Читать книгу Where War Ends - Tom Voss - Страница 14

2

WHAT HAPPENED

The administrative assistant looked nervous. I don’t remember what the rest of her looked like, but I remember her nervous smile when Beck and I first walked into the office. She asked us to take a seat. Then she knocked on a door, opened it a crack, and exchanged low murmurs with someone we couldn’t see. We were late for my appointment, but it wasn’t too late. The guy would still see me, she said.

Beck had found an OIF combat-veteran-turned-social-worker and booked an appointment for me because she was a doer. A maker. A producer. She’d just written, produced, and starred in a short film. The film was about a woman whose roommates turned out to be figments of her imagination. There was this scene in the film where the main character tried to slit her wrists in the shower, but one of the roommates — the guardian-angel roommate, I guess — stopped her from going through with it at the last second. I couldn’t decide if Beck was afraid I was going to kill myself, too, or if she just really wanted to be my guardian angel. Maybe both.

In the waiting room, we waited in silence. I was ready to tell the social worker I was fine. I just needed to get out in nature a little more. The short walk from my apartment to Beck’s car had perked me up and given me some relief from my hangover. Being outside awakened the senses, which seemed to dull my pain. If I could focus on the wind against my skin or the scent of crushed leaves, I could temporarily forget about what happened in Iraq. If I could just be outside, where there was enough room to move, I could move past what happened back then.

That’s what I’d tell the social worker. The thing about nature. If I told him I blocked out the noise in my head with the noise of a bar, he’d probably make me go to AA. The nature thing sounded better. Less alcoholic. I’d go with that. I just really, really hoped he wouldn’t ask some lame question like, “What seems to be the problem?” I couldn’t stand stupid questions like that.

A white guy in his midthirties emerged from behind the door and stepped into the waiting room.

“I’m Jack,” he said, reaching to shake my hand. “I’m a clinical social worker,” he said.

Jack’s dark hair was carefully coiffed in a large, deliberate pompadour that stretched past his forehead like a plant seeking the sun. It seemed like his sole attempt to remind the world he was once young and hip. The rest of him had settled into the safe mediocrity of middle-aged, middle-income Midwesternness: nondescript brown shoes, sensible slacks, suburban physique, and a perfectly pressed button-down shirt his wife had probably ironed that morning. But it was clear Jack had an agenda. There was an outcome he was after. I didn’t know what it was, but I could tell just from shaking his hand that he knew exactly how to get it, no matter how unassuming he looked at first glance.

My dad was a social worker for thirty-two years. When I first toyed with the idea of following in his footsteps, he told me there were two kinds of social workers: the kind who genuinely wanted to help people and the kind who were so messed up, they needed an entire career to figure out why. For the latter kind, working through other people’s problems was just a way to poke and prod into the hairy folds of their own trauma. They used client sessions as therapy sessions, either projecting their own issues onto the client or using the client’s issues to distract themselves from their own problems. I had an idea which type of social worker my dad thought I’d be. I wondered which type Jack was.

“Would you be more comfortable if your sister was in the room?” Jack asked, ushering me toward his office door.

Beck leaned forward in her chair, wide-eyed and eager, hoping I’d say yes — like my mental health was an item she could finally check off her to-do list.

“No, I’m good,” I reassured everyone, including the nervous assistant. She and Jack seemed to think I was there against my will — like Beck was the only thing stopping me from running out of the room and into oncoming traffic. But besides what remained of my hangover, I was fine. I was at the appointment of my own free will, and more important, I didn’t need to be there. I was just there as a courtesy to Beck, since she went to all the trouble. She wanted me to talk to someone, so okay. I’d talk. I’d tell Jack that I was a functioning, contributing member of society and that I was fine. More than fine. Why did everyone seem to think I wasn’t fine?

I left Beck in the waiting room and followed Jack into his office. He sat down behind a big, outdated desk. I chose the empty office chair directly across from him. On the wall behind Jack hung framed photographs of him with his buddies in Iraq. Images of sunglasses, weapons, and fatigues had been lovingly framed and displayed like fancy medical degrees. If I were sitting across from any other social worker in town, it’d be impossible to explain the unspoken things captured in those photographs of war.

