Thank You for Your Service (33 page)

“Seasonal vegetable,” types the aide and pauses. “What’d you say? Trio?”

“Yeah. Trio,” says the chef. “But you might put it at the front.”

“Tri? Tri-seasonal?”

“You could use three.”

“Tri-Seasonal Vegetable Bisque,” types the aide. “Now we’re in the main. What’s it going to be?”

“Lamb,” says the chef.

“What are we going to call it?” asks the aide.

“Lamb,” says the chef.

There is choreography to these dinners. Chiarelli dresses casually, offers a toast and during appetizers might tell the story of John Wilkes Booth being buried for a time not far from the house. Beth Chiarelli wears her double pearls and might mention the strange way the flowers grow on the spot where Booth was eventually exhumed. Members of Chiarelli’s staff and a civilian protocol officer will be just out of sight, sending texts and updates. “The dinner has formed well.” “Everybody seems happy.” “No issues so far.” The Strolling Strings will always play an encore, and the encore is often a song called “Rocky Top.”

“Herb-crusted,” the chef says now about the lamb.

“Herb-crusted,” the aide types. “With?”

“I would put fig demi-glace.”

“And?”

“Green beans,” the chef says.

“Put some color on the plate,” the aide says. “Carrots?”

“I’d just go with the green beans, man,” the chef says.

The dinners are formal. Gold-rimmed plates. Many, many forks. This is what certain people in Washington expect, and Chiarelli has seen its effects, such as the dinner a few months before when a U.S. senator clasped her hands in delight as the Strolling Strings launched into the song “I Can See Clearly Now.” The senator’s importance at the dinner was highlighted in the dossier assembled beforehand by Chiarelli’s staff, where, under “Reason for Inviting,” they had written, “An influential member of both the SASC and SAC.” That was shorthand for the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee, two committees vital to Chiarelli’s interest in getting every single person in official Washington to pay attention to soldier mental health issues. So it wasn’t the worst thing when at the end of the song, after the last chorus of “It’s gonna be a bright-bright, bright-bright, sunshiny day,” the senator, beaming, said to Chiarelli, “Thanks to your efforts, there will be more soldiers having bright, sunshiny days.”

“S’mores,” the chef says, about dessert.

“We gotta make it sound good,” the aide says.

“We’ll use the new gelato machine and make a chocolate gelato, a meringue for the marshmallow, a graham cracker, and give it a crazy name.”

“Newfangled?”

“Uh …”

“The Chiarelli s’mores? S’mores … s’mores … Suicidal s’mores?”

“No.”

At the same dinner, another of the guests, the incoming army surgeon general, spoke of her father, who had fought in World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam. He had been nominated a few times for the Medal of Honor and awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Valor, and three Purple Hearts. In World War Two, under fire, he had run across an open field, climbed a cliff, and, as he had described it at one of his award ceremonies, “I just started eliminating the Germans one by one. After the
fifth one, six more came after me. They kept spraying with automatic weapons, but I just kept running around to different spots, popping up and shooting.” That was her father sixty-seven years ago, and now he lives with her, and she said she begins every day listening to him screaming in his sleep. So yes, she said, as surgeon general, she would be paying extra attention to issues involving mental health.

“How about reconstructed?” the chef says.

“Reconstructed s’mores. That’s fun,” the aide says. He types it in. He changes Reconstructed to Deconstructed. He adds, “w/Caramel Sauce and Macerated Raspberries.” He prints it out and looks it over. “That’s a pretty good menu,” he says.

So go things in Washington, where in a few days some of the people who authorize wars and fund wars will gather with someone who ran one for a while and now is obsessed with healing some of the people who were in it. “This is a problem we’re going to be suffering with for many, many years,” Chiarelli often says at gatherings with those pleading eyes of his, trying to convey the urgency of the moment, the depth of the problem, the need for action, and now he will have the chance to say it again.

