Thank You for Your Service (28 page)

“Yeah.”

“Henry,” she says. “Hairy.”

“Hairy Fisher,” Tausolo says, nodding.

“Think you got that one committed to your memory?”

“Yeah.”

“So what’s his name?”

“Henry Fisher.”

“What’s the first lady’s name?”

“Um … Catherine. Taylor.”

“Catherine Taylor. And Henry Fisher. And the third person,” she says, holding up a third photograph, “is Andrew Harris.”

“Andrew Harris.”

“Do you know an Andrew?”

“Yeah …”

“Do you know a Harris? How could you associate Harris with that picture? Hairless? Harris? Something like that?”

“Oh, okay, I get it.”

“So what’s his name?”

“Andrew Harris.”

“Okay, so the first lady?” she says, holding up the first photograph.

“Um, Catherine … Taylor?”

“Mm-hmm.” She holds up the second photo.

“Uh, Henry … Fisher?”

“Mm-hmm.” She holds up the third photo.

“Andrew … oh, I can only remember hairless.”

“And that’s supposed to bring you to …”

“Harris,” he says after a few moments of concentration.

“Harris. Yes,” she says.

“Harris.”

He smiles, pleased. Three names in a row.

Meg continues with the session. She picks up a clock and sets the alarm. “When the alarm goes off, I want you to ask me two questions,”
she says. “Okay? The two questions are: ‘When do I have to see you again?’ and ‘When does the session end?’ “So when that alarm goes off, whatever we’re doing, we’ll be in the middle of something, stop and ask me those two questions.”

“Um, what are the two questions?” Tausolo asks.

Meg repeats them.

“Wow. That’s a lot,” Tausolo says.

She moves on with the testing. “I’m going to read you a story, and I want you to recall back as much of the story as you can. Any detail that you can recall. Any highlights. The gist of the story. Just do the best that you can. Ready?”

She reads him the story. “Mr. Brian Kelly, a security express employee, was shot dead on Monday during a bank raid in Brighton. The four raiders all wore masks, and one carried a sawed-off shotgun. Police detectives were sifting through eyewitness accounts last night. A police spokesman said, ‘He was a very brave man. He went for the armed raider and put up a hell of a fight.’ ” She pauses. “Tell me what you can remember from that story.”

“I got confused,” he says. “I was trying to listen to you, but my mind keeps going back to the different things.”

“Do you want me to read it again?”

“Yeah.”

She reads it again.

“Okay,” Tausolo says. “Somebody got shot, and, um, they, um, and someone said he was a brave man. He went after the four raiders, and … that’s it.”

“Anything else coming to you?” Meg asks.

“No.”

The alarm goes off.

“Um, um, what time are we done with the test?” Tausolo says.

“Yes!” Meg says. “Very good!”

“And, um, oh! When am I going to see you again?”

“Excellent! Terrific! You got it!” Meg says. “Now the story I read you earlier—what was it about?”

“Umm, a guy who died, and there was an investigation, and, um,
someone said he was brave, he was a brave man for taking on four … four …”

“Okay,” she says. She picks up the very first photograph she had shown at the beginning of the session and shows it to him again.

“Oh shit,” Tausolo says. “Catherine … Catherine … that’s all I can remember.”

“I want you to think longer,” Meg urges. “Think of some of the things we talked about.”

“Catherine … Catherine …”

“Do you remember the initials?”

“No.”

“Okay. Her last name starts with a T.”

“Trevor?”

“Taylor.”

“Taylor,” Tausolo repeats as Meg holds up the next photo.

“Um, Henry … Fisher,” he says.

“Very good! And the last one?”

“Andrew,” Tausolo says. He concentrates really hard. “I remember hairless. But …”

“It’s close to that,” Meg says.

“Hairy?”

“Harris,” Meg says.

She looks at him, waiting. “You did very well on that overall,” she finally says. “There was a
ton
to remember.”

He knows better. He looks at her and shakes his head.

They’re out of time.

“Somebody up front will get you scheduled for next week,” she says.

He gathers his things and goes out to the receptionist, who asks him, “Who’s your appointment with?”

He thinks for a moment. “I forgot her name.” He keeps thinking. Laughs in embarrassment. “What’s her name?”

Now he is back at the WTB, at formation. He goes every morning without fail, even in the rain, even when the temperature is sub-zero.
Formation is usually at 6:30 a.m. and attendance is mandatory. It’s still the army, after all, so they all show up, form into lines, and wait for their name to be called—“Aieti!”—so they can indicate that they’ve made it through another night—“Here!” They’re all here, morning after morning, all alive, until one morning when one of them isn’t.

He was twenty-one years old, had been sent home from the war early, and killed himself in the middle of the night in his barracks room. According to his obituary, he had been a Boy Scout, a member of his church’s Celebrate Life Science Quiz team, and “loved his dog ‘Sarah.’ ” Aieti didn’t know him well, but they stood near each other in formation and sometimes went to the gym together. So much for that. Now one more soldier is on his way to the Gardner Room, and a lot of other soldiers are on their way to a memorial service at the chapel, where the electronic sign out front has some flashing messages:

“It is your responsibility to get help for a fellow soldier.”

“Never let your buddy fight alone, be willing to lend a hand.”

Heads down, they fill seven rows of the chapel and watch a woebegone family file in and take seats in the front row, within touching distance of an easel, upon which is a photograph of a defeated-looking young man. “What next?” his expression might as well be saying, and his family’s, too. Next to the easel is a display of his boots, helmet, and rifle, and near that is a podium for one of the eulogists to stand at and declare in the most mystified voice, “What is there to say at this point except thank you for your service?”

