Blackened Spiral Down (12 page)

So he let the big man’s hand fall as he stood up, looking down at his unforgettable friend.  His chest was no longer rising or falling.  He could see another tear fall across John’s weathered face, yet he was at peace, and all was OK with the world.  Roland knew that he was witness to the passing of one of the great ones, and he knew he was a better person for having known him.             

Bodies In My Pocket

1

              Sergeant Carlos Rivas was squirming in the hard plastic chair in Mrs. Whitney’s waiting room.  Despite being the Army for 11 years now, he still was annoyed that Uncle Sam wouldn’t provide more comfortable seating, especially for someone coming back after his second deployment to Iraq.  The big clock on the wall ticked louder than it should have, which made the fact that Mrs. Whitney was fifteen minutes behind schedule that much more obvious.  The décor in the old World War II-style barracks, renovated to office space, was dated almost to the point it found itself back in style. 

                            Suddenly the door began to open as Peggy Whitney said goodbye to a patient.  Her smile was always warm, and her demeanor was not intimidating, like many of the psychologists Carlos had met in the past year.  She was a civilian working in the mental health center on the base.  When given the choice of who to talk to as part of his ongoing treatment for PTSD, Carlos asked to see Peggy.  He felt at ease talking to her, and the way she did things, it made it seem like they were just friends talking.  It didn’t feel clinical like most of the others, clad in white lab coats and using clipboards to make notes as he spoke.  They nodded a lot and did their best to seem interested in what he was saying, but he always felt like they were just filling in their government forms and didn’t care in the least about what he had to say.  In that sterile environment, Carlos felt nervous and didn’t say much.

              “Good to see you, Carlos,” she said, making her way to the tan plaid couch in her office.  It was weird hearing someone call him by his first name when he was on base.  Peggy did that to make him feel more comfortable.  She had her hot tea steeping on the coffee table that separated her couch from the matching love seat.  Behind her was a huge bookcase that spanned the entire east wall, with a variety of psychology books as well as the fiction novels she devoured in her free time.  There was also an old globe in a pedestal stand.  It was a gift from her grandfather, who gave it to her after she graduated from the University of Connecticut with a degree in psychology.  Carlos felt like he was home.

              “Same here, ma’am,” he said, sitting down on the love seat.  Carlos could smell the lemon escaping her hot tea and knew he was in a safe place.

              Peggy took a deep breath, looking at Carlos behind a soothing smile.  Her mouse-brown hair was up in a ponytail like always.  She was in her early 50’s, but Carlos thought she was a very attractive woman, despite being 20 years her junior.  Running two miles a day and eating well had done her right, with a dancer’s figure that radiated good health.

              “Why don’t you tell me what happened the other night?”

              “I don’t know if I’m ready to talk about it, ma’am.”  His left eye twitched for a second.

              “Carlos,” she said as she took a sip of her tea, “I told you that inside this room I’m Peggy.”

              He forced a smile.  “OK, ma’am.  I mean . . .  Peggy.”

              They both laughed, and then it was quiet again.             

              “Why don’t you start with what made you go out at that hour?” 

              He fidgeted on the love seat.  Carlos didn’t notice, but Peggy did.  She had to notice those little things in her line of work.  She loved her job.  Helping soldiers was the best job she could have.  She lost her own father to suicide after he came back from two tours in Vietnam.  He wasn’t home a month before her mother found him in the bathtub, with half his head on the shower surround and a shotgun in his lap.             

              “Well, I needed to go to Walmart to get some stuff for the trailer.”

              “At two o’clock in the morning?”  Peggy held the mug with two hands in her lap.

              Carlos looked down.  “Yeah, I can’t go during the day – there are too many people.”

              She nodded.  “I understand.  That’s a normal reaction from someone who’s been through what you’ve been through.”

              Carlos continued, “I started to feel really anxious, like I needed to do something.”

              She smiled again, taking another sip of her lemon tea.  “So, what did you do about it?”

              “I took out the bodies in my pocket.”

              “Just like we discussed.  That’s good.”

              Carlos looked at her, tears beginning to well in his eyes.

              “Did you stall on the first one again, Carlos?”

              “Yeah.  It was Davenport.  He’s always the first one.  The first body in my pocket.”

              Peggy leaned back on the couch, engrossed in what Carlos was telling her.  “Tell me all about the bodies in your pocket.”

2

              Carlos was sitting on the couch in the living room of his rented mobile home.  He was wide awake at 2 o’clock in the morning.  This was an every night occurrence since he got back from Iraq two months ago.  The nightmares were there every time he closed his eyes.  They played through like the trailer of a really scary movie.  Over and over again, it would repeat in his head until he couldn’t take it any longer and forced himself awake.  Even awake, Carlos had the dreams, only they weren’t quite as vivid as in slumber.

              When he got home this time, he found a note on the kitchen table.  It was from Kayla.  He could tell it was her handwriting as soon as he opened the door.  The trailer was quiet, so he knew that she and the baby weren’t there.  The television was off.  Even at night, when they were in bed, she kept the television on in the living room.  She used to say she needed to hear the noise.  After his first tour in Iraq, he agreed and didn’t mind having it on all the time.  Carlos didn’t like the absolute silence, either.  It made his mind keep going, and there were too many things rattling around in there which he would rather not think about.

