A Hard and Heavy Thing (25 page)

He quit smoking. He quit going to the gym to lift, preferring to run alone. He did not watch movies or play video games. He was not there to make friends; he was there to finish his tour and take care of his troops. What good were friends if they were dead?

Each night he went to bed and in the darkness the images returned. One by one, each horrid memory swelled into focus, a moment with no context, a word with no meaning.

•••

Before deploying, he had always wanted a medal. Nothing prestigious, just something to recognize his time and sacrifice. Something to put in a box for his kids to find in the attic. Something for them to ask about someday. But then he had seen real combat, and he had left Iraq in 2005 with no medals. All he had earned was a small rock. Just a small pebble as a souvenir. An incisive reminder to do better next time. By the time he left, he was fine with that. He had come to accept that. He was just happy to be going home at all.

[But that's not entirely true either. I expected to be happy, but let me tell you something. Anticipating happiness and being happy are two entirely different things. I told myself that all I wanted to do was go to the mall. I wanted to look at the pretty girls, ogle the Victoria's Secret billboards, and hit on girls at the Sam Goody record store. I wanted to sit in the food court and gorge on junk food. I wanted to go to Bath and Body Works, stand in the middle of the store, and breathe. I wanted to stand there with my eyes closed and just smell, man. I wanted to lose myself in the total capitalism and consumerism of it all, the pure greediness, the pure indulgence, the pure American-ness of it all. I never made it that far. I didn't even make it out of the airport in Baltimore with all its Cinnabons, Starbucks, Brooks Brothers, and Brookstones before realizing that after where we'd been, after what we'd seen, home would never be home again.]

After the beer started flowing on that first night in an Applebee's near Fort McCoy, Levi tried to believe that maybe, just maybe, he could be happy going back to real life. The second day was spent in bed. He spent day three on the computer Googling news for FOB O'Ryan and Ad Dujayl. He searched YouTube videos for video montages of photos and explosions and the green-tinted videos of night missions that could have been one of his own night missions. And that was day four, day five, and day six.

By day seven, he had set aside the war porn to barter and negotiate with the Reenlistments NCO with the hope of getting a second taste of the real thing. He waived his dwell time, signed a new contract to go regular army again, and days later he was active with the 10th Mountain. He was headed to Afghanistan, and he was fine with that.

[Truth be told, I was better than fine with that. It was the very raison d'être for our initial enlistment, back when there were still such things as the right reasons. And if I tried hard enough I could rationalize with myself; I somehow convinced myself that those reasons still existed.]

Then after a few months in country, when the Korengal Valley pass had made the canal roads in Iraq look like I-90 through farmland, when he had started smoking again, when the low ground was starting to make Ad Dujayl look like Disney, and when he had nearly forgotten that Lieutenant Colonel Bradford had made a promise—or a veiled threat—that Levi would get exactly what he deserved, his company commander materialized at their wilderness combat outpost. The man was a pale bowling ball of a captain from Mississippi by the name of Chambers. Levi had only seen him a handful of times during pre-deployment training. He flew to their little COP on a bird that wasn't part of the scheduled ring route, and he told Levi to pack his bags; he was going home on R&R early. Some big shot general in the Wisconsin National Guard had demanded his presence.

All the old thoughts, fears, and guilt that Levi had buried to focus on the immediate task of staying alive came bubbling back to the surface, and as he packed his bags—certain he wouldn't return—he knew his reckoning had finally come.

When Levi got on the bird, which waited just for him, Captain Chambers smacked chewing gum and stared at Levi without speaking. It was all Levi could do to ignore the smug smile on the captain's face as he looked out the gunner's door at the foothills blending into vast desert below.

When they landed on Bagram and waited for transport to the PAX terminal, the captain finally broke the silence. “So what did you do?”

Levi's stomach dropped into his balls. “What did I do?”

“You deaf?”

“I don't know what you mean, sir.” The thought actually crossed Levi's mind that he should contact an attorney.

“Your bit of pomp and circumstance is messing up my perfectly coordinated R&R schedule. The least you can do is stop playing the aw shucks bit and tell me whatchya did.” The look on Levi's face must have betrayed his confusion because Captain Chambers blew a bubble and said, “By golly, you really didn't know?”

Levi shook his head slowly. “Didn't know what?”

