Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Tom barely slept that night, like every night. He’d lie on his cot and watch movies or listen to music on Jimmy’s laptop, and often he’d cry, quietly, rolling onto his right side, face tucked beside the mud wall, so the Marine on radio guard at the desk ten feet away wouldn’t hear him. He’d usually fall asleep sometime before dawn and sleep into midmorning. He’d wake bathed in sweat, swing his feet over the edge of the cot, prop his elbows on his knees, and prepare himself for another day. Ryan now slept on Jimmy’s cot, but that hardly made the room feel less empty. Tom only saw Jimmy, and felt his absence. On the wall above Jimmy’s old cot, he’d hung Ian’s and Jimmy’s pictures, from the Beatley memorial service programs, and beneath them scrawled an inscription: GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN THAN TO LAY DOWN HIS LIFE FOR HIS BROTHER.

  In the heat of the day, after the morning patrol or before an afternoon patrol, when the farmers had retreated from their fields to lounge in the shade, Tom would unroll his foam sleeping pad in Dakota’s courtyard and sprawl in the sun, listening to music on a set of portable speakers. For that one hour every day, he was home, lying in the sand at Myrtle Beach. He and Jimmy had planned a beach trip to celebrate their August birthdays when they’d returned. He imagined waves breaking and his kids’ voices just beyond the music, a daydream occasionally interrupted by air strikes or roadside bombs in the distance, or fighter jets screaming overhead.

  He wrote in his journal less and less after Jimmy died, then stopped, with a final, half-page entry: “I have been fighting a lot of demons. I feel so responsible and guilty for the deaths of Staff Sergeant and Ian. It’s going to be a long fight for me. Have been emailing and calling both families as much as I can. They are all amazing people. I can’t wait to meet them soon. This has been a nightmare of a deployment. I miss Jimmy and Ian so much.”

  5. Home

  On a steamy morning in late July, as Tom and his Marines finished their last patrols at Dakota, Alison Malachowski left her house on the wooded hilltop in Westminster and drove south, toward an office building in Rockville, Maryland. She had been planning this day for weeks. Her husband and daughter knew her destination and wanted none of it. A friend had offered to drive with her, and Alison declined. This was far too personal to share with anyone else. Her stomach turned from the nerves, and she talked to him as she drove. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this. Jimmy, I’m not that strong. But she felt him pushing her.

  Before a service member killed in Afghanistan is prepared for burial by a mortuary team at Dover Air Force Base, a pathologist performs an autopsy, which has helped and maybe saved thousands of other service members: details about battlefield trauma gleaned in the exams have highlighted deficiencies in body armor and spurred improvements in bomb-resistant vehicles and frontline medical equipment. Family members can read the autopsy reports and talk to those who perform the exams, but few ever do. Bullets, buried bombs, exploding cars: no mysteries there.

  Army Major Dori Franco, who worked as a forensic pathologist out of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner’s office, in Rockville, had performed more than three hundred autopsies. But this was her first time meeting a parent to explain her work. “I’ve never done this before,” she told Alison, and Alison hadn’t imagined she’d want to know these details, until she spoke to Susanne Muller.

  When Ian came home, the Mullers had met him at Dover, but he’d been hidden in a flag-draped transfer case as a Marine honor guard carried him from the plane. And though the family had an open-casket viewing before the closed-casket wake, they still didn’t see Ian. He lay in a perfectly arranged uniform, every ribbon straight, every button polished, white gloves on his hands and his entire head wrapped in white gauze, like a mummy.

  A Vermont woman who works as a grief counselor for sudden traumatic death—car wrecks, homicides, workplace accidents—had told Susanne that viewing the body could be cathartic, especially when a loved one had died so far away. Susanne asked Dover for the autopsy pictures and viewed them with the counselor, who first described each photo, asked if Susanne was ready to see it, and then showed her as they sat in Susanne’s living room. Yes, his body was broken and torn. But the right side of his face was perfect. Were it possible, she would have been with him in that field and held his hand as he lay dying, but at least she could have stroked his cheek once he’d come home, one last time. Susanne told Alison that seeing the pictures had helped her.

