Redeployment (21 page)

“There’s PTSD, too,” I say, “if you believe
The
New York Times
.”

“We’ve got some PTSD vets,” Sarah says, making it sound like she’s keeping them in jars somewhere.

“No bad burns?” I ask.

“Not like Jenks,” she says to me, then quickly turns to Jenks. “No offense.”

Jenks makes one of those maybe-a-smile faces and nods.

She leans forward. “I just want you to go through what it was like, in your own words.”

“The attack?” says Jenks. “Or after?”

“Both.”

Most people, when they try to draw Jenks out, talk to him in a “here, kitty-kitty” voice, but Sarah’s all business—clipped, polite.

“At your pace,” she says. “Whatever you think people should know.” She puts a concerned face on. I’ve seen that face on women at bars when I open up. When I’m sober, it makes me angry. When I’m drunk, it’s what I’m looking for.

“It’s like a lot of pain for a long, long time,” Jenks says. Sarah puts one hand up, a delicate, pale hand with long fingers, and with the other she reaches into her bag and pulls out her smartphone, fiddles with some app for recording.

Jenks is tense again, which is why I’m here. For backup of some kind. Or protection. Jessie flashes him a smile and puts her fucked-up hand on his, and Jenks reaches his free hand into his pocket and pulls out a wad of folded-up notebook paper. I look away, toward the other table with the other two girls. They’re drinking beer. I read a study somewhere that people who drink beer are more likely to sleep with someone on the first date.

“He’d remember the IED better than I would,” Jenks says, looking at me. I look at Sarah and know for a certified fact I’m not telling this girl shit. “I can’t even tell you that much after,” he goes on. “Scraps and pieces, at best. I’ve been working for a long time to put them together.” He taps the paper but doesn’t unfold it. I know what’s in there. I’ve read it. I’ve read the draft before and the draft before that.

“I know I was in a lot of pain,” Jenks says. “Pain like you can’t imagine. But pain like I can’t imagine either, because”—he reaches up and rubs a hand over his fucked-up scalp—“a lot of the memories are gone. Nothing. Like, system overload. Which is okay. I don’t need the memories. Plus, they had me on a cycle of morphine, an epidural drip, IV Dilaudid, Versed.”

“What’s the first thing you remember?” Sarah asks. She’s talking about the attack, but Jenks is already sliding away from that.

“My family,” Jenks says. He stops and opens the paper, flipping through the first few pages, the pages she’s here for. “They didn’t act like anything was wrong with me. And I couldn’t talk to them. I had a tube in my throat.” He looks down at the paper and starts reading. “It must have been worse for my family than for me—”

“Do you want me to maybe just read that?” she says, pointing at the papers. “Then ask you questions afterwards? I mean, if you’ve already got it written down . . .”

Jenks pulls the papers away from her. He looks at me.

“Or okay,” she says. “You read it. That’s best.”

Jenks takes a breath. He sips water and I sip beer. Jessie’s scowling at her friend and squeezing Jenks’s hand. After a moment, Jenks clears his throat and holds the papers out again.

“It must have been worse for my family than for me,” he starts again. “People look at me now and think, God, how terrible. But it was so much worse then. They didn’t know if I’d survive, and I didn’t look like myself. When a body loses as much blood as I did, weird things happen. I was holding an extra forty pounds of fluid in my body, puffing up my neck and
face like a bloated fish. I was bandaged and oiled wherever I was burned and—”

“Do you remember the explosion itself?” Sarah cuts in. Jenks gives her a flat look. The day before, when he’d asked me to come, I’d told him that if he gave this girl his story, it wouldn’t be his anymore. Like, if you take a photograph of someone, you’re stealing their soul, except this would be deeper than a picture. Your story
is
you. Jenks had disagreed. He never argues with me, he just goes his own way. I told him I’d come with him whatever he chose to do.

“I’ve worked hard to remember it,” he tells Sarah, flipping back through his pages but not looking at them. “The problem is I’m not sure what’s real memory and what’s my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light. Except I’m sure of my bright light. There was a flash, definitely. There was a sulfur smell, like the Fourth of July, but real close.”

I don’t remember sulfur. I remember meat. Grilled meat. So, yeah, Fourth of July. Barbecue. It’s why I’m vegetarian now, and why the hippie chicks in Billyburg sometimes think I’m like them, which I’m not.

