Thank You for Your Service (18 page)

“So if all goes well, come spring, we will plant an oak tree,” she tells the girls with a sense of anticipation, and she loves her dead man right now for making this moment possible, her perfect, kind, considerate, patient dead man who wasn’t threatened by her undying love for him and knew that marriage is forever.

The suggestion for the pheasant hunt comes from Patti Walker, whose suggestions usually work out better. Her job is to work with wounded soldiers and ex-soldiers at Fort Riley, one of whom is Adam Schumann. She helped him find the job at the artillery range, and when that didn’t work helped him find the job at the benefits center. She found an organization willing to pay for his car repairs, has gotten him free turkeys at Thanksgiving, and meets with him every so often to see what else she might do. “Likes to hunt and fish; that’s his therapy,” she wrote about him once in her field notes, and so when she hears about an all-expenses-paid pheasant hunt that is being organized in western Kansas for combat-wounded soldiers, she thinks of him right away.

“Healing Heroes, Healing Families!” the flyer promoting the hunt says. “3 nights of lodging and 2 days of hunting.” “Spouse Downtown Pampering Excursion.” “Children Fun-a-thon.”

“Advised on pheasant hunt,” Patti writes in her notes after telling Adam about it, and a week later Adam, Saskia, Zoe, and Jaxson are in the car, headed west. It’s a 250-mile drive, and thirty minutes into it, as they’re passing through Abilene, home of Dwight D. Eisenhower, president and war hero, Adam turns on the radio. Saskia reaches forward and changes the station. Adam looks at her and changes it back. Saskia shoots him a look and changes it back.

And that’s all it takes. The fight gets so bad, so quickly, that Adam pulls a U-turn and guns it back to Junction City, and as Saskia and the kids get out of the car, she is screaming at him to get help or get out of her life forever.

Hunting in Kansas

He drives off. He doesn’t know where else to go, so he gets back on the highway.

Four hours later, checked into the hotel, thoughts creeping back into his mind of wanting his life to be over, he gathers with the other wounded soldiers and their families in a conference room for welcoming speeches and receives his first gift of the weekend.

A shotgun?
he thinks as he sees the box.
Really?

Back in his room, he removes it from the box and assembles it so he’ll be ready to go in the morning, and things slide downhill from there. He sets his alarm. He asks someone to wake him up just in case. He doesn’t hear his alarm. No one knocks on his door. He gets to the hunt two hours late and sees more people than he expected. Who are they? he wonders, his mood darkening even more. Volunteers? Sponsors? Those people who drive around with “We Support the Troops” signs on their cars, as if a sign on a car makes any difference? The ones who have never been to war and will never go to war and say to soldiers, “Thank you for your service,” with their gooey eyes and orthodontist smiles? They’re certainly not hunters, not the way they’re wandering around, and look at them now, fawning over the soldiers with visible injuries, the one with gunshot scars, the amputee. And here come the inevitable thoughts. Those soldiers are injured. He’s not. They’re wounded warriors, and he’s weak, a pussy, a piece of shit. He stands off by himself. He talks to no one. He has lost the capacity to see that his behavior
is
the behavior of the wounded. At some point, a few pheasants rise into the air, and when a dozen guns begin blasting away, he decides he’s had enough. He goes back to the hotel, packs in a fury, and leaves, and soon he is back in Junction City.

Home again.

And once again, he has a shotgun.

“ ‘I can’t pay my rent.’

“ ‘I ran out of meds.’

“ ‘I haven’t gotten my pay.’ ”

Patti Walker is reading the messages waiting for her at the start of a
new day. She sighs. She is a big sigher, although that may come with a job described as “Soldier Family Advocate” on the business cards she hands out to soldiers, which also include the promise “for as long as it takes.”

“He’s burned,” she keeps reading. “He needs clothes for the summertime.”

“His wife doesn’t speak English. How am I going to get her a job?”

She is a talker, too, and a hugger, and as Saskia once said of Amanda Doster, “She can put on the waterworks like that.” Unlike Amanda, though, who is defined so much by sorrow, Patti is defined by the stress of dealing with the problems of forty-nine wounded soldiers during the day—forty-nine Adams is one way to think of it—and then going home at night to the fiftieth. This is her husband, Kevin, who was blown up in Iraq, lost an eye, lost some of his brain, lost most of his hearing, lost his sense of smell, has some facial disfiguration, has a long list of diagnoses, including PTSD and TBI, and among his many surgical scars has one on the back of his head that Patti has affectionately suggested looks like a penis, which may be why he prefers to wear a cap. There are two children at home as well, a young son who at one point seemed so confused by the sight of a fake eye that his father decided to stop wearing it, and a teenage daughter who one day announced that she wanted to dye her hair blue. “We’re not trash,” Patti said. “Why?” “So when we go to Walmart, people will stare at me instead of Daddy,” the daughter said. In Patti’s life, the wounded are everywhere, awaiting her answers, and her answer in this case was to let her daughter dye a small section of hair as blue as she wanted, and when blue hair didn’t merit a second glance at the Junction City Walmart, she let her change it to pink.

So Patti knows things about soldiers and their families and how they get better and don’t. “I think they all try, really, really hard,” she says, awe in her voice, and she gets to help them by having a job that she despises at the most elemental level—not the work itself but the need for it. “Why does my job have to exist?” she wonders.

