She was not allowed near. She watched from afar, looking at her beautiful first boy. He was ungainly. He moved as if in slow motion. When he had enlisted in the Navy, he was nothing like this. He had been gorgeous before. He was cuffed, tattooed, bearded, stuffed into a police cruiser, gone.
The police took him to a hospital, where he was found to be unhurt, and then to the Cobb County jail.
* * *
Kirby was arraigned on a reckless-driving charge in the morning. His suicidal wish had faded with the crash. He felt as if a burden had been lifted and he could discuss his pain. He returned to his parents’ home. His mother and he began to talk. She said that for the first time she was aware he suffered from PTSD. She admitted that she had not wanted to acknowledge this before. He heard an understanding he had not found in the past. That day he did not drink. He stayed sober into the night, and the next day, too. He did not drink in the weeks after either. The court soon sentenced him to probation and therapy. His face hurt, eating was hard, and he remained self-conscious. He was weighed down with agonizing emotions and bouts of crushing doubt. But as he attended therapy he was moving toward acceptance. He was seeking peace of mind.
Gail was changing, too, growing into the roles her life as the mother of a wounded corpsman demanded. She was reading up on PTSD and becoming involved with veterans’ support organizations and conversant in their work and their causes. Her perspective changed about her son’s return from the war. She realized that even if he had not been shot in the face, he would still have PTSD and difficulty reintegrating into civilian life. She began speaking at veterans’ events, sharing details of her family’s suffering. And she looked for chances for Dusty to be honored, so he might hear gratitude and encouragement from people outside his immediate circle.
In the fall of 2013, through the Armed Forces Foundation, she nominated him to be a guest of Kurt Busch, a NASCAR driver, at a race in Texas. He was selected and received permission from his probation officer to leave Georgia for the trip. The entire Kirby family was at the speedway when one of the organizers, who had worked for President Bush, said he was trying to arrange a personal meeting with the former president, whose office was not far from the NASCAR event. The follow-up was fast: Bush would see them, Gail was told, the next morning. She slept fitfully. This was an audience every veteran’s mother should have. She did not intend to squander it.
* * *
President Bush looked fit for a man nearing seventy. He offered coffee to his guests and thanked them again for visiting. He was interested in veterans and their families, he said, and pleased to meet Doc and his family and hear about his service and their lives since the war.
He seemed to have a format, and went around the room. He turned to Daniel and Destiny and asked them about their work and school.
“Attaboys” all around, Doc thought. He knew his turn was coming and was not sure what he would say when asked. The whole meeting felt over-the-top.
What do you say to the president of the United States?
Doc knew the truth: He had not been doing much since the Navy sent him home. He had little to report and did not want to complain. Nor did he want to disclose all that had gone wrong, including the fact that to visit Texas he had needed permission from a parole officer in Cobb County.
The president turned to him. Doc was a sight, with his black cap above his beard and scars. He had been a fighter once, well groomed and lean.
“How about you?” Bush asked. “Are you going to school?”
“No,” Doc said.
He had thought about his answer, about finding a balance between honesty and a happy progress report.
“I’m not doing much of anything really,” he said. “I’m living my retired life, trying to keep myself together.
“I kind of fell out of the military and sat where I landed,” he added.
He left it at that. It wasn’t Bush’s job to fix his life.
Bush pressed. Doc said he’d been in an accident but was better now.
Bush nodded thoughtfully. He thanked Kirby for his Navy service and his work with Marines, and talked about the value of his commitment and sacrifice. Doc was surprised. The man seemed like he really was trying to get through.
This is the guy who was making all the big calls, and he’s talking with me?
He knew Bush met many veterans of the wars. It seemed as if he had learned something, Doc thought, and understood Weapons Company’s time in Karma—even though he couldn’t possibly know the details. He told Kirby that after what he had done, he needed to get up and live his life and not waste it on meaningless days.
Doc nodded back, the way one does to a boss. “Thank you, sir,” he said.
Bush smiled at Gail. It was her turn.
“Hi, I am Gail,” she said. “The mom.”
All the barriers were gone. She was having a one-on-one with the man who had sent her son to war.
“What are you doing?” the president asked. “Do you work?”
“Yes,” Gail said.
She wanted to push past small talk. She had practiced what she would say, and she was annoyed by what she had just heard from her son. Dusty had downplayed his troubles and his mistakes. He’d allowed himself to be charmed, and had not given the president the real information. She looked at Dusty dismissively.
“Did you hear him?” she said to Bush. “He told you about that truck accident like it was nothing.”
She wanted Bush to know the truth. Too many people must sugarcoat things for him. Why should the Kirby family hide what it had endured?
“He tried killing himself by driving his truck into a tree at speeds in excess of 120 miles an hour,” she said. “I am not the same mom who sent her son to Iraq. I’m different now.”
Doc squirmed in his chair. Buzzkill, he thought.
She was ruining the ritual and undercutting him in front of his former commander in chief. Damn, he thought. He was proud of me.
Gail did not stop. This was her turn. “It would have destroyed us if he’d been killed,” she said.
