a rewritten memory and saving of face

My perception of the war is secondhand. I glimpse snippets, and what lies between the snippets I fill in with my own imagination. Like a movie.

THERE ARE LOTS of words in our army culture that we whisper or don’t say at all. Suicide is next to impossible for us to say without flinching. A less impactful but still cringe-worthy term is accidental discharge, which means the accidental firing of a weapon. Usually when cleaning the weapon or loading or unloading it. Accidental discharges often result in punishment and always complete embarrassment. And to be the wife of the perpetrator of the accidental discharge adds an extra depth beyond regular humiliation. It means that your husband isn’t adept at how to handle his weapon. And anyone who has ever seen Full Metal Jacket knows the fundamental intimacy between an infantryman and his weapon.

Ironically, our very first accidental discharge is one of our battalion’s most senior leaders, the husband and chummy counterpart to witchy Liesel Leonard, whom I am still harboring resentment at for being a no-show at the wrenching chapel KIA briefing. As he nears the end of his career, this is his first deployment. Somehow that’s possible in our world. Inconceivable, but possible.

The second accidental discharge isn’t quite so straightforward. When the wife is beloved and valued, nothing negative or humiliating that falls on her soldier’s lap is simple.

One of our platoon sergeants, Nate Shaw, is a kinetic ball of energy. His vibe screamed PTSD to me before the deployment, but Shaw is revered by his men. Jack and I are keen on the art of maximizing our team members’ strengths and minimizing weaknesses. Clearly Jack is more astute at this talent than me, but I still try. Nate’s wife, Anna, is humble, unflappable, and hardworking, never a wince of hesitation. She is Canadian, which kind of says everything you need to gain a good picture of her and what a solid person she is. Anna is her husband’s greatest asset, which was not an atypical occurrence with army couples. It’s shocking how often the wife is the stronger of the two. Scary, really.

A week after the two IED casualties, Sergent First Class Shaw shoots himself through the calf and returns to Fort Drum to recover. Humiliated and disgraced. Within a week, he winds up in the psych ward, claiming to be traumatized and haunted by seeing Colonel Hawkins “kill a haji with his bare hands.” Ben retells Nate’s horrific story to me, minus the gory details that I later fill in with my own imagination, and I am left feeling both mortified and also a little in awe. This is the piece of the puzzle that I still can’t quite comprehend. Is reality as graphic and bloody and barbaric and intimate as I imagine it? Or is what happens over there more removed and calculated? I don’t know, and I’ve rarely asked. I don’t want a true picture, but I do. The imagined brutality is somehow the sexier scenario, and I realize how twisted that sounds. I almost need the brutality to justify my own grisly emotions and desperate sacrifice.

Beyond that, it occurs to me how little I really know of Jack’s daily life over there. Does he hang out of low-flying helicopters doing badass tricks in the middle of the night, like in movies? Or does he spend most of his days sweating in his heavy gear through long, tedious operational meetings? I suppose I need to ask this at some point, but I don’t know which of those two possibilities I would like for an answer. Somehow I think it’s a little bit of both, with not much in between.

The day after Thanksgiving, before Nate shot himself through his calf and ended up in a psych ward, Jack emailed me a few photographs that I in turn disseminated to the wives. The pictures seemed cool, but innocuous enough. One photo was Jack and a few of his men, Nate included, all geared up with weapons in hand. The caption Jack sent was, “On an objective.”

I thought it might rouse a bit of Thanksgiving pride in our families, so I forwarded the pictures to our troop-level leaders and asked them to blast them out to the families. Done and forgotten.

Now, just a couple weeks later, I listen to Ben retell Nate’s interpretation.

“Nate is disgusted that you forwarded those pictures. I really wish you would have asked me before you blasted those out. So now he can’t touch his daughters because he thinks he sees blood on his hands. He was fucked up before he ever went back. Your husband knew it. We all knew it.”

Jack reveals nothing of Nate’s too-vivid story, and I don’t bring it up. But it keeps me awake at night and I wonder. Who am I married to? Do I love this possibility or loathe it? Or do I hover somewhere between the two extremes?