The Good Soldiers (28 page)

Joshua Atchley

War? What war?

But soon it was back again as Kauzlarich flew to San Antonio and was escorted to the fourth floor of the hospital at BAMC, where a sign read,
U.S. ARMY INSTITUTE OF SURGICAL RESEARCH BURN CENTER.

He had decided to start with Duncan Crookston.

He put on a protective gown, protective boots, and protective gloves and walked toward a nineteen-year-old soldier whose left leg was gone, right leg was gone, right arm was gone, left lower arm was gone, ears were gone, nose was gone, and eyelids were gone, and who was burned over what little remained of him.

Michael Anderson had been right. It was September 4 all over again.

“Wow,” Kauzlarich said under his breath. And then, taking it in: “Bastards.”

Here it was, then, the view of the war at its far end, and not only in the first startling view of Duncan Crookston, but in a series of first views that Kauzlarich would absorb throughout the entire BAMC complex. There had been more than thirty thousand injuries to American troops so far in the war, and several thousand of the worst of them had been sent to this corner of Texas to recover, or, every so often, to die. The severe burns came here. Many of the amputations came here. The stays could last weeks, months, a year, whatever it might take, and the medical care was widely regarded as extraordinary.

But just as extraordinary was the culture surrounding the care, which could feel as determinedly hopeful as the other place Kauzlarich had been to on his leave, Disney World. Injured soldiers were referred to not as injured soldiers but as Wounded Warriors, with the
Ws
always capitalized. When they arrived they were given a Warrior Welcome Packet and a Hero Handbook. They and their families got assistance in the Warrior and Family Support Center, a Returning Heroes Home was being built, and amputees received specialized care in a new facility called the Center for the Intrepid, which, by coincidence, was dedicated on the same day in January 2007 that Duncan Crookston was in his little apartment in Fort Riley, saying into the phone “buried” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” as his parents and new nineteen-year-old wife listened. “Just planned my funeral,” he’d nonchalantly told them after he hung up, and meanwhile, at the Center for the Intrepid, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was saying in a dedication speech, “There are those who speak about you who say, ‘He lost an arm. He lost a leg. She lost her sight.’ I object. You
gave
your arm. You
gave
your leg. You
gave
your sight. As gifts to your nation. That we might live in freedom. Thank you.”

And that in a nutshell was what BAMC was about—no pity, all hooah and gratitude. Kauzlarich would have two days to tour various parts of BAMC to get a sense of how much was being done for America’s emerging generation of burn victims and amputees. At the Center for the Intrepid, he would see the prosthetics lab, the wave pool, the climbing wall, the driving simulator, and the shooting range. Most impressive of all was a room with a computer-controlled tilting floor to help soldiers regain equilibrium. The floor was so sensitive to changes of weight, and so quick to adjust to them, that according to the tour guide it could balance a pencil standing on its end.

But two other sights, not on the tour, were also crucial to see.

One was a gazebo. It was empty when Kauzlarich happened to walk by it in the morning, but at night it was packed with mothers and wives who couldn’t get to sleep, even though it might be four o’clock in the morning. In mentioning this to Kauzlarich, Judith Markelz, the program manager for the Warrior and Family Support Center, said that there might be as many as twenty women in the gazebo, no matter the season, no matter the weather. “[A] chance for that child to grow up in peace and to realize dreams,” is what President Bush said any mother wants, but in the gazebo their wishes had been updated. Some would smoke. Some would drink. Some were on medication for indigestion, and most were on antidepressants. “Whatever it takes for a mother who spends twenty hours a day in the burn unit watching her son scream,” Markelz explained.

As for the second sight, it was the waiting area outside of the burn unit, where as Kauzlarich waited to visit Duncan Crookston, he met one of those mothers, Lee Crookston, and one of those wives, Meaghun Crookston. Both had been living at BAMC since Duncan arrived on September 6. Four and a half months later, they were used to everything about the place, but they were also aware of what seeing Duncan for the first time could be like, and they wanted to prepare Kauzlarich.

“A lot of the time you just don’t know what he’s saying,” Meaghun, who was twenty years old and had married Duncan a few months before his deployment, said. “He can’t bring his lips together yet.”

