The Good Soldiers (26 page)

They spent one night together, and then they were at the airport saying goodbye. It would be six months before he would see her again, and he wanted to find the right words that would last that long, or if it were to come to that, longer.

“My wife,” he finally said, saying those words for the first time.

She laughed.

“My husband,” she said.

And then he came back.

Adam Schumann was going home, too. But unlike the others, he was not coming back. Five months after carrying Sergeant Emory down the stairs in Kamaliyah, his bad-news vessel, as David Petraeus might describe it, was no longer able to drain.

This was Schumann’s third deployment to Iraq. He’d been here thirty-four months by his own count, just over a thousand days, and it didn’t matter anymore that he was one of the 2-16’s very best soldiers. His war had become unbearable. He was seeing over and over his first kill disappearing into a mud puddle, looking at him as he sank. He was seeing a house that had just been obliterated by gunfire, a gate slowly opening, and a wide-eyed little girl about the age of his daughter peering out. He was seeing another gate, another child, and this time a dead-aim soldier firing. He was seeing another soldier, also firing, who afterward vomited as he described watching head spray after head spray through his magnifying scope. He was seeing himself watching the vomiting soldier while casually eating a chicken-and-salsa MRE.

He was still tasting the MRE.

He was still tasting Sergeant Emory’s blood.

He needed to go home. That was what Combat Stress had said after he finally gave in and admitted that his thoughts had turned suicidal. The traveling psychiatrist who spent a few days a week on the FOB diagnosed him as depressed and suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis that was becoming the most common of the war. There had been internal studies suggesting that 20 percent of soldiers deployed to Iraq were experiencing symptoms of PTSD ranging from nightmares, to insomnia, to rapid breathing, to racing hearts, to depression, to obsessive thoughts about suicide. They also suggested that those symptoms increased significantly with multiple deployments and that the cost of treating the hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffering from them could eventually cost more than the war itself.

Every study that had been done indicated the seriousness of this, and yet in the culture of the army, where mental illness has long been equated with weakness, there remained a lingering suspicion of any diagnosis for which there wasn’t visible evidence. A soldier who lost a leg, for instance, was a soldier who lost a leg. Losing a leg couldn’t be faked. Same with being shot, or pierced by shrapnel from a lob bomb, or incinerated by an EFP. Those were legitimate injuries. But to lose a mind? Early in the deployment, a soldier had one day climbed onto the roof of an Iraqi police station, stripped off everything he was wearing, then ascended a ladder to the top of a guard tower, and in full view of a busy section of New Baghdad began hollering at the top of his lungs and masturbating. Was it an act of mental instability, as some thought, or was it the calculated act of someone trying to get home, which was Kauzlarich’s growing suspicion? Trying to figure it out, Kauzlarich kept returning to the fact that the soldier had paused in the midst of his supposed meltdown to remove sixty pounds of clothing and gear before climbing the ladder, which suggested a deliberateness to his thinking. Perhaps he hadn’t been so out of control after all. Perhaps he was just a lousy, disloyal soldier. And so, in the end, he was sent home not with a recommendation for treatment, but for a court martial and incarceration.

Kauzlarich himself was another example of the army’s conflicted attitude about all this. On one hand, he endorsed the idea of his soldiers being debriefed by the FOB’s Combat Stress team after witnessing something especially traumatic. But when Kauzlarich was the one in need of debriefing after he saw the remains of three of his soldiers scattered along the road on September 4, he made it clear that he needed no help whatsoever. “I don’t need that bullshit,” he told Cummings, and so Cummings, who knew better, discreetly arranged for a Combat Stress specialist to casually drop by Kauzlarich’s office. An hour later, he was still leaning in Kauzlarich’s doorway, tossing out questions, and afterward Kauzlarich mentioned to Cummings that he was feeling a lot better. He understood what had just happened and was glad for it, and yet even with that he had no intention of ever being seen walking into the aid station and disappearing through the doorway marked
COMBAT STRESS
. And as reports of soldiers supposedly having problems continued to reach him, he continued to reduce some of those reports to the infantry’s historically preferred diagnosis: “He’s just a pussy.”

