Thank You for Your Service (29 page)

The Pathway Home

Sixty years later:

He had gotten through the rest of his childhood in California’s Central Valley by working in middle school as a janitor’s assistant and in high school as a picker in the vegetable fields. He had spent a few years in the military and come out with money for college. He had received an undergraduate degree in child development and a graduate degree in social work, and gotten a job at a VA hospital. He had tracked down Vietnam vets who had come home to scrapheap lives and coaxed them into therapy. He had started the country’s first residential treatment program devoted to those vets and, after treating thousands of them, had come to believe that their best hope depended on their having enough time to understand their illness in the context of an entire life, that what mattered wasn’t just who they became after a traumatic event, but also who they had been the moment before. Deep digging, without time limits, back to the beginning and down to the soul—this was Fred’s approach, and after decades of success with it, he had become concerned when the VA and other providers switched to treatment models with maximum stays. Seven weeks. Four weeks. One week with optional renewals. Eventually, he had grown discouraged enough to consider retiring, and that was when the call had come about Pathway. It would be entirely donor-supported, they told him. No insurance companies to answer to. Independent of the VA. He would have his own building on the vast grounds of the California Veterans Home in Yountville, and the program would be his to design and oversee. “One last run” was the way he explained his decision to people who asked why he was doing it, and now, on a Friday afternoon, three days from starting the hard part of treatment with his newest group of war-wounded vets, the part referred to as Trauma Group, he walks over to a visibly distressed Adam Schumann.

“Looking forward to Monday,” he says.

The distress is due to a text that just arrived from Saskia.

He was upset even before he looked at it, just by hearing his phone buzz. Why can’t she leave him alone? Just let him get better, and one day he’ll come home to her healed. Instead, since quitting her job, she has been texting more and more, fifty times a day sometimes, about anything, as if he were still in Junction City. What did he get at McDonald’s? That was a text. Jax growled at her when she told him to go to bed. That was a text. What now?

“Any way you can be home by Monday nite? They’re doing tubes Tuesday morning. He’s got complete hearing loss in his left and mild in right.”

It was about Jaxson, who still wasn’t talking, in spite of being eighteen months old, and as soon as Adam read it, he was once again thinking of the night he fell asleep and Jaxson rolled off the bed.

“Jesus,” he said.

So he will go home. He is needed there. But Monday is when Trauma Group begins. How can he not be here?

He goes outside, where some of the other guys in the program are hanging out on a second-story landing of their building. From a distance, they look no worse off than any other young guys with dangling cigarettes and softening muscles. Only up close does the nervousness in their eyes become noticeable, along with the three bubbly scars on a guy who is now describing the great sex he had once with a girl he met on a psych ward. One scar crosses his left wrist. One crosses his right wrist. One covers the length of his left forearm.

Fred was right in what he had said on the drive from the airport: a lot of ups and downs in this place, and after two months, Adam is feeling at home among them. He doesn’t know if he’s any better yet, but after a shaky first couple of weeks, the thought of going back to Kansas at this point, even temporarily, makes him feel like he’d be betraying the best chance he might ever get. The counseling sessions, the anger-management classes, the Monday-night bowling with the Rotarians, the meditation lessons—he likes all of it. And he has been looking forward to Trauma Group, even though he has heard it described by someone who went through it as “a kick in the face.” Is that progress? He supposes it is.

The conversation switches to things they used to do to kids during the war. One guy mentions putting Tabasco sauce on the M&M’s they handed out. Another says they used to throw dollar bills to kids and bet on who would win the inevitable fights. Someone flicks away a cigarette butt, and they all watch it pinwheel to the ground in a satisfying shower of sparks.

Adam finishes his own cigarette and goes inside to check on his roommate, Will, who, after nearly a year in the program, is leaving. Another thing Fred says: it takes a guy a few months to overcome the sense of hopelessness he arrives with, and Will was a case study in that. For a long time, he didn’t want to talk to anyone or even come out of his room, and now here he is, swearing he’s ready to return to the wicked world that sent him here in the first place.

“You need help packing up, shitbird?” Adam asks him.

Will shakes his head. He’s all done. The only thing left is to get rid of his TV, which is too big to take with him. Adam borrows Will’s car, runs to an ATM, grabs two hundred dollars, and comes right back. “All right, let’s do this,” Will says to himself. He turns to Adam and extends his hand. They’ve been roommates since Adam’s very first night here, when an attendant searched Adam’s duffel bag for weapons and drugs and discovered a hidden note from Saskia that said “Baby, I love you so much.” He’s the only one who Adam has told about Emory and Doster. “I’ll see you later, Kansas,” he says.

“You’re not gonna take the trash out?” Adam says to him as he walks out.

The door closes.

“That’s a dickhead move,” Adam yells.

The door opens. Will is laughing. He grabs the trash.

“See you, man,” Adam says, and there goes Will for good, leaving Adam to wonder if it’ll take a year for him, too.

A moment later, his phone buzzes with another text. What does she want this time?

“Why’d you take so much money out of the account?”

He sighs. It’s been, what, twenty minutes since he went to the ATM? “It fucking feels like I have a fucking satellite watching me,” he
says, and instead of replying, he turns off the phone and goes back outside.

The others have gone somewhere, so he lights a cigarette, and then another, trying to figure out what to do. From his first day, the place has unnerved and seduced him: hundreds of acres, grape air floating over from the bordering winery, and trees everywhere, of all types, including the tall, skinny palm with the weird leaves outside of his window that, when the wind is blowing, he can’t help but hear. It’s a different sound than in Kansas, when the wind moves through the cottonwoods and he’s hidden up in a tree stand. That has a scratchy sound to it that can make him feel chilly, especially in autumn, when everything is turning brittle. This is more lush, and comes with a chill of a different kind. It would be easy to shimmy up it, he thinks, and the jump, if not soul-cleansing, at least would guarantee relief. That’s the chilling part, the way the leaves in this lovely place seem to be calling to him.

