Thank You for Your Service (9 page)

He writes about the night Cajimat burned to death:

He writes about another nightmare, or starts to, but doesn’t finish because it is day sixteen now, and he has made it past Level I, past Level II, and arrived at Level III. He can wear shoes with laces. He can shave unsupervised, and go to the Loaf ’N Jug. He’ll finish writing later when he’s alone again, but soon he’ll be getting his first visitor, Sascha.

What he has written so far:

It was an eight-hour drive from Fort Riley to Pueblo, and for a pregnant woman in a compact car Topeka would have been easier. But Sascha made the drive without hesitation. She needed to see if this program she knew nothing about was helping. In Kansas, he’d been taking forty-three pills a day for pain, for anxiety, for depression, for nightmares—were there fewer pills now? Was he still having flashbacks? Thrashing around in his sleep? Sleepwalking into closets, looking for his rifle? Could he now start telling her what had happened during the war? And could she tell him about what was happening to her? She’d had a dream the other night that was the worst dream she’d ever had. She’d given birth, and for some reason she had taken the baby and put it in a pressure cooker, and then she had woken up from the dream, terrified and alone. Could she tell him that soldiers aren’t the only people who have nightmares? Was he ready to hear that?

She gets to Pueblo, checks into a hotel, and waits for visiting hours to begin. Nic, meanwhile, is being given his medications. Antidepressants. Mood stabilizers. Pill, water, swallow, pill, water, swallow, all under the observation of a nurse who after the last pill checks Nic’s mouth to make sure he swallowed them all. The pills are kept in a locked room behind the main desk along with cigarettes, which are doled out on breaks. When Nic is done, he is replaced by another soldier, and then another, twenty-three PTSD cases in all, including one who was blinded in an explosion and is being guided by a dog. So many soldiers with psychological injuries envy soldiers with physical injuries because those soldiers can see evidence that something is really wrong with them, but what to make of this poor eyeless soldier who doesn’t even get that benefit? The soldiers are especially tender with him. So is a nurse who walks over to him, not with pills, but with some donated items. “You hit the jackpot,” she says, placing them in his hands. There is a tube of shaving cream.
There is a small bottle of body wash and a small bottle of shampoo. He runs his fingers over the labels.

“Suave,” she says.

“Fantastic,” the soldier says, smiling like he’s the luckiest blind man in the world.

“Smoke break,” one of the other soldiers hollers now. “Smoke break.”

“Level III smoke break,” a nurse calls out, checking the time. The smokers with Level III privileges are led out by an escort who has a key to unlock the door, and soon after they return, all of the soldiers go into a conference room for a session that their daily schedule lists as CPT Group.

It’s a therapy session scheduled to last an hour, and the model for it, much like Topeka’s, is to get the soldiers to think about what happened to them by reading from their journals and talking with one another until they are no longer avoiding the subject. Of all the treatment protocols being used for PTSD, this form, called Cognitive Processing Therapy, is regarded as one of the more effective, but that doesn’t mean the hour will be easy. Doors have been punched after these sessions, furniture has been tossed, and walls have needed to be patched because at one time or another every one of the soldiers in this place has felt fucking violent.

“All right. Everybody pay attention, and don’t talk when others are talking,” says the staff member leading the session, seated at the head of a long table. He thinks for a moment. “Also, don’t fart,” he pleads, and with that out of the way, the first soldier starts reading.

He is a soldier who spent his war looking for hidden roadside bombs. “This is just something that’s been on my mind for quite a while,” he says. “It’s entitled Bombs Bombs Everywhere.” He sits at the head of the table with his journal, reading slowly, and if this were happening anywhere else guys would be laughing at him, or throwing beer bottles, or doing whatever it would take to get him to be quiet, cut it out, shut the fuck up, but they’re all here, in this place, in this room, and when his voice cracks as he says, “I still see the bombs, I see bombs all the time,” a few of them duck their heads because of what they’re seeing, too. “Make it stop,” he reads. “Make the bombs go away. I don’t want to see them anymore. How do I become normal? How can I stop seeing bombs?”

