A rolling table with a mirror stood by the bed. Kirby wanted to see his face for himself. He leaned forward, dragging hoses and tubes as he moved. Vertigo spun him. The room rolled upside down.
He dropped back onto the bed. The two Marines watched him, unsure what to do. The younger Marine decided. He pushed the mirror toward him.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” the staff sergeant said.
Rank meant nothing here and now. The younger Marine adjusted it so Doc would have a full view.
Doc looked. A face stared back at him, swollen to enormous size. He did not know it.
That’s not me.
Both of its eyes were darkened; one a deep blue, the other a light green. A hump of skin and flesh protruded from the face’s right cheek, as if the cheekbone had been broken and its ends were angled up and out from a mound of meat. Beside this strange lump he saw a large hole. He categorized it immediately. This must be where the bullet had exited, he thought. He noticed thick sutures, gauze, and dried blood, and the ventilator tube. He kept scanning—part patient, part provider—looking for anything familiar, a sign of himself, of the face he used to know.
He thought he recognized the top of his forehead.
He was not even sure of that.
He looked back at the hole where his right cheek had been. He heard an echo of the doctor’s words: “missing bone.”
Bones that are missing are gone.
This is bad, Kirby thought. What will I grow to replace that?
He pushed the mirror away.
He settled the back of his head into his pillow. He had already classified his case: He was not going to be one of those wounded vets the magazines write about, the maimed soldier who rebounds to run marathons and scuba dive. His face was broken. Part of it was gone, just as if someone had scooped it away with a jagged spoon. He could not speak. One part of his mind wanted to scream. Another was a corpsman still, trained in medical care.
This is going to be an extensive process, far beyond dentures and wiring the mouth shut, he thought. This is going to be years.
He calmed himself. His face hurt. He could see that he was hooked up to the IV drip. Painkillers, he thought. He’d soon be dosed again, and back asleep. These were the first minutes of his new life.
Anger flashed through him, momentarily overriding fear. A lot was headed his way that he did not yet understand. In his last conscious hour he had been in an outpost in Iraq, ringed by militants waiting with rifles and bombs. He was not ready to be a patient. He was still wired to fight.
What the fuck ever, man I don’t care.
Kirby slept.
* * *
Doc’s mother, Gail, woke Christmas morning feeling crushingly sad. For months she had dwelled on her son’s second tour in Iraq. The news from the war was unrelentingly grim, and unlike his first tour, which he spent mostly on ship, he now was serving the entire time in one of Iraq’s most violent provinces. Fear was her companion. It followed her everywhere.
Gail had started a new job at the Kmart in Hiram in the summer and she had been trying to learn the position. But she felt distracted, worn down by mental and emotional fatigue. The Christmas season drained her further, with its streams of shoppers and long hours. She closed the store Christmas Eve and was late getting home, where she discovered she had missed Doc’s holiday call from Iraq. He had spent Christmas Eve on Camp Fallujah, a safer place than out on Route Chicago. She did not know he had gone back, or that he had been assigned to a rooftop post. She felt heartache. She wrote him an email, reminding him of the Christmases they had shared and promising good things to come. At last she went to bed.
In the morning the holiday took an unexpectedly upbeat shape. One of her cousins, who had three young children, was spending Christmas at Gail’s home, filling the house with energy. Doc’s new wife, Lauren, visited with a gift. Lauren and Doc had been married just before Doc left for war. By afternoon Gail had an uplifting realization: She was having a good day.
In the evening she stepped down into the basement to have a cigarette out of sight of the children. She was due back at Kmart in a few hours to open the store for the overnight stockers. Its shelves had been picked bare and needed to be filled for a December 26 sale.
One cigarette, she thought. A moment away.
Destiny, Doc’s sister, rushed down the stairs. She was holding the telephone.
“It’s Camp Lejeune, and they won’t tell me anything,” she said.
Gail took the phone. A Marine staff sergeant identified himself in a flat tone.