  Alison needed a different sort of closure. Jimmy’s wake had been open-casket, and the Malachowskis could see him, touch him. But she wanted to know exactly how her son had died, and whether anything could have been different. For three hours, with reports and photos, Major Franco told Alison what had happened to her boy, how the blast had ripped through him, crushing and splintering bones, puncturing organs, severing arteries, and shredding muscle.

  Her curious boy, who had learned so much about insects that he won first place in entomology at the Maryland State Fair at nine years old, with exquisite collections that still hung in glass-covered frames on the living-room walls. Butterflies and crickets, ants, dragonflies and spiders.

  Her boy, who had called from Iraq during his first tour, frustrated and furious that he’d been told to go count enemy dead, of whom nothing but pieces remained, telling her this as two women walked past Alison griping about the terrible selection at Lord & Taylor.

  Her boy, who cooked and gardened and built furniture, who studied martial arts, loathed personal failure, and always seemed older than his years, a father figure to his Marines. She told Jimmy that if any of his men died during the deployment, she and James would attend the funeral in his behalf. So they had driven ten hours to Vermont, mourned with the Mullers, and driven home, and the next morning, as Alison worked in her garden, prepping flowerbeds that would be in bloom for Jimmy’s homecoming, a white van with government plates pulled into the driveway.

  Here he was now, her only son, in two dimensions, pictures and diagrams. Alison asked questions and Franco answered. The pile of wadded-up tissues grew. They sat side by side in chairs, their knees almost touching. Close enough, Alison figured, that Franco must feel the pain and grief radiating from her body.

  Franco walked her outside, and the wet heat swallowed them. “Are you going to be okay to drive home alone?” she asked. Alison nodded, but she wasn’t sure. She sat for several minutes in her stifling black Volkswagen Jetta with the broken air conditioner, then rolled down the windows and left. Maybe she was in shock, after hearing so many horrible details, but she felt fine as she poked along with the building rush-hour traffic, unburdened even. Thank you, Jimmy, she said. Thank you so much.

  Three weeks after Tom and his men came home from Afghanistan, the Marines of 2/8 held a memorial service for Jimmy, Ian, and the six other men they’d lost around northern Marjah, and Alison drove down the coast to Camp Lejeune to deliver Jimmy’s absolution to the men of Third Platoon. Many of them gathered at Whorl’s house after the memorial to toast their dead friends, take shelter among the living, and let liquor dull the constant ache. Alison pulled a few of them aside, one at a time, those who were with Jimmy that day in the compound, and told them what she’d learned: Jimmy’s death wasn’t their fault. “There wasn’t anything anybody could have done, and he wouldn’t have wanted to survive with what was left of him,” she says. “I didn’t want them thinking if they’d just been faster, or tried harder, or been stronger … all those things that would have held them back and destroyed them.”

  It wasn’t his fault. Tom heard that a lot. He didn’t kill Jimmy and couldn’t have done anything to save him. The Mullers told him the same about Ian, and so did everyone else. Nina told her husband that their deaths were in God’s plan. “The instant you’re born, the day you’re going to die is already set out for you,” she says. “That’s your destiny, and there’s no changing it.” The chaplain told him just the opposite, that God doesn’t pick and choose who dies and when; the randomness of war decides. Lieutenant Colonel Harrill told h
im that this job is bloody and terrible and friends will die, and that nothing can change the nature of war. Tom’s father told him that had he made different choices, things could have turned out far worse. Tom listened, and he tried to let their words help him. He knew his suffering tore at them, and he could see the truth in some of what they said. And he wanted to believe them—how easy that would have been, how quick the relief.

  But Tom saw things differently. He had called the building clear. Just like he had sent Ian down that road. Simple as that. He made the decisions, and he failed them, and they died. If only. If only he had made different decisions. The guilt was obstinate and bullying. It rotted his thinking and wove roots into his days like weeds choking a garden, until it was everywhere, wrapping itself around him, squeezing, in quiet moments with Nina or during family dinners or driving across base, as he waited for sleep, while he slept, and when he woke.

