Thank You for Your Service (31 page)

Shawnee Hoffman

“I’ll try anything at this point,” as Adam Schumann had once said.

“I try so hard …” as Nic DeNinno had written.

“Another damn day,” as Michael Emory had said, waking up one more time.

“Catherine … Catherine …” as Tausolo Aieti had said, staring so hard at the photograph of that woman, and then, not ready to give up, he said it again.

“Catherine … Catherine …” he said, because what was the alternative?

It was five minutes in the Gardner Room.

It was becoming a lesson learned.

And so their lives now: trying to recover from the trying they did during the war. Emory may have bitten a wrist. DeNinno may have overdosed. Aieti may forever hear Harrelson. Schumann may have come the closest of all. But the fact is that three years after their war ended, all of them are still here and still at it, as are all of the soldiers from the unit, as is every other affected person in this cluster of war wounds. They are, if nothing else, all still alive, and it is something they hang on to like some kind of battle victory, right up until they hear about Danny Holmes and realize that as hard as they try, the war keeps trying, too.

He had been in charge of all the weapons for the company for a while, so all of the guys knew him that way, and then as things worsened he
became one of the guys who grew increasingly reclusive and spent his down days huffing a lot of cans of Dust-Off, and then he went home from the war with a sleep prescription and an honorable discharge, and now he is the one who shifted what’s possible for all the others, leaving behind a fiancée named Shawnee Hoffman and their twelve-month-old daughter, Aurora. It has been ten days since Danny Holmes killed himself. It happened in Dodge Center, Minnesota, population 2,600, the newest point of light in a country aglow, and as soldiers keep sending out messages—“I don’t believe it”; “RIP bro”; “Please forgive”; “sorry you went out like that”; “you served your country well”—Shawnee is remembering the first conversation that she and Danny ever had, a year after he’d come home.

“What do you see in my eyes?” he asked her.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Pain?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

They were at a party. She was nineteen years old and he was thirty.

“We just clicked,” she says now. “I didn’t feel pity for him. I didn’t feel bad for him. I felt like I could relate to him. I recognized that look.” And so began a relationship that, like Kristy Robinson’s, steadily began to deteriorate and eventually turned her into the newest version of what James Doster’s commander had once said of Amanda: probably the saddest woman yet. She is twenty-one years old now, broke, jobless, and on her own to figure it out for herself and Aurora, who at the moment is teething and feverish and gumming her dead father’s dog tags for relief. As for her own state of mind, she hasn’t been sleeping very much because she sees Danny hanging in front of her whenever she shuts her eyes.

There isn’t much furniture in the apartment she and Aurora are left with, but there is a couch that she sits on to look once again through Danny’s old computer. Hidden away in a file called Iraq/Graphic are a series of photographs that she would find him staring at sometimes, his lower lip twitching. They are of a day when the entire battalion was out on an operation to clear an area of insurgents who had been way too successful in blowing the soldiers up. At one point, a helicopter gunship opened fire on nine men clustered on a street corner, some of whom had
weapons and two of whom turned out to be journalists covering the war. A video of those people being blasted to pieces became infamous when it was posted on the Internet by the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks and watched more than ten million times by people around the world, many of whom would comment on it in absolutes and certainties, as if war could be comprehended fully by a high-speed connection to the Internet and a carefully edited video clip. The footage from the video, in somewhat grainy black and white, was hard enough for anyone to stomach, but the views of that day that Danny would look at were the views that no one had seen except the soldiers themselves as they swarmed in, at least one of whom took pictures to document what had happened for after-action reports.

Heads half gone, torsos ripped open, spreading blood, insides outside.

Close-ups, auto-focused, sunshine lighting, perfect color.

The war, in other words, as it was experienced by the soldiers who were in it and asking what had happened to Harrelson and wondering after a mortar attack if anything might be sticking out of their head. The pictures were supposed to be classified, but many of the soldiers brought them home anyway as trophies of a sort, and as Shawnee looks at them now, she remembers when Danny showed them to her soon after they met, which was two years before he died.