“I am calling to inform you that your son, Dustin Edward Kirby, has been hit by enemy small-arms fire in Iraq,” he said.
Gail’s mind stumbled over the language. Enemy small-arms fire? What does that mean? She thought she knew.
Her mind would not let it stick. Enemy small-arms fire.
Then it registered.
“What?” she asked. “He’s been shot?”
The staff sergeant repeated the sentence like he was reading from a note card.
She raised her voice. “He’s been shot?”
She didn’t hear an answer. I am his mother. He is my kid. They have to tell me.
She shouted the question: “HE’S BEEN SHOT?”
The basement was becoming a blur of disassociated motions and sensations. Her husband, Jacko, stood at her side. She had not seen where he came from. She was screaming uncontrollably. “You promised!” she shouted. “You promised!”
Someone was trying to hug her. She struck whoever it was.
“Mama, please stop,” she heard.
She recognized this voice. It belonged to Daniel, her younger son.
Regret mixed with her grief. She had to take care of Daniel, too, and of Jacko and Destiny. She was more than Dustin’s mom.
Why have I been so focused on just Dusty?
Dusty.
Jacko took the phone and walked into another room.
She had not heard the details. Dusty. Is he dead? He’s dead?
IS HE DEAD?
Jacko returned. He was somehow under control and able to talk in the clipped language of a man clinging to facts he had just heard. He spoke as if everything would depend on him sharing a verbatim account. Dustin had been shot through the face, he said. He was alive and in critical condition. Doctors had stabilized him in a military hospital in Iraq. The Marines planned to move him to Germany, then home.
The words meant one thing to Gail.
He’s alive.
She still had little idea of what it meant. Shot through the face?
The phone rang again. Her family was crossing into a new world, passing into the territory of the grievously wounded, a place of its own. She had no sense of time. Doc’s battalion commander called from Iraq. Between calls she and Jacko notified their larger family. They had a duty of notification. People needed to know. The family already had one wounded corpsman. Now it had two. There was so much to share, and yet so little. Dusty got shot in the face Dusty’s hurt, but Dusty’s alive.
Calls went out. More calls came in.
Already everyone was talking about how to relocate to Washington to visit Dusty in the military hospital, to help him, to learn the contours and customs of the new universe pulling them in.
For a while, Gail and her mother, who was nearing eighty, sat away from the others. Curled into a fetal position on a swinging bench on her back porch, Gail laid her head across her mother’s lap. They rocked slowly back and forth in the cool Georgia night. She was speechless, feeling her mother’s hand running softly through her hair, and then it was time to go.
Gail did not have her Kmart manager’s home number. She had to drive to the store, find it on the call list, and ask for time off. She drove wordlessly through the empty Christmas night, let in the workers for the overnight shift, made the call to her manager, and headed home. It was late when she stepped back into the house. Most of her family was asleep. The lights on the Christmas tree were bright.
She was waiting to find out what had become of her son, and of her family’s life.
My Dusty, she thought. What does it mean to be shot through the face?
* * *
Most people struck in the head by military rifle fire die instantly or soon after, and never reach the operating table. They leave nothing for surgeons to do. Doc Kirby’s wounds were among the rarest seen. The bullet blew through his mouth from left to right, ripping through bone and tissue but missing major arteries and veins. One minute Kirby was intact. The next he was dying. Then he was saved by a trauma team. He was wheeled into Bethesda Naval Hospital a few days later as the newest member of a tiny cohort—those who survived rifle shots to the face. He was more than a man now. He was a living exhibit of chance and the blind indifference of ballistics. A sniper making a thousand shots might not manage to replicate the result. Had Kirby’s head been turned slightly, if the angle of the shot had been different by a fraction of a degree, had it entered his face an inch higher or farther back, he would have been killed. Instead the bullet cut a left-side entrance hole, hit teeth and tongue, and blew through the right side of his jaw and out his right cheek, ripping open a hole. The impact cracked his lower skull near the roof of his mouth and damaged his sinuses.
