Thank You for Your Service (34 page)

And a memorial bracelet on his left wrist, also in honor of Doster.

“When’s the last time you two saw each other?” one of Adam’s relatives asks.

“In Iraq,” Adam says.

“That’s when I hated you,” the soldier says.

“I know,” Adam says.

It’s Christopher Golembe.

“None of this shit would have happened if you were there,” Golembe had said after Doster died and meant it as a compliment.

“None of this shit would have happened if you were there,” Adam had heard and nailed it into his soul as blame.

Now, nearly four years later to the day, ever so carefully, he listens again as Golembe is talking about some of the things that happened over there. The time they were running along the roofs in a firefight. The time a guy found a scorpion in his pants. The time they barreled into a house and past an Iraqi on his knees with his hands up except it turned out he wasn’t on his knees, that he had no legs and was balanced on his stumps and went flying across the room. The time …

“How do you remember all this shit?” Adam asks him. “I don’t remember anything.”

“Good times, man,” Golembe says.

They are standing in the backyard next to a fire pit. The sun is dropping. The temperature is falling. “I’m so fucking sick of this army shit,” Saskia says, walking away. Golembe drinks a beer, and Adam drinks a Mountain Dew. Golembe drinks another beer, and Adam drinks another Mountain Dew. “Remember that day you shot that guy in the ass?”

“Yeah. I probably shouldn’t have shot him,” Adam says, but as he looks at Golembe what he is really remembering is why, in the war, Golembe had been one of his favorites. He had been one of Adam’s team leaders, and after Emory was shot on the roof, and Adam draped Emory across his back, and Emory’s blood filled Adam’s mouth and stained his teeth as he carried him down those stairs, and Adam got Emory into the Humvee and then headed back up to the roof, Golembe was right behind him. They reached the top and scanned for the sniper, who still was out there somewhere. What they saw instead, there where Emory had fallen, was his helmet. It had to be retrieved. Golembe volunteered, and as Adam popped a smoke grenade, Golembe bear-crawled across the roof and brought back a helmet that Emory would one day fill with candy and use on Halloween but at the moment was partly filled with his blood. That was the moment Adam began truly loving Golembe, as they took cover and figured out what to do with the helmet, finally emptying out a flour sack and putting it in there so no one else would have to see it when they brought it downstairs.

“Let’s go out tonight,” Golembe says now to Adam as they stand by the fire.

“I just drove eighteen hours,” Adam says, shaking his head.

“We’ll get on motorcycles. We’ll get on dirt bikes,” Golembe says.

“No,” Adam says.

Emory happened in April, and after that Adam depended on Golembe more and more, right up until a night five months later when they ended up screaming at each other over some sunflower seeds in Adam’s Humvee. It wasn’t just a few seeds. There were handfuls all over the seats and
floor, which Adam had discovered after his Humvee had been used by soldiers on guard duty at the entrance to the outpost. It was, to Adam, the latest example of sliding discipline in the platoon, and when no one would take responsibility for the mess, Adam took his concerns to Doster, who agreed to put the entire platoon on guard duty one night as punishment. Body armor on. Helmets on. Gloves, eye pro, and knee pads on. The full battle rattle, all night long around the Humvees, to make sure, as Adam put it, “no fucking ghosts climb in.” “This is stupid shit,” Golembe told him at one point in the night, and when Adam walked over to him to hear what else he might have to say, he thought he smelled alcohol on Golembe’s breath. “Go back to your room and sleep it off,” he ordered. A few hours later, Golembe was back outside, still smelling of alcohol. “The last fucking time I’m gonna tell you, go back to your room,” Adam said. Then it was morning, and they were loading up the Humvees to go out on a mission, and Golembe still reeked. “I’m considering firing your fucking ass,” Adam told him. “Go ahead,” Golembe said, “fire my fucking ass.” So Adam fired his fucking ass, and Doster reassigned him into his own Humvee as his gunner, and that was how, a couple of weeks later, when a roadside bomb went off, Golembe came to be blindly feeling around in order to determine if he was alive or dead as his ears rang and his heart galloped and his soul darkened and he heard Doster, who was a few inches from him, scream, “I’m hit.”

