I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 (6 page)

Spencer was startled by the major’s outstretched hand. Major Davies’ tiny hand was tight, efficient, and shockingly firm. Spencer agreed to the deal not just to get out of Group and not to underscore a psych evaluation, either. On their walk, Captain Hall explained how he was never going to receive prosthetics. Walter Reed determined that without sightedness prosthetics could never function. But maybe, Spencer hoped, he could help Captain Sam get some hope, maybe, and maybe see his way to going home. That prospect gave him purpose, something more than killing time.

The following day, Spencer started by rigging a harness that allowed Captain Sam to trot and then jog on the flat east playing field. He was sprinting within a week, with Spencer dragging behind because he couldn’t keep up. Spencer was built for endurance, not long-legged flat-out speed. When he sprinted, Captain Sam kept his elbows in tight to his sides; his body moved in perfect synchronicity, like a well-oiled machine.

“You don’t just run, not like that,” Spencer panted, tugging at the captain to stop before he collapsed behind so the captain would have to tow him like an anchor.

That was the first time Spencer ever really saw the captain smile. “400 meter high-hurdler, Cornell,” he said. He was like that, always talking about politics and people in general and hardly ever letting on about himself. Cornell. ROTC took him to college. Economics and History.

*****

“Here,” Captain Sam told Spencer. “I’ve got us something.”

He reached into a bag slung over his shoulder and came back up with a newspaper clamped between both his wrists.

“Washington Post,” he said. “Let’s read it.”

“Sir?”

“Let’s find a cool place to sit down and read the paper.”

Spencer went to the front section and looked over the headlines.

“What do you want me to read?” He was reluctant at first, but it wasn’t too bad once he got going. Back in school he had been a good reader.

They moved through the paper fast. Most of the time, Captain Sam seemed to be satisfied by the first couple lines from most of the articles. Sometimes he would paraphrase the whole piece just from the headline and then have Spencer read it out loud. He was always right, too, calling it “predictable filler.”

“Skip to the editorials,” he asked Spencer.

After reading the titles, Captain Sam asked Spencer to read the whole editorial out loud. He read it. The words weren’t especially challenging.

“What do you think?” Captain Sam asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what do you think of what she’s saying?”

Spencer hesitated. “I thought you wanted me to read it to you,” he finally responded.

“You read it to me. Thanks. So what do you think? Do you agree? Do you disagree?”

Spencer protested. “I didn’t think there was going to be a test.”

“What test? I’m interested in your opinion. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Spencer grumbled. “Let me read it again.”

He started rereading aloud when Captain Sam cut him off. “You can read silently.”

“OK.”

When he was done reading, the captain listened to Spencer’s opinion, but it didn’t stop there. That was where it began.

“Why do you say that?” the captain wanted to know. “That writer has a Ph.D. Do you know something she doesn’t?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry! She’s a total ass!”

Spencer breathed a sigh of relief and laughed.

“Why
do
you
think
she’d
write
something
like
that?”
Captain
Sam
asked
him.

“It’s her job, I guess.”

Now the captain laughed. “Yup. She’s syndicated in something like 200 papers across the country. For that crap!”

*****

After that, they started reading the paper every day. Right after their runs. They listened to news programs, too. Fox. CNN. MSNBC. They talked about what was in the news and even what wasn’t there, too. Captain Sam asked a lot of questions about what Spencer thought that the news channels were trying to say. “Why do you think they chose that story? Was it fair? Did it make you think about all sides of the story?”

He would go further. Deeper. “Do you think the writer, or the newspaper, or maybe the company that owns the newspaper wants you to think a certain way? Do they want you to think at all? What are you seeing on the screen? Are there differences between reading a story and hearing it on the radio and seeing it on TV? What do you think about that?”

“Captain,” Spencer said one time, “Enough already. There’s all these agendas out there. I get that. But it’s tiring always questioning everything. Captain, you can’t question everything and run an army. I’m getting through my Physical Exam Board, I’m going back, and I’m going to do what I get ordered to do. Chain of command.”

“So if they tell you, you just go and do it. Jesus! ‘Mine is not to reason why, mine is but to do or die.’ Jonathan, you weren’t even twenty when you went in. How was your mind even formed? Listen to me!” the captain said. “It’s not OK to be this empty vessel and leave it to the army to fill you up. That’s not OK! You build a life by questions, by opening up to ideas and opening up to people. Don’t take other people’s ideas. Not mine, not anybody’s! Question! Challenge them! Formulate your own opinions.”

