“You can’t release some of my burdens,” I said. “You’re not the one that failed to speak up when it was most needed. You’re not the one who failed to voice concerns in the face of danger. You’re not the one who has to tell the tale of what happened because you didn’t risk your life like your friends did.”
Kaitlyn was now close enough to touch me, but her hands remained folded behind her, making it obvious she wasn’t going to touch me.
“I can offer you a listening ear,” she said. “And I would guess that no one else has done that. People might have done that, but with an agenda. To file an official report. To get what they wanted out of you. Who has listened to you just to understand? Just to be present?”
I wasn’t laughing now.
“I appreciate it, but I’m—”
“You’re not good, Michael, but that’s okay,” she said. “If you were good, well... but it’s okay to not be good. I want to understand. I’ve suffered loss of my own under tragic circumstances. I can’t believe that I might share it with a biker. But here we are.”
Maybe she was right—she understood it perhaps more than I was giving her credit for.
“You are right about one thing. I’ve never told the story to anyone.”
I let out a long sigh.
“Part of the problem is that telling the story isn’t just tough for others to hear. It’s hard on me. Every time I remember the story, let alone tell it, I suffer my own sort of PTSD.”
“Then tell it at your pace, if you even want to,” Kaitlyn said. “I support you either way.”
How we went from where we were to here is nothing short of a miracle. She should hate my guts and be running away.
But here we are.
“Okay,” I said.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and uttered the first words.
“It was in Ramadi in the last few months of my deployment.”
Once I got those words out, the rest became a little bit easier. Barely.
“A couple of weeks prior, a minor skirmish had broken out in Ramadi with the enemy lobbing a couple of grenades in our direction after we hit a small IED. We suffered no casualties and no damage other than some ascetic damage to one of our tanks, but it was very clear that the enemy had intended to do something more. Our commanding officer, when we saw him, was furious.”
As the memories of such an event came to mind—seeing the CO throw a binder of notes in frustration, pounding the table with his fists—it was so obvious what parts were a sign of what was to come and what parts were genuine. It only added to the frustration and the sort of self-crucifixion I was doing, but with the story started, I would not quit telling it.
“The CO enacted a plan to launch a counterstrike on a stronghold of the enemy. For a variety of reasons, it felt a little stupid and unnecessary. The enemy made its mark striking at us in these guerrilla-style attacks all the time. If they could have won a traditional war, then we would not have overrun Iraq as quickly as we did. These little skirmishes shouldn’t have distracted us from the main goal But in any case, I was a soldier, and he was the commanding officer. It was not my job to question orders, it was my job to follow them.”
Left unsaid, of course, was that that was true only once the orders had been finalized. Everyone thought the military was just a guy with buzzed gray hair yelling at guys with buzzed black and blonde hair, but it was much more dynamic than that. Leaders who just yelled and didn’t allow for questions were the type of leaders who didn’t last very long.
“We rolled out to the site, and... the details don’t matter.”
That was true. I could have gone into detail about how we intended to strike the base and how many men we had and what sort of assets we had with us, but that would all fly over the head of Kaitlyn. And in any case, it wasn’t why I had PTSD.
“What does matter is that I was in the rear, and my friends were in the front, and they walked in and got killed.”
The words came out much more dispassionately than I thought they would have. I guess I was just numb. I guess the incident had hurt me so much that I just didn’t think of it any other way anymore. It just had happened.
“We eventually evacuated, and by the time we got back...”
Suddenly, somehow, at this moment, I began to feel emotional. Maybe it was because this was where the parallels between the past and the present were so strong and so ugly. I didn’t know, someone with a therapist’s background could better understand.
“The CO had been...”
I shook my head. Kaitlyn placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. I didn’t want to admit that it somehow gave me the strength to keep going, but it did make me feel more supported.
“He’d been arrested for treason,” I said.
