Thank You for Your Service (30 page)

Now, from the open windows on the second floor, comes the sound of Rob saying to Adam: “I flew to the Green Zone once to see a guy who got shot. There was all this gunfire, and I was thinking, shit, I don’t wanna die doing this. I don’t even like that guy that much …”

Every so often, the old guys wonder what goes on up there. How could they know, though? Most of them came home from their wars to no help at all. There was nothing set up for them, only what they could figure out on their own.

“I would get next to my wife as close as I could, as hard as I could, because I know I was going to dream about it. I was afraid to go to sleep,” Raymond Sherman says of what he did after Guyana, which came down to crushing himself against a woman until their marriage came to an end.

“I used to have dreams of rocks coming out of a machine gun,” Mark Fischer says of the help he got. “I was in a bar and I told a guy this, and the guy said he learned every night when he was going to bed to lay there, go to your higher power, whatever, and say, ‘God, I don’t want to dream about Vietnam anymore.’ He said, ‘Just say that every night for a month, and I guarantee you, you won’t have any more dreams.’ That was in the mid-1990s, and by God, it worked. I don’t have dreams.”

The whistle goes off. He’s ready for it. He’s fine.

The pyramid grows.

Among the seven, the only one who had gotten any kind of professional help was Jim George, who had become suicidal twelve years after he was shot. “My dad caught me with a .45, at the table, about to do it,” he says, and because of that he was admitted to a fledgling residential program for Vietnam vets, where he stayed for a year. What he came to understand: “The worst thing about being in it is killing,” he says of war. “The worst for me was that I got to like it. I got pretty good at it. I hated myself for a long time for getting that good, liking it that much.”

The program, as it turns out, was Fred Gusman’s.

“Saved my life,” Jim says.

That saved life allowed him to marry and divorce four times and eventually brought him to the Veterans Home, where he lost his legs, got his wheelchair, and was at the picnic tables one day when he saw Fred Gusman going into the vacant building. He tried to talk to him, he says, and was disappointed when Fred didn’t seem to remember him.

Maybe it was his appearance. Fred knew him when he was six-foot-two.

Maybe it was something else. “Why would he remember one person when there’s probably thousands and thousands that he’s seen?”

He changes the subject to life at the Veterans Home and the good things about it. He has his own room at the hospital. He gets twenty-four-hour care from nurses who have learned to keep their distance when he’s having a violent dream. He almost never gets visitors, and so he is thankful at Christmas when all of the residents are given a gift, although for the past two years the gift has been a pair of socks.

“What am I supposed to do, put ’em on my dick?” he says.

This time, everyone laughs.

The beer pyramid keeps growing. Saturday goes by.

Now it’s Sunday. New pyramid. Same thing.

Now the weekend is over and, at last, two months after Adam got here, Trauma Group is under way. The guys are gathered around a table. Fred is about to say something. Here it comes, the kick in the face. All of a sudden, loud laughter drifts up from the picnic tables.

“Somebody’s having fun down there,” Fred says.

Not that Adam is around to hear it.

His decision was to fly home, spend a few days, and drive back so he would have a car. Five days at the most, he promised Fred.

“Don’t forget to come back,” Fred said, not at all sure he would.

Adam wasn’t sure, either. “It’s a fucking black hole, sucking me in,” he said of home.

Six days later, he’s back. The surgery had been successful. But if Jaxson was suddenly hearing, one of the things he got to hear in its full volume was Adam yelling and throwing his wedding ring at Saskia as she screamed that she couldn’t do this alone. They were going broke. He could get help in Kansas. She was going to a therapist because of him. She was on antianxiety medication because of him. He needed to stay home, be a husband, be a father. “Grow some fucking balls and man up,” she screamed. Eventually she apologized and he left for California, but now, as Trauma Group continues, and the day comes closer when it will be Adam’s turn to talk, to “detect everything about you,” as Fred put it, “because it isn’t when it went boom,” Saskia’s pleadings are only increasing. Texts. Phone calls. Letters.