*****

Spencer threw himself into improving every tiny factor in the captain’s daily functions. The captain had been at Walter Reed for six months; in a week, Spencer had him washing and feeding and dressing himself. He made up two elastic cuffs and covered them both with strips of heavy-duty Velcro. He wrapped more Velcro around spoons and forks and around a scrub brush for the shower, too. He put patches of the stuff along the hips in a pair of sweat pants so the captain could pull up his own pants. Spencer was like a one-man rehab center and Captain Sam got into the spirit as he could accomplish more and more. But the toilet remained a challenge.

“What if you had a bidet,” Spencer asked the captain. “You sit down on the toilet, do your thing, and go through a quick car wash and blow dry. No need to find somebody to help, you just go like everybody else.”

“Sergeant, just because something exists and makes sense has nothing to do with the army. You know that.”

“It doesn’t hurt to try,” Spencer told him. He already had the information for a bidet downloaded and printed out. $400 on Amazon.

Spencer was already used to Captain Sam’s knee-jerk negative reactions. But the idea had Captain Sam thinking. Spencer could see it on his face; the deep lines were standing out on his forehead. They were making progress.

Spencer approached the major with the idea for Captain Sam’s bidet. She provided him with the forms to put the request into writing. He looked at the sheaf of paperwork; it looked like enough work to fill a week.

“Major, how long will it take to get a special requisition through approval?”

“There are five toilets servicing eighty men on the ward. That is already beyond capacity. It won’t get approved, Sergeant, but it is your right to submit the request.”

Spencer kept his cool. “Adding the bidet seat allows Captain Sam to use the toilet by himself, but it won’t stop the rest of us from using the toilet. A grown man deserves to be able to take a crap without calling somebody to help. Right at the very top of the Patient’s Bill of Rights it says we have the right to respect and dignity. Can’t you cut the red tape?”

“Sergeant Spencer, you have the forms.”

“Major, they’re sending him books in Braille every two weeks. Is he supposed to learn Braille with his elbows? It’s completely safe, UL-rated, and there’s an outlet in reach of the cord. I’ll buy it with my own money and install it myself.”

“Sergeant, fill out the forms.”

*****

The SFAC, Soldier Family Assistance Center, kept getting TTOs for the captain’s wife, Alice, and the girls. They flew them in and put them up at Mologne House. Captain Sam had no discretion if and when his wife was coming up to the ward, but he refused to go down to the third floor, knowing very well that children couldn’t come up with her. Under-fourteen not allowed, for their own good.

Alice gave Spencer more background in a few minutes than the captain ever told about himself. “I married him for his big heart and his mind. He still has those. If he wasn’t so damned stubborn, we could figure out the rest. Sergeant, Sam and me, we can figure this out. I’m strong. The girls are strong, too. Help him get past worrying about us so much. We’re going to be OK. OK?”

Spencer found himself listening to Alice the next day, too. Captain Sam had wanted to become a teacher, “possibly even a college professor.” Every so often he would let slip that he had a dream of teaching at West Point.

“But then he fought in Fallujah. After that, everything changed. He called it their Alamo. Fallujah wasn’t all IEDs and hit-and-run attacks. Sam said that they held their ground. Insurgents with small arms and homemade bombs fought the best-trained army on Earth to a standstill. They had no food and no water and still they fought. One night he had his unit translator write out a note saying ‘God respects all brave men.’ Sam taped it to a carton of MREs and somehow got the carton with the note over to the insurgents.

“He wrote me that not a single shot was fired at his unit for the next 24 hours. But then what he did got up to brigade and his colonel found out and went ballistic. He threatened to have Sam court-martialed for aiding the enemy. Can you believe that? Right there, right in the middle of the battle,” she said.

“It was OK to kill them, but showing the enemy a little respect? No way. All the talk about winning hearts and minds. Right. Didn’t matter that the shooting stopped. The army couldn’t let it happen. Sam’s immediate superior at battalion intervened, thank goodness. The major told the colonel that Sam sent over pork rations to attack their morale. So he got out of it, but he wasn’t the same. Not after. He’d had it with the army.”

She looked around her at the ward, at the posters on the walls and the shiny linoleum and nurses trotting along in their scrubs, and sighed. “He’d be whole and home if they had court-martialed him,” Alice added.

He got it. About the MREs and the note. After that, Spencer found himself listening more deeply and more often when the captain spoke. Talking, too. A lot of times he thought that about the tribesmen in Afghanistan, fighting on guts and belief. No satellite photos. No drones. No air support. Sleeping under rocks on freezing windswept hillsides. Eating only the food they could carry, if there was food to be had.