“And black hitting so hard,” Jenks says.

“Black?”

“Everything black and quick, a knockout. You ever been knocked out?”

“Actually, yes.”

I let out a loud snort. There’s no way Sarah’s ever been knocked out. I bet her parents had put her in Bubble Wrap all the way to the Ivy Leagues.

“Then yeah. Black hitting you, like a knockout punch to the head, no gloves, but the knuckle is bigger than you are, it hits your whole body all at once, and it’s on fire. It killed the two other guys in the vehicle, Chuck Lavel and Victor Roiche, who were amazing Marines and the best friends I’ve ever had, though I didn’t know they’d died until later. And then there are scraps of memories and then waking up in another country, wondering where my battle buddies are, and at the same time knowing they’re dead, but not being able to ask because I couldn’t move or talk and had a tube in my throat.”

Chuck and Victor were my friends too, and good friends of Jenks’s, but never his best friends. That was always me.

“So the scraps,” Sarah says.

“I remember screaming,” Jenks says, “I don’t know—from the explosion, from later, in the hospital, screaming. Though I couldn’t have screamed in the hospital.”

“Because of the tube.”

“I feel like there were times I was screaming, or maybe times when I dreamed how things should have been.”

“What do you remember?” Sarah turns to me. So does Jessie. “Do you remember screaming?”

Jenks is looking down at his hands. He sips water.

“Maybe,” I say. “Who cares? My A-driver didn’t hear shit. No sounds at all. A thing like that, if you got ten people there, then you’ll have ten different stories. And they don’t match.”

I don’t trust my memories. I trust the vehicle, burnt and twisted and torn. Like Jenks. No stories. Things. Bodies. People lie. Memories lie.

“It helps to put things in order,” Jenks says, one palm resting on his paper.

“Helps with what?” Sarah says.

Jenks shrugs. He’s been doing that a lot. “Nightmares,” he says. “Weird reactions when you hear something, smell something.”

“PTSD,” she says.

“No,” Jenks says matter-of-factly. “Explosions don’t startle me. I’m all good. Fireworks, light and sound, it’s all fine. Everybody thought the Fourth of July would freak me out, but it doesn’t unless there are too many smells. And I don’t lose it or anything. Just . . . weird reactions.”

“So you try to remember—”

“This way, it’s me remembering what happened,” Jenks says. “I’d rather that than be walking down the street and I smell something and the day remembers itself for me.”

“PTSD,” she says.

“No,” he says, his voice sharp, “I’m fine. Who wouldn’t have a few weird reactions? It doesn’t mess with my life.”

He taps his paper. “I’ve written this twenty times,” he says. “I always start with the explosions, the smells.”

I want to smoke a cigarette. I’ve got a pack in my pocket, my last from a carton I picked up visiting friends in the Carolinas. In this city, smoking’ll kill your bank account way before it kills your lungs.

“So you got knocked out . . . ,” Sarah tries again.

“No,” I say. “He was awake.”

“I was frozen,” Jenks says. “My eardrums had burst. I couldn’t hear.”

“But you heard screaming?”

Jenks shrugs again.

“Sorry,” Sarah says. Jessie’s eyes are on Sarah. She looks unhappy.

Jenks goes back to reading from the papers. “I kept thinking, I can’t move, why can’t I move? And I couldn’t see, either. The only reason I can see today is I was wearing Eye Pro. I had shrapnel in my head, face, neck, shoulders, arms, the sides of my torso, my legs. I couldn’t see, but my eyes worked. I went black. I woke up, still on the road. The smells were the same.”

Your smells are off, I think.

“There was burning inside my body. The shrapnel in my skin and organs was still red hot and burning me from the inside while I burned from the outside. Ammo was cooking off inside the vehicle and one round struck my leg, but I didn’t know it at the time. Honestly, I was so out of it. I feel more sorry for the guys who had to rush in and treat me than for myself.”

This is Jenks’s standard line. It’s utter bullshit.

He turns to me. So do the girls. “It was what it was,” I say. “Not the greatest day.”

Jessie laughs. Sarah looks at her like she’s crazy.

