I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 (7 page)

I want my girls to be able to afford college. That money could be student loans, money for veterans, money for roads and bridges and curing diseases,” the captain said.

“Shouldn’t we at least know who they are? Rob a bank, go to jail. Own a bank, rob everybody.

Nobody ever looks into the really colossal crimes happening right in plain view, Jonathan. I know where I’d start looking. If I still had eyes I’d start with two angry old bastards worth billions who get off on playing this country like a fiddle with all their bullshit institutes and behind the scenes string-pulling. Follow the money!”

“Why don’t we get a couple soft-serve ice creams,” Spencer suggested. “I’ve been thinking how I can set up your strap so you have it on your own. It’ll be good.”

“Jonathan, I’m talking about this whole country and you’re wanting ice cream.”

“Yup. It’s hot out.”

*****

Two days later, under the big oak tree, Spencer framed his own idea: if they were “wounded warriors,” then shouldn’t they be reconnecting with the warriors inside them? They had wheelchair basketball. Why not martial arts? Teach krav maga. Teach stick fighting. Show a guy with no legs how to crush through a pelvis with one blow. Spencer had the captain stand up and worked him through the basics: balance, centering strike energy, elbows/forearms/knees, straight kicks. Throat, sternum, pelvis, knees.

After a half hour he had the captain energized, animated and positive.

A krav maga program would work alongside rehab and vocational counseling, Spencer suggested to Major Davies. “Help the men feel powerful again, then maybe writing resumes and applying for jobs, the stuff you keep pushing, would be easier, too. “

“Resources are limited, number one,” Major Davies responded. “Number two, these men need to fit in, not get instruction for how to act out.” She said that getting them thinking like warriors was a form of cruelty. Their war was over.

“Major,” Spencer argued, “they’re truly scared of the war that begins when they leave here.”

Captain Sam tried telling the major “You get us into Group and you say we need to support one another, but then all we talk about is how each one of us is going to handle it after we’re out,

“All that advice about staying away from booze and drugs, about breathing and counting to ten and not hitting our wives and our kids… that’s all about staying small. You don’t get it. You can’t make a man a warrior and then take it away without putting something strong into that black hole. Demons breed in that hole.”

She closed like a steel vault. Spencer saw it. Captain Sam felt it and heard in her voice that they were wasting their time.

“Captain, we were talking about krav maga,” she briskly reminded him. “I am forty percent over capacity. What we can achieve is small steps, and without cooperation we won’t even achieve those. Keep it clear, finite, and fixed in the achievable and I’ll work with you, but knowing how to fill out a job application will help these men. Teaching bar-fighting tricks won’t.”

“I’m talking about really supporting one another. About organizing,” Captain Sam yelled back. “But you can’t talk about that, about real change. That’s rocking the boat.

“Your attitude is nothing new, Major. Governments have been afraid of veterans for three thousand years. Two millennia ago, Julius Caesar was taking stolen land back from rich Roman senators and giving it to Roman army veterans. The vets earned it, but the Senate stabbed him to death.”

“Captain,” Major Davies griped, “you need to stop this appeals nonsense and go home. Go home and organize all you want.

“What are you doing here? Appealing your PEB. You have full benefits for life? Don’t you realize how ungrateful you are acting? How many men would kill for the benefits you won’t accept!

We have a program in place here. It doesn’t include martial arts, or bidets, or Julius Caesar either. Go home! That’s your reality. Final. Period.”

*****

Captain Sam pressed his back into the tree trunk and pulled his legs up to his chest. Get him talking politics and he wouldn’t stop talking, but mentioning even the idea of him having a home or any future with Alice and his girls and he snapped shut like a bear trap. Spencer caught how he always turned away; even without eyes, he was looking somewhere else.

“Look at what you’re able to do, Cap. You’re dressing yourself. You’re feeding yourself. You run my ass into the dust. Couldn’t you maybe just give it a chance at home? You can read books on tape. You can still teach or do radio. You can run and dance and tell the girls bedtime stories. Dude. Yeah, it sucks, but get out and do the stuff you keep talking about. Hell, run for Congress!”

“Congress!” Captain Sam scoffed. “What, so I can do nothing just like the rest of them? So I can play the north pole-south pole charade like corporate-owned Democrats and Republicans? Red states and blue states both made to look a thousand times more different than they really are. Money isn’t red or blue, it’s green. I can see that and I don’t have eyeballs.”

“Then go and change it,” Spencer urged. “You say corporations are killing more people than wars. Go after them! You say billionaires are buying our democracy. Go after them!”