It exists not only at Riley, but also across the country. There are, on this day, about eight thousand soldiers in the program Patti works for, called the Army Wounded Warrior Program, or AW2. They are the soldiers who have been diagnosed with the war’s severest wounds, and the
primary diagnosis for about half of them is PTSD. The diagnosis, in other words, is a psychological wound rather than a physical one, such as amputation (11 percent of them), and to help in their transition to civilian life are a hundred or so advocates like Patti who make up one more layer in a growing army bureaucracy for mental wounds that stretches from a soldier’s homecoming, when he is presumed to be okay, to the WTB, where good endings are still expected, to an advocate’s office, where good endings are still possible, to the Gardner Room at the Pentagon, where all possibility is gone. The fear of a soldier’s killing himself is always there for Patti, and she does what she can to keep that from happening, by telling an employer, for instance, that yes the soldier he hired gets headaches sometimes, but the reason for the headaches is that he got rattled in an explosion fighting a war that most people in the country didn’t think about then and don’t care about now, and maybe, instead of only being concerned about his business, the employer could be so kind as to set up a room with some dark curtains for the soldier to rest in from time to time until the goddamn headache is better.

“Ya
know
?” she might tack on for emphasis.

She says that a lot, because in all of Fort Riley, no one feels more about wounded soldiers than Patti, or takes it more personally, and sometimes what she feels is irrepressible anger over their raw deal—the high unemployment rate, the high rates of PTSD and TBI, the high suicide numbers, all of it. “I’m really happy that we’re so resilient, and I’m really happy that we’re doing so good,” she is saying one day, the sarcasm full throttle, the waterworks on the verge. As often happens with her, she is about to say something more, but before she can finish the thought, someone is outside her door knocking.

It is one of her forty-nine, a soldier who happens to have been in Adam’s battalion. His name is Brandon, and he has come with his wife to tell Patti that he can’t find work, none of the leads she was able to scrape together for him are panning out, they are almost out of money and are moving to Arizona, where at least there is family to fall back upon.

“You’re killing me,” Patti says to him.

“I’m killing
me
,” he corrects her.

He is a haunted-looking young man who, like most of the others,
didn’t know what he was getting into, a good soldier right up until the end, when he was out on a mission to retrieve a blown-up Humvee in which two soldiers had died, and some rocket-propelled grenades landed close by and did him in. He came home and fell apart. His memory is sketchy and his dreams are bad. He knows he needs more counseling, and he has promised Patti he’ll get some, but what he wants most of all is a job. A liquor store showed some interest in hiring him, but he suspects he shouldn’t be around liquor. An airport shuttle company also seemed interested, but he doesn’t want to be driving a van full of people along roads that he sometimes imagines are lined with bombs.

“We just want to get out of Kansas,” he says, a soldier defeated.

“How’s your marriage doing?” Patti asks.

“We’re doing good,” he says.

“We’re doing good,” his wife repeats.

And the way they glance at each other makes Patti see that they are doing good, that it’s everything else. They live in one of the shabbier apartment buildings in Junction City, their car has bad tires and broken windows, and they’re down to their last eight hundred dollars, which they’re going to use to fix the tires, fix the windows, fill up the gas tank, and get out.

One thing Patti has learned is that the only thing left for her to do sometimes is wish people the best of luck and tell them she’ll stay in touch.

“As always, I’m proud of you,” she says.

Brandon smiles at her.

“Hooray,” he says.

Now it is the wife of a soldier who comes to see Patti. He was in the same company as Adam and Tausolo Aieti, and in the same platoon as Nic DeNinno. He had deployed several times, lost three friends, blamed himself for one of them, and left the war for good after being shot in the neck, and some of what happened next is in his wife’s statement in a court file.

“As soon as he got home,” he “really wasn’t the same no more at all,”
she had written. “He was forgetting constantly even the real easy things like he would put laundry in the washer but then forget about it. He would turn the oven on and forget it was on and a few times he got the food in the oven but forgot about it being in there so I stopped him from using the stove and oven.

“One night we were in bed sleeping,” she continued.

Her statement goes on for five pages. It includes twenty-eight examples of her husband’s behavior after he came home, and it is buttressed by other statements from other people also trying to understand what had happened.

“I trust him with my life and couldn’t ask for a better leader,” wrote the soldier who dragged him to safety after he had been shot. “He always upheld high moral values and made sure we did the same.”

“I am one of his soldiers. I served this last deployment with him and he is the most squared away person I have ever met,” another soldier wrote. “I know he would never do anything to dishonor his family. He
told me once that if everything is lost to always keep your honor. He believed in that very much.”

“…  a devoted father and family man,” another soldier wrote. “When his son was born, he was beaming for weeks.”

“…  he could not have done any of the crimes he has been accused of,” another wrote. “It is not in his character and it goes against all of the army values that he holds dear.”

A psychologist who examined him and diagnosed him as having PTSD with psychosis, major depression, and dementia wrote that he was “a very ill man who has deteriorated so much that he is now quite dysfunctional.”

His defense attorney wrote in a motion asking for no prison sentence: “It was only after these multiple instances of physical and mental trauma that [he] engaged in the conduct for which he stands before the court.”