That’s the way Clark will remember it. Tausolo will remember it differently, that Clark snaps at him, “Look at me when I’m talking to you,” and he decides right then and there that there’s no point in trying to persuade Clark that he hadn’t hit Theresa, that he’d cussed her out because he discovered some cigarettes and didn’t want her breast-feeding the baby with nicotine in her, that she’d said she was going to take the baby and go home to Samoa if he kept yelling, that she was terrified he was about to become violent because of how violent he had been before. Instead of saying any of that, though, he holds still while he is handcuffed. This is the way things go. He knows it, as surely as anything. Life involves following orders. If he is told to collect thirty-nine signatures, he will collect thirty-nine signatures. If someone says, “Do you want a quilt?” he will want a quilt. If someone says, “Put some jet engines on your legs,” he will put some jet engines on his legs. If someone says to get in the Humvee, he will get in the Humvee. If someone says, “Look at me when I’m talking to you,” he will look at him, and then he will get in the police car and say nothing more.

  So he is surprised when Brad Clark—who will later remember thinking, “I wanted to give the guy one more opportunity. This guy’s not a jerk. This guy, it appears to me there’s a problem. The guy needed frickin’ help”—breaks the silence with a question.

  “Hey, man, you’ve got some issues here, don’t you?” he asks.

  Silence again, until Tausolo mumbles something about PTSD and multiple deployments.

  Well, be sure to tell the judge, Clark suggests, so it can be taken into account.

  They are at the jail now. Tausolo is processed in, given a yellow jumpsuit to change into, and put in a cell with four other inmates. The only place for him is a middle bunk. His heart is racing from nerves. He doesn’t have his Zoloft and Lunesta and Trazodone and Abilify and Concerta and Klonopin. For three nights, he dreams of Harrelson. On his meds, it happens once a week. Here, it happens every time he shuts his eyes.

  Finally, after the weekend, he is released. He goes to court, pleads guilty to a charge of disorderly behavior, pays a fine of a few hundred dollars, and promises to get marriage counseling.

  Back at home, he apologizes to Theresa, and Theresa apologizes to him.

  And then he is back to where he was before all of this happened, at the WTB, where he reluctantly seeks out his case manager to tell her what happened.

  The reluctance is because she is new—his third case manager in as many months. Such is the nature of personnel churn at the WTB. Sergeants who are squad leaders and platoon leaders come and go, often with destabilizing effects as the new ones adjust to the peculiarities of the place. It’s the same at the command level—just when things are going fairly smoothly, it’s time for a new battalion commander, who, on his first official day, assembles the soldiers at the parade field for a change-of-command ceremony. It’s a gray, drizzly day, and the soldiers stand in the wet grass with their hands clasped behind their backs, and only when a few of them drop to the ground quaking does he realize that the customary cannon blast wasn’t such a good idea.

  Of all the personnel changes, though, the change of a case manager can be the most destabilizing of all. This is the person who is supposed to coordinate a WTB soldier’s day-to-day care, and when Aieti met this new one for the first time—it was just before he was arrested—he didn’t know what to make of her.

  “Well, welcome, sir!” she had said when he walked into her office. “I’m going to be your new case manager.”

  She motioned him to a seat. He sat. What happened to the old case manager? he thought.

  “Okay. My role. What is my purpose in your life?” she continued. “This is my purpose in your life. I am like your mom.”

  She smiled at him and winked.

  A winker, he thought.

  “We’re gonna do a risk assessment right now,” she said. She brought up a form on her computer. “Okay, on a scale of zero to three, three being, ‘This is horribly heavy on my heart,’ zero is, ‘I’m all cool, everything is copacetic,’ where are you on that scale?”

  “Uh, two,” he said, wondering why he was doing another risk assessment after having done so many.

  “Two,” she said. She noted his answer and turned her attention to his treatment at Topeka. “Did it help? Did it help at all? Was it a first step to helping? I’m talking about the PTSD program. How’d you feel afterward?”