“So,” said Jack, and paused.

I waited for him to ask one of those shrink-ish questions you hear on TV, the kind that made me cringe. “What seems to be the problem?” was only slightly worse than “What brings you here today?” Maybe, if he asked that, I’d say something snarky, like “My sister brought me here today.” But Jack just looked at me for a moment without saying a word.

Finally, he asked, “What happened?”

I stared at him for a moment, completely taken aback.

What happened?

The question inserted itself into my chest like a key into a lock.

What happened.

Those were the two words no one had dared ask until that moment — two years since I’d returned from twelve months in Iraq, where I’d served in a scout sniper platoon as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Those were the exact words I couldn’t stop asking myself.

What happened.

What happened to me?

Tommy Voss. Tombo. I was the kind of guy who was friends with everyone in high school. I was the quiet one, but when I spoke up, everyone laughed at my jokes. I was a lover, not a fighter: a lover of football and video games and after-school snacks and Kimmy. She was a wicked basketball player back then, all thin and tall and blonde and bright-eyed. We’d chat on AOL Instant Messenger when the internet was still in its adolescence, just like we were. On weekends, we’d get drunk on Smirnoff Ice.

When I was away at basic training, Kimmy mailed me letters and photographs. The raciest pictures were of her and her friends at the beach in their bikinis. I put the pictures up in my wall locker in our barracks. The guys in my platoon would crowd around the pictures and call to their friends, “Dude! Go check out Voss’s locker! He’s got all these chicks!”

But I only had one. It was her.

Kimmy was the kind of girl who’d fly 1,991 miles just to spend forty-eight hours with me right before I deployed to Iraq. And then, after saying goodbye to me in a Seattle hotel room and letting me go so bravely, she kept visiting my mom the whole time I was at war, just to make sure Mom was okay.

For better or worse, leaving Kimmy to join the army and go to war felt as natural to me as breathing. My Bampa, my father’s father, was a marine who fought in the battle of Iwo Jima. My maternal grandfather was a sailor who shuffled papers in London during the war. But my family wasn’t a military family — they were a service family. They came to the United States from Ireland and Germany, Poland and England — white European immigrants who married other white European immigrants, and sometimes Native Americans. They were Catholics, bearers of children, teachers and social workers and volunteers. They were lawyers, but not the kind who made a lot of money. They were potato farmers who never missed Mass, veterinarians who accepted payment in trade, community servants who died in the care of the hospice program they’d founded.

In this family you were rewarded by thinking of others first. The more you gave up selfish desires for the greater good, the more you were loved and admired. The more you indulged selfish desires, the more you were disapproved of. It’s pretty easy to understand if you break it down by career choice: teacher, social worker, volunteer coordinator, civil servant = good. Entrepreneur, hedge-fund manager, movie star, real estate investor = bad. It was okay to be poor, just as long as your poverty could be blamed on a noble career path and not laziness. It was okay to be successful, just as long as your success helped others first. It was even okay to make money, as long as it wasn’t too much money, you donated most of it to charity, and you didn’t go flashing it around like some kind of rich person. You could eat in a fancy restaurant as long as you volunteered at the food pantry, too. You could marry into money and attend the best law school if you used your degree to fight for social justice. You could trust that your service meant you were preferred in God’s eyes.

It wasn’t hard to follow in my family’s footsteps. Examples of service — the sacrifice of it and the honor in it — were everywhere I looked. My mom began her career teaching emotionally disturbed children and kids with severe autism. A typical workday for my dad might include getting bitten by a handcuffed teenager or tackling a twelve-year-old boy to stop him from hurting his own mother. My Bampa had to leave his new wife, who was pregnant with their first child, to go serve his country in Japan. My grandmother spent every holiday season collecting donated gifts so poor families in her community could give their kids Christmas presents. The sacrifice and the selflessness of it all only became sacred when you rubbed at the bite marks, changed the ten-year-old’s diaper, kissed the pregnant belly goodbye (maybe for good), or wrapped the hundredth gift for a stranger who wouldn’t even thank you — all without a single complaint. You were most loved and admired when you carried your cross quietly, and with restraint.

