The Fighters

by C. J. Chivers

  No one recognized him.

  No unit likes it when a stranger touches its kit. Corporal Upton strode up to him to ask what he was doing in the blunt-speak of grunts.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he said. The two men had been in a truck together when it was hit by an IED. But Upton could not place him.

  “Who the fuck am I?” Doc answered. “Who the fuck are you?”

  Then it happened.

  “Doc?” Upton said. “Doc Kirby?”

  Marines from Weapons Company rushed them. Pressed tight among his Marines, Kirby was encased in the biggest hug of his life.

  * * *

  The joy of the reunion, for all of its authenticity, did not last. Dustin Kirby’s wound and the bitter undercurrents of Weapons Company’s Karma tour were the ingredients for a crash.

  Doc was no longer a member of an infantry battalion. The damage to his head ensured he would never join a line unit again. The fragility of his rebuilt face, his speech difficulties, the absence of a fibula—these disqualified him from combat duties. Being a corpsman had been his identity. He clung to it. But his circumstances required him to trade infantry duties for life as a recovering sailor.

  At first the routine held promise. He and Lauren rented an apartment, he joined the battalion that tracks the rehabilitation of wounded Marines and corpsmen, and soon he was splitting time between treatment centers on or near Camp Lejeune and the naval hospital in Bethesda. But physically he was diminished. He was unable to run and could not work out. He had few responsibilities beyond healing. For a man of his intensity, the official aimlessness of his new status was maddening. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continued. He wanted a meaningful role.

  In pain, beset with anxiety, prone to rage, and at risk of seizures, he began unraveling. Doctors prescribed pills: Ativan, Seroquel, and Depakote, along with Percocet and morphine sulfate. The cocktail disagreed with him. He had not joined the Navy to be a junkie, and he wanted to stop using anxiety and seizure medications. This will turn you into a zombie and make you fat, he told himself. But doctors kept prescribing more pills, and his pain did not relent. He put on weight, slowly climbing over 200 to 215. Painkillers became an accepted staple of his life, the engine of a grim logic: Fear of letting the pain get ahead of his meds kept him glued to the dose schedule. He was reliant on his pills, physically and psychologically. His leaner, agile self was gone.

  Old friends from his infantry battalion visited him, but the reunions often were not uplifting. He remained dedicated to most of Weapons Company’s Marines. Many of them were trying to grasp the meaning of their combat tours. Had it been worth it? Had they helped? Why had they been ordered to fight the way they fought? Doc tried pushing aside any larger assessment of the war. He was of two minds. He accepted that he did not understand all the reasons behind the American occupation, or the Marine Corps’ tactics, or their prospects for success. He had not seen much in Karma that he thought worth fighting for and no longer bought the idea that what the Corps was doing in Karma was tied to American security at home.

  He could not dwell on this. He opted to remember his own reasons for serving: to care for Marines in combat. His entire being was invested in that. But sometimes calls and visits from his friends came with ugly whispers, the agonizing rumors of a combat tour, including that Doc had been shot by one of Weapons Company’s M4s. The stories varied. In one, an Iraqi sniper had obtained the rifle the sergeant had lost in Karma and used it to shoot him on the roof. In another, a Marine had tried to kill him, either because of a rivalry or a grudge. The rumors formed a dispiriting mash of postwar barracks gossip. They were unverifiable, corrosive, and profoundly cruel. Doc was unmoored, unsure whom or what to believe.

  It was bad enough to have been wounded while standing extra duty as punishment. It was worse to be haunted by other questions. Was he a victim of negligence? Attempted murder? Cover-up? Or had one of Karma’s snipers simply set up with his own weapon near OP Omar on Christmas Day and waited for a clear shot? The last scenario was more than plausible. Snipers around Karma were hitting Marines before their company lost an M4. With no firm or conclusive answers, he passed days believing he had been ruined by error or crime, then cast aside by the unit he had faithfully served.

