War Flower

by Brooke King

  “Brookie, you know you can tell me and Grandpa what’s going on. I heard that a lot of soldiers that come back from Iraq have this PTSD thing.”

  “Grandma’s right you know, Brookie. If you want to talk, we’re here.”

  Glancing up from my mechanical drowning of Earl Grey tea with sugar, I said, “I don’t have PTSD, so can we drop it.”

  “Brookie, someday you’re going to have to talk about this . . .”

  Interrupting Nana, I said, “Yeah, but today is not that day.”

  Breakfast had slowly turned into another one of their ploys to get me to talk, but having grown up with them under the same roof almost all my life, I knew the best way to dodge a conversation was just to walk away. Getting up from the table, I grabbed my teacup and said, “I’ve had enough of this.” Their longing stares of concern left a burning sensation in my heart, filling me with the awful sense that by not telling them, I was somehow making them suffer instead of myself. Casting my eyes down at the brown patchwork linoleum floor, I said, “I’m just going to go lie down. My back is killing me from carrying these two so low.”

  I rubbed my back and waddled side to side away from the kitchen table and disappeared into the next room. As I walked toward the blue floral print couch in the den and lay down, I tried to think back to a traumatic event that had happened to me during my deployment, but the only thing that I could possibly think of was the time I was blown ten feet back by a mortar round that had come into the motor pool while I was trying to fix a forklift. It was as if I had blocked out my whole deployment and the nightmares were only adding to the frustration and anxiety that I was having now that I was home.

  The nightmares had started to get worse. Seven months pregnant, I was fed up with not having James there, worn out from being pregnant, and every physical demand that my body endured left me overworked. The encouragement I used to receive from my family about trying to talk about Iraq was now replaced by their dismay at my unwillingness to cooperate in talking about it. I began to fight a battle at home, and it seemed like every week, after the usual Q&A about how I was feeling, Nana would suggest that I return to the clinic. Every sincere effort on her part was met with my hostile resistance.

  “Brookie, . . . I’m starting to worry.”

  Nana would come up to me, sit beside me, rub my back, and try to encourage me to go back to the VA, but it only made me enraged.

  “Leave me the fuck alone!”

  Slam after slam of my bedroom door; it began to splinter from every even stroke of my arms’ strength. I fought as a way to show I was healing, to show how the new me loved another person by not letting them into the horrors of my mind, but each time I showed how much I really loved them by leaving them in the dark, I knew that I was really just extinguishing the memory of the girl I used to be. Each time I slammed my bedroom door, protecting them from the monster I was now, I could hear Nana’s quiet sobs inside the kitchen. My hurtful tone and angry words chiseled away again at the love she had for me in her heart. I was no longer the same granddaughter who used to help her form small round meatballs for Great-Grandma Romanolo’s famous spaghetti and meatballs or helped her shred the swiss cheese for the quiche lorraine that we had every Tuesday. Each time, I could hear Grandpa’s comforting words to her as she sobbed in the kitchen. He knew I would never be the same, but I knew that each time I yelled at her, it broke down her spirit, making her realize that I would never truly be the same again.

  “She’s got to figure it out on her own, Jackie. You just can’t keep reminding her like that. When she’s ready, she’ll talk to us.”

  I was there after every nightmare; slouched over, kneeling in the middle of my floor, rocking back and forth, sobbing, smothering my screams with my hands, and shutting my eyes up tight to make the tears go away. I sat there time and again, trying to understand why I was different and why I hated the person I was now. The reeling back of time made it hard for me to translate what it was I was feeling in the present. I knew that from their bedroom, Nana and Grandpa could hear my two-in-the-morning screams of terror, and I didn’t want my problems to affect anyone but myself. So I tried to shelter them from my suffering by stifling screams into my pillow, muffling my cries of desperation with my hands, wiping every tear from my eyes with tissues that I would stuff back into the Kleenex box on my nightstand.

