Thank You for Your Service (27 page)

“He’s in the front living room.”

“He’s in the front living room still? Has he calmed down?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, what did he do?”

“He hit me. So many times. With his hands.”

“Do you need an ambulance?”

“No.”

“Okay. Is your child okay?”

“Yeah. My, my, my baby’s okay. I was holding him when he, um, beat me.”

“Okay. Does he know the police are coming?”

“I don’t know. I’m making the phone call in the room.”

“Okay. I understand. Do you think he’ll open the door when they come?”

“I’ll open it.”

“Okay. Can we stay on the phone with you until they get there?”

“What was that?”

“Do you want me to stay on the phone with you until the police get there?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Fine?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, I’ll go ahead and disconnect. If he starts trying to make it through the door, just give a call back, but they should be there in the next few minutes.”

“All right, thank you.

So his dream about Harrelson continues, as do its consequences, and now there’s nothing to do but wait for the police to knock on the door.

Tausolo sits on a couch in the living room, where the old gouges in the walls have been covered with photographs of the new baby.

Theresa remains in the bedroom, where a blank piece of notebook paper has been carefully taped over the old fist-sized hole in the door.

Meanwhile, Brad Clark, who is the chief of police in Grandview Plaza, turns on the siren and speeds toward Geary Estates. He is no longer surprised by domestic-disturbance calls that turn out to involve a soldier. When he first took the job in 2004, when the wars were in their early years, the police force consisted of him and one other officer. Since then, as the population of Grandview Plaza more than doubled, mostly with military families moving into Geary Estates, the force has grown to six full-time and three part-time officers, and the equipment they carry now includes semiautomatic rifles, a door ram, and a ballistic riot shield. There have been fights to break up, marriages in violent free fall, and a notable increase in drug-related arrests. There was the case of a crazy high soldier who climbed to the top of a dirt mound and began waving around what seemed to be an assault rifle, and thank heavens the officers took enough time to realize it was a paintball gun. There was the case of a woman so unhinged after her husband deployed that she covered the walls of her apartment with feces and her children were taken into protective custody. There was the case of a woman from Korea who had no idea what to do when her American soldier husband died in a training exercise. “Where do I pay the electric bill?” she asked. “Where is Walmart?” The worst cases, though, were the two suicides. As police chief, Clark responded to both, saw the rooms, saw the bodies, and each time found himself thinking all over again of his first suicide, years before, when he was just starting out as a cop, which involved a garage and a nicely dressed woman hanging in the most absolute stillness. There she was again, directly in front of him, and it made him wonder: If that kind of triggering could happen to him, what must it be like for these soldiers?

“Dig a little deeper,” he has told his officers when they get a call
involving a soldier. “See what the problem is.” It’s something he has in mind when he and two other officers knock on Tausolo and Theresa’s door. But when he goes into the bedroom and sees what appear to be marks on Theresa’s cheeks and neck, he has no choice. He arrests Tausolo for assaulting Theresa, and when Tausolo protests, saying nothing happened, he says, “Don’t stand there and bullshit me.”

That’s the way Clark will remember it. Tausolo will remember it differently, that Clark snaps at him, “Look at me when I’m talking to you,” and he decides right then and there that there’s no point in trying to persuade Clark that he hadn’t hit Theresa, that he’d cussed her out because he discovered some cigarettes and didn’t want her breast-feeding the baby with nicotine in her, that she’d said she was going to take the baby and go home to Samoa if he kept yelling, that she was terrified he was about to become violent because of how violent he had been before. Instead of saying any of that, though, he holds still while he is handcuffed. This is the way things go. He knows it, as surely as anything. Life involves following orders. If he is told to collect thirty-nine signatures, he will collect thirty-nine signatures. If someone says, “Do you want a quilt?” he will want a quilt. If someone says, “Put some jet engines on your legs,” he will put some jet engines on his legs. If someone says to get in the Humvee, he will get in the Humvee. If someone says, “Look at me when I’m talking to you,” he will look at him, and then he will get in the police car and say nothing more.

So he is surprised when Brad Clark—who will later remember thinking, “I wanted to give the guy one more opportunity. This guy’s not a jerk. This guy, it appears to me there’s a problem. The guy needed frickin’ help”—breaks the silence with a question.

“Hey, man, you’ve got some issues here, don’t you?” he asks.

Silence again, until Tausolo mumbles something about PTSD and multiple deployments.

Well, be sure to tell the judge, Clark suggests, so it can be taken into account.

They are at the jail now. Tausolo is processed in, given a yellow jumpsuit to change into, and put in a cell with four other inmates. The only place for him is a middle bunk. His heart is racing from nerves. He
doesn’t have his Zoloft and Lunesta and Trazodone and Abilify and Concerta and Klonopin. For three nights, he dreams of Harrelson. On his meds, it happens once a week. Here, it happens every time he shuts his eyes.

Finally, after the weekend, he is released. He goes to court, pleads guilty to a charge of disorderly behavior, pays a fine of a few hundred dollars, and promises to get marriage counseling.

Back at home, he apologizes to Theresa, and Theresa apologizes to him.

And then he is back to where he was before all of this happened, at the WTB, where he reluctantly seeks out his case manager to tell her what happened.

The reluctance is because she is new—his third case manager in as many months. Such is the nature of personnel churn at the WTB. Sergeants who are squad leaders and platoon leaders come and go, often with destabilizing effects as the new ones adjust to the peculiarities of the place. It’s the same at the command level—just when things are going fairly smoothly, it’s time for a new battalion commander, who, on his first official day, assembles the soldiers at the parade field for a change-of-command ceremony. It’s a gray, drizzly day, and the soldiers stand in the wet grass with their hands clasped behind their backs, and only when a few of them drop to the ground quaking does he realize that the customary cannon blast wasn’t such a good idea.