Gail and Jacko arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital as their son, fresh from evacuation from Europe, was being wheeled down the hall. Gail had a glimpse. She thought he looked agitated but was not sure. She stood in a waiting room until the staff had moved him to a room and allowed the couple in.
She rushed the bed, scanning his face, crying. At first she focused on his eyes. They were expressive. His eyes told her he was there. Then she looked him over more closely. For four days she had wondered what he would look like. She had not anticipated this. His face was so swollen that it looked like he was hiding a bowling ball in his mouth. His bandages were stained with seeping blood.
He could not speak but wrote notes on a pad of paper. His mother was a fresh source of information. They talked past each other. She wanted to know how he was. He wanted to know about his battalion and whether everyone else was okay.
“Have you heard from my boys yet?” he asked, then asked again.
Doctors explained the procedures ahead. His surgeries would require more than reconstruction. They would require replacement of rows of teeth and a chunk of jaw. Soon after his return, they began. They removed his right fibula and grafted part of it to the right side of his jaw. With screws and plates, the transplanted bone created a hybrid mandible where the original had been. His face was being remade.
Lauren, his wife, took turns at his bedside with his parents. His pain was excruciating, lessened by drugs administered through an IV machine that he reset when the staff was not looking. In this way he could decrease the time between doses and exceed the prescribed amount. Nurses fed him nutritional shakes. He vomited many of them, sending them back up through his wired jaw in frame-shaking heaves.
A week passed. Then two. His face healed. The rest of him grew weaker. He lost weight. When he stood, he felt dizzy—a mix of drugs, exhaustion, a disrupted sleep schedule, and the lingering effect of the jolt to the brain. The physical-therapy staff urged him to leave the room for walks around the hospital floor, in family areas and outside. He resisted. When he made eye contact with strangers, he felt them squirm.
He was taken off the ventilator and breathing through a hole in his trachea. He still could not talk. His family and nurses hand-bathed him. Privacy was stripped away. Depression gripped him, along with a narrowing sense of hope. Getting shot in the face in some ways is the worst wound possible, he thought.
Some of his handwritten notes reflected irritation, discomfort, and pain. “I itch,” he wrote. “I am nauseous.” Hospital life required endless small adjustments. “I just want a better pillow,” he wrote, between requests for more medication or changes to the bandages over a sore on his backside.
Other notes were electric with insecurity and fear. “If I stop breathing, will you help me?” His mind could feel fevered with anxiety. “It scares me so bad. Could you give me some low grade anesthesia to keep me from freaking out.”
At times he summoned humor.
“I am gonna vomit,” he wrote one day. “Would you prefer I used the term ‘oral discharge’?”
Guilt stalked him. Kirby had been flown home early. He believed he had let Weapons Company down. On this theme he would write and write, scribbling on loose sheets of printer paper or a yellow legal pad. “I could never stay out of the fight. I am a warrior and I just feel like a failure. I should be there. I should be fighting still. I just wish that everyone else would get to come home.”
Dignitaries made their rounds through the hospital to visit wounded troops. Kirby observed the rituals, replying like the faithful prop his circumstances forced him to be. “Honored to serve,” he’d write, or something similarly accommodating. Inwardly he was angry. The visits felt like mere formalities, senior officers checking a box. Some of them presented him with challenge coins, medallions with military unit insignia or sometimes a general’s name. Self-referential junk.
“Put this coin with the rest of my coins,” he wrote, after one officer left.
He vented later to Gail that it was as if these visitors did not understand military service, or that he was part of a company of Marines: “Something gets on my nerves about all these congressmen and generals and bigwigs, like all these people, they don’t ask anything about my unit or how they are doing or feeling or anything like that.”
One officer was different: Major Justin Constantine.
A Marine reservist and lawyer who had volunteered for a tour in Iraq, Constantine had been shot through the mouth by a sniper about two months before Kirby. The bullet hit the back of his jaw beside his left ear and exploded out his mouth. He was further along in the reconstructive process than Kirby and an outpatient who returned to the hospital for surgeries, therapy, and follow-up care. He was learning to talk again.