“I know,” Bush said.
She took her eyes off Bush to look at her oldest boy.
“Dustin,” she said.
“Mom,” he answered.
“It would have destroyed us.”
Bush looked at Doc, too. The former president had turned serious and set his face.
“Were you drunk?” he asked. “Or just being stupid?”
Dustin remembered the drive that night, the desperation, the last miles before the deliberate crash, the sound of the tires hissing on the road, the release as he chose the moment to die. He could feel that depression. People did not know what coming home from war is like, much less coming home maimed and in ceaseless pain. He was displeased with his mother—Here she is, blaring all my shit at the president, he thought—but nothing that could be said in this meeting would be as bad as that wearied despair.
“I wasn’t really thinking about anything other than giving up on my situation,” he said. “I didn’t feel like I had anything going. I felt like I wasn’t what I was, and I didn’t have anything left.”
And that’s it, he thought. Honesty.
He waited for Bush’s reply. None came. The meeting had turned. Gail was driving now.
She kept going, talking fast, seeking assurances that Doc’s wounds had not been for nothing. She needed to know that this man had really been in charge. “You did know what you were doing, right?” she asked Bush. “Because let me tell you what it is like for a mom when her son goes to war.”
Gail had prepared a monologue and practiced its lines overnight. The president would listen to her script.
“I realize that you may not understand what we are going through as parents while our child is serving in a foreign country during a war. You may not have a son that is serving. But you do have that grandchild that you are completely in love with.”
She stared at the president, and held his gaze. He looked back. She plunged
on.
“Now picture that baby being out in a car seat and put in the middle of the highway, a very busy highway, with hundreds of cars that are zooming past him all day long.
“You know in your heart that that baby will be safe as long as no cars swerve even just a little bit. You pray every minute of every day that those cars stay away from that yellow line and your baby in that car seat.
“That is exhausting enough.
“But to make it harder, we will put you in an office with a TV that is playing the footage of those cars driving past your baby every minute of every day, for weeks on end. To make it even more realistic, there must be hundreds of babies, dressed exactly like your baby, in the same state-of-the-art car seat, lying on that yellow line as far as your eyes can see.
“You know in your heart that every baby has a mom praying as hard as you that their baby stays safe.
“But you pray even harder now.”
She kept talking, barely allowing time for breath, allowing no pause for the president to interrupt. She was looking into Bush’s eyes.
“You get absolutely exhausted, watching that TV every minute that you can, only leaving when it is necessary.
“And then it happens: One of the cars swerves just enough to clip a baby.
“Is it yours?
“Is that baby dead?
“Oh, God, tell us something!
“If it is, the phone will ring or there will be a knock on your door.
“You wait and pray even harder, dying a little every second that passes.
“The special report comes on and it is not your baby.
“Thank you, Jesus.
“Thank you, Jesus.
“Then the road is cleared and the cars are speeding past those babies again.
“So you go back to watching all of the cars again.
“You are so thankful that it is not your baby that you celebrate for a minute.
“And then it hits you: It was someone else’s baby.
“Then the guilt pours over you like a heavy blanket, adding to the exhaustion that you already feel.
“But all that you can do is watch that TV, because you know that it very well could be your baby the next time.
“Then one day a car swerves, and it’s your baby.
“It’s your baby that was hit.”
Gail stopped.
She turned to her son. He sat bolt straight in his chair. He couldn’t believe what he had heard. His mother was going after the man, the commander in chief, like she was in charge, not him. Damn, Doc was thinking. Wow.
She turned back to Bush. He had sat through her monologue silently, maintaining eye contact and shifting slightly in his chair. Now he looked around the room, at all the tense faces. Each member of the Kirby family was waiting for him to react. Jacko was braced for anger, expecting a thunderclap.
That’s a president of the United States right there, he thought. Nobody talks to him like that.
Gail did not care. Her son had been shot. She had not come here for ceremony, or to be denied her agency or right to speak.
Bush’s demeanor was gentle. He leaned forward.
“That’s quite an analogy,” he said.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I am responsible, I know. I sent him there.”
Gail had grown used to people changing the subject. The aftermath of the wars was beyond what many people had the time or heart to hear. The Kirby story was too big, and it was just a small part of it all.
But she had unloaded on Bush and he was still there listening. Her family’s experience was being validated. She was exalted, carried away by the experience of being heard. He’s not like so many people, she thought. He respects us.
These veterans deserve respect, she thought.
Gail Kirby felt herself relax. Her concentration drifted. The rest of the meeting was a blur of small talk and coffee before Bush asked his guests if they would like to have their picture taken with him. This was their signal to go. Gail led Jacko and Doc’s siblings to an anteroom for the shoot. For a moment Bush and Doc were one-on-one. The president had shown his disappointment in Doc’s postwar slide. He seemed alarmed at Gail’s description of a man who had saved others’ lives and later chose to drive his truck off the road to end his own. Not many people stepped into presidential offices like this. With his scars and tattoos, his beard and baseball cap, Kirby could be mistaken for anger personified. He was not. He had survived his leaders’ bad ideas and Karma’s efforts to kill him to come through a chain of disasters alive. His mouth was a mess. His eyes retained the brightness of youth. Bush suggested that no one should waste such a gift. Countless mistakes had brought them here, along with crimes to shame the world. The former president smiled, held up his right hand, and gave the former corpsman a fist bump. “Make better decisions,” Bush said.