Captain Chambers shook his own head, mirroring Levi. “Well let me, as your proud and somewhat envious commander, inform you of what I am amazed you did not know. You have earned the Silver Star Medal, and some Yankee general in your old Yankee guard unit told our BC that your presence is required in whatever Yankee state you come from so they can give your Yankee ass your medal in front of all your Yankee buddies.”

So after four days of flying and waiting in airport terminals, more than a year since the battle in question, Levi stood in full service dress between his parents at the base theater on Fort McCoy, Wisconsin. His father wore an understated black suit with miniature Bronze Star and Purple Heart ribbon lapel pins that Levi had never seen before. His mother held a glass of juice, and she took little nibbles of a sugar cookie as if she hoped it would last forever because once it was gone, then what would she do with her hands and nervous energy?

Lieutenant Colonel Bradford—like a proud kid at show and tell—led Levi around and introduced him to three different mayors, the lieutenant governor, various county and city officials from the local area, and a boatload of flag and field officers he had never seen before. With each handshake, Levi had a new unit's challenge coin pressed into his right palm, which he had to drop into his pocket before shaking the next hand of the next officer who also felt obligated to personally honor Levi with his own personal coin to show his own personal gratitude for Levi's service and bravery. Meanwhile, Levi's vacuous thank yous rang hollow in his own ears, and his forced smile felt to him like the grimace before the tears. These people were throwing a party to celebrate the worst day of his life.

During the ceremony, Lieutenant Michaels gave an emotional and sometimes self-deprecating speech in which he relayed to the crowd an account of a ferocious and cool-under-pressure soldier willing to disobey orders to save his friends. He made no overt mention of his own physical assault at the hands of his subordinate, but he sprinkled the speech with plenty of idioms and metaphors. He referenced black eyes, busted jaws, and knockout punches. To Levi, the soldier he described sounded like a figment of someone's imagination. “Sergeant Hartwig is the kind of soldier that every platoon leader needs,” he said. Before closing his speech, he paused and turned to make eye contact with Levi, who was sitting in the front row with his parents. “He's driven. He's fierce. He's aggressive. I can tell you from personal experience that anyone who tries to stand in his way doesn't stand a chance.” He winked. “I couldn't be prouder to have had the honor of commanding him in battle.”

The words, and particularly the heartfelt conviction with which they were delivered, created in Levi his own emotional tumult. The room erupted into applause, and Lieutenant Colonel Bradford stepped to the podium. Before Levi had the opportunity to breathe, the colonel—who had indeed promised they would not forget about him and that he would get what he deserved—spoke into the microphone. “Sergeant Hartwig, could you please come up here?”

Members of the local press sat in the front corner of the crowd with their video cameras and microphones, leaning on the edges of their chairs, moving around to catch the best angles of the stoic soldier's face. They ate up the juicy and violent narrative as a great hometown-hero feel-good piece, a success story in an otherwise disappointing and frustrating war.

Certain phrases jumped out at Levi as the colonel read, and Levi would stop listening to think about how their tone and spin ran in sharp contrast to how he had come to perceive the events in the long months since that tragic day. Since the day in question, Levi had mulled the events over in his head every night as he tried to sleep, during every conversation's lull, during every shower, every workout, and every meal. Every morning's foggy transition from sleep to wakefulness consisted of filling in the gaps where his memory failed him. He had never spoken of it, had never discussed it, and had never been pressed when he evaded the topic. He had lost his objectivity long ago, and he had accepted his own guilt-laden perspective—the one in which it was all his fault—without reasonable doubt or credible challenge.

Levi felt something inside growing softer and lighter as Lieutenant Colonel Bradford read on. The events still felt like nothing to be celebrated, but Levi had locked himself away in his own cage of guilt and regret for so long, the narrative made him feel something like grace. That day in Iraq had presented a terrible situation and he had done the best he could. The reading of the medal was something of a revelation. He listened with fascination and he thought, even if it was not true that he was a hero, perhaps it was true that he was not a criminal or a failure. The possibility existed for him for the first time that the past was mutable—that he might have a new truth, a new narrative that was truer than his own tortured memory. For the first time, he realized how subjective it all was and how the past was not as inviolable as he had come to believe. And didn't the possibility exist that his own recollection and the Silver Star citation were equally true? Perhaps that single afternoon had manifested both his greatest failures and his greatest accomplishments.