Thank You for Your Service (21 page)

That was it, all he had to say. “Do you hate me?” Tausolo had asked,
opening a vein to a brother in combat, and if the answer he got wasn’t quite the exoneration he’d been seeking, it would have to do, because while the truth of war is that it’s always about loving the guy next to you, the truth of the after-war is that you’re on your own. There were five guys in the Humvee that day, and the only one not trying to figure out what happened in his own way, at his own speed, is Harrelson. For the other four, the individual reckonings continue, and now one of them begins his second day at the WTB by laying his head on a table, closing his eyes, and wondering how many signatures he can get in the next eight hours.

It happens to be a significant day in the army, not at Fort Riley but in Washington, D.C. As Tausolo moves from one office to another with his list, a ceremony gets under way at the White House to present the first Medal of Honor awarded to a living person since the Vietnam War. “It is my privilege to present our nation’s highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, to a soldier as humble as he is heroic: Staff Sergeant Salvatore A. Giunta,” President Obama says in remarks directed to a soldier whose nervous eyes bear some resemblance to Tausolo’s, and then describes what happened one day in Afghanistan:

“Sal and his platoon were several days into a mission in the Korengal Valley—the most dangerous valley in northeast Afghanistan. The moon was full. The light it cast was enough to travel by without using their night-vision goggles. With heavy gear on their backs, and air support overhead, they made their way single file down a rocky ridge crest, along terrain so steep that sliding was sometimes easier than walking. They hadn’t traveled a quarter mile before the silence was shattered. It was an ambush, so close that the cracks of the guns and the whizz of the bullets were simultaneous. Tracer fire hammered the ridge at hundreds of rounds per minute—‘more,’ Sal said later, ‘than the stars in the sky.’ The Apache gunships above saw it all, but couldn’t engage with the enemy so close to our soldiers. The next platoon heard the shooting, but were too far away to join the fight in time. And the two lead men were hit by enemy fire and knocked down instantly. When the third was struck in the helmet and fell to the ground, Sal charged headlong into the wall of bullets to pull him to safety behind what little cover there was. As he
did, Sal was hit twice, one round slamming into his body armor, the other shattering a weapon slung across his back. They were pinned down, and two wounded Americans still lay up ahead. So Sal and his comrades regrouped and counterattacked. They threw grenades, using the explosions as cover to run forward, shooting at the muzzle flashes still erupting from the trees. Then they did it again. And again. Throwing grenades, charging ahead. Finally, they reached one of their men. He’d been shot twice in the leg, but he had kept returning fire until his gun jammed. As another soldier tended to his wounds, Sal sprinted ahead, at every step meeting relentless enemy fire with his own. He crested a hill alone, with no cover but the dust kicked up by the storm of bullets still biting into the ground. There, he saw a chilling sight: the silhouettes of two insurgents carrying the other wounded American away—who happened to be one of Sal’s best friends. Sal never broke stride. He leapt forward. He took aim. He killed one of the insurgents and wounded the other, who ran off. Sal found his friend alive, but badly wounded. Sal had saved him from the enemy—now he had to try to save his life. Even as bullets impacted all around him, Sal grabbed his friend by the vest and dragged him to cover. For nearly half an hour, Sal worked to stop the bleeding and help his friend breathe until the MEDEVAC arrived to lift the wounded from the ridge. American gunships worked to clear the enemy from the hills. And with the battle over, First Platoon picked up their gear and resumed their march through the valley. They continued their mission …”

Obama goes on from there, talking about one day in one part of one war, and meanwhile, in one part of another war, on that very same day, in those very same hours, Tausolo was hobbling around Iraq on crutches and telling no one about his dreams of Harrelson, all of which goes to show how long it can take for a Medal of Honor to be approved.

“…  our brave servicemen and women and their families have done everything they’ve been asked to do,” Obama is saying now. “They have been everything that we have asked them to be. ‘If I am a hero,’ Sal has said, ‘then every man who stands around me, every woman in the military, every person who defends this country is.’ And he’s right. This
medal today is a testament to his uncommon valor, but also to the parents and the community that raised him; the military that trained him; and all the men and women who served by his side. All of them deserve our enduring thanks and gratitude. They represent a small fraction of the American population, but they and the families who await their safe return carry far more than their fair share of our burden. They fight halfway around the globe, but they do it in hopes that our children and our grandchildren won’t have to. They are the very best part of us. They are our friends, our family, our neighbors, our classmates, our coworkers. They are why our banner still waves, our founding principles still shine, and our country, the United States of America, still stands as a force for good all over the world. So please join me in welcoming Staff Sergeant Salvatore A. Giunta for the reading of the citation.”