“He’s working on it, though,” Lee said.

“Well, the last time I saw Duncan was right after the, I mean, right after . . .” Kauzlarich began to say, and then paused when he saw one of the other patients on the ward moving along the hallway. His face appeared to have been burned almost entirely away. He was moving so slowly it was as if the merest bit of air moving against his skin would hurt. “How’s it going?” Kauzlarich’s escort said to the man as he got close. “All right,” he answered, and as he moved past, Lee Crookston smiled at this vision of what her son could one day become. “He’s a real success story,” she whispered. Hope at its most warped and willful—that was the waiting area, where Lee and Meaghun now took turns telling Kauzlarich how many surgeries Duncan had been through and how many times he had nearly died.

“The doctors are like, ‘I’m not even going to guess anymore. I’m not even going to tell you,’” Meaghun said.

“They say, ‘We’re not going to predict anything anymore when it comes to Duncan, because he always proves us wrong,’” Lee said.

“Well, I heard he is like one of only three guys that has been this seriously wounded to survive,” Kauzlarich said.

“Yeah, that’s what we were told, too,” Lee said.

“Unbelievable,” Kauzlarich said. “You guys pray a lot?”

“Yeah.”

“All the time.”

“He’s just a fighter,” Meaghun said.

“He’s like a cat with nine lives,” Lee said. “You kind of wonder how many he’s got left, you know?”

“Yeah,” Kauzlarich said.

“But it is looking better. It’s looking much better than it was three or four weeks ago for him,” Lee said.

“When he first got here, we were told that we needed to be careful of what we tell him because what could happen is we could tell him stuff and then he’d go to sleep and forget it and we would have to go over it all over again,” Meaghun said. “And then one day, at the beginning of October, he was asking all these questions, and I was like I
have
to tell him. And so we got together, and we were bawling when we were telling him—”

“We were both really a mess—” Lee said.

“—and we explained to him, ‘You had, you know, both of your legs amputated.’ And he said, ‘Both of them?’ ‘Yeah. And your right arm, and your left hand.’ And he said, ‘Okay, look, I want details.’ And so we told him everything we knew about it, and then he wanted to know the whole process of how they told us, and how we got down here, and then we told him about his friends that passed away, and his mom told him that we didn’t want him to feel guilty—”

“—that he was still here and they weren’t—” Lee said.

“—and he said he doesn’t think of death that way, that those men died honorably. And his mom goes, ‘Well, you got injured honorably,’ and he goes, ‘Yes, I did.’”

“I think he knew that he was hurt bad,” Lee said. “But he was so drugged all the time—”

“We thought he was going to take it a lot harder than he actually did,” Meaghun said.

“We were worse off than he was,” Lee said.

“He said that from time to time he gets depressed, but he gets over it,” Meaghun said. “He said for a while there it was hard to wake up and just realize that this was his reality. Sometimes he wished he was back in Iraq, because he’d have his arms and his legs.”

“He said, ‘If I was back in Iraq, it would mean that this didn’t happen to me,’” Lee said. “And I said, ‘Well, it did, and I know that you can handle it. You’re a tough kid, and you’ve proven that over and over again.’ And I said, ‘You know we’ll do everything we can to help you through whatever you need.’”

“Yeah,” Kauzlarich said and paused again as another burn victim moved along the hallway, his entire head wrapped in bandages except for eyeholes.

“So he just, I don’t know . . .” Meaghun said, watching that one go by.

“The military guys that came and talked to us told us about the actual bomb; they said it was huge,” Lee said. “I mean just a gigantic explosive.”

“Well, the bomb was a ten-inch copper plate, concave shape, so when it blows up there’s about fifty pounds of explosives behind it; it just goes like this and forms and shoots right through the vehicle,” Kauzlarich said.

“It’s made to penetrate,” Lee said.

“It’s made to penetrate,” Kauzlarich said, nodding. “It went right through the vehicle. It immediately killed Murray. Murray didn’t even know what hit him. Shelton didn’t know what hit him. It immediately amputated Duncan’s legs. It went through the back of David Lane. So he bled out pretty quick.”

“They said they got him out of the car,” Meaghun said.