With Schumann, though, there was no such pronouncement, because it was obvious to everyone what had happened, that a great soldier had reached his limit. “He is a true casualty of battle,” Ron Brock, the battalion’s physician assistant, said one day as Schumann was preparing to leave Rustamiyah for good. “There’s not a physical scar, but look at the man’s heart, and his head, and there are scars galore.”

You could see it in his nervous eyes. You could see it in his shaking hands. You could see it in the three prescription bottles in his room: one to steady his galloping heart rate, one to reduce his anxiety, one to minimize his nightmares. You could see it in the Screensaver on his laptop—a nuclear fireball and the words fuck iraq—and in the private journal he had been keeping since he arrived.

His first entry, on February 22:

Not much going on today. I turned my laundry in, and we’re getting our TAT boxes. We got mortared last night at 2:30 a.m., none close. We’re at FOB Rustamiyah, Iraq. It’s pretty nice, got a good chow hall and facilities. Still got a bunch of dumb shit to do though. Well, that’s about it for today.

His last entry, on October 18:

I’ve lost all hope. I feel the end is near for me, very, very near.

Day by day my misery grows like a storm, ready to swallow me whole and take me to the unknown. Yet all I can fear is the unknown. Why can’t I just let go and let it consume me. Why do I fight so hard, just to be punished again and again, for things I can’t recall? What have I done? I just can’t go on anymore with this evil game.

Darkness is all I see anymore.

So he was finished. Down to his final hours, he was packed, weaponless, under escort, and waiting for the helicopter that would take him away to a wife who had just told him on the phone: “I’m scared of what you might do.”

“You know I’d never hurt you,” he’d said, and he’d hung up, wandered around the FOB, gotten a haircut, and come back to his room, where he now said, “But what if she’s right? What if I snap someday?”

It was a thought that made him feel sick. Just as every thought now made him feel sick. “You spend a thousand days, it gets to the point where it’s
Groundhog Day.
Every day is over and over. The heat. The smell. The language. There’s nothing sweet about it. It’s all sour,” he said. He remembered the initial invasion, when it wasn’t that way. “I mean it was a front seat to the greatest movie I’ve ever seen in my life.” He remembered the firelights of his second deployment. “I loved it. Anytime I get shot at in a firelight, it’s the sexiest feeling there is.” He remembered how this deployment began to feel bad early on. “I’d get in the Humvee and be driving down the road and I would feel my heart pulsing up in my throat.” That was the start of it, he said, and then Emory happened, and then Crow happened, and then he was in a succession of explosions, and then a bullet was skimming across his thighs, and then Doster happened, and then he was waking up thinking, “Holy shit, I’m still here, it’s misery, it’s hell,” which became, “Are they going to kill me today?” which became, “I’ll take care of it myself,” which became, “Why do that? I’ll go out killing as many of them as I can, until they kill me.

“I didn’t give a fuck,” he said. “I wanted it to happen. Bottom line—I wanted it over as soon as possible, whether they did it or I did it.”

The amazing thing was that no one knew. Here was all this stuff going on, pounding heart, panicked breathing, sweating palms, electric eyes, and no one regarded him as anything but the great soldier he’d always been, the one who never complained, who hoisted bleeding soldiers onto his back, who’d suddenly begun insisting on being in the right front seat of the lead Humvee on every mission, not because he wanted to be dead but because that’s what selfless leaders would do.

He was the great Sergeant Schumann, who one day walked to the aid station and went through the door marked combat stress and asked for help from James Tczap and now was on his way home.

Now he was remembering what Tczap had told him: “With your stature, maybe you’ve opened the door for a lot of guys to come in.”

“That made me feel really good,” he said. And yet he had felt so awful the previous day when he told one of his team leaders to round up everyone in his squad.

“What’d we do now?”

“You didn’t do anything,” he said. “Just get them together.”

They came into his room, and he shut the door and told them he was leaving the following day. He said the hard part: that it was a mental health evacuation. He said to them, “I don’t even know what I’m going through. I know that I don’t feel right.”