  Tom watched the videos of Jimmy’s and Ian’s funerals every day, maybe once, maybe a half-dozen times, to split the skin anew, to pull the wound open and expose the nerves. He figured he deserved that pain, since he had killed his friends, but he craved the pain, too. Better to feel something than nothing. “I looked at my wife and I didn’t feel love,” he says. “I’d think about Jimmy and Ian and I didn’t feel sad. I never felt happy. I just did not feel shit.”

  He wasn’t alone in this. All of the guys were struggling, falling apart.

  Jesse, who had always been so mellow, now snapped at superiors, in bright flashes of anger.

  Ryan still couldn’t sleep. He’d lie in bed, not meaning to think about Ian, but sometimes unable to think about anything else, wondering how things might have turned out differently. When he did sleep, the dreams were bad. Some were of war and blown-up friends, but worse were the mundane dreams, bench-pressing at the gym with Ian, or drinking nickel Pabst Blue Ribbon with him down at Gus’ on Wednesday nights. And then he’d wake, and as his mind cleared he’d remember anew that Ian was gone.

  Since the day Ian died, Matt hadn’t dreamed about anything else. Except Jimmy, of course, once he was dead, too. Some dreams were thorough, taking him through a whole day; others were just highlight reels, picking up right before the blasts. Three, four, five times a night. “It’s pretty much just reliving those two days over, and over, and over,” he says. “And no matter how many times I dream it, the outcome is going to be the same. And that’s what drives mental health crazy, because most of the time your dreams will fluctuate. In some of them things will be different, like Ian would have lived. But mine are consistent. They’re the same every time, just reliving the day.”

  The doctors gave him sleep meds, but more sleep just meant more nightmares, and the pills to stop the nightmares didn’t work.

  “Everyone keeps asking, ‘Are you okay? Is there anything we can do?’” Matt says. “And you know they mean well, but it gets so irritating and so taxing because you don’t want to involve them, because no matter how you explain it, they’ll never understand. When you sit up for three or four months watching movies with a guy every night, you consider him your best friend, and he dies ten feet in front of you, it’s going to fuck you up. When you search a building and call it clear, and then somebody who you looked to like a father figure dies, it’s going to fuck you up.”

  The Marines sent Matt home from Afghanistan after Jimmy’s bomb—his third major blast—and now he was being medically retired, because of the nightmares and headaches and memory loss, symptoms of post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury. Even if he could stay in, he’d never deploy again, and he couldn’t imagine not being allowed to do his job. The Marines were all he’d known since he left Pike County, Georgia, after high school.

  He still wasn’t old enough to drink a beer legally, but he’d aged terribly, and he knew he couldn’t handle seeing another friend die. “Transitioning back to civilian life scares the hell out of me,” he says. “You only have this handful of people you can turn to and talk to, who you know will be there for you no matter what, and will understand if you call them at three in the morning crying because you just had the worst nightmare yet. I’m scared to death to be away from them. They keep me sane.”

  He told his wife about the three bomb blasts, and how his platoon had lost two men, but none of the details. He didn’t want to lay on her any of the weight that was crushing him. Ryan and Jesse and Craig Fazenbaker knew. They’d been right there. They could be wounded and broken around each other. They could tell each other about their terrible dreams, or say nothing at all and know that the others understood their withdrawal, anger, and frustration.

  Except for Tom. He wouldn’t allow himself the vulnerability. As the pressure built, he didn’t tell his guys that he had the very same thoughts and struggles. He was their leader. They looked to him for support and answers. How could they trust him if they knew he was just as fucked in the head as them? He would have failed them. He didn’t tell anyone that he needed help, that he couldn’t navigate the emotional wreckage by himself.

  While at Dakota and when he came home, Tom spoke to or e-mailed the Mullers and Malachowskis several times a week. Initially he did this as a duty to Ian and Jimmy, looking after their families the same as he would his Marines. The families wanted to know about their sons’ last weeks, hours, minutes. Their lives at Dakota. Their friendships. Their last words. Tom felt he had no right to deny them that. But he soon came to rely on the phone calls and texts, a friendly voice and shared history when few others could understand. “I had an escape,” he says. “When I talked to them, even though it brought back memories, that boulder was off my chest. That’s why it became so addictive—because of the feeling I had after talking to them. They were my outlet, and I was their outlet. I felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone else.”

