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.