I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 (5 page)

Afif left his worn-out shoes outside and timed his entry to the gusts of wind ruffling the canvas. His yellow eyes were accustomed to the dark. He could make out the shape of Spencer’s legs stretched beneath the covers, stepped over the sergeant’s huge size thirteen sand-colored boots, and stood with his thumb against the hilt of his knife at the head of the cot.

Spencer’s ribcage rose and fell again as his lungs filled and depressed. The odor of decay drifting on Afif’s breath made Spencer stir in his sleep. Every vertebra along his spine stood out clearly beneath the taut skin. The Ismaili froze, watching and listening for Spencer’s deep even breathing to resume. Spencer’s fatigues hung above the cot, three stripes up and down and the white-faced Airborne eagle.

Afif flipped the knife so that his right thumb covered the butt of its handle, moving the blade into a stabbing position. His target was a two-inch circle left of the spine and just below the rib cage. Stab and lean in, driving the steel edge up into the heart. Down and push. More like killing a horse than killing a sheep or goat.

He shifted, spreading his legs to support his choreography, then lifted the blade and pillow and steeled himself.

Like a 2x4 slamming into Spencer’s ribs, the blade stuck there, all blunt force into bone. Spencer’s entire frame contracted. Afif’s full weight smothered him beneath the pillow. Spencer felt the sharp blade’s point moving, tearing a line down his back, through nerve-endings. Then a new, sharper pain surged deep inside; Afif had found unresisting soft tissue and plunged in the blade all the way to its hilt.

The agony surged into Spencer’s eyeballs. He rolled toward the pain, snapping and sweeping back his right forearm, thrashing instinctively, and the pain soared again, intensifying as the tribesman pulled back the blade to stab again toward Spencer’s chest.

Spencer lifted his blanket and stretched it out between his fists, meeting the knife as it was plunged for the kill. Spencer twisted Afif’s entire arm in the heavy cloth and rolled. His attacker’s shoulder socket popped out of joint. The blade dropped on his belly and fell to the tent floor.

Flashlight beams darted around the room. Spencer’s eyes swam as the interpreter’s face showed, brightly lighted just inches away. His cot collapsed under the weight of the soldiers diving on top of them. Spencer was unaware of his own shouts and of the five-foot bloody arc spraying the tent walls from his severed renal artery.

“You dirty motherfucker,” Miller screamed. Before anyone could react, he jammed his pistol barrel into Afif’s prominent nose and fired. An ear-ringing explosion of warm liquid, grit, and muck blew six feet around. A medic yelled something. Spencer felt hands turning him over. He imagined his hands gripping around the squared bars of a field stretcher.

“Get off me,” Spencer thought.
Leave me alone, let me stand up. I’ll be OK. Only I need to stand up.

Pressure applied against his back.

The sweet, rusty, familiar stench of blood.

Being lifted. He reached his right hand around the stretcher’s rail, feeling the heat coming off its utilitarian square steel. A chopper motor. The screech of metal sliding on metal then the door clunking shut. Nothingness.

Four days in Bagram. Landstuhl, Germany, after. Where they took his kidney.

CHAPTER THREE

Spencer transferred stateside on a stretcher. His complete belongings consisted of  a light blue  hospital gown, one blue toothbrush, and an army-green baseball cap. No Barrett. No guitar. He told himself that his weapon and his music were waiting for him; the mission was getting back to combat readiness. From the second day in Germany, he ignored doctor’s orders to relax and give his body the time to heal, and began a strict regimen of micro-exercises from toes to his waist and neck to his shoulders; hours of them. Once the intravenous drips came out he mouthed pain medications beneath his tongue then dumped them out the window. At Madigan, he tried a squat exercise and ended up feeling something tear. But now the sutures were out of his back, he was ambulatory, putting on weight, and already planning to be into more intense workouts. Behind his bed, the window looked down into the open quad where groups of broken men, half of them in wheelchairs, sat around and chain-smoked together. Spencer fought being lumped in beside the gimps. He didn’t belong.

