plan is for me to stay around and try to do some good.
“So all I want to say, and then I’ll pass it along …
I just want to say it’s a hell of a lot easier to hold on to your seat in this room than it is to give it up and think
you can get it back again. If we do get back to the rooms,
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the wear and tear on our bodies and souls is considerable.
And then there are the ones who don’t make it. And I was
almost one of them. So take my advice. There’s nothing
for you out there.”
A pause. No one filled it. No one spoke while a person
was sharing, and everybody waited to be sure they were
really done. Until the sharer passed the torch, so to speak.
Zoe opened her mouth again. “I want to hear from…”
She pointed directly at my brother. I could see the
alarm on his face.
“I forget your name, son.”
“Roy,” he said.
“I want to hear from Roy.”
A long silence. Like, really uncomfortably long. But no
one filled it. It was Roy’s turn to share and that was that.
He could say he chose to pass, or he could start talking.
But the meeting was not going to go on until he decided.
“My name is Roy,” he said.
My body and brain tingled, waiting to see if he would
say it.
“And I’m … well, I have no idea what I am. No, I do.
That’s not really true. I think I know I’m an addict, but
I just don’t want to say it out loud, because then it will
be the truth about me and I can never unsay it. And it’ll
never stop being true. But I guess I pretty much just said
it anyway, didn’t I?”
He paused. Sighed.
“I just got back from overseas.” His eyes came up to
where Joe was sitting at the far corner of the table. “Like
that guy, only my story just about couldn’t be more differ-
ent from his. No disrespect to him. Just the opposite. He’s
the one who deserves the respect. My story is a disaster.
There is nothing about me to respect.”
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He paused again. Long enough that I wondered if
he’d ever restart himself. Long enough that I found it
hard not to shift in my seat. Everybody else seemed to
manage to hold still and wait. Then again, they weren’t
his kid brother.
“I can’t believe I’m about to do this,” Roy said. “I
really don’t want to do this.”
But then he did.
“I didn’t enlist like this other guy,” he said. “You
could’ve held a gun to my head and I wouldn’t have gone
over there. If I hadn’t been drafted, I mean. And I didn’t
get hooked on the drugs the army gave us, either. I hated
speed. I wouldn’t even take it. I didn’t tell anybody I wasn’t taking it. I’d just hide it in my cheek and spit it out later.
It made me all jangly and nervous, like the top of my head
was about to come off. Like I couldn’t make my stomach
hold still. Hell, I felt that way anyway over there, all the time. I didn’t need something to make it worse.
“It was all street drugs for me. Except the word ‘street’
is an exaggeration. Most of the places they had us stationed didn’t even have streets. But you could always get scag,
and it was strong and it was cheap. And it was heaven.
You could be right in the middle of hell and smoke that
stuff and feel like everything was just fine. And I was right in the middle of hell, so that was handy.”
He stalled again. Everybody waited.
My stomach knots were twisting into stomach double
knots.
“I hate to say all this in front of my brother. I think
he sort of looks up to me. And believe me, he never will
again. Not after he hears about this mess. But I guess
sooner or later I was going to owe it to him to tell him
how it all went down.
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“Okay. Here goes. Man, I hate this.
“I was smoking all the time. Not just to wind down
at night like most of the guys. All the time. Even when I
knew there might be enemy fire. I just couldn’t face it any
other way. I knew I was a sitting duck, loaded like that.
Sometimes I could barely raise my arms, so I wouldn’t
have been any too quick to fire back in my own defense.
I guess I just got to the point where I didn’t even care
anymore. Like I couldn’t even care. I just didn’t have it in me to care. I was scared out of my skin, and I just wanted
to go home.
“What I finally ended up doing, I’d almost done
it a dozen times before. Just so I could go home. I just
wanted a quick ticket out of there. But I didn’t do it. I
mean, until the day I did. Because of the guys. The other
guys. I figured I owed it to them to stay. Anything less
just seemed so selfish.”
I got that all-over tingle again. Waiting to hear what
“it” was.
“But then I got this letter from my kid brother, saying
he loved me and wanted me to come home safe. He’d
never talked to me like that before. I guess war pulls all
kinds of stuff out of you that you didn’t even know was
in there. Even if you’re not actually over there fighting
it. It just takes a toll on everybody.”
Something came into my head. Something my brother
had said to me the first day he was home. After he told
me he’d gotten the last letter I sent him. The one he was
telling everybody about now.