He watches now as one of the elderly people who live here year-round comes toward him on a sidewalk. There are said to be eleven hundred of them tucked into the various buildings, most of them old, some of them disabled, most of them men, and all of them with military service at some point in their lives. Judging by the caps they wear, most of them were in Vietnam, but this one, so old and moving so slowly, must be World War Two. He is using a walker. He takes a step and rests, takes another step and rests. He keeps coming, and as he nears Adam, he stops, turns as if he’s about to break, and stares at him. Adam stares back. The man takes off his sunglasses and keeps staring. Adam finishes his cigarette. Finally, the man turns away and walks on.

“Goddamn,” Adam says, a little creeped out.

More of them are coming now, headed to the dining hall. Some walk on their own. Some use walkers. Most are driving motorized scooters adorned with American flags. Adam keeps watching along with another guy in the program, Rob, who has come out to join him. Now one of those scooters is swerving along the sidewalk instead of going in a straight line like all of the others.

“Wasted,” Adam says.

“No, if he was wasted, he’d be going off the sidewalk,” Rob says.

They keep watching as the scooter goes off the sidewalk. “Oops,” Rob says. But the old man driving it only wants to stop under a magnolia tree for a cigarette, and after finishing it and doubling over in a fit of coughing, he steers onward toward the dining hall.

Another old vet comes along now who probably
is
wasted, one of the hard-core guys who spend every day drinking beer at the picnic tables behind the Pathway building, which has a snack shop on the ground floor. They never say hello, or even wave. They just sit there and drink.

“They’re always fucking drunk,” Rob says of them.

“They look alone” is what Adam says. “They look broken.”

“Six in the morning and they already have a beer pyramid going,” Rob says.

“That’s me in thirty years,” Adam says. “If this doesn’t work out, that’s me.”

Actually, it’s ten in the morning when the beer pyramid gets going.

Six in the morning is when Raymond Sherman shows up. He’s the first. He often is, the result of a day in the army a long time ago when he was sent on a clean-up detail to Guyana, where nine hundred people at a religious compound had poisoned themselves in a mass suicide. A few years later, he began having dreams about those nine hundred people, and now he sits alone in the morning chill, his hands wrapped around a cup of coffee, waiting for beer sales to begin. At 9:59, he goes into the snack shop. “Three Keystone Lights and three Natural Lights,” he tells the cashier, and a minute later, the pyramid is under way.

Paul Alexander—army, World War Two—is the next to arrive. He is wearing a cowboy hat and driving a scooter with two beers in the basket, and after him comes Jim George—Marines, Vietnam—who has neither beers nor legs and is balanced high on his hips on his motorized wheelchair. Soon there are seven of them, all drawn here by the snack shop, which for years was the only functioning part of a vacant two-story building. One day, they were surprised to see painters show up. Next came furniture movers hauling beds and bureaus to the second floor. Then came the first of the haunted soldiers from America’s two latest
wars, and now a voice is floating down from an open second-floor window:

“Wake up, motherfucker.”

It’s Rob, trying to wake up Adam, who wants to sleep in on a weekend.

“Wake up, bitch,” Rob tries again a few minutes later, laughing, and meanwhile, at the picnic tables, Jim George is telling about the day he was shot three times. “September 21, 1971,” he is saying. “I’ll always remember that date.” He says it happened in Laos, when he was part of a five-man reconnaissance team that was ambushed. The others were killed, and he lay alone for a long time under a bush, blood seeping out of three holes in his stomach and who knows what seeping in. The area was coated in Agent Orange, and after several days under the bush, he was down to hallucinations when rescuers finally arrived. The years passed. His immune system deteriorated. One day, thirty-three years later, he got an ingrown toenail that became infected, and when it wouldn’t heal, they amputated half of his right foot. The infection continued to spread, and next they amputated the rest of his foot above the ankle. The next amputation was below the knee. Then above the knee. Then mid-thigh. Then all the way up at the hip. The entire leg was gone. And then, he says, the infection showed up in his left foot. Six more surgeries. Six more amputations. Both legs entirely gone. “I enlisted,” he says, thinking back to how this began. “I was mad at the world. I wanted to be a Marine. Big, tough guy. Did me a lot of good. I went in the corps, I was six-foot-two. Thirty-three years later, I’m three-foot-one.”

He laughs. No one else does.

“I mean, all wars are the same,” he says.

“Only the landscape changes,” someone else says.

The beer pyramid grows higher. One person plays solitaire. A few others watch until one of the Pathway guys walks past with a dog he is training to be his service dog, and two more come out and head to the parking lot. The young soldiers don’t say good morning. The old soldiers don’t say nice-looking dog. No one acknowledges the others at all.

“They won’t talk to us.” Raymond Sherman shrugs.

“Most of them won’t even look at us,” Jim George says. “It’s like we done something wrong.”

“They act like they don’t even see us, and yet they’ll come to our home—and this
is
our home, for them it’s just a stopover—and they’ll bring their dogs out to take a shit and not even pick it up,” Raymond Sherman says. He is sitting with his knees together, apart, together, rocking back and forth.

He’s the most visibly nervous, but they all have their own ways of coping with what they’ve become. They drink and have the faces to prove it. Some of them scooter up to the cemetery at night and smoke a joint or two among the headstones of five thousand dead soldiers. Jim George says he spent fifteen years high on methamphetamine. Paul Alexander rarely says anything at all. Another of them, Mark Fischer, checks his watch over and over as noon approaches because noon is when a whistle goes off and forty-five years after Vietnam he’s still getting used to loud noises.