“I never thought I’d talk to you again,” Adam says now, easing closer to the fire, the evening air turning chilly.

“Shit happens, man,” Golembe says, working on another beer.

They were the final words of Doster’s life. “I’m hit,” he screamed, and soon after that Golembe was helping to load him into another Humvee for evacuation to the aid station, him and his severed left leg, and meanwhile, back at the base, where Adam had stayed behind because of the video link with Saskia, the rolling boom of an explosion and resulting radio chatter had brought him to the aid station as well. He stayed outside, at one end of the blood trail, as inside, at the other end, doctors and nurses did what they could. He remained outside as Doster, minutes away from death now, was brought out motionless on a stretcher and loaded onto a helicopter. He was there as the soldiers who had been part
of the convoy emerged from the waiting area, and he kept waiting by himself until the final soldier came out. “You doing okay?” he said to Golembe, but Golembe couldn’t talk, fearing if he tried to he would break down, so in silence and fighting back tears the two of them walked side by side back to their rooms. Eventually, Golembe went to a bathroom to try to scrub the soot off his face. Eventually, Adam took Doster’s body armor to another bathroom and nicked his hand on the shrapnel he would give to Amanda Doster. Eventually both of them found out Doster had died, and Golembe said, “None of this shit would have happened if you were there.”

But it did happen, and now they are here.

“Did they ever check you for TBI?” Adam asks. Dinner is over. The others have broken off into separate conversations. Saskia is still around but getting tired.

Golembe shakes his head. “I’m not good,” he says. “I’m still fucked up. But I drive on.”

Later: “That place was horrible,” Golembe says. “I don’t know how you did it three times.”

“I didn’t,” Adam says.

Later, when Adam is standing off by himself, smoking a cigarette, Golembe goes over to him and wraps his arms around him in a hug.

“Schu,” he says.

Adam stands there uncomfortably, his arms at his side, and Golembe drops his arms when he realizes Adam isn’t hugging him back. He steps away. Neither says anything. Then he steps forward and tries again, and this time Adam wraps his arms around Golembe, too.

Later.

It’s just the two of them now.

“James was better than us,” Adam says.

“No he wasn’t,” Golembe says.

“I love that guy,” Adam says.

“That’s why we gotta get fucked up for him tonight,” Golembe says.

But they don’t. Instead, they try to get unfucked up as they stand together under a sky so clear that when they look up they must be looking at five hundred thousand stars.

That’s how glowing it is. As if the sky over America this night isn’t the sky at all, but a mirror.

The next morning.

Saskia is driving.

They fight in eastern Colorado.

They make up.

They fight again in western Kansas.

They make up again.

A car won’t get out of the way.

She gets close.

It won’t move.

She gets closer.

It still won’t move.

She honks her horn.

It still won’t move.

She is so close she can read the bumper sticker.

“Pray For Our Troops,” it says.

Now the car moves over, and Saskia guns it.

They’re almost home.

One day in the after-war, Shawnee Hoffman wakes up in Minnesota, carries Aurora down those fourteen steps where Danny Holmes launched himself, wants to go somewhere, can’t because of a car with a dead battery, has nowhere to go anyway, and settles onto her couch. For a brief period, she thought she was doing better. She started seeing someone new but stopped after they fought and he hit her hard enough to cause a bruise and the police were once again at the apartment she wished she had the money to leave behind. She is tired all the time now. She tried sleeping pills, then switched to an antianxiety medication, then to an antidepressant. The night before, she tried drinking, and now she is hungover. “Eventually, it’s like you just give in. I don’t know. Time? I don’t know,” she says. She plays a video game called
Modern Warfare 2
for a while, just like she and Danny used to do, and then she and Aurora go back up those stairs.

In Georgia on this same day, Michael Emory says, “I see life now as a second chance to correct all my mistakes,” and that second chance allows a man who should have been dead, who shouldn’t be talking, who shouldn’t be standing, who shouldn’t be walking, to make plans for another day. Soon, he will telephone Texas and speak for a minute to his little giraffe, and after that he may walk over to Radio Shack, and maybe he’ll hear from that woman who once wrote to him, “Thank you for serving our country,” but for now, he waits by himself for his aide to arrive so he can get dressed.

