met with a case manager, the chaplain, the pharmacist. He got to know Kevin Walker, who was his platoon sergeant when he started, and, later, Michael Lewis and the other sergeant who would find him dying in the bathroom, both of whom Kristy would call from time to time for support as he worsened. He got occasional counseling and was prescribed the twelve medications that would be mentioned in the post-suicide medical report. He also attended suicide awareness training and was given a laminated card on how to recognize the signs of suicidal behavior, which was found tucked into his wallet after he was pronounced dead.

The months went by. He spent days at the WTB and nights at home. He kicked the laundry basket. He overturned the coffee table. Kristy began taking notes.

Now it was April. He was arrested and jailed for domestic battery, and Kristy, fearful for Summer’s safety, took off with Summer to her parents’ house.

May now. He was in the psychiatric wing of the Topeka VA, medicated, calmer, and to Kristy’s eyes almost worn down. “I think he was starting to find his solution.”

June 12 now, and he was barraging her with texts. 7:45 a.m. “Are you awake yet?” 8:08 a.m. “Please know I love you very much.” 8:09 a.m. “Thanks for taking such great care of Summer.” 9:14 a.m. “I love you more and more with each passing day.” 9:41 a.m. “Would you please call me?” 10:04 a.m. “Please find some time to talk with me.” 10:11 a.m. “Please don’t just turn your back on me. I need your support. I can’t do this by myself.” 10:23 a.m. “Please work with me.” 10:27 a.m. “I need you to stick by me.” 10:38 a.m. “Please find a way to enjoy my company.” 10:49 a.m. “Would you please call me?” 10:55 a.m. “Please find some time for me?”

July 8 now. He would be getting out of the hospital the next day, and Kristy stopped by the house with a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread, and a box of Lucky Charms so there would be food waiting for him when he came home.

July 15. “Are you doing ok” Kristy texted him.

“No.”

“What’s going on? Did you eat dinner”

She waited for him to answer.

“Summer says ‘hi’ (actually just dadada)” she texted.

No answer.

“Mom & I are going to Sears to look at washing machines”

No answer.

She texted him a phone number of a crisis hotline someone had once given her. “If you are not going to reply to me, please call”

“I called that number and its not in service” he wrote back a few minutes later.

“I’m sorry—I will get you a good number”

“Ok”

“This is a good number to call,” she texted, passing along a different one. “I just called to check and make sure. They are there 24/7 if you are struggling”

“Ok”

July 17. “Did you call that number I gave you?” she texted.

“Not yet,” he wrote back.

A little later, she telephoned him.

“Did you call?”

“Yes.”

“Did it help?”

“Not really.”

July 19. Now someone was telephoning her. “Corporal Robinson didn’t check in,” one of the WTB sergeants said. “Do we have your permission to go to the house?”

Lately, she has been taking all of Jessie’s e-mails and text messages and assembling them as a chronology. She worries that her memory is distorting things. If she can think about what happened as an unfolding timeline, and be taken again and again to her moments of trauma as they were unfolding, maybe it will help her make sense of it all. It’s an idea, anyway, and she’s willing to try it. “Little by little” is what those messages have told her so far about how Jessie died. It is the same phrase she uses in describing her coming back to life.

She has gotten rid of the bedroom furniture, including the bedpost she came to fear. That felt good.

She has sorted through his clothing and sent all but one of his uniforms to his beloved family in Sacramento, California, where he was born and where he was buried.

She has begun seeing someone new, a man named Kent Russell, who was her math instructor at the community college she enrolled in a year after Jessie died. “I kept talking to her and thinking, ‘Wow,’ ” Kent remembers of their first conversation. He liked biking. She liked biking. He liked plays. She liked plays. He had been married once. She had been married once. He had a son. She had a daughter. “I’m divorced,” he said. “My husband died,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Was it in the war?” he said. “No. He committed suicide,” she said.
Okay. That’s a lot of candor
, he thought, not in a bad way. A few weeks later, he was at her house, having barbecue on the deck from which Jessie had once tossed a Christmas tree and threatened to hang himself. A few months after that, she was
showing him all of the messages hidden in her cell phone. Eventually he bought her a ring and proposed, and Kristy began planning their wedding. With Jessie, she had eloped. This time would be different. She would wear an actual wedding dress. Kent would wear a tuxedo. There would be a buffet dinner and a buttermilk cake. And then she called off the engagement because she decided one day to get her hair cut, then decided she shouldn’t because Kent wouldn’t like it short, then realized it was Jessie who didn’t like it short, and then realized she was nowhere near ready to get married if she was still making decisions based on her fears of Jessie’s reactions. So she returned the ring, and when Kent said he would marry her whenever she was ready she believed him, and when she got her hair cut and he told her how much he liked it, she believed that, too.

Is that progress? She thinks it is, as are her decisions to repaint the walls and start seeing a counselor, who often reacts to what Kristy tells her by saying, “Oh my gosh.” Hers is that kind of story, apparently. At the end of the first visit, the counselor said Kristy was suffering from depression. After a few more visits, she changed it from depression to PTSD and gave Kristy something called a “Feeling Word List” with instructions on how to use it. Pick a word, she said, write it down with the words “I feel” or “I felt” preceding it, finish the sentence with whatever comes to mind, and soon enough you’ll own the emotion that at the moment is owning you.

Kristy looked over the 347 choices on the sheet of paper and chose the word “angry.” “I feel angry that Jessie is still impacting and controlling my life,” she wrote.

She chose “demeaned.” “I felt very demeaned when he would drag me around to all the offices on Fort Riley and make me smile and show what a happy family and perfect couple we were.”

She chose “petrified.” “I felt petrified when Jessie overturned the china cabinet.”

She chose “degraded” and “demoralized.” “I felt very degraded and demoralized when Jessie would yell at me and tell me how much of a whore and a slut I was.”

She chose “enraged.” “I felt enraged when I got to the point where I beat Jessie with a baby blanket.”

Then, trying to think of something that sounded more positive, she chose “relieved” and “unburdened.”

“When Jessie died, I felt relieved and unburdened,” she wrote, and it’s true, she says, she did, but of course the more time that has gone on, the less that’s been the case. Sometimes she envies the army, with those five lessons learned about her husband’s suicide. How did they come up with so many? Because when she goes over the circumstances of all that happened, culminating in the phone call when she learned that Jessie hadn’t checked in with the WTB, she can come up with only one.

She was in church in Kansas City when that call came, and at first she wasn’t terribly worried. He was probably asleep, she told the sergeant who was calling. Or perhaps he had turned his phone off and forgotten. She hung up and went back into the sanctuary. Then came a second call an hour later, asking for her permission to go to the house. Now she was worried. She hung up and began pacing outside of the sanctuary as Michael Lewis and the other sergeant drove to her house, noted the car in the driveway, noted the keys in the ignition, noted the mowed lawn, opened the door, climbed the stairs, and headed toward a light at the end of the hallway. Here came the cat. Here came the moan. “Jessie?” they called out. “Jessie?” Now came the third call to Kristy, and soon she was on her way to the hospital in Junction City where Jessie had been taken. Her father drove, and she sat in the back with Summer, thinking, “This is not how it’s supposed to be,” and then correcting herself: “I’m not the one who says how it’s supposed to be.” It was a long ride in a quiet car. Mostly she tried not to think at all. At some point, someone called to say the doctors had managed to coax a few breaths out of Jessie, so there was some hope, but the hospital was still an hour away, and by the time she got there he was dead and his trip to the Gardner Room was under way.