“Do you judge me?” he asked. “Do you think of me any different?”

“How many people have you killed?” she asked him.

“Quite a few,” he said.

“Did it bother you?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“Not ever?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“Not even the worst one?” she asked. “Did you walk up and look at him?”

“Yeah,” he said.

Now she is remembering another conversation, soon after that.

“He said they were in a Humvee, or whatever they were called, and they were driving, and they were taking fire, engaged, whatever, so they stopped to return fire, and Danny said there was an Iraqi with a girl in
his arms, and he was shooting, and he was holding the little girl, and Danny said, ‘I had no choice, I had to shoot him,’ so Danny shot and killed him and also killed the little girl. That’s the story I was told.”

He told other stories, too. The day he was in the shitters during a rocket attack. That one he laughed about.

The women who worked on the base who you could pay for sex if you used the code word. “Apples,” he said, and he laughed about that, too.

But it was his killing of the little girl that he kept coming back to and retelling, especially after Aurora was born. Some of it was specific. She had dark hair and looked at him and seemed about three years old. Some of it was vague. No date. No time of day. No exact location. Making it even hazier: none of the soldiers he was with remembers such a thing ever happening. “That
never
happened,” one of his sergeants insists. But Danny dwelled on it more and more. “I see children everywhere,” he would tell Shawnee, waking up from another nightmare. He mentioned it to his mother, too, although only briefly, and only after she had asked what it was like over there. Like most soldiers, he preferred not to talk about what he had experienced, and with his mother he’d been extra-protective of her ever since helping her through what she thought would be the worst days of her life: when her oldest child, severely bipolar, stopped taking his meds, then hanged himself. For several weeks, Danny held her hand until she was asleep and was there waiting for her when she woke up. That was eight years earlier, though, before the war, when he was still capable of such things.

“You need to get help,” Shawnee urged Danny from time to time.

“I’ll get help,” he said.

He didn’t, though. Shawnee says he told her once that the VA wanted to do a workup on him at the hospital in Minneapolis to see if he had TBI, even offering to get him there by van, but that it would take all day and he didn’t want to waste his time. Toward the end of his life, he told her he called a crisis line of some sort, but she doesn’t know if he actually did.

Instead, as his decline continued, he began ignoring Aurora, whom he had doted on when she was first born. He stopped cleaning up after
himself, leaving his dishes wherever. He stopped showering every day. “He was constantly tired,” Shawnee says. “He was constantly in a bad mood.” He told her it might be a good idea to hide his knife collection, so she tucked it under the couch.

More conversations:

“Are you sure you want to be with me?” he began asking.

“Yes,” Shawnee said, feeling increasingly overwhelmed.

“Are you sure we’re going to stay together?” he asked over and over.

“Yes.”

“I just need to hear you say it,” he said again and again.

Two weeks before he killed himself, around the time of Aurora’s first birthday, he went to see his mother, who lives in a tiny town in northern Iowa called Chester. “I’m not worth nothing. I’m not worth nothing,” she remembers him saying to her, and later that night, she remembers watching from a window as he stalked in the dark around the yard, finally disappearing into a garage toward the rear of the property. After a while, she heard a couple of gunshots. A few days later, she would see a broken window and realize it was Danny, but lots of people have guns where she lives, and at the time she figured it was one of the neighbors, up to whatever.

Before saying goodbye to her the next morning, he fished his old dress uniform out of the attic. Back home, he put it on and asked Shawnee to take a picture of him.

A few days later, after another fight about her feeling smothered by him, she woke to the sounds of Aurora crying and Danny screaming, “Shut the fuck up!”

“Danny?” she called, and immediately his voice changed.

“Are you ready to get up?” he asked Aurora.

A week or so later, she woke to the sound of scissors and Danny saying in the dark that he just wanted to cut off a little piece of her hair.

“You’re doing crazy stuff,” she told him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “My head’s not right.”