  He and Lauren were young, new to marriage, and under extraordinary strain. Their bond weakened. They fell into quarrels. Recriminations piled up.

  Officially, Doc Kirby was a hero. Personally, he was in a spiral, racked by anger and doubt, like a man who wondered whether he had been betrayed by his own church. The Navy assigned him to a small medical clinic for boot Marines attending their first infantry school. It was an out-of-the-way post, a satellite shop.

  Doc understood that he had been sent there because his bosses did not want him around. He managed to enjoy some of the duties. He often ran morning sick call, treating and documenting minor injuries and common illnesses. Sometimes he instructed new Navy corpsmen on what to expect when they went to war, assuming the mantle of battle-scarred veteran holding forth. He was an imposing presence, teetering toward a fall. By 2008 he was drinking heavily and ignoring warnings that his painkillers and alcohol should not be mixed. He filed for divorce and slid further into a funk. Trash, laundry, and dirty dishes accumulated in his apartment. He kept cold beer in his pickup truck in the parking lot and in a small refrigerator at the clinic. Some days, after seeing patients in the morning, he would sit in his shop and drink. He knew this was wrong but it alleviated pains he could not quell.

  He wanted to recover, and tried. At least twice a month he attended PTSD therapy or biometric feedback, to train himself to recognize his triggers and learn to calm down. He stopped taking the anxiety medications. He could not dispense with painkillers or alcohol. Lauren returned. They tried to reconcile. They parted again.

  One night after she had moved out for the last time, Doc was alone in his apartment when he accidentally called his mother on his cellular phone. It was a pocket call. Gail was shocked by what she heard. “We’re going to see him,” she told Jacko. They drove to North Carolina and found their son, the decorated combat veteran of Anbar Province, alone in a state of squalor and with a refrigerator low on food. His parents remained for the weekend, doing laundry, taking out trash, cleaning rooms. Gail was scared and mad. She blamed the beer and the booze. She rejected the idea that it was anything more, and would not hear any suggestion that Doc suffered from PTSD.

  They’re not going to put that tag on my kid, she thought.

  She left, determined to pray harder for her son.

  A weekend of mothering was not enough. Doc Kirby did not change. The gunshot had stolen his identity and purpose, and saddled him with unceasing pain. His years after Iraq extended into a blur of surgeries and duties that did not challenge him, all while he jealously watched fresh crops of Marines training for wars that would not end. Years passed bleakly by: 2008, 2009, 2010. He had trouble telling them apart. Battalions returned from Iraq, refitted, restocked with new officers and boot Marines, and flew off for Afghanistan. He worked in an infantry-producing machine. Younger faces filed by, as yet unbroken. He stayed put, shattered.

  He had not joined for this.

  Gail and Jacko were unsure how to help. He’s drinking his wages, Gail thought. They invited him home to Georgia for weekends and holidays, to remove him from an environment where he was embittered and stagnating. She asked God to help her son find his way.

  In June 2010, on a trip back, he met Brandi Smith, a single mother with two daughters, one four years old and the other a newborn. She was separated from the girls’ father. They began dating. Brandi moved to North Carolina to be with him, not long before the military decided it could neither do more for his wounds nor expect him to be able to serve abroad. The Navy retired him medically in early 2012, severing him from the active-duty forces for good.

  * * *

  The return home was jarring. Five years of bouncing between Bethesda Naval Hospital and Camp Lejeune had left
Doc semi-functional and struggling with substance abuse. But active-duty service had organized his life, coming with a regular paycheck, an apartment, and daily proximity to people who understood. It gave him a partial sense of belonging, enough to prevent complete collapse. In Georgia, however, it was as if he were starting adulthood over, with no routine at all. He had been somebody in North Carolina, surrounded by sailors and Marines. In Georgia, surrounded by civilians, he was no one. He felt unknown. The downward slide was swift.