And if only Tausolo could be hearing this part, maybe he would feel better about being a soldier, but instead at this moment, as the president is hanging the Medal of Honor around Sal Giunta’s neck, the thing he is feeling good about as he heads toward the pharmacy is being up to twenty-one signatures.

“So I’m Sue, and I’m the pharmacist here. Do you have any questions?”

“No,” Tausolo says.

“Okay. You want to just get everything out?”

He has brought all of his prescriptions in a Walmart bag. He lines them up on her desk.

“Zoloft,” Sue says, picking up the first one. “Are you taking this every day? One a day? You feel like that’s working for you okay?”

She picks up the second. “Klonopin. Do you take this twice a day every day? Does it help you with your anxiety?”

The third. “Abilify. What do you take this for? Do you feel like it helps you?”

Tausolo laughs. “I don’t know. I’m on so many pills,” he says.

“Trazodone,” she says, moving on. “Do you know what this one is for?”

“Sleep?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Now I notice you also have Lunesta. Do you take them both for sleep?”

He nods.

“I guess my question is do you need them both?”

He nods again.

“And then your ibuprofen,” she says, picking up the next.

“Yeah. That’s for my knee thing.”

“And here’s another bottle of Lunesta,” she says. “And here’s another Trazodone.”

She makes notes of all this and checks them against a list she’d been given before his arrival.

“Now what about Concerta?” she says, mentioning the drug he had told Tim Jung he takes for attention deficit and memory. “Are you taking that?”

“Yes,” he says sheepishly. “I forgot to bring it.”

She reaches into a supply cabinet and fishes out two plastic pill boxes, one green, one purple, one for morning, one for evening, each of which can hold seven days’ worth of medication. “Would that make it easier?” she asks. She takes out a pen.

Twenty-two signatures.

Later, walking down a hallway with his Walmart bag reloaded, he runs into the sergeant who the day before had asked him what was going on with him, to which he had nervously answered, “Good.” That was uncomfortable enough, but now the sergeant, whose name is Michael Lewis, is poking around the Walmart bag and motioning Tausolo over to his desk.

“You got a lot of pills, man,” he says as Tausolo once again finds himself seated across from someone he knows nothing about. Jung, at least, seemed friendly. But there’s something about this guy that makes Tausolo hesitant to say anything at all, and it’s not like he’s much of a talker to begin with.

“Wow,” Lewis says, taking out a container and looking at the label.

He takes out another.

“You got it bad, man,” he says.

He takes out the next one, aware of Tausolo watching and knowing
what he is thinking of him. Too bad. This is the way he is now. He’s been in this place for three years, and at first he tried to get close to everybody, even the one who threw beer bottles at anyone who came in his room, which he not only tolerated, but understood. He’d lost three guys in the war. But then, back here, came his fourth loss, a high-risk tracker named Jessie Robinson, who on a Friday night called in, right on time, saying he needed to go to his house and cut his grass. Saturday morning, he again called to say he was at the house and about to start mowing. Saturday night, he called to say he was at his house and had just finished. Sunday morning: nothing. Lewis waited until fifteen minutes after deadline and then called another sergeant, who hadn’t heard from him, either. They drove to his house, where the grass was freshly cut, the car was in the driveway, the car windows were down, and the keys were in the ignition. They knocked on the front door. No answer. They circled the house, trying to see inside. Everything looked shut and locked. They tried the front door and were surprised to find it open. “Jessie?” the other sergeant called as they went inside. “Jessie?” The house was dark. Lewis started climbing the stairs up to the main level. “Jessie?” A cat came flying out of nowhere and disappeared down the stairs. “Jessie?” Now, at the top of the stairs, he heard a moan and saw a slice of light at the end of the hallway. It was coming from the bathroom, and when Lewis looked in, there was Robinson, on the floor near two empty pill bottles, his head resting in a puddle of blood. “And the blood was black,” Lewis would recall. “Jessie, Jessie, it’s Lew,” he said, lifting him. Robinson vomited. He went limp. Lewis held on to him until, as he would put it, “there was no noise anymore.” And that’s who Tausolo is looking at, someone who describes himself as “more leery now. More cautious.” Because “you have to be. You never know.” Because “it kind of messed me up.”