She needed a break. It was getting too weird. She could no longer look at those pained eyes that had attracted her in the first place. “It
would make me sick to my stomach,” she says. She made plans to go out with some friends who weren’t thirty-two years old and always coming home from a war. He didn’t want her to go.

“I need to talk to you,” he said as that day began.

“I gotta do the laundry,” she said, and she went to do the laundry.

“Please talk to me,” he said when she was done. His lip was twitching like it would do when he looked at the photographs. She knew she was ignoring him but just wanted to get away.

“I’m gonna go tanning,” she said, and she went tanning.

“I want to talk to you.” She cleaned the house. She cleaned their old car. “Will you please talk to me?” She showered and got dressed and kissed Aurora goodnight.

“I wish I had stayed home,” she says, but instead, she went out, drank a few beers, got pulled over for speeding, failed a breathalyzer test, spent the night in the booking area of the jail, couldn’t call Danny because she had the cell phone they both used, called some friends to take her home when the police released her, and remembers how the sky was just beginning to lighten and the birds were chirping up a racket as she opened the front door. The light above the stove was on, but otherwise the apartment was dark. Still, there was enough light for her to see Danny in silhouette, just to her left, lying on the steps leading to the second floor, with his neck and head somehow suspended in the air.

Another conversation:

“Is this 911?”

“Yes it is.”

“911?”

“Right.”

“I’m freaking out.”

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter?”

“I think—I think that my baby’s daddy killed himself,” Shawnee wailed. “He was watching my daughter and I came home and he was hanging from the steps and I don’t know if he’s dead I think he’s dead I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know …”

“Okay stay on the line for me. You’re at 106 Fifth Street Southwest?”

“Yes …”

“Apartment thirty?”

“Yes apartment thirty Dodge Center the Crossroads please
please
please please send someone please right now please. Please.
Please
. I don’t know if he’s dead …”

“You said he might have hung himself?”

“Yes he’s hanging from the steps …”

“Are you able to cut him down?”

“I don’t know how long he’s been like this I just got out of jail I …”

“Okay, I’m going to page you an ambulance. Stay on the line. Don’t hang up. Try to cut him down if you can, okay?”

“Okay …”

“See if you can get him down.”

“Okay I’m gonna try to get him down you really want me to do it, okay, I’ll try … oh my God …”

How exactly did he do it, she is wondering now, standing at the base of those steps and looking up. There are fourteen steps, a banister, and a small landing at the top, beyond which is Aurora’s room, where a pillow had been placed on the floor next to the crib, and Shawnee wonders: did he lie there for a while and say goodbye? He used his military-issue parachute cord. It’s a shoelace-thick cord, made mostly of nylon. He knotted one end around the top of the banister and the other around his neck. And then what? “The rope was so tight, I’m thinking he had it all measured out,” Shawnee says. “I’m thinking he tied it at the top of the steps and just jumped. Just jumped and rolled down the steps. Or he jumped straight down, and it jerked him back, and he probably sat there and struggled and tried to get it off his neck.” He was wearing boxers. Just boxers. When she touched his leg, it was cold. The coroner, she says, told her that it probably had happened before midnight, which meant that he had been there all through the night while she was drying out at the jail and watching TV with a sign underneath it that said “No Soap Operas.” “You motherfuckers are funny,” Shawnee told the jailers when she saw that, and meanwhile, Danny was hanging cockeyed on the steps and Aurora was in her crib. So she’s been thinking about that. The coroner also said it probably took him ten minutes to die, so she’s been thinking about that, too, and also about what a neighbor said to her just after
Danny had been placed in a red velvety body bag and taken away. The neighbor, who Shawnee had seen from time to time, introduced herself by saying she was a medium. “ ‘I can see what he did—he was pacing back and forth from the kitchen to the living room to the kitchen. He decided, fuck it, I’m just going to do it,’ ” Shawnee remembers the neighbor telling her. “She said that as he did it, he heard Aurora cry, and he spent his last minutes struggling and regretting it. That’s what she was getting from Danny on the other side.”