The poor bastards would never be soldiers again. Some were missing limbs, others looked fine except that TBI’s, traumatic brain injuries, had robbed them of their abilities to process thoughts or to speak or to make it through a day without uncontrollable seizures. If a chair was set down hard on the linoleum some of them would dive for cover. Any loud noise could freak them out.

Spencer eyes scanned them when he shuffled through to the bathroom. Some had noses gone, some minus an arm, two in wheelchairs with air where both legs were gone, one with concave voids, no eyes, with both forearms ending in bandaged stumps.

I’d chew a bullet, he thought.

Estimated wait time before his Medical Evaluation Board and final Physical Evaluation Board was out to nearly four months, meaning that he was stuck there with the gimps. He had a singular purpose for his time: to come out of there physical fit; better than ever before. In four months, he was going to overcome anything they put in front of him. 
Keep it together and get back to what you were trained to accomplish.
Only Major Davies, the female psychiatrist running the floor, just wouldn’t leave him the hell alone.

“Master Sergeant Spencer, I can’t force anyone to attend group counseling sessions, but psychological fitness is equally important.

“Sergeant,” she warned him, “isolation is a sign of depression and I consider that your unwillingness to support your fellow soldiers in their own recoveries is a serious malaise.”

When Spencer offered no response she put it more simply. “Participate in Group or I’ll write you up, Sergeant. You receive a negative psych eval and I guarantee it will impact your PEB.”

Her message was loud and clear.
Attend or face a shitstorm.

Major Davies spoke in group using a practiced calm tone that sounded like a bad infomercial with a touch of Southern Baptist tossed in there. She sounded to Spencer like any of a hundred Southern black women around where we grew up in Virginia. Strong women, always ready to lead the congregation, looking for “Amen” and “Praise the Lord.” Only the major had been on the job too long. The evangelist had left the building. Spencer quickly learned to tune her out. He would show up, but that was all. Nobody was going to turn him into one of
them.

Spencer wanted to run out of the room. He should not have been there; his presence was like leaving a weapon out in the rain. It was irresponsible and wasteful. When he got back to business, he didn’t need that stuff in his head; none of it added to his capabilities.

Major Davies, all five-foot-three of her, sat there bursting out of her uniform like a sausage in the frying pan, one part doctorate in social welfare, part cheerleader, part hardened no-bullshit realist. “We’ve all been told and trained to be tough; we stick our heads down and work through the pain when it gets hard. But when you’ve been through stuff that is never going to make sense no matter how many times you put it through your head, that doesn’t work so well, does it?

“All the toughness in the world won’t bring back your arm or your leg and toughing it out won’t make you a better son or brother or husband or father because it isn’t just you; the people who love you don’t understand and just won’t get it no matter what. So don’t drag them through your being tough. Behind all that toughness, it’s scary. We’re leaving something we know and going out into the unknown. What we’re going to do here, together, is to acknowledge our fears and to identify and embrace new opportunities. There’s not a man here who is fully equipped right now to look into the mirror and see his own potential. But I see it in you and I’m going to help you bring it out. So let’s do it.” She put her hands together and started the group of them to ‘clap it out’.

“Can’t decide if I’m going to become a court stenographer or a film editor,” the blind guy offered, deadpan. He raised his stumps and held them together in a handless mock prayer.

“Won’t one of you righteous individuals please help me?” he mocked. Spencer had a hard time looking at the man.

“From recruitment to basic right through to every deployment all we hear, Major, is ‘us,’ ‘we,’ ‘together,’” Captain Sam snarled. “We and us, plural; team, squad, unit, company, battalion, division. ‘We’re only as good as the guy next to us.’ ‘That soldier next to you, ahead of you, behind you, we’re there for one another.’ All ‘us,’ all fuzzy warm togetherness. And then we get shot or we get blown up or worse, we get it in the head where nobody else can see what’s wrong. Then nobody fucking says anything about it being ‘us’ anymore.  One split second and then it’s all ‘you and you and you and you ‘cause the army is all done with ‘us’. We’re on our own and we are fucked.

“Tell me, Major, why don’t you talk about ‘us’ now? There are two and a half million of
us
who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. You tell me, you really think we need to ask for anything? All we need is to stay ‘WE’ and WE can take what WE earned.”

The major was standing up and puffing, with her giant boobs looking ready to burst the fabric barely holding them contained.