Epilogue
The chaplain arrived at Tanja Slebodnik’s door early in the afternoon of September 11, 2008, not long after she had put her three-year-old son to bed for his afternoon nap. He was accompanied by an Army officer Tanja did not know. He said something about Mike having been shot in the leg. Oh, thank God, she thought. We can handle that. They kept talking until she understood. Her husband was dead.
They stayed with her for about two hours as she notified Mike’s world. First she called his parents in Western Pennsylvania. Then she called her mother. She called Mike’s ex-wife, and a few others, and it was done. They explained some of what would follow: the return of her husband’s remains, the inventory and return of his personal effects, death benefits that would be paid, arrangements for his funeral. Ben, Mike’s youngest son from his previous marriage, returned home on the school bus at 2:45. She took him upstairs to share the news.
The weeks that followed proceeded in a gray procession, punctuated by anguish and frustration and fear. The Army did not bring Mike’s body home for more than a week; there was some sort of complication, the casualty assistance officer told her, about finding all of his damaged leg. Two more senior officers visited. They spread out maps to show her the flight routes on the day Mike died and described something of his last mission, and something else about the long route to the hospital in Bagram and the efforts to resuscitate him. If they had gotten him there faster, he might have survived, they said, because they did have an adequate blood supply on hand. After they left, she was perplexed. Why did they tell me this? What was the purpose?
She withdrew. She discovered she could not bear the sound of the doorbell. Each time she heard it, she thought of the chaplain on her step. She disconnected it so it would not ring again.
Before the burial at Arlington National Cemetery, Spencer, another of Mike’s sons, put a Bible Mike had given him on his father’s chest.
The return of Mike’s personal effects was a special form of torture. His possessions arrived in black plastic footlockers with inventory sheets. She opened the first box. A foul odor rose to meet her. Everything had been sanitized. It was hideous to Tanya, but she followed her duty to her husband methodically. The casualty assistance officer instructed her to mark each item off the lists as she unpacked, and she did this, down to the Army’s maddening level of detail, right down to the last half-used disposable pen. When she lifted his laptop, she felt hopeful. Here would be the things she would cherish and want—his journals and photographs—and that would allow her to glean some sense of his last tour.
The laptop would not switch on.
The Army told her it had wiped his hard drive clean. It did this, she learned, for everyone who died.
When the last crate was empty, she realized the Army had not returned his wedding ring. She called the casualty assistance officer, who said there was no record of it.
She could not understand. The Army had accounted for every scrap in Mike’s pocket, had logged in and registered even his toothbrush. How could they lose his wedding band? Tanya pursued it for months, calling and sending emails up and down the Army chain of command. As time passed she se
nsed she was driving people crazy. She did not relent.
In early 2009, at home, she was looking for something else when she opened a small, heart-shaped porcelain box she had kept for years. The wedding ring was inside with a note written by her husband’s hand.
“I love you,” it said. “Mike.”
* * *
Viper Company suffered no more fatalities after Private First Class Richard Dewater was killed on April 15, 2009, and in the weeks that followed, Second Platoon’s ambushes—one outside and one inside the kill zone—came to seem like seminal events.
The platoon shifted some of its tactics, working more often at night or in larger, company-sized operations. The violence in the valley declined. Intelligence units tracking the Taliban and listening in on their communications began to hear some of the valley’s commanders participating in attacks outside Korengal. Fighting continued around the KOP, but the clashes were less frequent and intense. It may have been that the Taliban changed its focus, or that the Korengalis were playing things smart and were less inclined to fight Viper Company at the end of its tour, when its experience level was highest and its fire-support reaction times were dialed in. Or it may have been that the ambush on the ridge had proved costly to the Korengalis, or that the uptick in American night patrols and the larger operations left them off balance.
One linchpin of the American strategy had been to fight the Taliban away from population centers, in part through outposts the military called blocking positions. The troops understood that the assumptions in this strategy were weak. The Taliban was not really blocked. Its fighters had no trouble leaving the valley, and the soldiers in the outposts, bound by strict rules of engagement, had almost no chance of stopping them.
Aware of these limits, Captain Howell and Lieutenant Rodriguez were quietly recommending to their superiors that the Americans depart their outpost. They did not propose a retreat. They favored a negotiation in which the Taliban would make concessions. They sent a letter, via the elders who came to Captain Howell’s shuras, to Nasrullah, the Taliban’s leader in the valley. They proposed a measured American withdrawal in exchange for a Taliban commitment to reconcile with the Afghan government and a pledge not to allow the Korengal to be used as a staging ground for attacks.
The Fighters Page 37