              The note was your standard “Dear John” letter that soldiers got all the time out in the field, or on deployment.  Now they came in the form of email or even text messages, but he was getting one old school.  Kayla told him she loved him, but wasn’t in love with him.  She said she had met someone about six months into this last deployment, and she didn’t mean for anything to happen, but it did.  She told him she paid the lot rent for three months with the money he’d been setting aside, and she left him $100, but she was taking the rest to get a new place for her and Carlos Junior, or CJ as they called him.  It was like ten daggers in his back, sitting there in the kitchen, his duffel bag still in his hand, reading this note from Kayla.  Part of him wanted to go grab one of his guns from the bedroom and kill the guy.  Then he thought about CJ and how the last thing he would want is for him to think of his Dad as a murderer.  He also didn’t like the idea of seeing his son on visitation day at Leavenworth prison.  In the silence of the trailer, Carlos sat dazed and didn’t really know what to do next.

              As time passed, Carlos began to get things on track.  He was getting into the routine of his stateside duty assignment at Fort Knox as an instructor at the Armor school on base.  He kept himself busy after work fixing things at the trailer, keeping his lawn looking good, and trying not  to think about what had happened in Iraq that had caused him to come home three months earlier than the rest of his unit. 

Now, as he sat on the couch at 2 o’clock in the morning, Carlos knew what he needed to do to help get through this anxiety attack.  He could feel himself breathe heavier, and he became jittery just sitting there.  Usually, he would get up and do something, like the dishes, or polish his boots.  Anything was better than sitting idle when one of his attacks came on.  Taking one of the Xanax pills that Dr. Harrington prescribed helped, but when he was in the middle of an anxiety attack, they didn’t do much.  Sometimes the cloudy mind that they would induce would bring on his vivid imagination and things he would rather keep locked up tight.

Peggy had been working with Carlos for the last month.  He went to see her every Tuesday after he got off work for the day, and it had been helping him deal with his thoughts.  She showed him a sort of card game, as she called it, bodies in your pocket.  She would take pieces of heavy paper, the size of playing cards, and write on them the things you were having trouble with.  She would write down a person’s name, if you had lost someone in your life.  Or she would write down a place, or what she would call a trigger word, that might be a way to remember a tragic event.   Peggy would take the cards and laminate them.  She would tell you to keep them in your pocket, and when anxiety began to rise to the surface, take out the bodies in your pocket and begin to think about them in a positive way.  It was an interesting technique she developed, and it was of interest to some at the Department of the Army.  Many of them had been after Peggy for years to go back to school and get her MD, but she didn’t want any part of that.  She loved working with her soldiers, and now with the Middle East conflicts going on like they had since 9/11, Peggy felt a duty to the men coming home more than ever before.

So Carlos took out the bodies.  The first one was Charles Davenport.  Charles was always the first one.  No matter if Carlos shuffled the six cards she made for him, Charles was always first.  There were other traumatic events he saw in Iraq.  One of his friends lost both his legs only ten feet in front of him, on a dismounted patrol during his first tour in 2003.  He was the gunner of a Bradley, a lightweight reconnaissance tank used by the modern cavalry soldiers, when a nearby apartment building exploded and collapsed on top of them.  The sergeant that was with him in the turret was crushed to death by the falling debris.  Carlos sat there for 30 minutes, staring at the dead face of the sergeant, while he waited for help to come and dig them out of the bricks, mortar, and concrete.  He spent a year on night duty, putting the dead into body bags, and taking prisoners along with them, to the Iraqi police checkpoints.  Carlos had seen more death than he cared to think about.  But no matter what the event, it was always Charles that bothered him the most.

There it was on the coffee table in front of him.  The name was Charles Davenport, in neat handwriting, done by Peggy herself with a medium black Sharpie.  He thought about the good things.  They had been in basic training and AIT (advanced individual training) together.  There’s something about going through that with a person that makes you close.  The fact he was back at Fort Knox made him think about it even more, since that’s where they did their training.  Carlos remembered how excited they both were to be going to Fort Hood, Texas together after graduation, and then two years later both winding up in the First Cavalry Division, in the 1/7 Cavalry regiment. 

Charles had met a young woman off post, and they had twin girls before his first deployment.  Coming home from the first trip to Iraq was when Carlos met Kayla.  They would double date often and had some good times out as a foursome.  Kayla got pregnant and had CJ only a month before they left for the second deployment – this one scheduled for 15 months.  Carlos married her the day before he left for Iraq, and together they had big plans of buying a house and having more children when he returned. 

Charles and Carlos both struggled leaving behind their women and children.  The patrols they were going on were increasingly more dangerous.  Luckily, the army had been putting armor on the Humvees that they used, but it was still common for the crews to suffer major injuries and casualties.  In Baghdad, the terrorists were getting more sophisticated in how they gathered intelligence, and many of the patrols had been met strong resistance.  Charles and Carlos were both in B troop, and they were sending out 12-hour patrols every day and night, where the crews got 24 hours off at the end of their shift.  They would send them out in patrols with eight Humvees, two Bradleys, and a squad of dismounted soldiers.  They were talking to the locals to gather as much intelligence as they could.  Amazingly, many of the civilians spoke decent English.  The patrols always had a medic with them and at least one interpreter. 

Carlos remembered when things went to hell.  It was June 8
th
in 2004 when he and Charles ended up in the same Humvee.  They had a lot of guys on sick call the last week with some bad water giving many of the troop dysentery and causing the ones afflicted to stay back on base where toilets were close by.  For 48 hours, almost half the enlisted men were sick with it.

The lead Humvee, with Captain Sharkey, was down two men, so Charles came over to help out.  The Humvee had two privates in the rear that would provide dismount support as needed, the captain in the front passenger’s seat where he could access the computers and GPS system, a 50-caliber machine gunner in the turret, and a driver.  Carlos knew that the most dangerous place to be in the vehicle was the gunner:  the upper part of his body was exposed outside the Humvee.  Since he was manning a big machine gun, he would be a likely target.  Carlos volunteered to man the 50-caliber so Charles would drive.  They were going home in three months, and neither of them wanted to end up in a body bag in the back of a truck, heading to the morgue.