Two weeks later, released from Pueblo, Nic gets on a plane and makes one last entry in his journal:

  Taking off during a sunrise in bad turbulence is one of the most beautiful things in the world, the fear that something could go wrong like the wings fly off or the pilot decides to up and quit and jump out compared to the beauty of the sun cresting over the edge of the planet gradually turning the edge of the sky from dark orange to a fading black as night retreats as the chase goes on, and there’s that fucking turbulence, like an 8 year old driver at the wheel of a 68 Ford Bronco driving through Walmart, fuck, keep the main sails steady! I’m surprised I can keep my pen straight.

  And then he is home with Sascha, who knows now about one day of the war.

  Four hundred more to go.

  5

  At 6:35 in the morning every house on the street is still dark, including the little house with the swinging kitchen door hanging cockeyed on its hinges. Somewhere inside, Adam should be tiptoeing around by now, slipping into a shirt and tie while trying not to wake Saskia, but that’s never the way it works out. Every night he sets his alarm for 6:30, hoping to get to work on time, but once again in the middle of the night Jax was howling, and then Zoe wet her bed yet again, and now Saskia is mentioning very loudly that the goddamned alarm has been ringing for five minutes. He gets up, stumbles into the shower, and falls asleep under the spray. He throws on an old shirt and the jeans he was wearing last night when he was out fishing, with traces of fish guts and blood smears on the legs, and by the time he walks out the front door, the sun is coming up. Late again.

  Oh well.

  He’s got his antidepressants in one hand and a sack lunch with a Walmart enchilada and a Mountain Dew in the other. He swallows his pills as he turns onto the highway and passes by Geary Estates. He exits at Fort Riley, clears security, parks outside of an old limestone building, smokes a last cigarette as if he’s about to be blindfolded and executed, and heads toward a work cubicle that is just outside the sight lines of his boss, who is hopeful about her new employee: “I hear him on the phone. He sounds very confident. He’s really picking up fast.” She adds, “If you don’t have compassion for people, you probably won’t make it in a call center.”

  That’s what this place is—a call-in center for army retirees who need help figuring out their benefits, which strikes Adam as comical because if he had gotten better benefits for himself he wouldn’t need to be working here. To keep up with bills, he had found a job at the Fort Riley range, but maybe the daily explosions weren’t the best thing for someone with war-related PTSD. So here he is at the call center, where sometimes he thinks he should call himself, explain his problems, and see if he can get some answers.

  General Peter Chiarelli, U.S. Army vice chief of staff

  Instead, the first thing he does is what he does every day: turn on his computer, sign on to a website called militaryhire.com, and look for another job. He wants to be a forester. He wants to be a park ranger. He wants to work at a golf course if it will pay enough. He wants to be outside. The ringing in his right ear is particularly loud today, but not loud enough to drown out the woman two cubicles away who is driving him absolutely batty. “Right … right … right … right,” she is saying into her headset, like a metronome, like a pile driver, like a car alarm, and Adam fantasizes about picking up his pencil and stabbing her in the neck. Here comes the boss, walking around, and he quickly signs on to e-mail, where the message he happens to open up as the boss walks by is from the guy in the next cubicle. “Gun control isn’t about guns, it’s about control,” it says in big letters. Totally inappropriate. But the boss doesn’t notice, and the guy in the cubicle is laughing, and the woman two cubicles away is smiling, and the realization that everyone seems so happy here makes it even worse for Adam because he feels like he is dying. He is an ex-soldier who wishes he still were a soldier, and instead he is sitting in a cubicle and putting on a rubber fingertip so he can more efficiently sort through the papers of someone who is bitching that his benefits don’t match up with his annual salary of $137,410.

  Galling. All of it. And most galling of all? That would be the attitude of the guy down the hall who told Adam about this job.