Except soon after the menu is done, one of the congressmen who had promised to attend pulls out because of some kind of conflict with some other event. Chiarelli’s staff scrambles to find a replacement, but now another congressman pulls out, too, for some reason, and when another might be wavering, the scramble is to get an e-mail out to all of the others on the guest list. Was it the topic that did it? Something else? Doesn’t matter. “It is with regret that I inform you the Suicide Prevention Quarters Dinner scheduled for 21 September at GEN and Mrs. Chiarelli’s quarters has been cancelled due to unforeseen scheduling conflicts,” it says. “The office of the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army will attempt to re-schedule this dinner at a date yet to be determined.”

It will never happen. In a few months, Chiarelli will retire from the army. The monthly suicide meetings that he began will become something different under his successor, on whose watch the number of suicides will keep rising until it is exceeding the number of combat deaths and averaging almost one a day. The Pistachio Sea Bass w/Frisée and
Warm Bacon Vinaigrette will never have its moment, and neither will the Tri-Seasonal Vegetable Bisque and Deconstructed S’mores.

That’s how things can go in Washington, too, up at the high levels, and meanwhile, two days after the suicide dinner would have taken place, on the other side of the country, down at the low levels, another gathering goes on as scheduled.

“You okay?” Saskia asks.

It’s graduation day at Pathway.

“Mm-hmm,” Adam says.

In Trauma Group, he had done what he promised himself he would do when he returned that day in surrender. He started with his childhood and went all the way through the war. He must have spent twenty minutes just on fucked-up Emory, whose blood he could taste as he spoke, and thirty minutes on dear dead Doster, whose every word to him he could hear. He talked about losing his footing as he tried to get Emory through that doorway, about what Golembe had said after Doster had died, about coming home ashamed, about dropping Jaxson, about going down to the furnace room, and about his years of suicidal thoughts. He talked about all of it, every humiliating thing. Some great soldier, he said, and when he was done, he wiped his eyes and waited to hear the others confirm what he already knew about himself.

“You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of,” one said.

“You did more than enough,” another said.

He loved those men in that moment, and he loves them now as the ceremony begins and they are called one by one up to the stage.

“Are any of your family members present?” Fred Gusman asks the first of them as he walks uncertainly to the podium. A hundred or so people are watching—family, friends, some of the Rotarians who take everyone bowling on Monday nights to help them get used to being out in public, a woman who will give each person a yellow long-stemmed rose.

“Nobody came,” he says.

“Well, that’s why you have us,” Fred says, and stands to the side as
the soldier describes three deployments and two suicide attempts and says, “This is the happiest I’ve been in a long, long time.”

There is applause for him as he gets his yellow rose, and then Fred calls up the next one, who is wearing dark sunglasses and is so nervous he begins gasping his words. “My family thought I was crazy. I was ready to give up,” he says. “All I knew is I wanted to kill myself …”

“I wrote something, but I don’t know if …” number three begins and then stops. He bows his head, leans on the podium, and looks as if he might collapse. He walks off without saying another word and disappears out a door.

“My God,” Saskia says quietly, starting to cry.

“Okay, he’ll be back,” Fred says, and calls up number four, who has decided to wear his uniform for the occasion. “So, yeah, this is the next step for me in my life,” he says, and as he keeps talking, Saskia is crying so hard her makeup is running.

Number five:

“I haven’t wrote anything,” he barely gets out because of nerves. “I appreciate your coming, and I appreciate your support.”

Number six:

“I thought everything was going good, and then all of a sudden” is how he begins, and how he finishes is “Now I know how beautiful life can be.”

“Well, we’re getting right down to the end here,” Fred says.

Number seven:

“Frightening, shameful, and humiliating” is how he describes his war, and then he says of what he learned at Pathway: “I know now that everything matters because everything has to do with everything.”

Number eight:

He speaks of the day he wanted to kill himself and called his grandmother, whose husband had killed himself after Vietnam. “She told me if I did it I would break her heart,” he says.

“Okay, last but not least,” Fred says, and for the slightest moment gets uncharacteristically emotional. Maybe it’s because of pressure: he is nearly out of money and had begun making contingency plans to shut
down, and then came an unexpected donation of ten thousand dollars in the morning mail, which means he will still be open when fifteen new guys arrive next week. Or maybe it’s something else. “These warriors are truly brave people,” he continues after a moment. “I’ve had the privilege now to meet and know all of them, and the last one that’s going to speak today is Adam. So come on up, Adam.”