None of which he says to Tausolo, just as Tausolo says nothing to him. Instead, he sweeps the pills back into Tausolo’s Walmart bag, flips open his briefcase, shows Tausolo the pill containers he carries around, says quietly, “I got my demons, too,” and tells Tausolo to take the rest of the day off.

And maybe what happens next doesn’t happen if Tausolo, hearing
this, gets up right away. But he hesitates for a minute, and when he stands up he nearly collides with Tim Jung, who happens to be rushing by. “Quite a grocery bag,” Jung says, and instead of going home, Tausolo is once again lining up his pill bottles on a desk.

“Klonopin?” Jung asks, remembering that Tausolo didn’t mention Klonopin.

“Where’s the Concerta?” he asks, remembering that Tausolo did mention that.

He reaches for the phone to call Sue the pharmacist. It will take him several tries to get through to her, and when he does this is what will happen:

He will remind her that Tausolo is on the high-risk tracker and say, “Well he’s got a small buffet of Trazodone here … Well he certainly doesn’t need sixty Klonopins while he’s in high-risk … same for the Trazodone … same for the Abilify …”

This in turn will lead to Tausolo going to see someone who will painstakingly sort through all of his pills, take out a week’s worth of each one, put the rest in a pile for disposal, and ask which of the two pill containers he was given he would like to use for the pills he takes in the evening. “It doesn’t matter,” he will say, but she will say it does matter, it really does, and will wait patiently until he chooses the green one, and then she inexplicably will write on it with a pen “A.M.”

She will then call someone to dispose of the leftover pills, who will turn out to be Sergeant Lewis. “I told him to leave early. He walked right into this,” he will say under his breath when he sees Tausolo, and after they’ve disposed of the pills—some two hours after he told Tausolo to go home—he will shake his head and say, “Next time I tell you to leave early, put some jet engines on your legs.”

“Damn,” Tausolo will whisper to himself. “How’d I get myself into this mess?”

All because he didn’t get up fast enough. Or because he is why the banner still waves, the founding principles still shine, and the United States of America still stands as a force for good all over the world. Or because he once got in a Humvee because someone told him he needed to go from here to there, and because of that he is high risk.

Whatever the cause, all of this will happen as surely as Harrelson will return to his dreams, but first, as Tim Jung dials, once again seeing the look that has returned to Tausolo’s face, he pauses. He knows the look. It’s the look of the river-bound. He had it himself once, and he didn’t leave the river that day so someone would die on his watch, not his soldiers, not himself, and not Aieti, Tausolo, who by contract acknowledges he is in a difficult state.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he says to Tausolo.

“I know,” Tausolo wishes he could say back, but he knows he has.

Why else would he be here?

Jessie Robinson’s trip to the Gardner Room in the Pentagon begins as soon as he is taken from Michael Lewis’s arms, rushed to the hospital, and declared dead from an overdose of acetaminophen.

Right away, his unit starts work on completing a Commander’s Suspected Suicide Event Report, also known as a 37-Liner, even though it contains only thirty-one lines of questions. The report will be the basis for what Peter Chiarelli eventually sees, and it asks about such things as Jessie Robinson’s marital status, financial status, alcohol use, drug use, suicide prevention training, behavioral health history, and “Details of suspected suicide event, including suspected method of death (e.g. hanging, drowning, overdose).”

At the same time, a different army unit, the Army Medical Command, works on its own report, which among other things will say that at the time of his death, Robinson was separated from his wife, Kristy, had been diagnosed with “Major depression, recurrent” and “Atypical psychosis,” and was taking twelve prescription medications. It will also say that Robinson “had two spouse abuse cases … that were substantiated with him as the offender,” and that “there were also accusations of infidelity, conspiracy theories, communication problems, depression (for both), anxiety, obsessive compulsive tendencies, and trust issues. SGT Robinson continually attended therapy sessions, but it cannot be determined if they were successful due to his unwillingness to cooperate, stay on task, and talk about the presenting issues. Towards the end of his life, the Robinsons were pending divorce, and Mrs. Robinson had moved out of their house.”