Unquiet Ghosts

by Glenn Meade

  “He’s on his way to Michigan. A lady friend is having medical treatment, and he wanted to be there. Why, what’s up, Chad?”

  The clatter of helicopter blades seemed to erupt out of nowhere, like a volley of gunshots. I looked up, shielding my eyes. I recognized one of the private Bell helicopters belonging to Chad’s company. A white-and-burgundy-striped logo on the tail, “Brown Bear” beneath an upright grizzly bear, the chopper polished and gleaming. It descended, hovered. The pilot, wearing sunglasses, deftly landed in the field beside the cemetery, the blades dying to a dull swish.

  Chad raised his voice above the noise. “I need to take you someplace.” He held out his hand for mine and nodded toward the helicopter. “It’s pretty inaccessible, but the chopper can get us there.”

  I felt a strange flutter in my chest. “Take me where?”

  He glanced over at the grave of Jack, Amy, and Sean, a lingering look before he turned back to me.

  “They’ve found them, Kath. They’ve found Jack’s aircraft.”

  7

  * * *

  The past

  Kyle was always my mother’s favorite.

  I know she loved me, too, but Kyle reminded her of her young brother, Tom, who died of TB in childhood and whom she nursed in his illness. Kyle had the same sandy-blond hair, sapphire eyes, and freckled grin. Familiar features passed in memoriam through DNA, in what can either be a cruel trick of nature or a comfort. It’s sometimes hard to tell.

  My mother was never keen on Kyle joining the Army, wary of the dangers. But the Army was in our blood, and Kyle had only one ambition after he graduated from West Point: to join my father in the 101st Airborne, be posted to Iraq as a second lieutenant, where my husband-to-be, Jack, was also serving.

  Five years older than me, Jack had followed in his own father’s footsteps and became an Army helicopter pilot, much later transitioning to fixed-wing aircraft, flying transporters, and then back to choppers. I’d known Jack since I was seventeen. We had the same base brat upbringing, laughed at the same wacky jokes and movies. We loved the outdoors, going hiking in the iciest of winters or canoeing on the lake in summer. We didn’t date until I was eighteen, but we sparked instantly, became soul mates, best friends, and lovers. Marriage was the logical next step, but we were in no hurry.

  Before my brother deployed, Kyle bought Courtney a silver engagement ring from Meyer’s Jewelry. They had kept their relationship going all during Kyle’s four tough years at West Point. They were a good match. I had a feeling they would start a family once they married. Kyle loved kids; he was a kid himself. Put Kyle with a bunch of kids, and he was in his element, joining in the horseplay.

  I was happy. Courtney was delirious. My mother was uncertain. She liked Courtney, even if she thought my best friend was a tad slutty and no stranger to a cocktail, my mom being pretty well qualified to judge the latter.

  But my mother’s worry came to nothing. Late in January, Kyle flew to Iraq to join my father’s battalion. Jack, a captain by now and with the 101st, promised to look out for Kyle, to keep my brother safe. My dad thought it would be better if they could both keep a protective eye on Kyle.

  Courtney and I read and watched the news reports, always fearful. The word from the base was that both sides fought like dogs in Fallujah during the spring offensive, the fighting so intense against Iraqi insurgents that many combatants lost limbs and minds in the savage battles that raged for four long months, until the ancient Persian city resembled the ruins of a mini-Stalingrad. The bombing was so intense that even dogs and cats lay down and died during the massive, thunderous blasts of heavy shelling.

  But when it was all over and the dust cleared, Jack had kept to his word, and he and my father and Kyle came home.

  Except they really didn’t.

  They were all different.

  My father lost most of his left foot to grenade shrapnel when he encountered resistance clearing a building. He had shown extraordinary valor that day by personally leading a platoon to wipe out a unit of insurgents directing withering rocket fire at his men.