  “Good,” he said.

  “Okay. Good means, ‘I’m on my road, on the way to recovery,’ ” she said. “Good means, ‘Okay, now I understand the scope of what PTSD means, but I still have a lot of issues with my symptoms.’ ”

  “Mmm.”

  “Okay,” she said, translating his mmm to an answer. “Any history of domestic violence or neglect?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. History of suicidal-homicidal thoughts.”

  “None.”

  “None,” she said. “When was the last?”

  “I never had any,” he said.

  “You never had any?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. PTSD symptoms. Zero is, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ six is, ‘My anxiety level is out of the roof, I’m gonna beat somebody up if they even talk to me, look at me wrong, I can’t sleep, I’m having nightmares, the whole realm.’ Where are you in that? Six is horrible, zero is none.”

  “Two,” he said.

  “Two? Okay,” she said.

  He waited for her to wink again.

  “Okay. I think we’re good,” she said after a few more minutes of this. “If you need anything and you have a question about something, if I don’t know the question, if it’s not in my lane, I can find out. So. Anything I can do for you, that’s my yob. Okay?”

  Did she say “yob”? he thought.

  “I’m mom away from Samoa,” she said. “So I’m the Samoan mama.”

  She is the Samoan mama, and now, as he goes to see her for the second time to explain that he has been arrested and jailed, he is wishing he still had his previous case manager. Or the case manager before that.

  This time, though, instead of talking and winking so much, she listens, and when he is done, she reaches into her purse, finds fifteen dollars, gives it to him, and tells him to go buy some roses for Theresa.

  So many people are rooting for Tausolo, it seems. Case managers. Police chiefs.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  He leaves her office. He has never bought roses before. Where does a person buy roses? He goes home.

  “Where can I buy roses?” he asks Theresa.

  “Why?” she answers.

  This is getting too complicated for him.

  He hands her the fifteen dollars.

  Before he got blown up, he could have figured it out. How hard is it to buy roses? There’s a flower shop on Fort Riley. They sell them at Walmart. But such are the effects of being in a Humvee that rolls over three buried 130-millimeter artillery shells, which explode at the perfect moment. Up he went, and down he came, and once his brain was done rattling around from a blast wave that passed through him faster than the speed of sound, here came the rest of it. Memory, fucked. The ability to pay attention, fucked. Balance. Hearing. Impulse control. Perception. Dreams. All of it, fucked. “The signature wound of the war” is what the military calls traumatic brain injury, and that’s one way to see it, but another is in a conversation that Tausolo has one day with a woman named Meg Vernon, who is a clinician at Fort Riley’s TBI clinic.

  “Like one time, I came in the gate, I forgot to register my car and I got pulled over, and the guy said I could keep going—and then when I get going I don’t know where I’m going,” he tells her with some embarrassment at how forgetful he has become.

  He has come to see her so she can help him with his memory, or at least give him some tricks for remembering things. One more person rooting for Tausolo—that’s Meg Vernon, who begins a session with him by holding up a photograph of a young woman.

  “Her name is Catherine Taylor,” she tells Tausolo. “Say it back to me so I know you heard it right.”

  “Catherine Taylor,” Tausolo says.

  “And what are you going to do to remember her name?” Meg asks. “Walk me through what you’re going to do. Because we’re probably not going to remember it unless we really take some effort to commit it to our memory. So what are you gonna do?”

  “I don’t know,” Tausolo says. “ ’Cause I can’t associate it with—”

  “Because it doesn’t look like anyone?” Meg asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know a Catherine? Or a Taylor?” she prompts.

  “No.”

  “Okay. We can use multiple strategies. You might say it over and over. Or you might think of CT. I think of, like, a CT scan when I see CT. But whatever comes to you that you might be able to use.”

  Tausolo keeps staring at the photograph.

  “Think you’ve got that tucked away?” Meg says after a while. “You want to look at it a little longer?”

  Tausolo shrugs.