  Doc moved into a bedroom in his parents’ house and began drinking prodigious amounts of booze. Soon his room was lined with empty green Jägermeister bottles. Brandi had a job at a convenience store. He spent days sitting on the front lawn, often alone, tending bonfires. To keep the fires burning, he removed the trees and bushes beyond the house and fed them to the flames. He abandoned the military’s grooming standards and let his hair and beard grow. Sometimes he wore a long knife sheathed at his side.

  Joe Dan Worley, Kirby’s cousin, had gone back to Georgia years before him. He had survived the IED blast on the bridge in 2004 but lost his left leg above the knee. His right leg was damaged, too. But he seemed to thrive. He had a job and was active at a Baptist church, where he was a youth pastor and deacon. He was committed to fitness, and often in the gym. Years after the blast, he was muscular and lean, with a torso and shoulders like the Superman that Dustin had always thought him to be.

  One night, the two men met at a family gathering, a pair of cousins, both medically retired corpsmen from the Marine Corps’ Anbar campaign. They talked about their respective wounds, and about how each man had been injured in ways that undermined his particular sense of self. Worley, the athlete, lost a leg and his mobility, and the ability to participate in his favorite sports. Kirby, handsome and confident, had suffered a disfiguring trauma to his face. He was prone to drooling and felt unsightly. He told Worley that he felt disgusting. “We both just got hit in our vanity,” Worley said. He looked at Kirby with worry and concern. Five years had passed since he had been shot, and he was not adjusting.

  Gail was a devout Christian. She knew her son was in there, but she did not know how to reach him, and disapproved of his drinking, which she considered the source of his troubles. She saw positive signs when he was with Brandi and her children. His enthusiasm returned, along with a playful and upbeat demeanor. He could exude pleasure. But it was never enough. Brandi had to return to work. And Doc returned to his fires and his bottles. Some days he was drinking before lunch and continued until he passed out, late at night.

  His neighbors did not know what to think. In April 2012, a few weeks after returning to Powder Springs, Doc stood in front of his house in a sleeveless T-shirt and torn blue jeans, wearing black work boots with his knife. He weighed about 220 pounds. His arms were covered with tattoos, and his beard was patchy and long, partially hiding the scar that traced his indented right jaw. The fire burned a few feet away.

  Three girls, about ten years old each, rode down his quiet street on bicycles. When they neared the Kirby house they spotted him on the lawn. Like a school of fish, they abruptly turned and crossed to the opposite side of the street, giving him wide berth. Doc watched, knowing that they saw him as grotesque, a human eyesore on their residential street. He was used to it. He remembered people’s reactions the first time he stepped into the halls of Bethesda Naval Hospital. They had turned their eyes.

  “All the kids who ride past the house each day, they look up here at me on the lawn and they think, ‘What a weird guy,’ ” he said. The fire burned at his feet, crackling and snapping, sending smoke into the warm Georgia air. “Adults drive by here and think that, too.”

  He had been sipping rum and soda over ice since morning and eaten nothing but a slice of pizza. His doldrums seemed complete. His pay stopped when he left the Navy. He was due for a medical pension, but there was a delay before it kicked in. He was behind in his bills. At the pace he was burning the foliage in the yard, before long the Kirby property would be bald. He still wondered who had shot him and whether he’d been hit by an American weapon. He loathed what he had become. I went from being an independent, capable person to being nothing, living on my parents’ couch.

  In early May, Doc was in Marietta, spending an evening with Brandi at her brother’s house. He had a few drinks at dinner, played with her daughters, gave them their baths, and helped them to bed. He was brooding. After the kids fell asleep, he and Brandi quarreled about how she was using her phone. It was a harsh argument, more than he could bear. He shouted at her, so loudly that a neighbor called police. Shortly after midnight, before the police arrived, he stormed out of the house in pajama pants and unlaced sneakers, started his pickup truck, and drove away. He wore no shirt. He was not sure where he was going. He eased his pickup onto U.S. Route 41 North and sped through town. He was crying and blaring emo music. Tears rolled down his face, over scars. He shouted, then screamed. He drove through the commercial corridor at more than 80 miles an hour.