“Well, how long?” one of his soldiers said, breaking the silence.

“I don’t know,” he said. “There’s a possibility I won’t be coming back.”

They had rallied around him then, shaking his hand, grabbing his arm, patting his back, and saying whatever nineteen- and twenty-year-olds could think of to say.

“Take care of yourself,” one of them said.

“Drink a beer for me,” another said.

He had never felt so guilt-ridden in his life.

Early this morning, they had driven away on a mission, leaving him behind, and after they’d disappeared, he had no idea what to do. He stood there alone for a while. Eventually he walked back to his room. He turned up his air conditioner to high. When he got cold enough to shiver, he put on warmer clothes and stayed under the vents. He started watching
Apoc-aljpse Now
on his computer and paused when Martin Sheen said, “When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle.” He backed it up and played it again. He packed his medication. He stacked some packages of beef jerky and mac-n-cheese and smoked oysters, which he wouldn’t be able to take with him, for the soldiers he was leaving behind and wrote a note that said, bnjoy.

Finally it was time to go to the helicopter, and he began walking down the hall. Word had spread through the entire company by now, and when one of the soldiers saw him, he came over. “Well, I’ll walk you as far as the shitters, because I have to go to the bathroom,” the soldier said, and as last words, those would have to do, because those were the last words he heard from any of the soldiers of the 2-16 as his deployment came to an end.

His stomach hurt as he made his way across the FOB. He felt himself becoming nauseated. At the landing area, other soldiers from other battalions were lined up, and when the helicopter landed, everyone was allowed to board except him. He didn’t understand.

“Next one’s yours,” he was told, and when it came in a few minutes later, he realized why he’d had to wait. It had a big red cross on the side. It was the helicopter for the injured and the dead.

That was him, Adam Schumann.

He was injured. He was dead. He was done.

“You okay?”

Laura Cummings asked this.

“Yeah. Just watching the storm,” Cummings said. He was home, too, now, sitting on his front porch since waking up in the dark to the sound of explosions. Just thunder, he’d realized, so he’d gone outside to see his first rainstorm in months. He’d watched the lightning flashes come closer. He’d felt the air turn moist. The rain, when it came down on the roof, and fell through the downspouts, and washed across his lawn, and flowed along his street, sounded musical to him, and he listened to it, wondering what time it was in Iraq. Was it two in the afternoon? Three in the afternoon? Had anything happened? Unlikely. Anything bad? Anything good?

“We’re going to have to get the umbrellas out for the girls,” Laura said now, and he wondered whether the umbrellas were still kept in the same place as when he had left.

At Radina’s, the coffee shop he liked to go to, one of the regulars clapped him on the back and motioned to a friend. “Come on over and meet Brent Cummings,” he said. “He’s just back from Iraq. He’s a hero.”

Before a Kansas State University football game, as he stood in the stadium parking lot, dressed in school colors, just like always, and wondering if he would ever again think of a football game as life and death, people had questions.

“How are things in Iraq?”

“It’s been difficult—but we’re doing good,” he said.

“Is the war worth it?”

“Yeah, I think it’s worth it,” he said.

“You can ask him,” he overheard a man saying to a woman, who then asked, “Is Bush a good man?”

Sometimes he would look at his daughters and think about the day that a little Iraqi girl waved at him and a man standing next to the girl saw this and slapped her hard across the face, and he grabbed the man and called him a coward and said if he ever did that again he would be arrested or killed. “It felt good to say it,” he had said that day, right afterward. “It felt good to snatch him off the street in front of people. It felt good to see the fear in his eyes. That felt good.”

He would sit on the porch and listen to the automatic lawn sprinklers that Laura had mentioned in an e-mail that she was having installed.

He would sit in the living room and listen to his daughters play the piano that Laura had mentioned she was thinking of buying.

Back at Radina’s, someone said, “We saw a few soldiers in the paper,” and he knew what they meant and wished they would talk about something else. And soon they did. The conversations were once again about football or vacations or the weather or, for the thousandth time, how good the coffee was, and he was grateful.