“Captain, we have a lot of material to cover in this section and you have been through the entire program before,” she told him, rigidly pressing herself to maintain her icy even tone, “so I’ll ask you to refrain from interrupting.” The man was an officer!  What kind of officer crushes morale? His injuries didn’t alter his responsibility to offer leadership.

“Material. I’ve heard it, remember? This isn’t my first rodeo.  Major, these men have all been in combat. I’ve been there, too. Have you? Tell me that. Where did you fight, Major?”

Major Davies glared at the captain; she kept steady and calm, but Spencer could see that the captain had struck a nerve. Major Davies sent a text. 9-1-1. Two orderlies rushed down the hallway trailed by a nurse who hustled to uncap a syringe.

Before they could inject the sedative, Spencer sprang to his feet and lifted the captain up off his seat.

“Major,” he told her, “I’ll take the captain out for a walk.” He put his body between the captain and the orderlies.

“Cap, I got you,” he whispered. “Come on. Now.”

He hooked his arm around the captain’s forearm and choreographed his movements. His body wasn’t fully there, not enough to be reliable. Not yet. Fighting two meant disabling blows, the sort of violence that they wouldn’t walk away from.

He stared at both orderlies, his eyes conveying that they were the ones in trouble.

“Do they have sedatives?” Captain Sam asked Spencer.

“Affirmative.”

“Major, I’d like to take that walk,” Captain Sam told her. He told Spencer to “walk slowly until we get a pace together and try to tell me what’s coming up, stairs and curbs especially.”

Spencer did as ordered. The orderlies parted without intervening.

As they walked toward the double doors at the top of the ward, Spencer wondered what made him get involved. Why would he risk screwing up? He was onto the home stretch. Bagram to Landstuhl, Landstuhl to Madigan, Madigan to Walter Reed, Walter Reed-PEB-Afghanistan.

Group made the men feel small. None of them were small, but they went along. Only the captain didn’t go along. Before that, Spencer had added it up, but it was just like the captain said. The army was always about working together right from the first hour of basic training; now personal responsibility was all they ever talked about. Now they were making guys who are already down feel like they ought to be grateful for everything the military was doing for them and not the other way around. Captain Sam saw what was coming, how the MEB and PEB processes weren’t about a soldier’s future; this was all about pencil-pushing actuaries getting the grateful nation off the hook with the cheapest settlement they could get away with. Major Davies worked for that machine. Everything coming out from her mouth was filtered by it.

They took the elevator down to the ground floor without talking. They headed east out the rear entrance toward the flat grassy sport fields where Spencer thought the captain could walk on his own without any obstruction.

“Sergeant, I apologize for taking you away from therapy.” Those were the first words the captain ever spoke to him. It might have been the first time he had heard any captain apologize about anything.

“Not a problem, Sir,” Spencer replied, sounding upbeat. The reality was he’d take fresh air over Group any day. “I’m just killing time until they get me through Physical Exam Board and I get back to Afghanistan.”

They were coming to stairs; Spencer told the captain, who asked him to stop at the top of the stairs and then take them one at a time.

“Tell me when we’re on the last step before flat ground.”

Spencer felt the pressure on his shoulder increase and prepared himself to straight-arm the captain if he tripped going down, but they made it successfully without incident.

“I like what you said, Sir,” Spencer admitted, surprising himself when the words came out of his mouth. “About how we don’t need to ask for anything.”

“But you’re going back?” the captain questioned.

“Yes sir.”

Captain Sam stopped and turned, squaring his shoulders toward Spencer. “You’ve been deployed. You know these wars are bullshit,” he said. “But you want to go back there?”

“Affirmative.”

“Affirmative what, Sergeant? That the wars are bullshit or that you want to go back?”

“Affirmative.”

Captain Sam raised his stumps as if his missing hands were still attached to help him get his mind around Spencer’s statement. “You’ve been there. You know we can’t win. We’re not accomplishing a damned thing. But you want to go back?”

In motion, his mind worked clearly. Standing there in one place his thinking was like digging a hole at the seashore, with every wave caving it in upon itself. Spencer started walking again.