At her house in Kansas, Kristy Robinson is having a birthday party for Summer, who on this day is turning three. Her walls remain half
painted and the kitchen floor remains nicked. The door at the end of the hallway remains gouged. The texts from Jessie remain in her phone. Reminders of what happened remain everywhere, and yet two weeks ago, she was missing Jessie so much that she laid her head on Kent’s shoulder and wept. She has been wondering how to say more to Summer than what she already has said, that “Daddy’s head got hurt,” and “Daddy was sad,” but not today. This day is about Summer seeing some party hats and balloons and getting all wide-eyed. “Are those for my birthday?” she asks.

Home

On Fort Riley, where Suicide Prevention Awareness Month is about to end and Apple Days are about to begin, Nic DeNinno on this day is meeting with his case manager. After nearly two years in the WTB, two trips to Pueblo, and two suicide attempts, he’s waiting to receive his final disability rating, and then he’ll be done with the army. His biggest struggle continues to be guilt, he says—“the guilt is just kind of over how we treated people”—but he’s concerned about his medications, too. He asks his case manager if there’s a way to get off the pills upon which he has become so dependent, and she promises to come up with a plan.

On another part of Fort Riley, Tausolo Aieti leaves math class, heads past the sign announcing Apple Days, and goes into Walmart. He has no idea when he’ll be getting out of the WTB—no time soon, they’ve said—but on this day, Tausolo is feeling better than he has in a while because of the dream he woke up from this morning. “It was about my son,” he says with relief, and tries not to worry about what will happen tonight.

In her house, meanwhile, Amanda Doster is composing a message to Sally. The anniversary of James’s death is three days away. Four fresh acorns are on the kitchen counter after yesterday’s trip to the cemetery at Fort Leavenworth. The new flag has been bought and is ready to be hung, but what is on Amanda’s mind this day is a lump in her neck that her doctors want biopsied to see if it’s cancerous. Suddenly, there are so many things to do. “I want you to finish the girls’ quilts if I can’t,” she writes to Sally, feeling more out of control than ever. “Grace’s is very very close. I quit working on Kathryn’s the day James was killed. You would do it with love. But I’m going to start working on them tonight again.”

Everywhere on this day, the after-war continues, as eternally as war itself, and now it comes to a house that Adam and Saskia arrive at after a daylong drive through the crimson-gashed grass fields of Kansas. It’s late afternoon when they pull up, almost four years after Adam came home the first time in shame. This time, no one is rushing toward him asking him what happened. Instead, he pauses in front of the house and squeezes the outstretched hand of his son.

For a thousand days, he had been the great Sergeant Schumann.

Then he was injured.

Then he was dead.

Then he was done.

Now, another thousand days later, he points toward the front steps of a home that in this one moment anyway seems like the most peaceful place in the world. The wind isn’t gusting. The clouds aren’t skidding. The bushes aren’t bending. The birds aren’t cartwheeling. “Ready?” he says to the boy he had once dropped, releasing his hand.

He feels so alive suddenly. If only the moment could last.

“Go go go go,” he says.

This book is a work of nonfiction journalism. All of the people named in the book agreed to participate with the understanding that whatever happened would be on the record. I withheld the name of one family because of charges involving sexual crimes with a minor. I also agreed at the request of the army to not name soldiers whose suicides were being discussed at Suicide Senior Review Group meetings unless I had a specific family’s permission. While most of the book is based on events I personally observed, the book also contains some scenes for which I wasn’t present. In those instances, the details, descriptions, and dialogue used in the book come from interviews, U.S. Army records, Department of Veterans Affairs records, court records, 911 recordings, historical documents, photographs, videos, and personal letters, e-mails, text messages, and diaries of the participants. Primary reporting for the book took place between January 2010 and September 2011 in Kansas, Washington, D.C., the Pentagon, Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, and California. Additional reporting took place between April 2007 and April 2008 in Baghdad, Iraq.