“Memory gets really spotty after that,” Jenks says. “There’s this drug, Versed, it kills your recall. I guess that’s good. So this is all stuff they told me after the fact.” He looks down at his papers and starts flipping through while we all wait. I sip beer. Then he starts reading. “They pumped blood into me using a power infuser. At one point I lost pulse and went into PEA, pulseless electrical activity. My heart had electrical activity going on but not in an organized fashion, so it couldn’t form an effective contraction of the ventricle. It’s not a flatline, but it’s
not good. They were pushing blood and epinephrine into me as quickly as they could. I was on a respirator. Earlier, Doc Sampson had put tourniquets on both my arms and everybody I talked to was very clear: Those tourniquets saved my life.”

“So—”

Jenks holds up a hand to shut her up. “What they are not clear about but what is very clear to me is that it was not just Doc Sampson who saved my life. It was the first guys who got to my vehicle”—he looks up at me—“the Marines who called in a nine-line. The pilots who flew out. The flight nurse who kept me alive on my flight. The docs at TQ who stabilized me. The docs at Landstuhl. All the docs at all the places I’ve been to stateside.”

Jenks sounds a bit choked up and he’s looking at his paper, though I know he doesn’t need it there. This bit hasn’t changed from the first draft. I’ve never heard him read it aloud.

“I am alive because of so many people. My life was saved not once, but repeatedly, by more people than I will ever know. They tell me I fought, kicking and screaming, before they drugged me. And some of the techniques that saved my life didn’t even exist until Iraq, like giving patients fresh plasma along with packed red blood cells to help clotting. I needed to clot, and I couldn’t do it with just my blood. I needed the blood that the soldiers and airmen who I will never know lined up to give me, and I needed the docs to have the knowledge to give it to me. So I owe my life to the doc who figured out the best way to push trauma victims’ blood, and I owe it to all the Marines that doc watched die before he figured it out.”

Jenks takes a pause and Jessie nods, saying, “Yeah, yeah.”

There’s a bit more to read, but Jenks very slowly slides the
paper over to me. Sarah looks at Jessie with a cocked eyebrow, but Jessie isn’t looking at her.

“Yeah?” I say to Jenks, who doesn’t make a sound. I can’t read anything on his face. I look down at the paper, though I’ve probably got it by heart.

“Whether I’m a poor, disfigured vet who got exactly what he volunteered for,” I read, “or the luckiest man on earth, surrounded by love and care at what is unquestionably the worst period of my life, is really a matter of perspective. There’s no upside to bitterness, so why be bitter? Perhaps I’ve sacrificed more for my country than most, but I’ve sacrificed far, far less than some. I have good friends. I have all my limbs. I have my brain and my soul and hope for the future. What sort of fool would I have to be, to not accept these gifts with the joy they deserve?”

Sarah gives a quick nod. “Okay, great,” she says, not even stopping to dwell on Jenks’s little personal statement of recovery and hope. “So you get back, your family is there. You can’t talk. You’re happy to be alive. But you’ve got fifty-four surgeries ahead of you, right? Can you take me through those?”

And Jenks, who has always separated the pain that came before and the pain that came after, takes a breath. Sarah still looks concerned, but also unyielding. I think, Jenks blew his story of triumph too early in the conversation. Especially since he ultimately gave up, told them he’d rather look like this for the rest of his life than go through more surgeries.

“They had to reconstruct me,” Jenks begins.

Sarah checks her phone, to make sure it’s still recording.

“Some stuff,” he says, “the way they do it, the orthopedics, it’s like building a table. Other stuff . . .”

He sips water. One of the other girls in the bar, the ugly one, goes out for a smoke. Her hot friend starts checking her phone.

“They had to move muscles around and sew them together to cover exposed bone, clean out dead tissue, and seal it with grafts. They take, well, what’s basically a cheese grater to some of your healthy skin and reattach it where it’s needed and grow skin from a single layer.” He takes another swig of water. “That wasn’t like the other pain. Drugs didn’t help. And there were the infections. That’s how I lost my ears. And there was physical therapy. There still is physical therapy. Sometimes the pain was so bad, I’d count to thirty in my head over and over again. I’d tell myself, I can do this. I can make it to thirty. If I can survive to thirty, it’s okay.”

“Good,” Sarah says. “But let’s slow down. What happened first?”

She’s got a sliver of ice in her, I think. I look down at my glass. It’s empty. I don’t remember drinking from it that much. I want more beer. I want a cigarette. I want to go outside and smoke with the ugly girl and get her phone number, just because.

“First thing,” Jenks says, “is the pain every time they changed my bandages. Every day, for hours.”