Price of Duty Page 12

  There is no glory in war.

  There is no honor in killing.

  No matter where they send you to fight, innocent people will die.

  Military recruiters can’t tell the truth because if they did, only the insane would enlist.

  Everyone who enters battle comes back wounded. But those wounds aren’t always to the flesh, and aren’t always visible.

  If they could do it all over again, a lot of the guys I served with wouldn’t.

  A week ago I came home to do more than the bare minimum, but I failed. Because I may be a hero, but I’m still afraid of bringing shame and embarrassment to my family.

  Because for all the things that are wrong with the military, we still need and depend on it to protect us.

  Because so many good people have died or been maimed, and so many families have suffered the loss of loved ones. Just so that we Americans can enjoy the freedoms we have.

  And finally, because I honestly believe that if there was a better, more humane way than war to protect our country, the United States Armed Forces would be the first to use it.

  In the dark beside me, I hear the ice clink in Dad’s glass as he takes a sip. “I’ve been dreading this moment, Jake,” he says. “You may think I don’t know what you’ve been going through, but I think I do.”

  That could mean a lot of things. I glance at him uncertainly. He’s hunched forward in his chair, cupping his drink with both hands.

  He sits back and sighs. “Son, if I could do it over again.” Then he shakes his head. “No, it wouldn’t be any different.”

  “What, Dad?”

  “Sometimes I think the only reason I entered the service was because of Uncle David.”

  I’m confused. Uncle David was the Vietnam draft dodger. The one who brought shame upon the Liddells. But what could that have to do with Dad entering the military? He’s not making a whole lot of sense.

  “I would have signed up anyway,” Dad continues, his shoulders stooped. “I never had the guts Uncle David had.”

  “Guts to be a draft dodger?” I ask skeptically. This is really starting to make no sense.

  “In the Liddell family? You better believe it. Going into the service was the easy way. David could have taken the route I took. He could have had a desk job far from the action.”

  But that’s not what Dad’s always said kept him from active duty. “I thought it was your knee.”

  He takes another sip. It has to be my imagination, but it feels like the air changes around us.

  “Knees are tricky, Jake. The Army docs gave me the benefit of the doubt. But . . .” Dad hesitates. If he’s going to say what I think he’s going to say, this can’t be easy. “The truth is, I could have seen active duty. . . if I’d wanted.”

  He knows this isn’t what he’s led me to believe. He always made it sound like he’d been ready to do battle, but the Army doctors said no. “Dad, you’re . . . you’re saying you didn’t want to be in the Army?”

  We may only be the tiniest speck of dirt and time in the universe, but this moment is HUGE for me . . . and for him. “I had no choice, Jake,” Dad says. “It was bad enough to have one turncoat among us. The Liddells have been a military family for almost as long as the General’s has. Could you imagine us having two deserters? We would have been the laughingstock of the military.”

  I’m still perplexed. “So you’re saying you think Uncle David was right to be a draft dodger?”

  Somewhere out in the dark, a dog starts to bark, and then a second joins in. Blue, who’s been sleeping on the terrace beside us, raises his head as if trying to decide whether it’s worth the energy to join in. His head goes back down. Guess it wasn’t.

  Dad takes another sip. “It was Vietnam. Not the Second World War, which was clearly a war of good versus evil. It wasn’t like the wars we’re fighting today, which, I guess you’d say are wars of sanity versus insanity. Vietnam was different. A difficult war to get behind. All those men dying in a tiny country eight thousand miles away. Meanwhile, our country was never in any danger of attack. There was no threat of terrorism. Nothing like 9/11 or any of these other terrible bombings and rampage shootings. In Vietnam, all we were fighting against was some vague idea called the domino theory. An unproven fear that if South Vietnam fell to the Communists, the rest of Southeast Asia would follow. And then, supposedly, the entire rest of the world.”

  Despite the long explanation, Dad still hasn’t answered my question, which is so big and portentous, that I feel like I have to repeat it. “So . . . you’re saying that Uncle David was right to dodge the draft?”