“They got him out, but he had already—he looked fine, but it was behind him that they couldn’t see,” Kauzlarich said. “And it blew Joe Mixson, who is six foot six, completely out of the vehicle, and he was laying on the ground, rolling around, and I’m like, what in the heck? I mean we’ve been hit by single EFPs and then multiple arrays, like six of them all together. This one was one single, and it hit exactly—”

“In just the spot that could do the most damage,” Lee said.

“In just the spot,” Kauzlarich said. “And it did.”

They began walking down the hallway now, toward Duncan’s room. Four and a half months later, there was still so much about September 4 that Lee and Meaghun didn’t know. That Duncan’s platoon circled up and prayed before every mission. That his body armor was still on fire when he was loaded into a Humvee. That his hands were so black that Michael Anderson thought he was still wearing his gloves. That as Anderson cradled his head in the back of the Humvee, Duncan, hair and eyebrows and so much else of him gone, began to talk.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Anderson. Can you hear me?”

“How’s my face?”

“Don’t worry. It looks good.”

“Ow, it hurts. It hurts. It burns. And my legs hurt.”

“Don’t worry. Don’t worry. I got you. Just rest your head in my hands. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“Give me some morphine.”

“It’s okay.”

“Morphine.”

“It’s okay.”

“I want to go to sleep.”

“Stay awake. Don’t close your eyes.”

“I want to go to sleep.”

“Keep talking to me, buddy. You love your wife, right?”

“I love my wife.”

“Well, don’t worry, man. She’s gonna be waiting for you, man.”

“I LOVE MY WIFE.”

“You’re safe. You’re here with us. We got you.”

“I LOVE MY WIFE. I LOVE MY WIFE.”

“Nothing’s gonna happen to you.You’re safe.You’re fine.”

“I LOVE MY WIFE. I LOVE MY WIFE.”

He shouted that again and again, all the way to the aid station. They didn’t know that, either, but from the moment he reached BAMC, they knew everything from then on, because this was their life now. His infections. His fevers. His bedsores. His pneumonia. His bowel perforations. His kidney failure. His dialysis. His tracheotomy for a ventilator tube. His eyes, which for a time had to be sutured shut. His ears, which were crisped and useless when he arrived, and subsequently dropped away. His thirty trips so far to the operating room. His questions. His depression. His phantom pains, as if he still had two arms and two legs.

“I mean, we weren’t even married for a year,” Meaghun said as they neared the room.

“I know,” Kauzlarich said, and now he was looking through the window at the sight that Anderson had called honestly creepy, but even that didn’t begin to describe what he was seeing. There was so much of Duncan Crookston missing that he didn’t seem real. He was half of a body propped up in a full-size bed, seemingly bolted into place. He couldn’t move because he had nothing left with which to push himself into motion except for a bit of arm that was immobilized in bandages, and he couldn’t speak because of the tracheotomy tube that had been inserted into his throat. Every part of him was taped and bandaged because of burns and infections, except for his cheeks, which remained reddened from burns, his mouth, which hung open and misshapen, and his eyes, which were covered by goggles that produced their own moisture, resulting in water droplets on the inside through which he viewed whatever came into his line of sight. “Bastards,” Kauzlarich said quietly as into those droplets Meaghun now appeared.

“Do you want the music on or do you want me to turn the music off?” she asked, and when there was no response from him, she patiently tried again.

“Do you want me to turn it off?”

No response.

“Off?” she said.

No response.

The room was hot. The sounds were of the ventilator, IV drips of pain medication, and monitoring machines whose beeps and numerical readouts were the only indication that inside those bandages life continued to go on.

Now Lee swam into Duncan’s view.

“Is that better?” she said as she put a pillow on the board that was supporting the remains of his arm.

No response.

“Yeah?” she said as she fluffed it into shape.

No response.

And now it was Kauzlarich.

“Hey, Ranger buddy. It’s Colonel Kauzlarich. How are you doing?” he said as he stood at the side of the bed.

No response.

“You hanging in there?”

No response.

“Can you hear him? Yes or no?” Meaghun said.

No response.

“All the guys in Iraq want to let you know that they appreciate what you’re doing,” Kauzlarich said. “I appreciate what you’re doing.”