Spencer assessed bluntly that “Out there I am an Olympic gold medalist and an astronaut. I know what I am supposed to do and I know how to do it, with precision. I know my job, I do my job, I get it done. There I am the real deal. Here… I’m nothing.”

Outside of the army what would he be doing? He had asked himself the question plenty of times. Not a single response painted a picture in his head.

“It won’t last forever, the war. You’re going to have to find a new normal sometime.”

Spencer shook his head, not that the captain could see. What would he do, pull Romex for Jack; maybe someday learn how to install a service panel?

“What’s happened to you?” Captain Sam asked, relieving him of the toxic thought process of writing out a new and lesser life.

“Green on blue, Sir. Got stabbed.” Spencer thought about additional details, but what he said was all that really mattered.

“And you’re OK now?”

Spencer took them between the buildings heading east toward the playfield. The captain moved easily; it seemed like everything that wasn’t missing was working fine.

“Yes Sir. Down a kidney, but you only need one. I’m lucky.” Spencer hesitated. “Sorry Sir, not meaning anything by that.” They were into a wide path now with no obstacles for a hundred feet. MSJS stopped and considered that there had to be an easier way to walk. He decided to try.

Reaching across his chest, he took the captain’s forearm and let it down to Captain Sam’s side. “Captain, we’re in a wide open spot. I’ll let you know different if anything comes up. You’re good to walk on your own.” Spencer sensed that the captain needed to be challenged.

Captain Sam hesitated, reluctant to try, but made four tentative steps before he was veering off at a forty-five degree angle, heading straight toward a maple tree. Spencer caught his shirt. He needed to rig up some type of harness to tie them together so the captain could correct himself if he started going in the wrong direction.

“Talk to me,” the captain said.

“Sir?”

“Jesus, Sergeant, talk! You talk to me and I’ll know where you are.”

Spencer looked around for something to say. “We’re on grass now,” he told him. “It was just cut.”

Captain Sam smiled and agreed. He could smell it.

“Talk to me if we get near obstacles and we’re good, I think.” He used his forearm to brush off MSJS’s grip on his shirt.

“Family?” he asked Spencer.

“Just my dad. I’m not married. You, Sir?”

“Yes.” The captain was married. Kids, too. A couple of little girls.

“That’s good, Sir. You must be ready to get your PEB, too, and get home to them.”

“Would you saddle your wife and kids with me?” the captain responded. I’m a 200-pound infant who can’t ever be potty-trained.

Spencer had no reply. What can you say to that?

“I didn’t think so,” Captain Sam answered for him. “Not going to happen, Sergeant. I guarantee it.”

“Sir, can the Major do that, have you injected?” The captain was making trouble, no doubt about that, but sedating him like he was going nuts?

“The Major is doing precisely what her job description says to do, ticking every single box. She’s an idiot. She’s not helping these men.

Nobody is afraid of lost limbs. We can take that challenge just like taking the next hill. Those things go with the job.”

The look on the captain’s face said that Major Davies might as well have been spitting dog turds.

“I can hear it in their voices,” he continued. “Every minute they’ve lived as soldiers has been mapped out, morning to night. They knew who they were, where they were, what they were supposed to accomplish, and exactly how to do it. Just like you said. They don’t know anything now. They face a huge blank unknown.”

The captain was never going to pour maple syrup over a rock and call it breakfast, that was for certain. Respect.

“The Major knows what’s next. These men will get in front of a bunch of trained negotiators using actuarial tables saying just how little this grateful nation can get away with paying for a foot or a hand or an ear or an eye.”

Now is exactly the time for ‘we’ and ‘us’ and banding together and that’s the last thing they want us to do.”

*****

“I’ll make you a deal, Sergeant,” Major Davies proposed. “You don’t want to attend Group and Captain Hall can’t seem to resist interfering. Captain Hall hangs onto being bitter. That’s poisonous here and I can’t allow it. Run it right out of him, Sergeant. Like my mother always said, ‘a tired mouth is slower to talk back.’ Everyone in this facility means to do well and we are doing our best. If you agree to be responsible for the captain rather than attending group time, barring any reason otherwise, I’ll agree to write a positive psych eval toward your PEB.”