Dear Ruth, he’d tried to write, early on in the war, the birds here are noisy and the jungle is a place you would love. But then, even as he wrote it, it was gone. That quickly. From flame to nothing. What could he say to Ruth? And so he is in a room of fire and all night he watches red walls rise up and fall back and he thinks of the creators of his own world, how unlike the Americans they were. The A’atsika creators punished humans who weren’t peaceful. They sent them traveling, like Adam out of paradise, not for having knowledge but for having a lack of peace. They were sent from one world to another for being like the human he had become and he wondered what his next world would be.
In the next room Dwight sits up in bed, disturbed by the sounds next door. He thinks he needs to keep a watch on Thomas. He lights a cigarette. He has heard Thomas showering, then opening and closing drawers. Hell, the first thing a man learns is never to unpack, Dwight thinks as he listens to Thomas’s every move through the paper-thin wall, not knowing that in the next room the walls are red and burning.
Thomas stands up straight and puts on his dress uniform. He carries the medals in his pocket. He opens the door. Outside is rain upon rain. He goes back in and puts the plastic cover over his dress hat before he leaves. He puts on his GI issue raincoat and ties the belt. He looks perfect. His boots are shined but he doesn’t care to cover them, to keep them from being wet. He has already called the cab.
Dwight has heard all this, the door opening, closing. He goes out. “What are you doing? Hey, where are you going all spiffed up like that? Hell, you’re even spit-shined.”
Dwight follows a ways, asking Thomas questions, but Thomas ignores him. It is wet, even if it isn’t cold. Thomas doesn’t say anything. In fact, he doesn’t acknowledge Dwight, not even his presence, let alone the questions.
“We’re just different. It doesn’t mean anything. We’re amigos, you know.”
He gets in the cab. “Department of the Army,” Thomas tells the driver. The man looks at him, then opens a map. Then a phone book. “Sir, there isn’t one. It’s just a historical building. Is that what you want?” He looks Thomas up and down. “You might mean the Pentagon.”
“I saw it on the map.”
Dwight watches. He plans.
“That’s not the department anymore. It’s just the old building. The DOA. Ha, ha! I had one of those in here last night. Dead On Arrival.”
Thomas doesn’t smile. “Or maybe the White House.”
“Which one?” The man is becoming frustrated, losing time, which is money.
“Okay, the Pentagon.”
“Which section?”
“Hell, I don’t know. The Department of War.”
The cabdriver eyes the man in the backseat, dressed in his uniform, wondering why he is lost. “Where are you from?” He sees the other man still standing in the rain as he drives away.
“It’s a place called Dark River. No one ever knows where it is. It’s out West.”
When they pull up and he gets out of the taxi, he gives the cabdriver a large tip.
There are doors and doors and an underground tunnel and somehow Thomas wanders through it all. Security. He thinks of how good he looks today, in his uniform, newly cut short hair, good proud looks. He looks right. He feels the way he did when he first joined, getting his picture taken with the flag. But going into the building at first makes him feel smaller than he felt while he was in the cab, riding without being able to tell the man where he was going. He had planned in his mind what it looked like and not that it was like a prison of deep concrete, then wood, stone, a place of vast scale, not like the rooms he inhabited but one designed to make the army look like it was all clean lines, perfect in scale despite being full with the spirits of the dead. In here is a museum of wars. Files of war. He sees it in his mind like a room one enters underground, then up steps, elevated, but it is still overdone. He should have known there are no buildings here that are not imposing and official.
“Can I help you, Sergeant?” the voice is almost an echo. “You don’t look well.” He can barely see the man behind the desk.
He himself thinks he looks official in his dress uniform, but for a while he is speechless, vulnerable. Of course, he is being watched. There are small cameras. He looks for them as a criminal would, before he enters through security without so much as being questioned, showing his ID. Then he goes into a room where a major sits behind a desk and he tosses his medals on the desk and says, “I want to return these. I want it noted that I am giving them back.”