  His name is Calvin McCloy, and back in the war, during Adam’s second deployment, he and Adam were in the same unit together. Poor Calvin, who one day was up in a hatch of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle when a roadside bomb exploded and the Bradley caught on fire. He was thirty-six years old and a platoon sergeant, like Doster had been. He was burned over 40 percent of his body. His back was burned. His backside, too. His stomach. His wrists. Under his arms. His uniform was burnt off, all of it except for part of his T-shirt and boots. He spent four months in a hospital burn unit undergoing skin grafts and another year in compression clothing. He has PTSD and TBI and a limited range of motion and wears hearing aids in both ears. His brain was bruised and he passes out sometimes, without warning, just slumps and goes down, and a few times has awakened on the ground with his head busted wide open. He went through a guilt phase. He went through a pissed-off phase. He went through a why-me phase. He went through a pills phase, and two years of intensive therapy. “There comes a point when you have to make a decision,” he has told Adam of the point he finally came to, and so one day he made a decision. “It isn’t about what I want to do. It’s about what I have to do. I don’t want to be sitting behind a damn desk. If I had my say, I’d be a sergeant major, training soldiers. But I can’t do that. I’m not going to be able to change the way I think. I’m not going to be able to change my memory. I’m not going to make the brain injury go away. It’s not going to happen. So I have to find ways to live with the injuries I have.” So that was his decision, to be sitting gratefully behind a damn desk, and every night he not only sets his alarm, he lays out his clothing in a certain way in order not to forget anything when he wakes up in a daze the next morning. He hangs his pants and shirt on the bathroom door. He puts his socks and T-shirt on the nightstand. He puts his shoes at the foot of the nightstand and his rolled-up belt in one of his shoes. He puts his cell phone, wallet, and car keys by the microwave. It’s a system for getting by that in his previous life he might have found humiliating but not in this life because here he is, at work, on time, in a shirt and tie and pants free of fish blood, happy to have a job that depends on repetition, which is what he can handle, and happy to have become a man who never gets angry anymore, not even on his birthday when his coworkers decorate his cubicle with a banner while he’s at lunch, and Adam wants to put a frozen can of shaving cream in a desk drawer where it will explode, and the coworkers say that’s not such a good idea, and Adam instead takes several months’ worth of hole punches he’s been saving, thousands and thousands of little dots, and dumps them like confetti onto Calvin’s desk, his chair, his keyboard, everywhere. “In my drawers, too?” Calvin asks incredulously when he returns, which will be the closest he comes to losing his temper as he starts to clean up.

  Why, Adam wonders, can’t he be more like Calvin? Why can’t he get better? “You gotta face reality,” Calvin has told him, and is that all it takes? Making a decision? He sits at his desk. The hours go by. The days go by. The overhead fluorescent lights hum. The copy machine grinds. The water cooler bubbles. The phone lines blink with waiting callers. “Three calls in the queue,” the boss announces over the intercom to a roomful of well-dressed workers wearing rubber fingertips. “Oh my God,” Adam sighs. He switches his computer screen from his work e-mail to a news site. “Army Releases Report on Suicide Prevention” is one of the headlines. “Can the Army’s New Suicide Prevention Plan Really Work?” is another.

  He ignores them.

  “Montana Bear Attack Survivor Played Dead” is another, and that’s the one he reads until he makes a decision to answer his ringing phone.

  In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, in conjunction with the release of the suicide report, the army is holding a press conference.

  “General, you’ve been looking at this for a long time now. You’ve overseen this report. The army today, your bottom-line assessment: How good a job is the service doing at preventing suicides?” a reporter asks. “Are they doing a better job today than they did fifteen months ago when you started this task force?”

  “Well, I happen to believe we are,” says Peter Chiarelli, the army’s vice chief of staff, who has come armed with charts and statistics about the 242 soldiers who killed themselves the previous year.

  “Sir, how did the army get so far behind the curve on all of this?” another reporter asks.

  “What in simple language does the army need to do?” another asks.

  “So everybody understands this is a priority now?” another asks.

  “That’s exactly right,” Chiarelli replies, and of all the answers he gives, this is the most wishful by far.