  Ten months later and not even fully recuperated, he was back in the fray in Iraq. The Army wanted him to help train new commanders and tidy up some loose administrative ends. My dad used to say, his satisfaction obvious, that the Army needed him, and in a way it did. He prided himself on being a counterinsurgency expert. But he also needed the Army. It was his lifeblood, his anchor, all he’d known since he was a seventeen-year-old cadet.

  There was even talk of him being awarded the Medal of Honor for the valor he’d shown when he lost his foot. Recipients are presented with the award personally by the president of the United States at a White House ceremony. My father was intensely proud.

  But it all came to nothing. When Kyle’s tour ended, my father’s ended at about the same time, and he returned home. But I got the feeling that my dad was bitter about something, that maybe he was forced into retirement and didn’t resign voluntarily. Whatever the truth, he never spoke about it, and he was never the same afterward.

  As a consequence of his wound, he became gruffer and sterner and developed a bitter edge, angrily hobbling around the house on his prosthetic limb.

  When the Medal of Honor was being talked about, my mother was extremely excited for a time. She anticipated the trip to the White House, the respect accorded her for having a husband as a recipient, and living on that promise seemed to imbue her with a new sense of pride and self-importance, but when that hope withered, she seemed to become bitter, too.

  Jack was never the same, either. Moodier and quieter, he started to drink more often, to spend more time alone, fishing on the lake or blindly watching TV, feeding off it as if it were an infant’s bottle. The glass nipple, Mom called the TV.

  But Kyle, the baby of our family, seemed affected the most. Courtney said he seemed “forever distant” after he returned from war. He told her he’d seen too much bad on his tour of duty ever to believe in good. Kyle started a Xanax prescription the week he got home. And he started smoking marijuana, something my sports-mad brother had avoided like crazy under the peer pressure of high school. Now weed seemed to make his lethargy worse and to induce an edge of paranoia.

  Melancholy ran river-deep in him. He avoided driving and crowds. He never talked about his battle experiences or what he witnessed, even though I tried many times to discover what the trigger was that changed him.

  A bloody moment in combat? Being shot at and shelled daily? Or was it more than that? What bad had he seen “over there” that shattered his mind? Jack said they once came across an insurgent safe house they had shelled; inside, to their horror, they found the mangled bodies of six children. I asked Kyle if that was it. But the brother I loved refused to talk, closed up tight as a clam, like the keeper of some terrible secret.

  I had the feeling he could not trust anyone, could not get close to anyone again because of what he’d seen.

  He walked the house morosely, in grubby pajamas that he never seemed to launder. The cotton stank of stale sweat and skunky weed, and he hardly bothered to shower or bathe. He left a malodorous wake around the house that was impossible to ignore. Often he kept his stubble for weeks. He piled on sixty pounds, drinking too much beer, eating junk food, and confined himself to the separate visitor’s cottage on my parents’ farm, which became his home.

  He looked older than his twenty-one years. A weird detachment clouded his face, an empty stare that told me my brother was lost to us and maybe never coming back. My father sought help for Kyle from an Army psychiatrist. Kyle saw him twice but never went back. He didn’t want help, I think because that kept him from having to think or talk about the events he witnessed.

  “There’s something really wrong with Kyle,” I told Jack, who was going through his own hell. After Iraq, Jack experienced nightmares that woke him in a drenching sweat, and he became obsessive about the c
hildren’s safety. He said he saw too many dead children in Iraq not to worry.

  “What did it, Jack? What happened to you all? What did Kyle see or do that made him like this?”

  Jack wore his poker face, the grim mask that tightened his features whenever we talked about battle. “The same unpleasant stuff we all saw. Dead, wounded, the aftermath of bombing. Some guys are more affected than others. I guess they’re more sensitive. Kyle’s one of them, Kath.”

  “I read that people who suffer trauma when they’re young are more prone to PTSD.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Kyle almost drowned when he was ten, but my dad resuscitated him. It happened in the lake at Admiral Farragut Park, where we played in the woods as kids.”

  We all tried to persuade Kyle to keep seeing the Army psychiatrist, but he just said, “Sure, I’ll call him.”