  Dad’s quiet for a bit. Then he says, “Well, let’s put it this way. I can’t say he was wrong. Not in that particular war. He refused to serve because he sincerely believed that war was immoral. In our family, in this country at that time, that took courage, Jake.”

  This is stunning. I’ve been brought up to believe that dodging service in any war is the worst sin imaginable. I always knew Dad wasn’t the most gung-ho soldier. But I figured that was because, with his bad knee, he was resigned to being a career desk jockey. It never occurred to me that he might have wanted it that way.

  In the dark, Dad turns to me. Without the moonlight, his face is just a shadow. “I want you to know something, Jake. As far as I am concerned, you don’t have to get on that plane tomorrow morning. You can stay here. Do your physical therapy here, and consider your service to the military complete. If that’s what you decide to do, I will stand behind you and support you in every way I can.”

  “If I don’t get on that plane, I’ll be AWOL.”

  Dad bends forward, takes another sip of bourbon, and shakes his head slowly. “No, son. The General won’t allow that to happen. You’re the one thing he’s always wanted, another hero to carry on the family tradition. Believe me, if you don’t want to go back, he’ll find a way to make sure you get your medal and an honorable discharge. He’ll do whatever he has to do to avoid that embarrassment. And he has connections to do it.”

  I’m speechless. In a week filled with the unexpected, this is the surprise that truly rocks my world. I really don’t have to go back. My father doesn’t want me to, and the General can’t stop me.

  But wait, isn’t this exactly the kind of nepotistic advantage I never wanted? I was so dead set on proving I could do it on my own.

  “You’ll be alive,” Dad says as if he knows what I’m thinking. “You’ve proven yourself, son. You’ve risked your life to save other men. You’ve been wounded in battle. You’ve done far more than you had to. But if you go back over there and something bad happens . . .”

  In the distance, tires screech as some road warrior jumps a green light. A dog starts to bark again. I sit back, stare at the night sky, feel my insides swirl. He’s left something unspoken. Six years ago we lost Mom. If anything happens to me, half his family will be gone. Dad’s not just telling me I don’t have to go back. He’s practically begging me not to.

  BRAD

  I was in the barracks, sitting on my bed with my laptop. It was the tail end of a two-day sandstorm. Even inside the barracks, sand got into everything. In our armpits and pubic hair. In our noses and mouths.

  I was playing Minecraft, the perfect escape. Morpiss had shown us the trick to playing in storms—cover the laptop with cling wrap. I just needed two more Eye of Enders and I’d be at the End.

  The barracks door banged open and Magnet stuck his head in. “It’s Sergeant Burrows!”

  In a flash I was on my feet, running out into the impossibly bright, hot, dusty sunlight.

  “Locked himself in the crapper!” Magnet yelled over his shoulder as I followed him.

  I heard the screaming long before I got there. It sounded like someone in horrible pain. Like Morpiss after the land mine. Like half the dozen other guys I’d heard scream in searing unbearable pain. A scream so agonizing that you knew that whatever had happened, the guy was never going to be the same.

  A small crowd of
soldiers had collected around the crapper, a twenty-foot Conex with a steel door. You’d need an acetylene torch or a cutoff tool to get in. The PFCs, corporals, even another sergeant, all parted when I arrived. Like I was a colonel or something. Of course, it was only because they knew I was the closest thing Brad had to a battle buddy.

  The screams continued. It sounded like Brad was being tortured. Which, in a way, he was. I pressed my cheek against the warm steel door. His cries were so harsh you could feel the metal vibrate.

  “Sergeant Burrows,” I said when he paused to take a breath.

  Another scream followed, but it was shorter.

  “Sarge,” I said at the next pause.

  “Morpiss!” Brad wailed and then started to sob.

  “Not your fault, Sarge.” I sensed it was too soon to ask him to let me in. I had to talk him down first.

  He roared with agony. A lion with his foot in a trap.