  At the intersection with the Ernest W. Barrett Parkway he turned left and headed west. Barrett Parkway is a six-lane country road, and often clogged with traffic by day. It was deserted in the darkness before 1:00 A.M., a veritable speedway now. Doc’s mind opened in an exhilarating rush. He pushed the accelerator to the floor. His GMC pickup had a 350-cubic-inch eight-cylinder engine. Its speed climbed quickly to 90 miles per hour, then slowly kept rising beyond that. He came upon a red light, could not stop, and blew through it, still accelerating.

  Oh, great, now I am going to get a ticket I can’t fucking pay, he thought.

  He kept the pedal pressed to the floor.

  The speedometer moved past 100 to 110.

  It finally stopped at 120 miles per hour, pegged.

  The asphalt hissed by underneath. The road was a wide and gently turning ribbon and he managed to make its turns. Time felt distorted. He was amazed. No one had stopped him, he had not crashed, he was in control of the truck at an almost impossible speed.

  “Fuck it,” he said.

  He’d die right here, right now.

  There was a spot ahead where the road turned slightly to the right and the shoulder fell away to a downhill incline that led to a stand of trees. Behind them was a row of houses. Doc usually slowed before the turn.

  He kept the accelerator floored.

  The distance closed.

  Eyes fixed ahead, he saw there was no guardrail at the turn.

  There.

  That would be the spot.

  He did not turn or release his foot from the gas. He removed his right hand from the steering wheel and reached down and released his seat belt.

  The truck’s front tires hit the curb with a jolt and burst.

  Its front end seemed to lift into the air as the ground sloped away beneath it. He was airborne, gliding in a truck cab at more than 100 miles an hour. The truck hit. It snapped the trunks of small trees. Glass shattered. Metal twisted. The truck banged to the ground, crumpled around him, and stopped.

  His troubles were no more.

  The night was still. He heard no sound.

  Except for the small driver’s compartment, which had wrapped around him like a bubble, his pickup truck was destroyed. Kirby sat in the wreckage, waiting for blood and pain, expecting to discover his bones were shattered and it was impossible to move as he bled out. Death would carry him off. He had seen the Reaper before, and knew the color of his eyes.

  But he had barely been scratched. He was alive.

  “Fucking shit!” he screamed.

  His phone rang. He rummaged around in the darkness until he located it. It was Brandi.

  “What the fuck!” he said.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “I don’t even know. I just got in a car accident.”

  A police officer was with her, she said, and she was going to pass him the phone. The officer asked him which road he was on.

  “I am on Barrett Parkway somewhere,” he said.<
br />
  The officer told him to stay put. The call ended.

  Doc stepped from the wreckage, walked uphill to the parkway, and called his parents. Jacko answered.

  “It didn’t work!” Doc said. “It didn’t work.”

  A police car, emergency lights on, eased beside him. The lights made him squint.

  “Are you Dustin Kirby?” the officer asked.

  “Yes, sir, I am,” he said.

  The officer asked what had happened.

  “I tried to kill myself, man,” Doc said. “And it didn’t work. This fucking blows just like everything else.”

  This was the bottom, and even here he thought he had failed. In the glow of the police lights, the wreckage of his truck behind him and down the hill, Doc started telling the officer a little bit about everything—about Iraq, about his wounds, about his discharge, about his absence of a mission and sense of self-worth. The officer was a former Marine. He said he understood. Doc’s phone rang again. His parents were calling back. The officer asked for the phone, told them where Doc was, and urged them to come for their son.

  Two more police officers arrived, and a wrecker.

  The first officer told Doc it was time to leave.

  “Look, I am going to place you under arrest,” he said. “Are you going to fight me?”

  “No,” Doc said.

  The officer was courteous. “Well, you’re pretty a big guy and you had a rough night and we don’t know,” he said. He turned Doc around and cuffed him.

  His parents arrived as Doc was being taken into custody. Gail pleaded with one of the officers. “That’s my son, let me go to my son,” she said.