Thank You for Your Service (6 page)

“What do you
want
to do?” Grace says, who is sitting there eating a biscuit, and Amanda continues to stand where she is, wishing she had an answer. What does she want to do? Why doesn’t she know yet? Why isn’t he here to help her figure it out? Why is she still talking to him? Why is she still seeing him alive?

What
happened
to him?

Two years later, she is still asking the question she asked Adam at the airport. She had heard initially that James had lost all of his limbs except for his right arm, then that it was only his left leg, that he died immediately, then that he didn’t, that he was unconscious, then that he wasn’t. She had asked for the autopsy report, waited months for it, and, with Sally sitting next to her, read it from beginning to end. Shrapnel wounds to the pelvis. Left leg amputation, below the knee. Massive bleeding. Protruding viscera. Six pages of details. And still she wonders: What
happened
? Did he feel it? Did he really say, “I’m hit?” Did he say anything else? Were his last thoughts of his family? Did he understand that he was dying? So she went to the airport with Saskia, and instead of seeing a skeleton walking toward her, she saw her chance for answers.

“Did he suffer?” she asked.

“Were you there?” she asked.

And Adam’s answer was to take out his wallet and hand her something he had been keeping since the day that James died, when he had picked up James’s body armor, taken it into a latrine, and tried to scrub it clean with some body wash and a toothbrush. It took him an hour because there was so much blood. The smell made him sick, but he kept at it, couldn’t stop, didn’t want to, he had loved James Doster, and at one point as he bore down, he felt something nick his hand. “What the fuck?” he’d said, and that was when he had found the sliver of metal that he handed to Amanda at the airport, and every so often since then she has taken this piece of the bomb that killed her husband and placed it in her palm and tightened her hand around it and kept squeezing until she bled.

This house then: it is nineteen thousand pounds of shrapnel that is continuing to explode, and late at night, after the movers have gone, the furniture has been arranged, the kitchen has been organized, the beds have been made, and the house seems presentable, Amanda goes back to Liberty Circle.

“James,” she says.

There he is, on a counter. He is the last thing left.

She places him in the car, buckles him in, leaves their house forever, and drives him to her new home.

I don’t know if everyone knows your story, but you all are fortunate—because this is a hero,” a woman is saying about Tausolo Aieti, who, back in the war, was in the same unit as Adam Schumann and James Doster. The woman, a psychologist, is standing with Tausolo in front of a few dozen people, all on folding chairs that have been set up in a little, out-of-the-way room at the Topeka VA hospital. She is smiling, and when she turns to Tausolo and says, “You define what a hero is,” he resists the urge to turn away. This is progress. He knows it. When he was admitted seven weeks ago to Topeka’s inpatient PTSD program, he couldn’t look anyone in the eye. Now, on his graduation day, the only one he can’t look in the eye is himself.

Three other men are graduating with him, all of them old Vietnam guys still trying to recover forty years later. One has the collapsed face of a drunk used to sleeping it off in the sun, and another has the posture of a man who lived for a time under a bridge. “Thank you ever so much,” one of them says to the hospital workers, family members, and the program’s twenty other patients gathered in this room. “I look at myself in the mirror each morning and tell myself, ‘You’re worth something.’ ” Another stands with his wife, who says they’ve been married forty years and for thirty of them he’s been ill, so she’ll see.

Tausolo is the youngest by far, the only one of the four still in the army, and the one whose wife has decided not to come. He is twenty-six and from American Samoa, and the stunned look on his face this day is the same as it was on the sunny afternoon that he was covered in soot
and blood and he asked another soldier if Pfc. James Jacob Harrelson was okay.

Tausolo Aieti, moments after the explosion

“And a hero isn’t someone who doesn’t feel fear, they’re someone who in spite of their fear does the right thing and really risks their own safety,” the psychologist continues. “You did that.”

The theory of this program: Return to the traumatizing event. Remember it in detail. Think about it through therapy and by writing about it. Keep at it until you are thinking about what you did do instead of what you didn’t. Learn that truth is relative, and that there is the moment of trauma, and then the moment following the trauma of your first reaction, when shame and guilt can take hold. Healing is an act of persuasion—this is what Tausolo has been trying to learn for seven weeks. “As we were going down the route, I saw some palm trees,” he wrote. “Harrelson was playing a nice, relaxing country music song. I looked at those palm trees, and it reminded me of back home in American Samoa. It reminded me of the coconut trees back home and when I was a little kid playing and picking the coconuts that fell off. Everything was right and boom it happened so fast.”

“And I hope you hold on to that as you leave here, because you have an opportunity to go back and to your family be a hero every day,” the psychologist continues. “To feel fear but do the right thing anyway. We’ve seen you do that here.”

Here is Building Two, second floor, mental health. Here is where no one knows he is. Or almost no one. His wife, Theresa, knows, and so does Adam Schumann, though in his case it’s only by accident. There had been another fight with Saskia. He had hit the swinging door between the dining room and the kitchen so hard it had flown off its hinges and crashed to the floor. He had gone into the bedroom and punched the headboard and begun to cry. He had calmed down, come out to the living room, held Jaxson, given him a bottle, nuzzled his baby hair, watched Zoe in her PJs eating grapes, and put the door back on its hinges. The next morning, he had quietly said “I love you” to Saskia, who was folding laundry and whose face was still puffy, and had driven without her to a doctor’s appointment in Topeka. “Hey, there’s Aieti,” he’d said, getting out of the car and looking across the parking lot. He hadn’t seen Tausolo
since the day he’d left the war, but he recognized his slow, limping walk in an instant. He waved, but Tausolo was too far away to see him, and as Tausolo went across the lawn into Building Two, Adam headed left toward the main hospital, wishing that he could go into Building Two with him.