“Jonathan, do you ever listen to anything I say?” Captain Sam shot back. “The American Legislative Exchange Council alone writes a thousand times more legislative bills than any elected politician. One lawmaker against that is like a ditch digger up against a bulldozer! Besides, I’m blind and I have no hands, or did you fail to notice?”

Spencer got nowhere trying to change the subject. Ranting about politics again. Captain Sam even floated a crazy idea that every vet who was going to kill himself anyway ought to put on a suicide vest and take out a bunch of rich people with him.

“One vet every hour,” Captain Sam said. “That would change things.”

Spencer laughed it off. “We don’t get 72 virgins, Cap. Our guys don’t off themselves to get to Paradise for jihad. Besides that, how would you ever reach them? Take out an ad in Stars and Stripes?”

*****

While the two of them were sitting on the grass, sweating and breathing hard after a two-mile run, eight laps around the track, they talked.

“We are either warriors, teachers, nurturers, or healers,” the captain told Spencer. “Whatever other title or rank we have is just splitting hairs. We’re one of those or we’re nothing, just taking up space.

“This country has three times as many billionaires now as when you, YOU, first went to Afghanistan. Eight hundred new billionaires. How many of them are warriors? Teachers? Nurturers or healers? They’re thieves!”

Man, I’ve been a warrior for a long, long time, Spencer thought to himself. Don’t tell me that we’re all being used, that the wars were for nothing, that they were about money and nothing else.
I don’t want to hear it!

What he wanted was to get his PEB done and to get back to his real life. In Afghanistan.

He was meant for war. He knew that. Sitting on lawns had his mind was drifting to the soccer kid in his red Manchester United shirt. He was thinking about him too much, and about Miller, too.

Captain Sam asked him point blank “Are you going to find Miller and kill him? Is that why you want to go back?”

Spencer never gave an ounce of energy to imagining revenge, but if that was how the captain could make sense of his plans, that was ok. Captain Sam, a great man, and that piece of shit Miller were actually on the same page about the war, but Spencer never told that to the captain.

How could he explain that he was made for what he did, that what he brought to the table and a million dollars worth of training went into a purpose? He, MSJS, might well be the best in the world at what he did. The missions were fact, objective proofs. That was something. That had significance.

In the quiet of the night he also sometimes asked himself what else did that say about him, that he was better at war than anyone else he had ever seen? It did stuff to him, to his insides. There were periods he couldn’t take a crap for weeks. His insides were too tied up.  He could have taken the bus down to visit or had his dad drive up; Jack was only two hours away from Walter Reed, but that never happened. From Afghanistan, he couldn’t make himself call Jack, not even to say he was OK. Life outside war was what was really scary. How fucked up was that?

“Just 85 people in the world have more money than the lowest 3.5 billion people,” the captain continued. “The more the rich take, the faster everything falls apart. They can’t justify that, Jonathan, not even if they own the Supreme Court, the government, the police, the intelligence services, and everything else. Which is exactly why the rich are consolidating power. They know they can’t take everything and then expect to hold onto it for long. But they can’t stop themselves.

The captain continued: “Jonathan, consolidation is the one fundamental flaw of tyranny. When the people fight back, and they will, concentrated power also concentrates the targets. There is no changing things from the inside! We are supposed to be one man, one vote, but that’s over and it’s not coming back. Oligarchs, all over this planet they’re strangling democracy like boa constrictors.

“You don’t talk to snakes. You cut off their heads!” 

“Captain,” Spencer suggested, “let’s get you dictation software so you can write your ideas down by saying them out loud. Just talk into a microphone like you’re talking to me.”

Captain Sam should have been talking to a microphone. He certainly wasn’t listening.

“They wiped out Occupy in one coordinated night,” he went on. “Swept it out of existence just like the Chinese wiped Tiananmen Square.

But people won’t take getting poorer forever. Hard work either brings the reward of a better life, or things are going to bust loose. We’re right back in the same fights we had in 1789 and 1889 and 1932, only this time the bad guys are winning!”

“Whoa. Cap, bring it down to scale, OK? Look at a regular day. You could cook the girls’ breakfast. I know you could! You could work on the telephone and organize vets. It’s all good, Cap. That’s the smarts I have. The politics is your thing.”

Mission planning and procedure were in his wheelhouse, not politics. Yes, mission success required knowledge. Intelligence-gathering. You keep the enemy on his heels, keep him guessing, make him look over their shoulder because he knows you’re coming but never knows when or from where. But politics?
Jesus, shoot me now
.

“That’s not OK,” Captain Sam screamed at him. He set the back of his head against the tree trunk, leaned forward, and banged it back hard.

“You have to be into politics!” He was about to smack his skull a second time when Spencer grabbed his feet and pulled him away lengthwise on the grass.