  The fact is that suicide prevention, and the wider issue of mental health, has never been the most urgent of priorities in the army, and if there’s any single person who knows this, it is Chiarelli. Before becoming the vice chief of staff, he was in charge of all the ground forces in Iraq during a time when fighting was nearing its worst. That was the priority, the fighting, and if there was a medical priority, it was getting injured soldiers back into the fight. Only after he came home and was promoted to vice chief of staff did he begin paying close attention to mental health issues when he was assigned to look into the rising suicide numbers. He had other assignments, too. Force modernization. Dealing with the budget. He understood that mental health was a back-burner issue. But soon he was spending half of his time on it as he realized how strained and ineffective the system had become.

  Soldiers were breaking apart but were reluctant to ask for help because of the stigma, and in some cases the consequences, of doing so. For those who did ask, there was a shortage of therapists and an over-reliance on medication that led to secondary issues of addiction. As the number of military suicides for the first time rose above the rate for civilians, Chiarelli would say to anyone who would listen, “I’ve got to try to change the culture,” and to that end he began traveling to army posts around the country, including, one summer day, Fort Riley for the dedication of the WTB.

  There, after the ribbon cutting, where the guests included Adam, who had never seen a four-star general before, Chiarelli was asked by an interviewer about the significance of the day. “I think a facility such as the one behind me shows our total commitment to our wounded warriors and our willingness to do everything we possibly can,” he said, and his earnestness made an overly rosy answer seem entirely believable, at least momentarily.

  That earnestness is what always has separated Chiarelli from the other generals who have been running these wars. The pleading in his voice as he practically begs soldiers about to deploy to “please, please, please” ask him any questions they might have, the emotion he makes no attempt to hide as he tells their commanders, “If you do anything, help me eliminate the stigma,” the furrow lines in his forehead, the way his eyes droop a little at the edges—all of it suggests someone with wounds under his skin. And now there is the way he is throwing himself at this impossible assignment.

  His wife, Beth, says this isn’t so, that there are no wounds to speak of. Yes, she mentions to people at a dinner party one night, he weirdly leaves cabinets open all the time now, and drawers, and he never did either before going to Iraq, but that’s probably because he’s gotten used to being followed around by an aide. And yes, he’s become a more impatient driver since coming home, even irritated at times, but who doesn’t get impatient in Washington traffic?

  “What you see is what you get. He’s really not that complicated,” she says. She taps her forehead. “Like a slab of meat,” she says, laughing.

  And maybe he is that and that’s all there is to it. But there is also the story of his first deployment to Iraq, when he was a division commander who in the course of a year lost 169 soldiers. One by one, he wrote their names and hometowns on index cards that he carried in his pocket until there were too many to fit. He attended all of the memorial services and wrote 169 condolence letters in 365 days. But the worst part may have come later, at home, when it was time to erect a memorial, and he was approached by some of his junior officers who wanted 168 names on the memorial, not 169.

  “The greatest regret of my military career was as Commanding General of the 1st Cavalry Division in Iraq in 2004–05,” he later wrote of the decision he made. “I lost 169 soldiers during that year-long deployment. However, the monument we erected at Fort Hood, Texas, in memoriam lists 168 names. I approved the request of others not to include the name of the one soldier who committed suicide. I deeply regret my decision.”

  By the time he wrote that, he had become the vice chief of staff. When he had gone back to Iraq a second time, he had hoped to be put in charge of the entire war—ground, air, the overall strategy—but that wasn’t how it worked out. Now, as Vice, he had his war at last. “This is it,” Beth says. “This is his contribution.” His war would be the after-war, and one of his first acts as its commander was to convene a monthly meeting of a type never before held at the Pentagon, with roots in his regret.

  “Joe, I hope you’ve had coffee,” he says now, beginning one of them, talking one afternoon by video linkup with a general in Korea, where it is 4:00 a.m. “Okay. You’re on.”

  “Sir, we have a really unfortunate one here,” the general, Joseph Fils, replies. “I’ll let Mike Tucker talk us through the details.”