Why do you think it all came down the way it did?
That’s what he’d said to me. And then he’d gone on to
avoid telling me how it all came down. I almost thought I
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about it with Mrs. Dinsmore. But I had not been able to
bring myself to ask the details of how it all came down.
I guess I figured I had no right to ask. It was his life. If and when he wanted me to know, he would tell me.
Now he was about to tell me. Now he was about to
tell everybody in the meeting.
I thought, Oh, holy hell, it was all my fault. Whatever
he’s about to say, it was all my fault.
“So, we got pinned down and ambushed, and I was
loaded. Really loaded. I was flying. We were taking fire from what felt like every direction, and I could just as
easily have passed out as fired back. And then somehow
my unit got on top of the thing, and whoever was shoot-
ing at us stopped shooting and retreated, and I was alive,
and, like … entirely unhit. And I still can’t figure that
out. I mean, is it true what they say about God looking
after fools and babies? Or was I keeping my head down
without even knowing it because I was so loaded? I hon-
estly have no idea.
“The details are just really fuzzy, and not because
a little time’s passed. It was fuzzy while it was happen-
ing. I just remember I was sitting there on the ground.
Afterward. And my rifle, my M16, was on the ground
beside my right leg.
For some reason that part was clear.
That part is, like, tattooed into my brain. I had my right
hand on the rifle. And there was a dead guy on either
side of me. Both of them were guys I knew. Not like my
best friends or anything, but I knew them. I knew they’d
been scared, like me, except I think they both handled
it better. But maybe I only think that because I’d been
on the inside of myself and on the outside of them. But
I knew they’d wanted to get home, just like me. And
they had parents, and brothers who wanted them to get
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home. Well, the one guy, I think he only had a sister, but
my point is the same. I thought about how their families
would get a letter or a call or somebody would come to
their house, and then I thought about my own brother,
and then what I wanted to do didn’t seem so selfish any-
more. I could tell myself I was doing it for him. That
might have been a story I told myself, though. I mean, it
was true and it wasn’t true. I was just at a breaking point.
Even so loaded I could hardly move my arms and legs, I
just knew I couldn’t take it anymore.”
He pressed his eyes against the heels of his hands.
Rubbed them hard.
I thought I was going to explode waiting to hear.
Even though most of me already knew.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said, dropping his
hands to the table again. “This is so stupid. I can’t believe I’m about to tell a bunch of people that I did something
this stupid. But I guess this is the place for it, right? Because it was definitely the drugs that made what I did so extra
stupid. My life would be so different right now if I hadn’t
been so loaded in that moment. But I was, and time is
never backing up again, and I’m never getting my foot
back, and I just have to live with that.
“Here’s the part where the scag messed me up. Here’s
what I thought I was about to do. I thought I could put a
bullet hole through my foot. You know. Just a hole. And
in time it would heal. Maybe I’d have to have surgery
to sew all those muscles and tendons back together. And
physical therapy to walk normally. But I figured it would
be enough to get me home. And I’m not saying I thought
very clearly about all those details right then, but hope-
fully you know what I mean. I just figured I could hurt
myself bad enough to get home but not enough to totally
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change my life forever. But it was a really stupid, really
loaded set of thoughts. Because here’s what I forgot to
consider. It was a point-blank shot. I’d seen bullet holes
made by M16s. More than I could count. If I hadn’t seen
so many of them, I might not’ve been so desperate to get
out of there. But I wasn’t considering that those bullet
holes were shots fired from a long distance. They were
not point-blank shots. This was a point-blank shot. I was
too loaded to understand that it was about to shred my
foot so badly that some amputation would be required.
“And there’s another thing I messed up on. I didn’t
take into account that it would be pretty obvious what
I’d done. Somehow I thought I’d be scooped up with
the other wounded, and that would be that. We’d all
be treated as having been injured in the firefight. But I
guess the army’s not that stupid. And also it’s possible I
might not’ve been the first guy to go to such lengths to
get out of there.”
I sat, listening to an invisible echo of his words around
the room. I looked at the faces to see if they were judg-
ing my brother. They weren’t. Not as far as I could tell.
They were listening. Just listening.
My brain filled with the image of myself in Connor’s
bedroom, holding that gun and box of bullets in my
hands. I remembered that feeling—the one where you’d
thought you knew, but now that you really knew, it was
just a whole different game of cards.