  What had happened during my deployment had spilled over into my civilian life, ripping it apart like a frayed, loosened seam on a worn-out shirt that was slowly coming unstitched. The only thing I knew for certain was that the nightmares I was having were fragmented, a distortion of the truth, and in them I was scared shitless. In the memories I still have from my deployment, I remember dragging the heavy chains to latch down the Stryker and my messed-up uniform stained with black char smudges and sweat, but I do not remember the blood or the bodies, and in my nightmare that was the most terrifying part.

  Into the main cab, I hunch over and climb through the blown-out compartment of the Stryker. My nostrils fill with a putrid smell of iron—like I had just licked the end of a battery. I try to breathe through my mouth, but I can already feel vomit rising in my throat. I spin around to the rear of the cabin, go outside into the early evening light next to the side of the Stryker, puke, and walk back into the Stryker.

  Making my way toward the front of the vehicle, something stops me. My right hand strikes something. I stop and sweep the light onto the object. There he is, slumped over. His uniform is blood-soaked and shredded from shrapnel, as if he crawled through barbed wire. There is a thin pool of blood where his left leg should be. A week of Combat Lifesaver training, and the only things I retained were how to give an IV and how to check a pulse. Reaching out to his neck, I gently move the pads of my index and middle finger of my right hand underneath the collar of his gear to the artery in his neck.

  Nothing.

  For the first time, I point the light onto his head. I stumble backward and slam into the compartment wall behind me. His face is half ripped off his skull. It dangles from his neck, pushed down from the weight of his helmet. A gash on the left side of his face is still dripping blood onto his ACU bottoms. Contorted, mangled, and burned alive, this is his death.

  There are two other bodies to account for. I inch farther into the vehicle. I approach the gunner’s hatch and find it closed. I turn the handle and open the hatch to get some fresh air circulating into the cabin of the vehicle.

  I approach the driver’s side.

  He is burned alive to his seat. All I can see are both of his black hands, dangling with chunks of flesh, both lying limply, palm up in his lap, turned in as if he had been praying to die quickly. I turn away from the smell of burned rubber and soured blood.

  In the passenger seat there is nothing left of the officer, only half a torso. His entrails lay scattered about the seat and on the floor. I try to find something, anything that would give anyone, even myself, comfort in knowing he came back in one piece. I find none. All bodies are accounted for. That is my mission. Now it is complete, and as I turn to leave and walk back into the light of the day, I awake from the nightmare.

  Throughout the years after my deployment, each time the nightmare revisited me, it changed, contorting the truth of what happened on my first mission.

  Even as I write this now, the truth of what happened on that first mission is lost forever, supplanted by the nightmare’s version of that day. I was left with a horrifying reality that I didn’t recall happening, and, because of it, I decided that the mission never happened. Yet, the nightmares perverted more than just the mission. They had even made the mundane of the mission terrifyingly painful to remember. I do know that when I returned from my first mission, I took a shower, but I do not remember the sadness, the horrifying look of my own reflection in the mirror staring back at me, or the blood that covered my uniform in wet crimson patches.

  I walk past the company building, ignoring everyone who walked in my direction. I stagger to my hooch. All I wan
t to do is get all this gear off me and go to sleep. Fumbling to get the keys out of my pocket, I manage to drop them onto the graveled ground.

  “Fuck!”

  I yell it loud enough that everyone in a three-hundred-yard radius from where I stand can hear it. Too tired to bend down, I peel off my combat flak vest, helmet, knee and elbow pads, and let each one drop to the ground with a haunting thud. I sit down on the stoop in front of my door. Pulling out my crunched pack of Lucky Strikes, I spark my last one up, take a couple of long drags, sniff myself to see if I need a shower, and reel back from the stench wafting off my body. I look down at my dirt-encrusted hands that are dry-stained with blood and decide it’s best that I take a shower. I flick my half-smoked cigarette onto the ground and walk toward the latrine that is catty-corner to my hooch. I ascend the steps with three brisk strides and open the door. A wave of panic hits me. Every single female soldier is staring at me. Ashamed that my appearance must be worse than I thought, I walk to a mirror, my eyes fixated on the speckled-gray linoleum-tiled floor. Halfheartedly, I look up and into the mirror in front of me.