Tausolo is not on hand to hear this. He is avoiding all of it: the bugler playing “Taps,” the gunshot salute that causes a few of the soldiers to wince, the father of the young man wiping his eyes and coughing, the tears of a woman a few rows back who had come alone, holding a book called
The One Year Book of Hope
. Whoever she is, the last thing Tausolo wants to hear are her memorial tears, or anyone’s. He’s been to enough of these services. They are Harrelson’s service all over again, and Doster’s, and the twelve others killed in his battalion. He knows what bad memories these things conjure in him, and that’s not what he needs to be remembering. He needs to be remembering Catherine Taylor, Henry Fisher, and Andrew Harris. He can’t keep going backward. He can’t go
back to jail. He can’t go back to Topeka. He can’t keep going back up into the air and down into another dream. Backward, up, down—those are all the wrong directions. If he’s going to get better, he needs to be moving forward, nothing but forward, and so he stays far away from the chapel until the day after the memorial service, when he happens to pass by it as he heads toward the next thing he’s supposed to do in his recovery.

He is on his way to his first day of class at one of the colleges offering courses at Fort Riley. “They told me to go to school,” he says. “Well I’m going to school.” The electronic sign is still flashing—“Have the courage to seek help,” it reads as he drives past the chapel—but he ignores it. Back in Samoa, he excelled at math. Does he still have the mind for it? He doesn’t know. Probably not is his guess. But he has signed up for an algebra class and is about to find out.

He parks near an old building and climbs a flight of stairs to a classroom on the second floor. Shyly, he slides into an empty seat in the back row and takes out a pen, and is using it to poke himself in the arm as the instructor stands to introduce himself.

“All right. Probably most of you don’t know me,” he says. “I’m Mr. Russell.”

It is Kent Russell, Kristy Robinson’s boyfriend. He is Tausolo’s next rescuer.

Kent, who knows some things about wounded soldiers and the effects those wounds can have.

Who took the engagement ring back from Kristy and said to her, “I’m going to hang on to it, and if the time is right, if it ever comes, I’ll have it.” “Thank you,” she had said.

Who took the ring home and put it in a drawer, and now, trying to move on, has turned his attention to a new class of students, including one in the back row who is using his pen to poke himself in his arm.

He turns around and writes his name on the board.

“Mr. Russell,” Tausolo writes in his notebook, and forty-five minutes later, he walks outside feeling pretty good, as if he’s getting somewhere at last. “So I’ll see you back tomorrow” was how Mr. Russell ended the class, and Tausolo thought:
Yes you will
. He likes Kent Russell.

As a matter of fact, he likes Meg Vernon, too. And Sergeant Jung and Sergeant Lewis. He even kind of likes the winker.

Some days he wonders why he ever wanted to be in the WTB. But there are also days when he can sense some progress, and on one of those days he heads over to the main building to meet with a new sergeant and get a travel request approved. The sergeant looks it over. “Go see the human resources lady,” he says.

So Tausolo goes to see her. “Leave? Emergency? What?” she says. She tells him to go back to the sergeant.

“Ask
her
,” the sergeant says.

“He told me to ask you,” Tausolo explains to her when she asks him why he’s back.

She signs the request and tells him to take it back to the sergeant.

He takes it back, but the sergeant is busy now, having a heated discussion with someone else about which is better, Whataburger or In-N-Out. It seems like it might go on for a while, so Tausolo takes a seat and looks around the sergeant’s cubicle. There’s not much to see, since the guy just arrived at the WTB, only a blank form tacked to a wall that looks like every other army form in the world.

“Hurt Feelings Report,” it is titled.

“Whiner’s name,” it says under that.

“Which ear were the words of hurtfulness spoken into?” it says under that. “Is there permanent feeling damage?” “Did you require a ‘tissue’ for tears?” “Has this resulted in a traumatic brain injury?”

“Reason for filing this report,” it says under that. “Mark all that apply.”

“I am a wimp.”

“I am a crybaby.”

“I want my mommy.”

“I was told that I am not a hero.”

“Narrative,” it says under that. “Tell us in your own sissy words how your feelings were hurt.”

Finally, at the bottom of the form:

It’s a joke, Tausolo supposes. He waits for the sergeant to finish his conversation, suddenly feeling tired. The dream was so vivid last night he couldn’t get back to sleep. Up he went. Down he came. “Why didn’t you save me?” Harrelson asked.

Some things he can’t remember. Some things he can’t forget.

When Fred Gusman was little, his father came home from World War Two and began beating him with a belt.

Too young to know why, what he did know was that anything could trigger it. One time it was some Spanish rice that his mother had piled onto his dinner plate, the smell of which was making him sick. Eat it, his father said. I don’t want to, he said.
Eat it
, his father said again, laying his belt on the table. Fred remembers using a fork to push around the rice until a single grain was stuck to it. He lifted it to his mouth. Stop it, his father said. He ate another grain, thinking he might vomit, and his father picked up the belt and took aim.

Sometimes, anticipating, he ran to a closet and hid. It didn’t matter. Eventually the door swung open.

Even now, Fred doesn’t know what was wrong with his father. The war, of course, had affected him—“If he didn’t have post-traumatic stress, he was
really
weird,” Fred says—but what about it? What specifically would fill a man with such fury? The one person who might have had an answer was a neighbor, also a war veteran, who one day asked Fred’s father to help him build a boat. They spent hours together in the neighbor’s yard, talking now and then as they worked, but any chance that friendship had of loosening something in Fred’s father came to an end when he went over one day and found the man hanging dead in his garage. He cut the man down and continued his beatings, and at last Fred’s mother fled with Fred to live with her mother, a church-going woman who believed in redemption. There’s goodness in everyone, she told her grandson over and over, which was news to an eight-year-old
struggling against bad dreams and wetting the bed. Even the worst people have some good in them, she said, and made him a promise. If he looked for it in anyone, he would eventually be able to find it.