But my brother was still sharing.
“So that’s my message about drugs if there’s anybody
in this room who needs one. Probably mostly just me,
right? I mean, they really make you that stupid.
“But, you know what? It’s a weird thing to say, but
I think if I had it to do over again, I’d still do it. Bad
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discharge and all. Permanent maiming and all. Because I
got home. I might not’ve gotten home if I hadn’t. I think
about it sometimes, and I feel bad for the other guys. The
ones I left behind over there. I feel like I let them down.
And it’s true, I did. But I made this huge sacrifice to get
out of there. If they decided it was worth half their foot,
they could get out, too. Sometimes I think that. Other
times I think I’m the biggest jerk in the world, and I’m
not sure which is true. Both, maybe. Maybe both parts
of the thing are true. But it’s not like I left them under-
manned over there. They’ll just draft somebody else to
take my place…”
He trailed off, and his face looked shocked. Like I was
watching the blood drain out of it.
“Oh hell,” he said. “I never thought of that. That’s
another thing I get to feel terrible about. I’m not trying to justify myself to you. You can think whatever you need
to think about me. Hell, there’s nothing you can call me
just going to say this, and it’s not an excuse. It’s just the damn truth. What did they think would happen? Take a
bunch of guys straight out of high school and send them
into that hell. Take away everything that was ever fam-
iliar to them and tell them to kill and die, to watch their
friends dying in horrible ways all around them. We were
kids. We thought we were men until we got there, and
then once we were there, it was so clear that we were just
kids. I know there are plenty of guys who handled it way
better than me. But how can you put kids in a situation
like that and not end up with a total mess in at least a lot of their cases? It just doesn’t make any sense to think so.”
He pressed his eyes with the heels of his hands again.
I thought he might be crying and trying to hide it. But
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when he dropped his hands, his eyes were dry. I wondered
if he’d cried over there. If the war had used up every tear
he’d ever had in him. Or if that was the place where he’d
learned not to cry, no matter how bad things got.
“The reason I haven’t been raising my hand as a new-
comer is this,” he said, seeming more settled in his brain.
As if he’d come home to the US in his head and could
speak more calmly. “Here’s the thing about that. I’m still
on a lot of pain meds for the injury. I’m taking them as
prescribed now, because I really don’t have any choice.
And I know from hearing
you all share that you can still
call yourself clean if you’re taking necessary meds the
way the doctor prescribed them. But I don’t want to do
it like that. When I’m really clean, I’ll come in here and
say so, and we can start counting my time from then.”
He stalled again. Looked around the room. He seemed
to have just wakened up somehow. He seemed vaguely
surprised by everything he saw.
“Of course I’m totally humiliated because I told you
all that,” he said. “And I’m done talking now. I’ll just sit here and let somebody else share and wonder why I said
all that. I guess I got tired of knowing it would come out
sooner or later. I guess I got to the point where maybe it
was easier just to get it over with. Speaking of which, I
call on Joe. The guy who served so much more honor-
ably than I did. Who’s probably over there thinking I’m
like something disgusting to scrape off the bottom of his
shoe. Because if he’s thinking that, I want to go ahead and
hear it now. I’m not good with waiting for terrible things
to catch up with me. I’d rather just get them over with.”
He paused, but nobody spoke.
“I’m done,” he said.
Everybody in the room said, “Thanks, Roy.”
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Catherine Ryan Hyde
Including Zoe Dinsmore. Who I’d temporarily for-
gotten was there.
I looked at her and she looked at me. Her eyes held
no judgment. Neither did they seem to want to console
me. There was something very matter of fact in her gaze.
As if she were telling me, “Yes, this is the world, Lucas.
I’ve been dealing with it since before you were born.”
Joe said, “My name is Joe and I’m an addict.”
Everyone said, “Hi, Joe.”
He looked right at my brother, who refused to look
back.
“Thanks for your share, Roy. In case you don’t know
it yet, you’re not the only person in this room who’s done
something stupid behind drugs, and you’re not the only
person whose fear got the best of them. So far as I know,
there’s not a person in this room who cares what you did
when you were out there using. We all mostly care what
you’re going to do now.”
Then he went on sharing about his own situation,
and the meeting just moved along. The focus never fell
on my brother Roy again.
It was as if the drama he’d just shared was no better
and no worse than anybody else’s drama. Or maybe there