  She puts the photograph down and picks up another, this of a man.

  “His name is Henry Fisher.”

  “Henry Fisher,” Tausolo repeats.

  “Henry Fisher,” Meg says. “So walk me through how you’re going to remember his name.”

  “Fisher …” he says, trailing off.

  “Do you fish?” she asks. “Are you a fisherman? Or do you know somebody that fishes?”

  “Yeah I know somebody that fishes.”

  “Okay.” She lets that idea settle in and turns to the first name. “Henry.” She points to some of his facial features. “He’s kind of hairy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Henry,” she says. “Hairy.”

  “Hairy Fisher,” Tausolo says, nodding.

  “Think you got that one committed to your memory?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what’s his name?”

  “Henry Fisher.”

  “What’s the first lady’s name?”

  “Um … Catherine. Taylor.”

  “Catherine Taylor. And Henry Fisher. And the third person,” she says, holding up a third photograph, “is Andrew Harris.”

  “Andrew Harris.”

  “Do you know an Andrew?”

  “Yeah …”

  “Do you know a Harris? How could you associate Harris with that picture? Hairless? Harris? Something like that?”

  “Oh, okay, I get it.”

  “So what’s his name?”

  “Andrew Harris.”

  “Okay, so the first lady?” she says, holding up the first photograph.

  “Um, Catherine … Taylor?”

  “Mm-hmm.” She holds up the second photo.

  “Uh, Henry … Fisher?”

  “Mm-hmm.” She holds up the third photo.

  “Andrew … oh, I can only remember hairless.”

  “And that’s supposed to bring you to …”

  “Harris,” he says after a few moments of concentration.

  “Harris. Yes,” she says.

  “Harris.”

  He smiles, pleased. Three names in a row.

  Meg continues with the session. She picks up a clock and sets the alarm. “When the alarm goes off, I want you to ask me two questions,” she says. “Okay? The two questions are: ‘When do I have to see you again?’ and ‘When does the session end?’ “So when that alarm goes off, whatever we’re doing, we’ll be in the middle of something, stop and ask me those two questions.”

  “Um, what are the two questions?” Tausolo asks.

  Meg repeats them.

  “Wow. That’s a lot,” Tausolo says.

  She moves on with the testing. “I’m going to read you a story, and I want you to recall back as much of the story as you can. Any detail that you can recall. Any highlights. The gist of the story. Just do the best that you can. Ready?”

  She reads him the story. “Mr. Brian Kelly, a security express employee, was shot dead on Monday during a bank raid in Brighton. The four raiders all wore masks, and one carried a sawed-off shotgun. Police detectives were sifting through eyewitness accounts last night. A police spokesman said, ‘He was a very brave man. He went for the armed raider and put up a hell of a fight.’ ” She pauses. “Tell me what you can remember from that story.”

  “I got confused,” he says. “I was trying to listen to you, but my mind keeps going back to the different things.”

  “Do you want me to read it again?”

  “Yeah.”

  She reads it again.

  “Okay,” Tausolo says. “Somebody got shot, and, um, they, um, and someone said he was a brave man. He went after the four raiders, and … that’s it.”

  “Anything else coming to you?” Meg asks.

  “No.”

  The alarm goes off.

  “Um, um, what time are we done with the test?” Tausolo says.

  “Yes!” Meg says. “Very good!”

  “And, um, oh! When am I going to see you again?”

  “Excellent! Terrific! You got it!” Meg says. “Now the story I read you earlier—what was it about?”

  “Umm, a guy who died, and there was an investigation, and, um, someone said he was brave, he was a brave man for taking on four … four …”

  “Okay,” she says. She picks up the very first photograph she had shown at the beginning of the session and shows it to him again.

  “Oh shit,” Tausolo says. “Catherine … Catherine … that’s all I can remember.”

  “I want you to think longer,” Meg urges. “Think of some of the things we talked about.”

  “Catherine … Catherine …”

  “Do you remember the initials?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Her last name starts with a T.”