He looks up from his journal and sees who is listening to him. Heads hang. One guy is in sunglasses. Feet are tapping. Legs are twitching. Another guy presses his hands between his knees and then stands up from the table, too nervous to sit. Nic is standing, too, at the far end, and he asks the guy who has been reading, “What kind of vehicle were you driving?”

“I was the Husky guy.”

“The Husky’s the big one?” Nic asks.

“It’s the vehicle that goes in front of the convoy.”

“You were in Iraq, right?” another guy asks.

“Yes.”

“Were you hit?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s hard being the first one,” someone else says, another Husky driver, an Afghanistan guy, “because, I mean, you have the whole convoy coming behind you, and if someone behind you gets hit, you feel bad because you’re supposed to be the one to find it.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s talk about habituation,” the session leader says. “Think about when you guys go see a scary movie. The first time you see a scary movie, at least for me, it sucks. I get home, and I have nightmares, and I’m frustrated, and I don’t sleep well, and just whatever because I’m a wuss at scary movies. If I go see the same scary movie the next day, and I go see it a third day, the third day, it’s still a little bit scary, but it’s not getting to me as bad. The fourth and fifth day is when I’m starting to sit there and I’m actually starting to get a little bit bored. The tenth time I see that scary movie, I’m like, okay, cue Freddy Krueger, here’s the cheerleader who gets her neck cut off, here’s the blood, and now the chain saw, and I’m getting bored. It’s the same principle with explosions for you guys. If you guys can go to a place and have the experience repeatedly and stay with it until it starts to dissipate, that’s when the explosion starts to be less and less impactful. It’s called habituation. To habituate. Make sense?”

And it does make sense until the next soldier starts reading what he has written. “Here goes,” he begins. “I personally never shot a round
into somebody but goddamn if I didn’t see my fair share of deaths, charred bodies, and dismembered—” He pauses for a moment, and when he resumes he describes the thing he is trying to habituate, a day in which he discovered a pile of skulls. He had no idea what to do, he says. He didn’t know who they were. Insurgents? Victims? Men? Women? He decided that taking them back to the base was the right thing, so he picked them up, skull by skull, loaded them into his vehicle, began driving, and then, near the base, pulled over. “What the fuck was I doing?” he reads. “I kicked them off. I booted the skulls into the ditch next to the road, and drove through the gate thinking, ‘Fucking ragheads.’ ”

“That story right there,” Nic says. “Would you tell your wife that story?”

“The first time I ever told my wife about an Iraq incident was two weeks ago,” he says.

“How’d she take it?” Nic asks.

“She started crying,” he says. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ She didn’t know.”

“I think the fact that she took it like that? That shows right there how much she cares about you,” Nic says.

“If you told her that story and she started crying, be grateful,” someone else says. “I told my wife some of my stories about my experiences, and her response to me was ‘You knew what you were getting into when you signed on the dotted line and I don’t feel sorry for you.’ And you know what? That fucking killed me. She didn’t give a shit about me. When she said that to me, I turned to the bottle, and I never shared another fucking word with her.”

He is crying. Three guys are standing up now, moving around, unable to sit still.

“Anything else for this gentleman?” the session leader asks, and when there isn’t anything else, a third soldier takes his place at the head of the table and begins reading a story about a day his unit came upon a burlap bag and opened it to see what was inside. “It was an Iraqi chopped up into pieces,” the soldier reads. “So they called me over to police it up. I said, cool. Fuck it. I’m a medic. Oh well. I did it. Don’t get
me wrong. It’s not like I picked up a fucking Dumpster full of dead bodies. It was kind of fascinating to me, really interesting seeing a dead human, especially in pieces. To see the lifeless eyes, and the end of life, was amazing. Even with all the war wounds I’ve seen in my lifetime,” he says, and goes on about being a medic, and seeing bodies chewed on by dogs, and “the smell, the fucking smell,” and what he did one day to an Iraqi as a result of all that. “There were times as I would render aid to soldiers, the platoon leader said, ‘What about the Iraqis?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ as I took my time to get to them, and it was a long time. As a medic I should take care of people, but I was pissed. So I would just take my time. To make it short, I gave this one guy a needle decompression for the hell of it. I know it hurt. But fuck it. As far as I knew, he had helped emplace a fucking IED. Did I care? No. Do I care now? No. Was that right? Fuck it.”