One day after Doc’s reconstructive surgery, Constantine arrived at his bedside and introduced himself, in slightly slurred and labored speech. He explained his own wound, although the description was almost unnecessary. His face was a calling card.
Kirby had never met another patient who had been shot in the face. He could talk differently to this officer than he could to the others. He took up a pencil and apologized.
“Not much to look at, sir,” the note said.
Constantine had been warned to expect something negative.
He opted to be stern, telling Kirby that while the bullet had gone through Doc’s face from left to right, the one that struck Constantine had gone through his head at a worse angle, from back to front, and caused more damage. But in spite of the severity of the wound, he had done whatever his doctors told him to do, and was making progress.
He summoned Kirby’s sense of duty, reminding him that he was a corpsman. He asked him what he would tell his Marines if they had been wounded the same way.
Kirby said that he would tell them to do their therapy and rehab.
Constantine said they both knew guys who didn’t come home from Anbar. They owed it to them, he said, to make the most of every day.
“You are going to get better,” he said. “I am an old man and I am doing it. You’re a young man and you can do it, too.”
Kirby watched the major closely. Constantine’s speech was imperfect, but he was articulating words. Kirby could understand him. And Kirby could see the major was living a life. He was not hospitalized. He was eating real food. He walked the corridors alone. He projected no self-pity. He radiated determination. It all suggested possibility and hope. The major told him to concentrate on small steps and immediate problems, and not to be overwhelmed about what he had lost or how long his recovery might take.
“Don’t think about before, or too far ahead,” he said. “Think about the here and now.”
Kirby wrote back, “Thank you, sir. Thank you for everythi
ng.”
After the major left, Kirby took his first shower. He examined himself in the mirror a second time.
His face remained huge but his body had shrunk, wasted from weeks of inactivity and limited food. But this time, after the first rounds of reconstruction, he could almost make himself out. A row of sutures ran along his jaw, holding together a wide purple scar. Big ol’ zipper face, Doc thought. His face looked as if it was under pressure from within, like it might burst. He knew the surgeons were just beginning, and that his remade jaw needed time to set and heal. His windpipe was still an open vent through which he was breathing. Soon it would be capped. Then, Kirby thought, he would breathe through his mouth and nasal passages and try to speak again. The mirror was loaded with information. He was coming out of early trauma.
Okay, this is me, he thought. I’m stitched up; I am plated and screwed together. This is the beginning of this journey. Shit is happening now.
Now when I am getting out of here?
* * *
Second Battalion, Eighth Marines, was scheduled to return to the States in February. Doc made it his goal to be there to greet them. By late January, doctors closed his tracheotomy and he began breathing through his mouth and nose. His voice was clumsy and thickly slurred. But to talk at all was relief. Suddenly he was not scribbling notes. After a swallowing study to ensure he could ingest soft foods and liquids, he was discharged from the hospital and returned to Georgia on medical leave. He had weighed about 180 pounds on Christmas Day in Iraq. He left the hospital at 137.
He bought a Chevy pickup truck and was issued Georgia license plates bearing an image of a Purple Heart. He was a wounded warrior now—a member of a class. He and Lauren drove to North Carolina to meet the Marines of Second Battalion, Eighth Marines, as they returned to Camp Lejeune.
The Marines had flown back to the States and were bused to the battalion area to return their rifles and equipment. Wives, children, girlfriends, and parents swarmed the grounds, looking for their Marine. Seabags were in piles. Doc found Weapons Company and strode to its small mountain of green bags and started moving them, just like the working parties he had been part of throughout his enlistment. He was wearing jeans and a black fleece over a gray T-shirt. His short hair was gelled. He had shaved and was regulation. He had been eating solid food again and had pushed his weight back up near 150, but his frame was still skinny, his face outsized and creased by a large purple scar.
The Fighters Page 35