  “Trevor?”

  “Taylor.”

  “Taylor,” Tausolo repeats as Meg holds up the next photo.

  “Um, Henry … Fisher,” he says.

  “Very good! And the last one?”

  “Andrew,” Tausolo says. He concentrates really hard. “I remember hairless. But …”

  “It’s close to that,” Meg says.

  “Hairy?”

  “Harris,” Meg says.

  She looks at him, waiting. “You did very well on that overall,” she finally says. “There was a ton to remember.”

  He knows better. He looks at her and shakes his head.

  They’re out of time.

  “Somebody up front will get you scheduled for next week,” she says.

  He gathers his things and goes out to the receptionist, who asks him, “Who’s your appointment with?”

  He thinks for a moment. “I forgot her name.” He keeps thinking. Laughs in embarrassment. “What’s her name?”

  Now he is back at the WTB, at formation. He goes every morning without fail, even in the rain, even when the temperature is sub-zero. Formation is usually at 6:30 a.m. and attendance is mandatory. It’s still the army, after all, so they all show up, form into lines, and wait for their name to be called—“Aieti!”—so they can indicate that they’ve made it through another night—“Here!” They’re all here, morning after morning, all alive, until one morning when one of them isn’t.

  He was twenty-one years old, had been sent home from the war early, and killed himself in the middle of the night in his barracks room. According to his obituary, he had been a Boy Scout, a member of his church’s Celebrate Life Science Quiz team, and “loved his dog ‘Sarah.’ ” Aieti didn’t know him well, but they stood near each other in formation and sometimes went to the gym together. So much for that. Now one more soldier is on his way to the Gardner Room, and a lot of other soldiers are on their way to a memorial service at the chapel, where the electronic sign out front has some flashing messages:

  “It is your responsibility to get help for a fellow soldier.”

  “Never let your buddy fight alone, be willing to lend a hand.”

  Heads down, they fill seven rows of the chapel and watch a woebegone family file in and take seats in the front row, within touching distance of an easel, upon which is a photograph of a defeated-looking young man. “What next?” his expression might as well be saying, and his family’s, too. Next to the easel is a display of his boots, helmet, and rifle, and near that is a podium for one of the eulogists to stand at and declare in the most mystified voice, “What is there to say at this point except thank you for your service?”

  Tausolo is not on hand to hear this. He is avoiding all of it: the bugler playing “Taps,” the gunshot salute that causes a few of the soldiers to wince, the father of the young man wiping his eyes and coughing, the tears of a woman a few rows back who had come alone, holding a book called The One Year Book of Hope. Whoever she is, the last thing Tausolo wants to hear are her memorial tears, or anyone’s. He’s been to enough of these services. They are Harrelson’s service all over again, and Doster’s, and the twelve others killed in his battalion. He knows what bad memories these things conjure in him, and that’s not what he needs to be remembering. He needs to be remembering Catherine Taylor, Henry Fisher, and Andrew Harris. He can’t keep going backward. He can’t go back to jail. He can’t go back to Topeka. He can’t keep going back up into the air and down into another dream. Backward, up, down—those are all the wrong directions. If he’s going to get better, he needs to be moving forward, nothing but forward, and so he stays far away from the chapel until the day after the memorial service, when he happens to pass by it as he heads toward the next thing he’s supposed to do in his recovery.

  He is on his way to his first day of class at one of the colleges offering courses at Fort Riley. “They told me to go to school,” he says. “Well I’m going to school.” The electronic sign is still flashing—“Have the courage to seek help,” it reads as he drives past the chapel—but he ignores it. Back in Samoa, he excelled at math. Does he still have the mind for it? He doesn’t know. Probably not is his guess. But he has signed up for an algebra class and is about to find out.

  He parks near an old building and climbs a flight of stairs to a classroom on the second floor. Shyly, he slides into an empty seat in the back row and takes out a pen, and is using it to poke himself in the arm as the instructor stands to introduce himself.