Silence.

Everyone’s twitching now.

“I know what you mean,” another soldier finally says. “We never had any remorse for anybody we saw dead. Because fuck it.”

“I guess I’m trying to learn compassion again,” the medic says.

“We used to occupy an Iraqi police station,” Nic says, “and every once in a while, the Iraqi police would bring in dead bodies, a couple of dead bodies, they’d throw ’em in the back of a truck, bring ’em in, shit like that, and at the time, this was the beginning of my deployment, we’d all run down there and go take pictures. You know? And one guy his head was chopped off, his body was all bloated and shit because it had been sitting in raw sewage, you know? And now I can’t get those images out of my mind. At the time, though, it was: Yeah, this is so cool. This is so cool. I mean, what were we thinking? Why did we even want to go look at that shit? You know?”

“Yeah, I just remember this one time, I don’t talk about it, I got a picture of it,” another soldier says, describing a day he found a skeleton, mostly bone, still some skin, and he picked up a piece of it. “The femur or something like that. I got pictures of me looking like I’m taking a bite out of it,” he says. “What was I thinking?”

“Exactly,” Nic says. “I had a hard drive that I destroyed. Pictures and stuff like that, next to dead bodies, shit like that. Horrible, horrible stuff. Horrible stuff. Us hanging out with dead bodies. At the time, I mean we were rockin’ and rollin’, we were mean mean killing machines. Now I look back and I’m like, God, what were we doing? What were we thinking?”

Everyone is talking now except for one sweet-faced soldier who looks to be the youngest of all and is suddenly shaking. His eyes flutter and roll back in his head, and he blinks them back into place. He holds up his right hand, watches it tremble, and grabs it with his left hand until whatever is happening passes through him. He takes a sip of soda. He is steady again. But not for long, because as the medic starts talking about the next thing that happened to him, he tears up, grabs some tissues, and covers his face.

“And it really hit me when I saw my first baby come in burned” is what the medic is saying. He is no longer reading, just talking, surely a step toward habituation. “Dipped in boiling water and skin sloughing off,” he says. “And you know what? I got to the point where I started carrying extra fucking medical supplies. I got to the point where I started feeling kind of sorry for them. I started feeling sorry that we’re sitting there fucking beating these people and it’s just like that fucking baby. We’re just using them, like they’re fucking nothing. Like they’re not even human. And you get to a point …”

And now he is the one shaking and sobbing in an otherwise silent room until one of the other soldiers comes to his rescue.

“I thank you for fucking being there,” the soldier says, putting his arm around him. “Secondly, I would like to applaud you for your usage of fuck.”

Laughter. Tears. Smoke break.

She goes to the east entrance by the flagpole and statue of Mary, takes the elevator to the sixth floor, dials “0,” waits for the door to be unlocked, is escorted in. There’s Nic, by the nursing station.

“Hi, sweetie,” he says.

He walks over and kisses her. They’d had only a few awkward moments last night, before visiting hours ended.

“How’d you sleep?” he asks her. “Was the baby kicking?”

She slept terribly is the answer, though she doesn’t tell him that. Nic hasn’t slept well, either. She can tell. The circles under his eyes look like bruises. He had been up writing, trying to make sense of the hallucination he’d had about the girl in the chair. “Dark hair with light strips of red flowing down to her shoulders,” he had written. “She couldn’t be more than 7 or 8. She was wearing a flower dress ripped and soaked in blood. Her eyes seemed to stare right through my soul …”