Thank You for Your Service (4 page)

And that was it, one soldier’s World War Two. When he came home, he never talked about what he had been through in Grosseto, or Nice, or even crossing the Atlantic, when he would have been filled with the naive optimism of a soldier who hasn’t yet reached the war. Instead, he turned into an angry drunk who stayed that way for years. He fought in Korea and stayed that way, and then in Vietnam, and only after twenty-five years of serving his country and being abusive to his family did he get himself under control.

Adam was nine when he got to know his grandfather, and it’s hard to say who was more in need at that point. No longer drinking, his grandfather had lapsed into a life lived mostly in silence. Adam, meanwhile, had arrived at the crucial point of a ruinous childhood. When he was very young, he was sexually molested by an older neighborhood boy who was babysitting him. When he was six, he remembers, his father one day started hitting him and kept at it until Adam’s mother picked up a chair and charged her husband with it. When he was nine, his mother said one day, “Your father’s gone. He’s not coming back,” and it was true. Adam had been doing well enough until that point—honor-roll grades, no shortage of friends—but his mother had no money, and soon they were evicted from their house, sleeping at a relative’s and living out of a car, and then they were moving in with this strange old soldier, who as far as Adam was concerned was just one more man who was going to let him down.

Instead of ignoring him, though, or abusing him, the old man would pile his bruised grandson into his Cadillac and take him for long drives. Just the two of them, keeping each other company. He never said a word, except to swear at other drivers. “You fucking bastard,” he would scream, and then keep driving in silence, smoking incessantly. At home, he didn’t talk, either. If he was reading the newspaper and wanted to show someone something, he would point to it with his middle finger, always his middle finger, and slide it across the table.

That someone was usually Adam. His grandfather was his first experience with war wounds, and Adam grew to love him, and soon after the old soldier died, he joined the army and became a great soldier and now has his own list of places he has been.

United States—born, molested, beaten, abandoned, girls. wow.

Iraq—We fought a tough battle there.

Interstate 70 in Kansas—“Hi. This is Adam Schumann,” he says on the phone now, Topeka nearing, calling to confirm his appointment at the VA. He listens for a moment and hangs up.

“The appointment’s not till tomorrow,” he says to Saskia.

She shoots him a look, starts to say something, doesn’t.

So he says it for her.

“Goddamn it.”

They ride in silence for a few miles.

“Fuck,” he says. “Fuck.”

“Well it’s not my fault,” she says. “Maybe you should write shit down.” She gets off the interstate at the exit for the hospital. Maybe they can worm their way in somehow. “Why didn’t you call this morning?”

“I was sure it was today,” Adam says. He rubs his forehead. He slaps his head. He drums his fingers on his leg.

There’s the hospital in the distance. Saskia slams on the brakes at an intersection in order to avoid a woman crossing the street against the light.
“Dumb bitch,”
she explodes.

“God, I can’t believe I messed everything up,” Adam says.

At the hospital now:

They pass through an entranceway lined with survivors of previous
wars in wheelchairs and “Proud to Be an American” T-shirts. “It just stinks like old people and smoke,” Saskia says. They walk down a hallway behind a woman who is giving a tour to two men. “The guys from Vietnam are so expressive, but the new ones, from Iraq and Afghanistan, go straight to violence and suicide,” the woman says. “Mm-hmm,” one of the men says. One of the worst things about Adam’s war, the thing that got to everyone, was not having a defined front line. It was a war in 360 degrees, no front to advance toward, no enemy in uniform, no predictable patterns, no relief, and it helped drive some of them crazy. Here, though, in this new war of Adam’s, there is a front line: this hospital. This old, underfunded, understaffed hospital, which nevertheless includes a compassionate receptionist who says she will see what she can do and a doctor who is underpaid and overwhelmed and says that of course he can squeeze Adam in. So in Adam goes, preceded by all of the previous histories dictated about him over these two years, rendered as only doctors and interpreting bureaucrats can:

Saskia waits outside. Sometimes she goes in with him, sometimes not. She wonders if this doctor will be able to speak understandable English, unlike the last one. She wonders if he will look Adam in the eye as he asks his questions or keep his back turned as he types Adam’s responses into a computer. She is sure she knows what the doctor will say: Adam is wounded. Adam is ill. Adam needs to stay on his medications. Adam
deserves the thanks of a grateful nation. She is seated near a sign for a suicide hotline that says, “It takes the courage and strength of a warrior to ask for help,” but she has her own saying at this point: “How much can you pity a person who cannot help himself?”

And then, just like that, as Adam emerges and she sees how lost he appears, even scared, her mood breaks, and she is once again allowing in possibility and all the hurt that comes with it.

On the way home, they pass the little airport where Adam returned from the war.

There were ceremonies when the others came home, raucous celebrations in a Fort Riley gym filled with spangly women, flag-waving children, and signs. “Welcome home, Daddy.” “Welcome home, heroes.” Straight from the war, the soldiers would march into the gym, in formation, and when they were dismissed a few minutes later, there would be a great rush as the order of the place dissolved into screams and embraces. It happened every time, again and again, as all of the Fort Riley soldiers returned, and at one of the ceremonies, everyone spilled out of the gym and into a perfect Kansas day: blue sky, buttercups in the summer grass, a gentle breeze, and then an unexpected puff of wind. It blew the caps off of men and lifted the flowery skirt of one of the young wives, exposing the thong she had chosen for this day and the new butterfly tattoo she had gotten, and instead of smoothing her skirt back into place, she laughed as she felt it rise like a kite above her shoulders, and the soldier she was with couldn’t stop staring and grinning, and everyone around them laughed, knowing what would be coming next, the sex, the desire, the relief that he was home safely, the poetry in the plains, and could there have been a moment further from the one that Adam had when he arrived?