  “Sir, this is Mike Tucker. Can you hear me?”

  “I can, Mike,” Chiarelli says.

  “Okay,” Tucker says. “Sir, he was actually a married soldier, living off post with a professional girl who worked down in the ville. This is a case, sir, where the chain of command thought they knew that he was involved in this type of behavior and counseled him, but they had nothing definitive. So when they first heard of it, they counseled him on it, and yet he continued to pursue this. Another NCO at another unit actually engaged him and told him this was not the right thing to do, you have a wife and a child back in Texas, you shouldn’t be doing this type of activity, and on the first of March, when he actually committed the offense, he had, according to her, had sexually assaulted her, and he felt as though she had cheated on him because that was obviously her business, and he told her, quote, unquote, ‘You will watch me die.’ And so he strung himself up on a door hinge, standing on a table, kicked the table out from under his legs, and as much as she tried to put the table back under his legs, he kept kicking her until he died. A very unfortunate incident, sir, for this young soldier.”

  “Okay, Mike,” Chiarelli says when Mike has finished, and after a brief discussion about what lessons can be learned from such a soldier, with twenty-eight more suicides to get through in two hours, he moves on to a general in Iraq who will tell him about suicide number two.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the Vice.”

  Another meeting, another month, another twenty-four suicides to review. Chiarelli walks into a conference room where those invited to the meeting rise to their feet as he looks embarrassed and tells them to sit. He takes his own seat at the head of a long conference table with a nice military shine. The curtains are drawn. The SECRET sign is lit. The video screens are linked to army posts around the world, where other officers, surrounded by their own staffs, sit at their own tables, waiting to be called on to talk about a particular suicide that happened under their watch.

  The setting for this meeting is the Gardner Room, a Pentagon conference room that was named in honor of a Vietnam War soldier named James Gardner, who died on his twenty-third birthday and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. According to the award citation:

  1st Lt. Gardner charged through a withering hail of fire across an open rice paddy. On reaching the first bunker he destroyed it with a grenade and without hesitation dashed to the second bunker and eliminated it by tossing a grenade inside. Then, crawling swiftly along the dike of a rice paddy, he reached the third bunker. Before he could arm a grenade, the enemy gunner leaped forth, firing at him. 1st Lt. Gardner instantly returned the fire and killed the enemy gunner at a distance of 6 feet. Following the seizure of the main enemy position, he reorganized the platoon to continue the attack. Advancing to the new assault position, the platoon was pinned down by an enemy machine gun em-placed in a fortified bunker. 1st Lt. Gardner immediately collected several grenades and charged the enemy position, firing his rifle as he advanced to neutralize the defenders. He dropped a grenade into the bunker and vaulted beyond. As the bunker blew up, he came under fire again. Rolling into a ditch to gain cover, he moved toward the new source of fire. Nearing the position, he leaped from the ditch and advanced with a grenade in one hand and firing his rifle with the other. He was gravely wounded just before he reached the bunker, but with a last valiant effort he staggered forward and destroyed the bunker, and its defenders with a grenade.

  Left out of the citation, but cited elsewhere, were Gardner’s final words. “It’s the best I can do,” he is supposed to have said after being shot in the chest four times, and the question for the ages, or at least those gathered in the Gardner Room forty-five years later, is why some soldiers become James Gardner and some become the soldier whose final words are “You will watch me die.”

  They are, by military measures, an impressive group: a few colonels here and there but mostly generals, and not just one-stars, either. Every high-backed leather seat is filled with an army success story. They are the achievers, the ones who got in and rose up and kept rising until they were one day invited by the vice chief of staff of the army to learn about some of the others who didn’t rise, who if they were in this room would look at the rows of medals and see their own failures, and the rows of water glasses and see shards of opportunity to slide across their wrists. No one would prefer to be here, not when you get down to it. It is a brutal, depressing meeting. At the end, people always walk out looking stunned. But here they are anyway, ready to go, as Chiarelli starts to talk to them about what they might do.