“I’m so sorry, I dont know whats going on with me anymore. But nothing I seem to do seems to be helping. I’m just melting in my own self pity,” she writes one night in the longest, saddest message yet. “I walk downstairs and look at that stupid fish and all I can see is you sitting there, shaking, with a gun to your fucking head, fighting you for it and not even thinking about the possibility of myself getting hurt or the fact that our son is upstairs crying or that our daughter could walk in at any moment and find her daddy’s brains splattered all over the basement. That moment I was forever changed …”

She is making herself sick with what she’s becoming, but that doesn’t mean the messages stop.

Finally, one of the family counselors at Pathway calls her to explain what Adam is dealing with, that if he comes home too soon he’ll almost certainly turn suicidal, but Saskia has some things to say, too.

“I’m pretty much tired of doing it myself,” she tells the counselor as
she sits in her living room, while Jaxson naps and Zoe is in the backyard, splashing around in an above-ground swimming pool they had bought during one of their good stretches. “My daughter cries every night … His leave is pretty much gone … I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be rude …”

Her voice is rising, enough for Zoe to come in from the pool and see if something is wrong, and Saskia goes to the front porch. She lights a cigarette as she keeps talking—her newest habit.

“I’m sick of it. I really am. I did not have kids, I did not get married, to be on my own … It doesn’t matter. If I lose my house, if I lose my car … What I’m getting really pissed at … I
understand
 …” she says, as one of the dogs comes into the living room and Zoe gets on the floor with him.

“My entire family is falling apart because of this … There’s only so much I can take …”

Her voice is shaking now, and she’s wiping her eyes. “Eddie, lay down,” Zoe says.

“I have not gotten
any
help. From anyone … That isn’t the point. I shouldn’t have to be doing this twenty-four-seven while he’s out there having fun … I can’t … I
can’t
. I can’t afford it …”

“Lay down,” Zoe says.

“I’m so angry because he’s not fucking taking care of what he’s supposed to
 … I am
done
. I am
done
. I am fed up. I am
sick
of it. I am tired of being made to feel guilty. Poor Adam. It’s always poor Adam …”

Zoe starts giggling as Eddie licks her neck. “Okay. More kisses,” she says when he stops.

“I can’t do it anymore. I cannot do it anymore … Why is it fair? … So when he comes home in two and a half months, I can’t even leave for the weekend …”

“Not in the eyeball!”

“Because the whole time I’ll have to worry about whether he hears my son or not … Once you drop a baby, it kind of takes the trust out of it …”

Saskia gets up and comes back into the living room. She stinks of cigarettes. Her eye makeup is a mess.

“Okay … Okay … Bye.”

Zoe, dog-kissed and grinning, looks at her.

“Oh my fucking God. I’ll fucking kill him.”

Zoe keeps looking.

“Go! Play!”
she says, and when Zoe goes, she sits on the couch, trying to figure out what just happened. “If he comes home, he’s going to kill himself. If he stays there, we’re done.

“What am I supposed to do?”

Her phone buzzes with a message.

Adam.

“I’m almost packed. Leaving in an hour.”

He must know about the conversation.

“Well she thinks I need to let you stay,” Saskia writes back.

“Just let it go,” he writes. “I’ll be home in a few days.”

“How am I supposed to let it go? I either suck it up and you stay or I get threatened with you killing yourself.”

“I’ll be fine. I know what I need to do.”

“No. Just stay.”

“Too bad,” he writes back after a few minutes. “I already left.”

“Turn around.”

“No. You live with it now.”

Where is he? she wonders. Did he really leave?

“You get what you want now,” reads his next message.

What does he mean by that? She calls him. He doesn’t answer. She calls again. No answer.

“He didn’t leave,” she says. “No way he left.”

But he did.