  “Sarge, we’ve been over this before,” I said patiently and calmly. “You followed protocol. Did what you were supposed to do.”

  “Those kids!” he cried.

  “They were attacking us, Sarge. They would have killed us if they could. It was us or them.”

  “Ahhhh!” he screamed again. He was in agony. Even if he’d done nothing wrong, men had been horribly maimed on his watch. That mother with the burned infant. The time in a dark basement when he’d found a half-dead, delirious torture victim whose ankles had been bored through with an electric drill. Brad was drowning in waking nightmares. Trying to be logical with him wouldn’t work because there was nothing logical about the way he was thinking. No human brain that’s marinated in a lethal mixture of guilt and trauma and half a dozen different medications can be expected to be logical.

  “You’ve got Amber, Sarge,” I reminded him, even though I wasn’t sure it would help. Erin Rose had told him she wanted a divorce. It was hard to imagine how his daughter would ever be a significant presence in his life.

  “I can’t. I can’t,” he gasped. “It’s . . . killing me.”

  I didn’t have to ask if he had a weapon. Of course he did. Any soldier who locks himself in the crapper and starts screaming like a madman knows what’s going to happen if he comes out alive.

  His career was over. Now it was a matter of life or death. “People love you, Sarge. They respect you. You’re a good man and a good soldier who volunteered to do things no one else wanted to do. I know what you’re feeling right now is horrible. But it won’t last. You know how it is. It comes and goes. It passes.”

  There was silence. I looked up at the concerned, aching faces of the soldiers around me. Brad had been a brave soldier. He’d seen action. He’d stood his ground. He’d protected his men.

  The silence from inside worried me. It meant he was thinking. And right now, whatever he was thinking couldn’t be good. “Sarge, you hear what I just said? It feels really bad now, but it’ll pass.”

  “But . . . it always comes back.”

  For a moment I was stymied. I knelt beside the crapper door, in the heat and dust, asking myself, How do you respond to that? How do you convince someone who’s been in terrible pain for months that it’s magically going to go away?

  I never got the chance to come up with an answer.

  When the gunshot came, a couple of guys jumped. I felt like the bullet had gone through me, too. Someone ran to get a cutting tool. I sat in the hot, dusty sunlight and sobbed.

  * * *

  Like a lot of good soldiers, Staff Sergeant Bradley Burrows had taken on jobs that no one else had wanted. And like a lot of soldiers, what he’d agreed to do had broken him. Just as it would have broken any normal human being.

  ONE YEAR LATER

  Wearing fatigues and body armor, carrying packs and small arms, a group of us are humping across an open field. Snap! A single shot and one of our guys goes down. The rest of us immediately hit the dirt.

  “Doc!” the wounded soldier shouts.

  Two men provide suppressive fire while another soldier and I crawl to the wounded man and assess his wound. It’s not seriously life-threatening, so we drag him to a protected spot and start to administer first aid.

  Tweeeeeeeet! A whistle blows. The “wounded” man sits up and brushes himself off. From across the field, a grizzled drill sergeant approaches. “All right, cadets, that’s it for field training. Get to class.”

  When I pull on my rucksack, a textbook falls out. Rucksack weight for these exercises is supposed to be forty-five pounds, but I’ve been sticking in additional load. It can’t hurt to get comfortable with an extra fifteen or twenty pounds.

  The drill sergeant reminds me of Sgt. Washington, my old JROTC instructor, only grayer and with deeper lines in his face. But with the same erect military bearing. Same by-the-book attitude. I’ve just picked up the textbook when he snags it out of my hand and reads the title: “The Inside Battle: Our Military Mental Health Crisis.”

  His wrinkled eyes narrow. “Mental health, huh? So, cadet, you gonna specialize in EBH?”

  “Drill Sergeant, yes I am.” Embedded Behavioral Health personnel are placed with the troops in the field. Their job is to identify and respond to emotional problems early and onsite instead of waiting in distant hospitals for soldiers to be brought in after they’ve crashed and burned. Or, in the case of Brad, soldiers who’ll never make it in at all.