Lucky Aieti. Getting help.

“Keep doing that as you leave here,” the psychologist says. “Congratulations.”

She hands Tausolo a certificate for completing the program, and after mumbling a few thank-yous, away he goes with his certificate and fifty-three pages of writing about what happened after the boom. The Humvee rising in the air. The concussion of the bomb. Opening the door and trying to run. Collapsing with a broken leg. Limping back to the Humvee and pulling out a bloody soldier. Pulling out a second one who was moaning and even bloodier as the Humvee sparked and burst into flames. Collapsing again, relieved that everyone was out, and then hearing someone yelling Harrelson’s name. “And it hit me ohh shit Harrelson. I forgot all about him,” he had written. “I looked over and all I could see was flames and the outline of a body where he was at in the driver’s seat.” Over and over he had written about it all, except for one thing that he has told no one, a dream he has been having ever since:

Harrelson, on fire, asking him, “Why didn’t you save me?”

The dream comes every few nights. He never dreams about the soldiers he did save, only about Harrelson, and only in that way. For a while, he could handle it, and then one day he couldn’t.

Home now, and it’s just as he had left it seven weeks before. The walls are gouged from him throwing whatever he could get his hands on. The bedroom door has a fist-shaped hole all the way through it. At least Theresa is no longer cowering, but she is looking at him with her own version of a stunned expression, one that tells Tausolo she is wondering what will happen next.

The place they live is Grandview Plaza, a speck of American landscape along the interstate between Junction City and Fort Riley. It’s a town of
low houses and tall pickup trucks, a towering billboard that says “Obama is a Fraud. Demand Resignation Now. God Bless America!” and Geary Estates, a 372-unit apartment complex that is filled with military families and where there have been two recent suicides. One was a soldier who had just returned from the war. One had yet to go. One very courteously tried not to make a mess, placing a folded sheet on his mattress and his army jacket on top of the sheet and then lying down on top of the jacket before shooting himself. The other shot himself, too, but abruptly against a wall. “I call it Bloody November,” says the apartment manager who scrubbed down the walls with bleach and primed them for repainting with a stain-blocking product called KILZ and used office scissors to cut out the sections of ruined carpet and wished the whole time that the county required that such things be done by a HAZMAT team.

Two weeks after the second suicide, Tausolo and Theresa moved in. It wasn’t one of those units, but it was only a few doors away from one of them. They didn’t have much: a mattress and box spring in the bedroom, a dining room table, a couple of couches in the living room. Their extravagances were a big TV and some framed family photographs on the walls, and the photographs were what Tausolo reached for first when he once again woke up from seeing Harrelson, finally broke down, and began throwing whatever he could get his hands on. He spent a week locked down in a hospital, then tried an outpatient program in Junction City he didn’t like, and then was admitted to Topeka.

For the seven weeks he was there, Theresa was on her own in the apartment, just her, the gouged walls, and the punched-in door. Like Tausolo, she had grown up in American Samoa. She had come to Kansas uncertainly, helped a little by the fact that her sister, who was also married to a soldier, had ended up here, too. Now, four months pregnant, she began going to her sister’s more often, sitting for hours outside in the sunshine and hoping the summer heat would burn away her growing doubts.

“Deep down, he’s scared of something. But he doesn’t want to talk about it, so he does stuff,” she said on the day before his return, trying to imagine how he would be when he came home by remembering how he had once been. “When I first met him, he was never like that,” she said,
but then he deployed, and one day he called and mentioned that he had hurt his leg, and then he was back home, waking up every few nights from a dream he would only say was about the war.

He began to take sleeping pills to fall asleep and another kind of pill to get back to sleep when he woke up. He took other pills, too, some for pain, others for anxiety. He began to drink so much vodka that his skin smelled of it, and then he started mentioning suicide.

Maybe this is what happens to soldiers, she had been thinking. Growing up, she’d been aware that a lot of Samoans joined the military, including in her own family, all of whom seemed the same as ever when they came home. But now she was learning otherwise. A few months before, a Samoan she knew a little bit, one tour in Iraq, diagnosed with PTSD, had hanged himself in his barracks in Hawaii. And according to her sister, her brother-in-law was having difficulties recovering from his tour in Iraq, which had caught her off guard because as far as she could tell he seemed as happy as ever.

Still—suicide? Tausolo? “I don’t know if he’s serious because before this he was never serious. My husband, he would joke about everything. Yeah. So. Suicide,” she said, holding her stomach as the baby growing inside her kicked. She stayed in the sun until it was time to go back to Geary Estates, and now, the next day, here he is, home, the hero, showing her his certificate.

He goes to see his company sergeant, Jay Howell, to tell him he’s back from Topeka. He hasn’t seen anyone from his unit in a couple of months, and as he walks through the building, wondering what everyone is thinking, feeling their eyes on him, Howell, watching him, says, “He thinks they’ll look at him for being weak. That’s why he’s kind of shy when he’s out there right now. But there’s not one guy who’ll look at him that way. Maybe some of the new privates, because they don’t know him. The older guys? No.

“There are mental issues, and there are bullshit mental issues. You’ve got to look at the person. Everybody has a breaking point,” Howell goes on. “You cannot overlook the fact that the guy should have got a Bronze
Star or Silver Star. There is no coward in this guy. The guy’s never failed at anything.”

In this one regard, Tausolo is fortunate. Jay Howell has a reputation of looking after his soldiers. But a nurse case manager is now looking after Tausolo, too. She wants him to transfer into another unit called a Warrior Transition Unit. It’s for soldiers who are injured, some physically, most mentally, a unit where a soldier is excused from the daily duties of a healthy soldier and is treated instead as a long-term, recovering patient.