He emptied out his room, threw everything in the car, said goodbye to no one, just left, and now, as he heads east, away from Pathway and back to his traumatized wife and craving daughter and son he dropped who may or may not be okay, he is once again a man out of control. He is shaking and crying and wishing to be dead. Saskia calls and he ignores it. She calls again and he ignores it again. Now it is Fred calling and he swallows hard and answers. “Did you leave?” “Yeah.” He tries to explain, and instead of telling him to come back, Fred simply says the choice of
what to do is his. “You need to take care of yourself,” he says, and when he hangs up, Adam feels as alone as he did when he was in Iraq, waiting in line for the helicopter out of the war and the soldier screamed at him, “Next one’s yours.”

Four years later, he is still waiting for it.

He doesn’t know what to do.

In Kansas, Saskia doesn’t know what to do, either.

He keeps driving. She keeps waiting to hear from him. Both of them know that something has to be done, that this has become unbearable, and it is finally Adam who makes a decision.

He swings the car around and heads west, away from Saskia and back to Fred.

He will tell him everything. His guilt over Doster. His guilt over Emory. His guilt over Jaxson. His guilt over Zoe. His guilt over Saskia. His guilt over the way he grew up. His guilt over all of it, all the way back to the beginning. That’s his decision, to finally stop dying and instead turn himself over completely to someone who has been dealing with fuck-ups like him forever.

Somewhere in Fred’s office is a video of him when he first started. It was, by his own estimate, seven thousand mentally wounded veterans ago, on a day in 1981 when Jim George was about to aim a gun at himself and Adam was about to be born. Fred had a mustache then. His hair was longer. His voice was a little higher.

Other than that, only the landscape has changed.

“There is no magic here. Okay?” he said that day to ninety young combat veterans from Vietnam, thirty-four of whom had tried to kill themselves. “The magic is you.”

Now Fred waits in his office to start the next session of Trauma Group. There’s goodness in everyone. The moment has arrived to let Adam know.

During the war, every day would begin the same way. The soldiers would tuck lucky charms into their pockets and joke about their final words. They would gather in quick circles to pray and smoke the last cigarette of their lives. They would tighten their body armor, push in their earplugs, lower their shatter-resistant sunglasses, and tug on their burn-resistant gloves, and when someone called out, “Let’s go,” they would climb into their Humvees and go, knowing full well what was waiting for them down the road. They had seen Harrelson’s Humvee rise into the air and burst into fire. They had seen Emory get shot in the head and collapse in his own spreading blood. They had seen soldiers lose legs, lose arms, lose feet, lose hands, lose fingers, lose toes, and lose eyes, and they had heard them, too, in the aid station, in whatever pain is enough pain to make a nineteen-year-old scream. They had heard a soldier ask, “Is anything sticking out of my head?” after a mortar attack. They had heard a doctor say, “I’m hoping, I’m hoping,” about a soldier who in a few minutes would be dead. They had heard a soldier tell a dying soldier as he stuffed what was left of him into a Humvee, “You’re gonna have to move your feet so I can close the door.” They had heard a soldier who had lost his right leg and left leg and right arm and most of his left arm saying, “Ow, it hurts. It hurts.” They had heard a sergeant who was watching something skid across the floor of the aid station, which had fallen from a shredded soldier who was about to die, say with sadness, “That’s a toe.” They had heard Aieti ask in the most hopeful voice a soldier could ever muster, “What happened to Harrelson?” They had heard Golembe say to Schumann, “None of this shit
would have happened if you were there.” Most of all, they had heard explosion after explosion and seen dozens of Humvees disappear into breathtaking clouds of fire and debris, and by the end most of them had been inside such a cloud themselves, blindly feeling around in those initial moments to determine if they were alive, or dead, or intact, or in pieces, as their ears rang and their hearts galloped and their souls darkened and their eyes occasionally filled with tears. So they knew. They
knew
. And yet day after day they would go out anyway, which eventually came to be what the war was about. Not winning. Not losing. Nothing so grand. Just trying until it was time to go home and discovering that life after the war turned on trying again.