Captain Sam rolled away from the tree trunk onto his side and curled up. “I can’t remember their faces,” he sobbed. “I can’t picture my own girls.” He really wasn’t thinking about politics at all.

Spencer placed his hand on the Captain’s forearm and looked away, past the manicured lawns, toward Wisconsin Avenue. What could he say? At Harmony Church, in sniper training, they said don’t think about faces, you push them down. If they came back in your dreams and you couldn’t stop them, then you stop yourself from sleeping.

One time, in 2004, he rotated back to Benning and then he stayed up for six weeks straight. It can be done. It’s just different. He pushed them down, but it tied his bowels in knots so badly that he didn’t crap that whole time. So he didn’t eat much. You can make yourself do that, too. He stayed hydrated and drank cans of Ensure.

He stopped talking to people. He spent two weeks inside a dark bedroom wanting all the time to be back in Afghanistan, back on familiar ground.

Now, he just wanted the damned PEB squared away and to be back in Afghanistan.

He wasn’t married and he didn’t have kids and the captain had both and the captain didn’t even give them a chance to be together as a family!

*****

“Captain, I am a doer. I get my mission; I get my mission squared away. Men like me; we’re trained to get the job done,” he said. “You, you’ve got a mind and a voice and a lap the girls can sit on and the parts you have all work fine. Step up, Cap. It will be different, but it can be good. Alice wants you home. I can’t say that. Nobody wants me to come home.”

Captain Sam didn’t say anything. Spencer reached out and stroked the captain’s head, once, then let him be. The blind helping the blind. What the hell did he know? Jack, his dad, went through the motions of living but Jack was a harmless zombie. Half the time he ate his dinner out of a can without bothering to heat it.

He thought about being 39 years old and never having a real girlfriend.
How different was he from Jack?

“At least when Jack was thirty-nine, he still had Mom,” he said aloud.

He thought about Mercy again. Mercy, who lived next door and helped with the house after Mom went on chemo. After her mom’s boyfriend started “getting weird,” Mercy stayed with him and Jack for a year. She was trying to stay put to finish high school and then she was moved in, just like that.

The mom’s boyfriend came around the first night. Jack walked him back off the porch. Spencer watched out the window. He must have been fifteen then. The guy was wearing an undershirt with no sleeves. He had tattoos and a mustache. He started to point at their house and tried to walk around Jack, but Spencer’s dad got in his way every time. Then he walked away a few steps. He turned around and stared, but then he left and stayed away. That was cool. He liked remembering that. Jack stepping up. He liked remembering Mercy.

Sometimes she cooked. Her food was bad. She wasn’t very good at cleaning, either. But with her there the house came back to life. Mercy was two years older. He liked her smell. Like cheesy sweat and flowers. Patchouli.

She taught him to play the guitar. She always had time for him. They practiced for hours, usually sitting on her bed. Her red-blonde hair was everywhere; she used to brush it away a hundred times until she finally raised her arms and pulled it back into a bushy ponytail. She had thick hair in her armpits and freckles all over her shoulders. He wanted to just reach out to feel the weight of her breasts in both his hands.

Every year, usually around Christmas, she still kept up. He never heard from anyone in his high school, but Mercy always came through even when he didn’t write her back. She’d had enough of cities; she said the last time she wrote to him. She had a farm now, in the southwest corner of West Virginia where the coalmines were all played out. She was raising sheep, or maybe goats, to make her own cheese. No more getting up to wear stupid outfits to go into some office. He tried to picture the place. He tried to picture Mercy twenty years older.

*****

T
he major stayed off his case. No more telling him about “dissociation” or that his intention to return to Afghanistan as soon as possible was “regressive” and “symptomatic of significant psychological wounds.” She no longer expressed a “profound level of concern” about his “reintegration into civilian life habits.”
Jesus.

During their mandatory five minutes of “social behavior measurement” she explained how “You’re beginning to relearn the basics for communication between people and not ranks.” Apparently people can talk, just banter. “It isn’t wasteful or weak, Sergeant. It’s another way to bond. Combat isn’t the norm,” she said.

“Between people, the norm is day-to-day conversation, which leads to fitting into a social unit and to forging healthy relationships.”

That was how he was going to fit in with the world “we hope to live in” rather than an environment dictated by threat and terror and hurt. “Afghanistan,” she said, “the war,” was “an artificial context.” He needed to get to know his real self. She urged him to remember the kid who used to lie down on the grass and watch the clouds go by. That unstructured joy was what they were are fighting for. (He never knew that one.) The war was going to be over. He was going to have to learn to fill his days himself, no more orders, to find out what he was good at doing and what he liked to do and then go do it.