  You just knew by Kyle’s tone that talking to a therapist meant about as much to him as talking to a pet rabbit. We had no answers. All we could do was love Kyle, be there for him. Except you can’t always physically be there.

  One day, three months after Kyle returned, I was at home with my mom when her cell phone rang. It was my father. I knew the second I saw my mother’s face screwed up in pain that something was terribly wrong. I saw her grip go loose on the phone and her mouth fall open in a silent scream of horror. She faltered, could barely stand, her eyes filling with tears as I rushed to support her.

  At Admiral Farragut Park, by the lake, on Knoxville’s pretty Northshore, in the same woods where we often played in summer as kids, Kyle had pulled up in his ten-year-old white Nissan. It was one of the few times I knew of Kyle driving his car since he returned—he always avoided driving.

  A woman walking her Labrador said she saw Kyle sitting in his Nissan for several minutes. She said he appeared to be talking to himself, until he started to cry, tears streaming down his face. Why he was upset she had no idea, but in her opinion—she was a registered nurse—the young man she observed seemed disturbed.

  Kyle took a fold-up sports chair he used to use for football games from his trunk, along with a blue nylon tow rope, and walked into the woods. There, in the soft, warm heat of that April afternoon, my beautiful Kyle threw the rope over a tree, tied one end, made a noose around his neck with the other, and stood on the game chair. He stepped off.

  The alarmed nurse had followed him into the woods, already calling 911. When she found Kyle, his body was hanging limply. She screamed, and a male jogger came to her aid. Between them, they managed to cut the rope with a penknife. Kyle’s face was blue, but he was still breathing. By the time the paramedics got to him, his heart had stopped. They hooked him up to a defibrillator and got it going again. It was touch and go all evening.

  Kyle lived. If you can call it living. The rope cut off the blood supply to his brain, causing a massive cerebral stroke.

  At twenty-one, my kid brother was condemned to dribble and drool and be pushed around in a wheelchair, fed liquid foods and needing 24/7 medical care for the rest of his days. He could talk and communicate, but it was all basic stuff, nods and grunts along with a few intelligible words. His head lolled from side to side like a sluggish ball bearing in a pinball machine.

  We found a well-run nursing home near Sevierville. Serenity Ridge was a twenty-mile drive, close enough to visit every day. These homes always have names that contain words or symbols of comfort and renewal—Serenity, Harmony, Spring, Meadow—as if to offer relatives a kind of hope, when really there’s often none. Five weeks after he went into the woods, Kyle was transferred to Serenity Ridge by ambulance.

  The first time my father visited, he came home looking as bleached as marble. He withdrew into himself for months. My mother barely seemed able to cope, even though she drank more. But the truth was, we all felt relieved that Kyle was still alive, that we still had him in body if not in mind. That we could still love him and not have to bury him in some cold patch of rust-colored earth in a Knoxville cemetery.

  But the young man we knew, the sweet and sensitive Kyle who enriched our lives with love and humor, the crimson-faced boy who made us laugh with his silly pranks or made our eyes wet from melancholy whenever he sang “Danny Boy”—that Kyle was lost to us forever.

  8

  * * *

  The past

  Whatever happened in Iraq seemed to have cast a wicked spell over all the men I loved—Jack, Kyle, my father.

  After Kyle’s suicide attempt, Jack, the man I was to marry, was a rock—comforting, loving, caring. But Jack was also drinking, moody, and nervous, which was so unlike him. Before Iraq, he was the calmest, most grounded man I knew. After Iraq, he was still loving, still attentive, but he wanted to spend more time alone, and he talked less, too.

  Sometimes Jack would get a faraway look in his eyes, a look that told me something disturbing was going on inside his head. Just as with Kyle or my dad, any mention of war was a no-no. I never saw or heard any of them sit around over a beer and shooting the bull about their combat experiences. Nothing. They never even went to veterans reunions. What awful event had changed them? What had they seen or done? Why did I get the feeling that there was some shared secret that none of them ever wanted to talk about?

