Rock Paper Tiger

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE WAY THE military determines if you have post-traumatic stress disorder is, they look at how many traumatic and stressful things you personally experienced. Things like being in combat, seeing your buddies get blown up, things like that. So, I wasn’t in combat, and even though I was a convoy medic for a while and that was pretty fucking stressful, I never saw my buddies get blown up, only some already blown-up hajjis and the soldier nobody knew who blew his brains out. As for the gunfire and mortars and RPGs going off all the time, almost everybody in the sandbox had to deal with that, so that wasn’t enough. You try to make a claim based on that, they say either you’re faking it, or you had some pre-existing mental health problem, which, if true, might lead you to ask, then why the fuck did you send me off to war in the first place?

Trust me, they don’t have a good answer to that.

Of course, I did get blown up myself. Here’s why that didn’t count:

I was on my way to the DFAC for chow. Middle of the day. And what happened was, some hajjis decided to launch a couple mortar rounds, just to show they could, I guess, because they almost always did that at night. And one of them landed close by me, and I got hit pretty good by shrapnel and the concussion from the explosion. But I don’t actually remember that part.

What I remember is leaving my hooch and being kind of hungry and hoping there were still some tacos left, because Pulagang had already eaten, and she’d told me the tacos were pretty good. And then I remember lying on my back, staring up at the yellow sky. Everything was really quiet, I guess because I was deaf from the shock or the explosion for a little while. It was actually kind of peaceful. I just lay there, blinking at the sun, watching clods of dirt rush toward me and land in little puffs of dust.

Next thing I remember, I was lying in the aid station. Blanchard was working on me, and in spite of his being a dickhead, he was actually a pretty good medic, and he got me packaged up and ready to go in record time, all wrapped up in tubes and gauze and air-filled plastic like I was some kind of extra-fragile FedEx. I was so fucked up, I can’t even describe what I was feeling as pain; but I got some morphine, and I could nod and respond and grab his hand, and holding somebody’s hand never felt so good or important, like it was going to save my life.

After I was more or less stabilized but before the copter got there, Blanchard let Trey come in to see me.

“Oh, Ellie. Oh, Jesus.”

He was crying. Tears streaming down his face. He covered my hand with his, gently, like he was afraid he might break it. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay. I’ll be there as soon as I can. I promise. I swear.”

I didn’t see Trey at the hospital at Camp Screaming Eagle Whatever, and he didn’t come to Landstuhl, which is where I went next. He couldn’t request emergency leave under the circumstances-technically, we weren’t supposed to be fucking.

But not too long after I got to Walter Reed, when it still wasn’t clear whether I’d keep my leg or lose it, I was lying in bed in a haze of morphine, watching some dumb-ass reality show about celebrities eating bugs, and I looked up, and there was a man standing in the doorway. He was tall, broad through the shoulders, wearing an Army dress uniform, and juggling this oversized bouquet of yellow roses, a teddy bear, and something else, I couldn’t see what.

“Trey?”

“Hey, Ellie.”

He stood there awkwardly. I couldn’t do anything much, as I still pretty much felt like I’d been hit by a truck. I think I smiled a little.

Trey put the roses on the nightstand by my bed, where I could smell the sap from their fresh-cut stems. He held on to the teddy bear for a moment, chewed on his lip, and finally placed it on the pillow next to my head. Then I could see the other thing. He’d somehow gotten my red Beanie squid, the one I’d taken over there with me. I almost cried when I saw it. Maybe I did cry. He put it in the teddy bear’s lap.

“Thanks,” I said.

“How’re you doing?”

“Okay.”

“I miss you,” he said.

“Me too. I mean, I miss you too.”

Trey bowed his head. Like he was ashamed about something.

“Ellie,” he said abruptly, “I want to take care of you. Let’s-”

On the TV, some supermodel shrieked about having snakes crawling on her.

Trey found the remote and turned it off. Then he knelt down at the side of the bed.

“Do you want to get married?” he asked. It was weird the way he asked it, like it was something that had just occurred to him.

He stared at his hands. They were clasped together, resting on the edge of the bed.

“I know I’m a sinner. And I don’t think I deserve you. But… I want to get better. I want to be a better man.”

I can’t really say that I thought about it. I was on so much morphine that thinking about much of anything was beyond me.

But what I felt, for just that moment, was that I was finally safe.

“Sure, Trey,” I whispered. “I’d like that.”

ANYWAY, BACK TO my PTSD claim. Like I said, they base it on the fucked-up shit you personally experience. And I wasn’t in combat, I didn’t see my buddies get blown up, and I couldn’t even remember much about my own injury.

What about what happened in the Admin Core, you might ask?

Well, here’s the thing. In order for it to count, you have to tell them about it.