  A young woman stares back. I observe her muddled stare, glazed over in front of me. She is so weathered and beaten that her face looks as if she has been fighting life itself. Her face is covered with charred traces of flesh and black smudges. Her hair is tangled and matted with blood. The expression on her face looks unhinged and lost. Her uniform top and bottoms are covered in charred fragments and battered and ripped from use. There are huge voids of cleanliness on her uniform from where her gear was worn, but everywhere else is spattered and soaked with someone else’s lifeline. Even I do not know who she is, let alone what happened to her that day, and the woman she was before the day’s events unfolded looks as if she is lost forever.

  Moved to tears by the young woman in the mirror, I realize that she is my own reflection. I lurch backward, falling into the toilet stalls behind me. Steadying myself against the cold hard metal wall, I walk toward the shower area and away from the mirror. I walk unsteadily to a shower stall. I look down at my hands and the dried, crusted blood that covers them. I turn them over and over again until the tears begin to well up in the corners of my eyes. They spill over onto my cheeks as I slap my body down on the bench behind me. My silent sobbing is starting to attract attention from the other female soldiers who are in the shower area. Pressing and pushing down on the blood-soaked uniform with my hands, kneading them for comfort like a cat, I sob louder and harder.

  I stand up, turn the shower knob to hot, and walk into the lukewarm water with my clothes on. Leaning my hands up against the shower wall to brace my body, I begin to cry even louder. I bend my body under the showerhead and let the water rush over me, cleaning all the blood and charred bits off my face and ACUs. I look down at the water gathering at the bottom of the stall near the drain and watch as it turns from red to black, from black to red, and eventually to clear with every movement of my body underneath the showerhead.

  Too overwhelmed by grief and sadness, I fall to the floor of the stall and weep openly. Not caring who sees me or what happens if they do, I cry until I feel as though I can cry no more. No one is bothering to help me. No one is bothering to see if I am okay. They know as much as I do that there is nothing they can do. By the time I am ready to leave the shower stall, I am utterly alone in the latrine and an overwhelming sensation of emptiness washes over me as I sit there in the stall. I begin to panic and hyperventilate. My static short breaths through my mouth force the tears to come again with more grief and pain than I have ever felt before. Shaking from the dampness of my clothes, I close my eyes and lean my head up against the wall of the shower stall. In my fragile state, I hear a familiar voice calling my name.

  “Brookie, are you okay?”

  I opened my eyes to a nightmare that was over. It had all been a dream, one horrible fucked up dream that seemed to be another figment of my mind’s creation, another painful memory like a hand clasped over my mouth, the one thing that kept me from breathing, but I couldn’t breathe with the pain clamped over my mouth, the grip too strong, the ability to breathe through my mouth not strong enough.

  Constellations

  When I got home from Iraq and stepped into the home I grew up in, I felt like somehow the house had changed, that somehow in my absence they had done something to the house. I walked around for weeks looking and feeling everything, but I couldn’t figure it out. Besides the upgrades to the stove and a new coat of paint on the outside, the house was still the same. One night when I couldn’t sleep, I went room by room trying to figure out what had changed until I came upon what was once my old room and is now the guest bedroom. I paused in the doorway, almost unable to take a step inside. There were too many memories in this room: eight-year-old tea parties with imaginary friends, the times as a child that I prayed to the moon to take me away from this place whenever my dad went on drug binges, my first kiss (with the neighborhood boy down the street), the first time I had sex in high school (with some skater kid named Nick), the countless times during my childhood and teenage years that I lay awake looking at the plastic stars on the ceiling as I listened to Nana and Grandpa fight with Dad, the first time I did cocaine and meth in college, the night I slept in the room as a soldier before I hopped a plane the next day for Iraq; I remembered them all as I stood there looking into the dark room. I stepped inside, walked over to the window, and put my hand on the window ledge, the marks from where I had dug my teeth into the plaster as a child still there, cutting into the ledge like swiss cheese holes. I rubbed my pregnant belly. The boys were kicking inside, making my back ache. I sat down on the bed and looked out of the window up at the crescent moon that shone just above the tree line. I thought back to childhood, my lame-ass attempt to understand why, even in this room, I still didn’t feel as though I was truly here, as though I wasn’t really at home.