Of all the personnel changes, though, the change of a case manager can be the most destabilizing of all. This is the person who is supposed to coordinate a WTB soldier’s day-to-day care, and when Aieti met this new one for the first time—it was just before he was arrested—he didn’t know what to make of her.

“Well, welcome, sir!” she had said when he walked into her office. “I’m going to be your new case manager.”

She motioned him to a seat. He sat.
What happened to the old case manager?
he thought.

“Okay. My role. What is my purpose in your life?” she continued. “This is my purpose in your life. I am like your mom.”

She smiled at him and winked.

A winker
, he thought.

“We’re gonna do a risk assessment right now,” she said. She brought up a form on her computer. “Okay, on a scale of zero to three, three being, ‘This is horribly heavy on my heart,’ zero is, ‘I’m all cool, everything is copacetic,’ where are you on that scale?”

“Uh, two,” he said, wondering why he was doing another risk assessment after having done so many.

“Two,” she said. She noted his answer and turned her attention to his treatment at Topeka. “Did it help? Did it help at all? Was it a first step to helping? I’m talking about the PTSD program. How’d you feel afterward?”

“Good,” he said.

“Okay. Good means, ‘I’m on my road, on the way to recovery,’ ” she said. “Good means, ‘Okay, now I understand the scope of what PTSD means, but I still have a lot of issues with my symptoms.’ ”

“Mmm.”

“Okay,” she said, translating his
mmm
to an answer. “Any history of domestic violence or neglect?”

“No.”

“Okay. History of suicidal-homicidal thoughts.”

“None.”

“None,” she said. “When was the last?”

“I never had any,” he said.

“You never had any?”

“No.”

“Okay. PTSD symptoms. Zero is, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ six is, ‘My anxiety level is out of the roof, I’m gonna beat somebody up if they even talk to me, look at me wrong, I can’t sleep, I’m having nightmares, the whole realm.’ Where are you in that? Six is horrible, zero is none.”

“Two,” he said.

“Two? Okay,” she said.

He waited for her to wink again.

“Okay. I think we’re good,” she said after a few more minutes of this. “If you need anything and you have a question about something, if I don’t
know the question, if it’s not in my lane, I can find out. So. Anything I can do for you, that’s my yob. Okay?”

Did she say “yob”?
he thought.

“I’m mom away from Samoa,” she said. “So I’m the Samoan mama.”

She is the Samoan mama, and now, as he goes to see her for the second time to explain that he has been arrested and jailed, he is wishing he still had his previous case manager. Or the case manager before that.

This time, though, instead of talking and winking so much, she listens, and when he is done, she reaches into her purse, finds fifteen dollars, gives it to him, and tells him to go buy some roses for Theresa.

So many people are rooting for Tausolo, it seems. Case managers. Police chiefs.

“Thank you,” he says.

He leaves her office. He has never bought roses before. Where does a person buy roses? He goes home.

“Where can I buy roses?” he asks Theresa.

“Why?” she answers.

This is getting too complicated for him.

He hands her the fifteen dollars.

Before he got blown up, he could have figured it out. How hard is it to buy roses? There’s a flower shop on Fort Riley. They sell them at Walmart. But such are the effects of being in a Humvee that rolls over three buried 130-millimeter artillery shells, which explode at the perfect moment. Up he went, and down he came, and once his brain was done rattling around from a blast wave that passed through him faster than the speed of sound, here came the rest of it. Memory, fucked. The ability to pay attention, fucked. Balance. Hearing. Impulse control. Perception. Dreams. All of it, fucked. “The signature wound of the war” is what the military calls traumatic brain injury, and that’s one way to see it, but another is in a conversation that Tausolo has one day with a woman named Meg Vernon, who is a clinician at Fort Riley’s TBI clinic.

“Like one time, I came in the gate, I forgot to register my car and I
got pulled over, and the guy said I could keep going—and then when I get going I don’t know where I’m going,” he tells her with some embarrassment at how forgetful he has become.

He has come to see her so she can help him with his memory, or at least give him some tricks for remembering things. One more person rooting for Tausolo—that’s Meg Vernon, who begins a session with him by holding up a photograph of a young woman.

“Her name is Catherine Taylor,” she tells Tausolo. “Say it back to me so I know you heard it right.”

“Catherine Taylor,” Tausolo says.

“And what are you going to do to remember her name?” Meg asks. “Walk me through what you’re going to do. Because we’re probably not going to remember it unless we really take some effort to commit it to our memory. So what are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know,” Tausolo says. “ ’Cause I can’t associate it with—”

“Because it doesn’t look like anyone?” Meg asks.

“Yeah.”

“Do you know a Catherine? Or a Taylor?” she prompts.

“No.”

“Okay. We can use multiple strategies. You might say it over and over. Or you might think of CT. I think of, like, a CT scan when I see CT. But whatever comes to you that you might be able to use.”

Tausolo keeps staring at the photograph.

“Think you’ve got that tucked away?” Meg says after a while. “You want to look at it a little longer?”

Tausolo shrugs.

She puts the photograph down and picks up another, this of a man.

“His name is Henry Fisher.”

“Henry Fisher,” Tausolo repeats.

“Henry Fisher,” Meg says. “So walk me through how you’re going to remember his name.”

“Fisher …” he says, trailing off.

“Do you fish?” she asks. “Are you a fisherman? Or do you know somebody that fishes?”

“Yeah I know somebody that fishes.”

“Okay.” She lets that idea settle in and turns to the first name. “Henry.” She points to some of his facial features. “He’s kind of hairy.”