  As for Kyle, I couldn’t stop crying about him for weeks.

  I cried for the blond-haired little boy I shared a bed with on winter nights when he was too scared to sleep. Cried for the memory of his puppy-fat cheeks and the hold-me-tight hugs. For the little boy who said “Ats” instead of “Thanks.” For the lost brother who suffered an invisible wound that took him to a place from which he could not return. Some days I’d just break down, in the middle of driving or at the mall or out on a date with Jack.

  I read and reread every newspaper report I could about the battles fought against the remnants of Saddam’s army, the various insurgent groups, tracing their names and their locations on maps: Fallujah, Najaf, Ramadi. I watched hundreds of YouTube clips on the same subject and googled a whole bunch of veterans blogs.

  Some claimed they survived total hell during their Iraq deployment; others said it was a walk in the park. I guess it depended on whether you were behind the front lines or up close to the action having your nerves shot to hell. I read lots of threads about roadside bombs, bloody skirmishes, and repeated deployments taking their toll, causing the dreaded four letters PTSD.

  Long before it was ever properly diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder, they called it shell shock. It could cause depression, sleeplessness, anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations, drug dependency, and a raft of mental-health issues and illnesses that sometimes caused once sane and sensible men to put guns to their heads and blow their brains out. Others withdrew into themselves like hermits.

  But it was impossible to know what it was that had wounded Kyle’s mind and spirit so badly that I could not reach him again.

  * * *

  I recall my last moments of closeness with Kyle, three days before the Admiral Farragut Park incident.

  We sat in two rocking chairs on my parents’ back porch. Kyle was smoking a joint and stared out at the lake, a faraway look in his red-veined eyes.

  “What are you thinking about, Kyle?”

  He kept staring ahead vacantly. “Know what the West Point motto is?”

  “ ‘A cadet does not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.’ Why?”

  He nodded and just kept staring out at nothing.

  “Talk to me, Kyle. What’s on your mind?”

  As I tried to break down the wall yet again, he took a deep drag before he slowly let it out, tossed down the tiny butt, and crushed it with his flip-flop. “Drop it, Sis. You really don’t want to know.”

  It was as if he couldn’t trust anyone. Couldn’t get close to anyone again because of whatever he’d seen in battle that so destroyed him. I rubbed his arm gently, but he
moved away, as if he was at risk of catching a deadly disease. Courtney told me they’d “lost it” as a couple. That Kyle never talked to her much anymore and that the slightest intimacy seemed to scare him.

  I persisted. “But I do, Kyle. I want to know what makes you feel the way you’re feeling. I’m trying to help. We all are.”

  I’d spoken those words so many times they were a worn script. Kyle’s far-off stare didn’t shift as he said tonelessly, “Some things you’re better off not talking about.”

  “Not even to Dad? He served with you, Kyle. He just wants to help.”

  “Help? Our father? Sure he does.” He grunted, cut it short, and I saw it then, the slit of his angry mouth, shut tight. It was so unlike Kyle. Once he and our dad and Jack went hunting together or to ball games. But Kyle hadn’t spent much time with our father since he returned. Whenever Dad asked him a question, Kyle would barely grunt a reply. And when Dad asked Kyle to join him duck hunting, my brother didn’t even answer. I had asked Kyle about it, but he just said, “I’ve seen enough blood to last me a lifetime.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked him now. “What was it you did in Iraq, Kyle? What brought you to this?”

  He looked out at the lake like a zombie, slowly shaking his head. “What I saw . . . what I saw . . . was like a stopover in hell. One village . . . near some cedar woods . . . it was a massacre . . .” He shook his head, tears welling in his eyes. His voice trailed off, as if the memory was too painful.

  “What village? What did you see?”

  I saw his hands tremble. Now his mouth twisted in irritation, and he wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “You need to drop it.”

  “You need to talk about it someday. Can’t you just trust me?”

  Behind us, I saw our father through the open blinds in his study. He got up from his desk and peered out at us before he left the room, as if coming toward us.