  My eight-year-old self sat on the bed, the oversized tie-dyed shirt hanging well below my knees. I had awakened to the sound of the Grateful Dead softly playing. Jerry Garcia’s bluesy voice echoed up the stairs and through my open bedroom door. The melody of his guitar invited me downstairs to the slightly opened sliding glass door of my father’s converted patio den, which was a haven for everything controversial in the house. The curtains were drawn, but still the light glinted through as if to beckon me to a place that was usually off limits at night. I opened the sliding glass door a little more, hoping that it was just enough to slip through and step inside. I peeked through the curtain to find my dad bent over a coffee table, his head to the glass surface. I called out to him, but the music was too loud for him to notice my voice. I walked all the way in and stood next to his water bed. I called out to him again. This time his head rose. His eyes, a storm of black irises and wild stares, were fixed in my direction. He got up and walked over to me, grabbing both my arms on either side, picking me up off the ground. My legs dangled. He shouted at me about how I was told never to come in here at night, how this was his time away from me. But, then again, he was always away from me, distant and cut off. The drugs had made it possible to forget me, even now. I tried to say something, but the words were lost as I stared into his eyes. They were bloodshot, and the hazel green around his pupils had all but been swallowed up by black. His grip scared me and I started to cry. He set me down. I can’t remember what he said or what I asked him, maybe it was for a cup of water or maybe just a hug, but that is when it happened. He pushed me down to the ground. I remember standing up, crying, and asking something again, but that was met with more yelling. He cursed at me and pointed to the floor, and that is when I realized I had wet myself. He shoved me through the crack in the sliding glass door face first. My shoulders barely made it through before the rest of my body followed. Through the kitchen, past the breakfast counter, and up the stairs I ran to my bedroom. Nana and Grandpa had slept through it. They were better sleepers back then. I slipped back into bed, with wet panties and nightie. I fell asleep that night looking
up at the moon that was barely visible through all the clouds that hung around it, like the ears of a cotton plant that has just bloomed.

  Other times in my childhood, I can recall looking at the moon outside my window and wishing that it would take me away from all this fighting and bickering. Grandpa and Dad fought constantly, mostly because Dad disagreed with Nana on how he should raise John and me. The bickering always turned into a shouting match, one I would listen to while holed up in my room, the one I shared with my brother until I was in high school.

  I remember crying next to the window in elementary school, my head poked through the curtains so that the light wouldn’t wake John. I remember praying to the man in the moon, asking him to help my dad. I knew there was something wrong with him. I had heard Nana say it over and over again. I asked her if I could help him, but Nana just replied that Dad needed to want help before he would ever take it. The yelling stopped. The front door slammed shut. I heard the fan belt on Dad’s VW Jetta squeak to life, the exhaust sputtering fuel out of the tailpipe. The headlights turned on. I duck my head down and lie back down on my pillow and stare up at the ceiling fan turning around and around as my dad pulled away quickly down Lancaster Drive. Nana and Grandpa didn’t talk about the fight or the fact that my dad had left, and when John asked where Dad had gone, they just told him that he had gone out of town and that he would be back as soon as he could. Grandpa slowly began to box up Dad’s things. I knew what it meant. I had seen Dad do it to Mom’s things when she left. It meant he might not be coming back, but, unlike Mom, Dad came back for us a week later, not just for his boxed-up things. He took us away from Nana and Grandpa’s house. I didn’t set foot back in the room until I was in middle school, and even then Dad, John, and I didn’t stay long before we left again. After some years John ran away and went back to Nana and Grandpa’s, and then was forced to leave and go to a Baptist boarding school in Missouri. Dad said it was for his own good. I knew better. John had fucked up, run away from home, done too many drugs, gotten into too much trouble, and now he was paying the price for his youthful indiscretions. After middle school I didn’t return to my old room until college, but even then I didn’t think the room had changed.