  The drill sergeant is still holding my textbook. “In Desert Storm, we didn’t have any of this mental health stuff.”

  He not only looks like an old-timer, he sounds like one. So I answer with: “With all due respect for your many years of service, Sergeant, the rate of suicide among veterans of Desert Storm is unacceptably high. We have to do a better job of taking care of the soldiers who risk their lives to protect us. Honestly, it’s the very least we can do.”

  The drill sergeant glances at my name tag, then opens the textbook to the front page, where I’ve written my full name and barracks back at Fort Sam.

  “Jake Liddell,” he says. Some people around here look surprised when they find out who I am. But not him. “Silver Star, right?”

  “Affirmative, Sergeant.”

  He hands the book back. “Those Desert Storm veterans who’ve committed suicide? Some were my buddies. It’s a tragedy. A real tragedy.” He pats me on the shoulder. “You’re doing a good thing, Cadet Liddell. Now get to class.”

  * * *

  I speak to Aurora nearly every day, but only get to see her a couple of times a week. She’s moved here to San Antonio, where she’s sharing an apartment with another dental hygienist, and working at the Joint Base San Antonio–Randolph Dental Clinic. I have the General to thank for that. He leaned on some of his connections to get her the job. After I decided to transfer to Fort Sam Houston for Army medical training, Aurora and I had a long talk. She insisted that she and Doug were never anything more than “good friends.” She also wanted to know about the evening her friend Emily drove past the park and saw me with Brandi in a “compromised position.” That was why Aurora wasn’t answering my calls or texts the day before I left for Walter Reed. She said she’d needed time to think.

  She accepted my explanation and knows that Brandi and I are still in touch. It’s not something I tell many people, but I support Brandi’s campaign for more transparency regarding JROTC’s relationship to the armed forces. I also support her argument that a disproportionate number of minorities and financially disadvantaged people are forced to enlist for lack of better opportunities.

  Not long ago, a fellow cadet here at Fort Sam told me that what first got him interested in the military was playing Call of Duty. I knew how he felt. I’ve played it too. It’s fun and exciting. But don’t kid yourself. Don’t think for an instant that a video game is anything like real war. No game results in a dick-shrinking terror so bad that you want to cry. So bad that you wished to God you were anywhere but there. So bad that you can’t believe this is something you voluntarily signed up for.

  Pla
ying video games doesn’t result in pain so unbelievably severe that you want to bite your tongue in half just to feel some relief.

  There’s no heavy metal soundtrack when you’re in a real firefight. The terror is real. The pain is real. Death is real.

  Our country came into being as the result of a war. And even though former President Ronald Regan once said that people free to choose will always choose peace, America has managed to be involved in some war somewhere for all but 17 of the past 240 years. I don’t know why it has to be that way, but I don’t have a suggestion for changing it either.

  As long as America continues in its Forever War, it will need soldiers. They will always be young, but they need not always have stars in their eyes and misplaced dreams of glory in their hearts. Those who choose to serve should be given an honest assessment of what lies ahead.

  Rarely does anyone become a hero without paying a terrible price.

  POSTSCRIPT

  “I am tired and sick of war . . . It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”

  —WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN (1820–1891, UNION GENERAL)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  USED BY PERMISSION OF THE TIMES HERALD-RECORD.

  TODD STRASSER (RIGHT) ON ASSIGNMENT AS A JOURNALIST, REPORTING ON LIFE AS A WEST POINT CADET DURING THE WAR IN VIETNAM, 1975.

  TODD STRASSER has written many critically acclaimed novels for adults, teenagers, and children, including the award-winning Can’t Get There from Here, Give a Boy a Gun, Boot Camp, If I Grow Up, Famous, and How I Created My Perfect Prom Date, which became the Fox feature film Drive Me Crazy. Todd lives in a suburb of New York and speaks frequently at schools. Visit him at toddstrasser.com.