The major looks up, expecting to recognize anyone in the vicinity, but finds a stranger in their building. “You want to return them? Whose are they?”
“Mine.” He drops them, bends down to pick them up, not at all with the dignity he wanted. He hears Dimitri’s voice in his head. No one gives a damn who killed what, who didn’t. We all did it.
“How did you get in here? This is a secured area.”
He looks suspicious and he knows it. “They saluted me through.” He laughs. “It must have been the uniform.” How far a few silver things, a few bars, a pair of spit-shined shoes can carry a man. Oh, he forgot: “Sir.”
“You have to go through two checkpoints.”
“Yes. I did that.”
“Just a moment, sir. I will direct you to the person in charge of this.” The major backs out of the room, careful of Thomas.
Men appear as if from the air and they push him down and keep him down and he smells the floor wax and sees what could have been his life in so many ways, if he hadn’t joined up and had remained home with Ruth and learned, himself, the old songs and ways they had started to teach him when he was young. Or if he’d gone along with the others and killed the children and women and the old man who was left behind and gone on to another village and done it again and lived or died with his troops, burning things behind him, keeping a souvenir here and there. And he could have gone home with them, found a job or two, drank a beer together with his buddies, watched a ball game, run for tribal council, the state legislature, or some other branch of a government just like this one where he is held down.
When his records come up on their computer, a voice from out of the sky like god’s voice, says, “Hell, why do you want to turn them in?”
“I didn’t earn them.”
“Weren’t you wounded? It says you were wounded.”
They already have his information. He thinks about the scar across his middle, the bleeding leg he’d thought was an artery and tried to hold together, the impact to his neck and arm which he didn’t even know about because of the blood on his leg. It made him sweat now to think of it. He kept it out of his mind, in one of the corners in a bundle he made called shrapnel and suddenly he weighed so much. “Yes sir, I was wounded.”
He is moving closer to words, to truth. “But I wasn’t killed or missing. I killed the wrong people. I stayed.” Tears began in eyes that had forgotten to dry. “I killed Americans. It was supposed to be a raid. It went wrong. And we were in the wrong place. I tried to tell them. I had the map in my hand. And we were supposed to kill the children and I said no.”
Time passed even if it didn’t seem to. He was sitting now. By then the doctor was there. “They say that a lot, you survivors. Did you know that? But your records say you already told the doctors. They told you that what you did was right by military law. The simple rules of engagement. But it was common then, you know. It also says you had a head injury.”
“But I did it. I knew what I was doing. They were going to kill innocent people. I left my own tags there so everyone would think I was dead, too. I ran away. I didn’t go home. I couldn’t. It was a choice, don’t you see?”
The two looked at each other. One of them said, “Well, maybe you weren’t wrong. The war is over, son. We have to let the past rest. Also, in my book you did the right thing. Get up. Walk out that door. Walk down those steps. Cross the street. Go home. The war is over. You don’t have to go on trial. You don’t have to give back your medals.”
“I don’t want them. The past doesn’t rest. They were smoking dope, they were killing the people’s pigs, they were planting land mines all around the place, killing innocent people. They shot at anything. The…cries, they were going to kill children. Rape and kill them. I looked at their faces. I looked at the children. I turned and shot them. There wasn’t even a look of surprise on their faces. They weren’t even that clear. I hated them. I hate myself.”
“You only won this war if you stayed alive. You should have left well enough alone. You’re more a hero in my book. Sir, is there anyone we can call to come get you?”
“No. But I’m trying to tell you I don’t want the medals. They hurt my hands to touch them. They are hot. Like fire.”
“You are free to go, Sergeant Just.” He salutes.
He didn’t know what he expected, but this encounter was as meaningless as the men who left their medals at The Wall to make a statement. Still, he left the medals, all of them, and walked away, merely walked away. Outside, looking at the Potomoc, he wondered what Indian word the river name came from, where the tribe lived.