The captain was right about a lot of stuff. But he was wrong about Alice. Alice and the girls deserved a chance, too. Only nothing he could say could convince the captain to think about going home.

*****

Captain Sam never did talk about what happened. His eyes. His hands.

After a long run, four miles Spencer figured, Spencer held the water fountain handle and Captain Sam sucked down about a gallon and then put his face and his head under the spout.

East of the hospital and rehab buildings a huge hundred-year-old oak tree became their favorite resting spot. The two of them cooled off after runs in the shade of its long limbs. Spencer lead Captain Sam up to the trunk and the captain pressed his back against it and slid down until he was sitting on his butt at the base. He drew up his knees and closed his eyes.

“How did it happen?” Spencer asked quietly.

Captain Sam recalled it in vivid color but Spencer wasn’t certain that he was going to say anything.

“I’m four hundred yards out, above and away from the action,” Captain Sam explained, finally opening up. He never said where, but Spencer didn’t interrupt to ask.

“I was observing and reporting back to battalion. I can see everything from where I am. There were two jihadi jackrabbits with AKs waiting behind a half-wall. My four-man recon patrol was moving right at them. I couldn’t raise them. Communications crapped out. All I could do was watch.”

“You didn’t have a sniper?” Spencer challenged. Hell, it was only four hundred yards.

“
No, no sniper. Christ. They had to have had a spotter somewhere, because these two waited until my guys were inside twenty yards and then they stuck their rifles around the wall and loosed a couple bursts. No aiming. Teasing. They took off running and it was on. Marty Seagull, my platoon sergeant, Jaime Estavez, his corporal, this little Guatemalan who was always playing guitar and singing songs in Spanish, and two specialists. They were sucked in hook, line, and sinker.”

Spencer thought about his own guitar. He hadn’t seen it since the medivac to Bagram. He wondered a lot about where it had ended up, but he said nothing.

“Do I wait for the Black Hawks?” the captain continued. “No! There’s an M11647A1 there so I jump in and floor it like I’m Bruce Willis. I should have waited, but these are my guys and I’m watching them heading out to get themselves killed. So, of course, what happens? Ragheads lured the little fish to bring in the big ones. Completely predictable bullshit. I chased their chumming right into an IED that blew the six-ton Humvee flying twenty feet in the air.”

Sprinkles of these pictures dropped through the captain’s mind like tiny fragments from the IED. Shards of plastic had stuck like porcupine quills into the mush where he had always had eyes. He knew they were destroyed. Knew instantly. But he didn’t even know his hands were gone, not then. He knew only bandages.

It took a month before he could piece words into sentences.

“Almost 5,000 Iraq-Afghanistan soldiers have lost feet and legs,” Captain Sam told him. “But IEDs and mines blow upward. They either kill you or blow off your lower limbs. Just 280 upper limbs have been blown off or amputated. Through the whole of Iraq and Afghanistan both. If they counted by the limb, I’d be a shy one percent of that total. I may be the single casualty in the entire military with both eyes and both hands gone. A freak event. They don’t even have an official designation; I am rated an ‘MLD,’ Multiple Loss Dysfunction. Sounds like mild, doesn’t it, ‘MLD’?”

“Did you save your guys?” Spencer asked.

“Yes. Estavez came home a citizen. That’s something, I suppose.”

“Damned right it is! That’s valor, Captain.”

“A silver star for hands and eyes? It’s stupid, is what it is. Dumb-ass trade-off. That valor you’re talking about, that ‘be all you can be’ BS that makes us go across the globe, is marketing. We should be turning our guns back on the chickenshit greedy assholes who sent us there.”

“Four men are breathing ‘cause of you, Captain, and that is a fact. You did that.”

“We fought a rich man’s war,” he said, “fought by everyone except the rich.”

Spencer let it in one ear and out the other. Captain Sam ranted a lot.

“Jonathan, I know you want to go back. Would you tell me, please, what are you going to accomplish? You and me, our families, the guys who fought beside us, our kids and their kids, killing and dying and getting fucked up and burning through trillions of dollars for Iraq and for Afghanistan. Trillions! For what? Trillions in public debt dollars that rich assholes turned into billions in their own private cash. They’re real life people living in mansions and flying private jets. They cost me my life and I don’t even know who they are! That pisses me off! Why don’t we have a government that tells us that stuff? Explain that to me, would you, ‘cause I want to know!