I was born of that restraint. Staying with Kimmy would have been an emotional indulgence, like I was spoiling myself with something I didn’t deserve. I had to deny myself, and her, the pleasure of too much happiness. I had to find something difficult, something punishing, something most people would complain about, so I could find the strength within myself not to complain about it. I had to find a way to be of service.

In the army, I found a way. I could serve my country, protect those who couldn’t protect themselves, and preserve a way of life where people felt safe. I thought everyone deserved to feel safe, and I thought that ideal was worth defending. The army also paid for college when my parents couldn’t afford to put both me and my sister through school. And if I needed one more reason to join, I had Bampa. He’d died just a few years before I left for basic training, when his heart finally surrendered to World War II battle wounds from fifty years earlier. Maybe joining the service and following in his footsteps would have made him proud. Maybe he would have understood.

Maybe he would have understood what happened.

What happened.

What happened to my friends?

My friends were the guys who stood by my side in the lush, open spaces of Kurdistan, watching big, sun-filled skies melt into rich reds and yellows and oranges. They were the ones who surrounded me the morning I emerged from the windowless Conex container where we slept and looked up to see thousands of blackbirds suddenly take to the sky, filling it like flecks of paint across a never-ending canvas. They were there, with me, before I needed the sky to be big, before I had any pain to offer up. They were there, with me, when it was beautiful.

My friends were also the ones who annoyed me, snatched cigarettes, talked trash over pirated DVDs. They were the ones who breathed and bled and sweated and stunk next to me in the cramped interiors of armored Stryker vehicles that rumbled through the cramped city of Mosul. They were the ones who leaned over me as I lay, unconscious, knocked to the floor of a moving Stryker by enemy fire. They were there when it was ugly. They were the ones who kept me alive.

What happened to them.

What happened.

What happened to my sergeants?

Sergeant Clark and Sergeant Diaz were our fearless leaders who flew bravely into battle, their limbs thrashing through the twilight, their weapons extensions of their limbs, their bodies dodging mortar fire like ninjas dodging blows, until suddenly they weren’t anymore. What happened was they were saving lives one minute, being carried from vehicles the next.

What happened.

What happened was death.

The death of those who were hunted in the streets between smoldering burn pits, where breath turned to dust beneath a foreign sky.

The death of the person I used to be, who died there in the streets of Mosul with his friends and sergeants and would never come home from war.

The death of an ideal, carried down through generations and ending with me. What happened was I went to be of service, and I failed.

What happened was scientifically impossible, because matter can’t be destroyed, it can only change form. But the scientists who said that were wrong, because what happened was the death of my soul.

But I didn’t tell Jack any of that. After Jack asked his question, I said nothing. So he waited. He listened for the answer I couldn’t yet give and left a space for it to appear.

In that space, something inside me that had been sealed shut and pushed down began to expand. It rose up and out, wracking my body with sudden sobs, like waterfalls. The sound of my sobs reverberated off the ceiling. Tears poured from me in a massive wave of grief and shame and sorrow, tears poured like alcohol, like all the shots I’d taken the night before were being filtered through my eyes. Tears poured like blood, ounce for ounce and pound for pound in lives taken and lost. There couldn’t have been more blood in my veins than tears that poured from inside.

I cried because I hadn’t cried before. Not once. Not since the death of Sergeant Diaz. I cried because I couldn’t undo any of what happened. Because what happened would never, ever leave me, no matter how much I smoked or drank or kept it down or pretended it didn’t matter anymore. I cried because there was no sky big enough, not anywhere in the world, not even in outer space, to absorb this much pain. I cried because Jack made it okay to cry. With the permission of his silence, the protective shield that had formed inside me in childhood, and hardened to titanium during war, liquefied and ran clear from my eyes. I wasn’t fine. I wasn’t fine. I wasn’t fine at all.

The keening ended just as abruptly as it had begun. I sat with Jack in the silence. He waited a long time before speaking again.

“I’ll see you back here on Friday,” he said.

I decided then that he was the kind of social worker who really wanted to help people. I decided that his agenda was to help me.

“See you Friday,” I said.

I meant it.