Adam goes on up.

He looks at the other graduates with their yellow roses. “A few months ago, someone asked me what does it mean to graduate from here. Is it proof that you’re cured? I’m not cured. I don’t think any of us are or ever will be,” he says. “But I’m definitely in a better place than I was six months ago. Even a couple of months ago for that matter. It feels like in the last couple of weeks, a million pounds have been lifted off my back. I can breathe again. I can wake up in the morning and smile. For the first time, I’m not thinking about killing myself every day.”

He looks toward Fred. “I want to thank you for saving my life.”

He turns to Saskia. “I’m going to be home,” he says. “Finally home.”

He keeps looking at her. She watches him get his rose, which he lays across the crook of his arm like a shotgun.

“Okay, here we go,” she says under her breath.

Clothes: packed. Fishing rods: packed. Rose: packed. Big TV: leave it for the next guy.

“If I’m ever in Kansas,” one of the others who is leaving says to Adam.

“It was nice to meet you and your shitty wife,” another says, to which Saskia smiles, pretty sure it’s a joke.

“Go be home,” another says, and as the last words Adam will hear at Pathway, at least they’re more encouraging than the last time he started a journey home, when a soldier told Adam in his final moments of the war that he’d walk with him as far as the shitters.

That was the walk after Saskia had said to him over a scratchy phone connection, “I’m scared of what you might do,” and Adam had told her, “You know I’d never hurt you.” Now, as they head onto the highway, Adam says, “This is the first time I’ve seen clouds in California.”

“Really?” Saskia says.

“Yeah. It rained that first week, and it’s been clear blue skies ever since,” he says.

The plan is to drive through the night, stop in Denver to see relatives, and go home from there. He turns on the radio.

She doesn’t change the station.

“Like it?” he says. He reaches over. He pats her on the leg.

She doesn’t push his hand away.

They head north toward Sacramento as the sun sets, and east toward sunrise in Utah.

“There’s nothing to be nervous about,” Adam says at one point, when Saskia has been quiet for a while.

At another point, he telephones one of his old soldiers, who he found out is at Fort Carson, just south of Denver. “It’s Schumann,” he says, and gives him the address of where he’ll be stopping, just in case the soldier feels like going for a drive.

“Are you nervous?” he asks Saskia again, a little bit later.

She is. She smokes now. She is in counseling. She is on antidepressants. She is unsure about whether their marriage can last. She sees herself sometimes bolting with the kids to North Dakota. She still tailgates at 80 miles per hour. “If people would move the fuck over and get the fuck out of the way, I wouldn’t have a problem,” she says when she takes the wheel for a while and a slow-moving car won’t move to another lane.

But when Adam is driving and flies over a bump in the highway he hadn’t seen, instead of screaming, or seething, or glaring, she instead rubs the back of his head until he calms down, and in this way they arrive peaceably in Denver.

They have been driving for eighteen hours. In Reno, at two in the morning, they had stood in line at a convenience store along with an Elvis impersonator. In Wyoming, at a gas station outside of Laramie, an old man had yelled to Adam, “Come here. I want to show you something,” so Adam went over and found himself looking at the freshly decapitated head of an elk. Once, long ago, just back from the war and trying to figure out what had happened to him, Adam had said, “I was a normal guy who got sent to Iraq and became crazy, so they sent me back
to America to become sane, and now it’s America that’s driving me crazy.” But something about this drive through America is reassuring to him, and in the best of moods, he hugs his aunt, and then turns his attention to his grandmother, who spent so many silent years married to her war-wounded husband and now looks over Adam from head to toe.

“How are you?” she asks.

“Better,” he says.

“Much much better?” she asks.

There are others here, too, including a kitchen full of people cooking barbecue and a patio full of people drinking beer, and now, pulling up out front, ringing the doorbell, making his way toward Adam, here comes the soldier from Fort Carson.

He has a tattoo on his right arm in honor of James Doster.