House on Fire

3

“I thought he was clean.”

“So did I.”

“The kids — never mind. I’m going to leave Boston now. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

“Thank you, Nick,” Patty said. “The kids really need to see you. Stay at our place. The guest room’s free.”

An hour later I was in my Land Rover Defender 90, driving along the Southeast Expressway toward Cape Cod and Sean’s house.

I was shocked yet not shocked to hear that Sean had died. I thought he’d successfully gotten free of an insidious opioid addiction. But he’d died from an overdose. It was easy to relapse.

His death wasn’t just heartbreaking, it was infuriating.

I liked him a lot. Most people did. He was a natural extrovert, very friendly, very funny, very smart. I used to imagine him running for office, becoming a state rep or a congressman or something. He had the right personality for it.

Sean was stocky, and strong, and short. Like a lot of the guys in the Special Forces. He had a baby face, and it took forever for his beard to become visible. When it came in, it was a scraggly, patchy mess.

He and I joined the army at the same time, in what’s called the 18 X-ray program, which was then sort of a new thing. It was an accelerated path into the elite Special Forces. You used to have to join the army and make the grade of E-4 before you could even apply to join it. Instead, in the 18X program, if you’d done some college, you could apply to try out for the Green Berets. The army was recruiting scholar-athletes — the ideal being the PhD who could win a bar fight, or so the joke went. Smart kids who also played football or ran track. That didn’t quite describe me, since I was a pretty mediocre student. But I was a dropout from Yale, which must have intrigued the recruitment office. I was nineteen.

You went through basic training at Fort Benning plus advanced individual training in one seventeen-week course. Then to jump school for a few weeks — five static-line jumps — and then you’re shipped to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where you go through the unique torture that is Special Forces training.

Those of you who are left in the program, that is. More than sixty percent of the candidates drop out along the way. You went on long rucksack marches. You went slogging through the swamp. You were constantly wet and cold and exhausted and desperate for sleep. The process weeded out the weak of body and spirit. Sean endured the whole drill without complaining. He always seemed happy despite it all. He’d make jokes to jolly everyone else up.

I’d been so surprised, at first, that someone that strong could succumb to pain pills.

After we qualified for the Special Forces, Sean and I were assigned to the same A-team. I was the junior weapons sergeant for some reason — I guess I demonstrated competency in weapons handling, though I was and am no gun nut. (Later I went through the training and became the intel sergeant, which seemed a more natural fit.)

Sean was the junior engineer, which meant he worked with demolitions. He was our breacher: he blew up doors and walls so we could go in.

All those years of working closely with explosives must have done damage to his brain. At least, that’s the theory. It’s called breacher syndrome. Repeated exposure to low-level blasts can cause traumatic brain injury. He came back with terrible headaches, shooting pain in his forehead. He also started getting regular migraines. A doctor at the VA hospital prescribed Oxydone, a nasal inhaler that dispenses a powerful opiate quickly, and just like that, Sean was hooked.

I should have checked in with Patty weeks ago. I guess I was figuring that if he was back on drugs, she’d let me know. I obviously figured wrong. I was angry at myself for not staying more closely in touch.

He saved my life once; I should have been able to save his.