No ceremony, no signs, no spangly dress—just Saskia pressed against a window of the terminal, watching him get off a plane. He descended the steps with the other passengers onto the tarmac, and Saskia thought:
He’s a skeleton
. She had been hoping so hard. Now she knew.

As for Adam, as he walked across the tarmac, he wished he were on crutches and covered in bandages. The great soldier, returning from war. He felt ashamed. He walked into the terminal. He dreaded what Saskia
would think of him. Now he saw her. She was smiling her beautiful smile. All of a sudden, he wanted to run to her. Here was his moment of welcome, his chance at absolution, and that was when he noticed the woman standing next to Saskia. He had never seen her before, but she seemed to know him because she was rushing toward him, on the verge of tears.

“Can you tell me what happened to my husband?” she was saying. “Can you tell me what happened?”

That was how he came home. Those were his welcoming words.

The woman was Amanda Doster, who on that day was one of the war’s newest widows.

Now, no longer new at it, she is at home waiting for the doorbell to ring, a ding-dongy chime that to her will always sound like a life coming to an end.

When it rang on the day her husband died, she had her two young daughters in the bathtub and cookies baking in the oven. She opened the door and saw who was standing there, and before they could say anything she had finished the quick calculations. An injury would be a phone call. A serious injury would be a visit from soldiers in regular uniforms. Death would be dressier soldiers, in their Class As. These two, asking if they might come in, were in their Class As. “There are a few things I have to get done before you say it,” she answered. She wanted to remain in control. That was important to her. She went into the kitchen and turned off the oven, knowing that she was about to forget about the cookies. She made a list. She phoned some neighbors and asked them to come over and get the girls. She phoned her mother and asked her to get on the first plane. She made sure the door to the bathroom was shut. Finally, she sat on a couch in the living room, and they stood in front of her and said it.

Ding-dong
.

This day, it is six moving men who are standing there.

“Good morning!” she says to them, once again trying to sound under control. She has a kind, round face and long curly hair and except for her widow’s eyes looks very much the same as the woman her husband last saw.

Amanda Doster

“We got lost,” one of the movers says, apologizing for being late, and when they’re all inside, she leads them through the house and gives them a few instructions.

“Don’t touch that jacket.”

“Not that flag case. I will transport that.”

“I’ll take his uniforms.”

“I’ll take that phone. It still has his voice on it.”

“I’ll do the black footlockers. I’ll do those.”

“Okay,” the foreman says, and as he and the others get to work packing, she and her best friend, Sally, who has come over to help, go down into the house’s tornado shelter, a windowless concrete room in the basement. She flips on the light. There, against a wall, stands a gun safe almost as big as a refrigerator, and after spinning the combination and swinging open the door, she begins removing what’s inside.

First the long guns, nine in all.

Three handguns.

A sword.

Some knives.

The ammo.

And lastly a sealed wood box, inscribed: “James D. Doster, SFC, 19 November 1969, 29 September 2007.”

“There’s James,” Sally says, as Amanda smiles at the box.

“Hi, James,” Amanda says.

For a while, she was taking him everywhere. She took him to his parents’ house for Christmas, strapping him in with a seatbelt all the way to Arkansas. She took him to Sally’s one day when a bad storm was threatening, transporting him that time in a laundry basket.

For a long while, she kept him on the bedroom dresser, the dresser they got together, front and center. One day, she put a framed poem about grief and faith there and eased him toward the edge, and another day she got new bedroom furniture and moved the dresser to the guest room and carried him down to the tornado shelter. He was on top of the gun safe initially, but eventually she put him inside, reasoning that it was
fireproof in there and giving no thought to the fact that what she was protecting from fire were cremated remains. She closed the door. She spun the lock. She turned off the light. She went upstairs and began adjusting to him being in the safe, behind the door, in the dark. And now she is leaving the house where she last saw him and promised she would be when he came back.

She had been adamant about that, too. As she told the casualty assistance office assigned to her in those first days, “I am staying here forever. I am never leaving.” She told her friends that as well, and while at first they sympathized, as the months went by, and then a year, and then another year, most of them began to lose patience with her inability to stop being so relentlessly heartbroken. “There comes a point,” one of them said. “You just have to get on with it.” So maybe this day, this move, is the coming of a point, she is thinking, even as she suspects that it isn’t, that she is still very much the woman she had cemented into by the time James’s commander called her from Iraq, just after his death, and said upon hanging up, “That’s probably the saddest woman I’ve talked to yet.”

How do some people move on? Why isn’t she one of those people? She has asked this of friends, counselors, and other widows. Now she asks no one anymore except God and Sally, of whom she can ask anything, even whether James is really dead. Because the thing is, she is still seeing him alive. Just the other day she was driving and spotted him at a stoplight, behind the wheel of a truck for a pest control company, and it was so clear to her what had happened. He had become bored with the war. He had left it. He was back in Kansas, lying low, waiting till the coast was clear, working pest control, saving money, and soon would be home, ringing the doorbell.
Ding-dong
. There have been plenty of versions of this over the years, going back to when she saw him in the coffin and wondered if it was him. She wanted evidence. She knew his wedding ring had been removed, but she also knew it fit so tightly it left an indentation in his finger that never went away. She needed to see the indentation. She discreetly tried to remove the glove he had been dressed in for his viewing, but to her horror, as she pulled on the glove, she realized that it had been taped into place. He’s alive, she began thinking, he’s gone
covert, this is a wax figure, that’s why the glove is taped, it’s all a ruse, she would prove it, and so she stood at the coffin, running her fingers back and forth over the glove, trying to feel the dent.