  Nina included.

  Life had seemed good for a while. When Tom and Nina came home in early August 2011, they drove to Tennessee to pick up their three children and settled into being a family again. For the first two months, the Marine Corps eased them back into life off the battlefield, with short workdays and plenty of three-and four-day weekends. Tom lost himself in the old rhythms of home, everything he’d longed for while he baked in the Afghan sun, worried about his men, and stared at Jimmy’s old cot. Many nights he grilled out, Sam Adams in hand, in the fenced-off oasis Nina had built for him during his first deployment, and nearly every weekend they drove to Myrtle Beach with the kids. They careened down slides at the water park, lounged on the beach, and ate out at night, dipping into the thousands they’d saved during their deployments, between the extra combat pay, no taxes, and neither of them being home to spend money.

  But the relief of home wore off, and Tom’s nerves frayed. Nina felt he was annoyed with her and the kids more and more, quick to lose patience as the kids raced through the house, banging doors. Don’t do that, she told them. Your dad doesn’t like it. She understood, far better than most spouses, the effects of a deployment. Of course loud noises might bother him, or the hassles of home life after the bizarre simplicity of war, and she knew how much he loved Jimmy and Ian. But this wasn’t just anxiety or grief. This felt different. He seemed so far away, beyond reach. She’d asked what was wrong and he’d say, “Nothing.” He sometimes told her he was thinking of Jimmy or Ian, but didn’t go deeper.

  He didn’t tell her how the rest of the world fell away as Afghanistan came into focus, until he was both places at once—at home and over there, the two scenes playing on top of each other. The feel of Jimmy’s dirtied hand in his. The smell of Jimmy’s souring breath in his nostrils. His skin color draining to a waxy greenish yellow. His eyes pulling back, losing focus. Or the sound of blood gurgling in Ian’s throat as he and Jesse sliced an airway into his trachea, as the smashed bomb jammer strapped to Ian’s back beeped and its cooling fan whirred. Beep. Beep. Beep. “That’s the shit that doesn’t leave your head,” Tom says. “Ever.”

  Tom swung open his bedroom door and bashed it against t
he wall, over and over, punching a jagged hole in the hallway wall with the doorknob. Andrew and Lee ran from their room into the hallway, screaming. Through the open doorway, Nina sat on the bed, an arm wrapped around little Gia, who’d been born a few months before Tom and Nina left for the deployment.

  “Get out of here!” she yelled. “You’re not going to terrorize us. We didn’t do anything to you.”

  Tom charged from the house, and Nina locked the front door behind him and phoned Jesse. “You need to get your ass over here. He’s flipping out.”

  They had argued more often in the months since their homecoming. Sometimes Tom blamed her for what he’d been through. If he’d just stayed with the fire department instead of rejoining the Marines, Ian and Jimmy might still be alive, and his own life wouldn’t be falling apart. But the argument on this late November night hadn’t been anything, just a mundane spat, when a few words over taking out the garbage spins into a storm.

  As Nina stood in the living room and talked to Jesse on the phone, Tom circled around to the open back door and walked into the living room, with a look she’d never seen, out-of-his-head crazy. Their marriage could run hot—for better, for worse. They fought and cooled down and made up. But now she was frightened of him, for the first time since she’d known him. The boys retreated to their room, and Nina ran into Gia’s room and locked herself and the baby inside. The house fell quiet. Tom stood outside the door. When he spoke, the anger had drained from his voice. “You’re not going to have to worry about me anymore,” he said. “I’m not going to be your problem.”

  Nina heard the front door close, and she followed him outside. Tom sat in their blue Pontiac G6, parked at the curb. Nina called to him to get out of the car and talk to her, but she stayed close to the garage, figuring he might try to run her over if she neared the car. He pulled forward and back in the street several times, then backed up three hundred feet to the intersection and disappeared. Nina ran into the kitchen and opened the far right cabinet, where Tom kept his mini-pharmacy of prescription medications for insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, and pain. Gone, every bottle. She called the police, then Tom’s father, who left within minutes for the six-hour drive south from Maryland to Camp Lejeune.