Finding Sgt. Kent

by Raymond Hutson

  “In Hutson’s novel, a soldier returns home, haunted by memories of war, and tries to track down family members he’s never known.

  “Robert Kent served as a sniper in Afghanistan, rising to the rank of master sergeant before he was discharged after some 15 years of service. Now he finds himself in a veteran’s hospital, alone and plagued by memories of past violence, emotionally lost but not yet ready to surrender to despair. Dr. Zilker, his preternaturally patient therapist, prods him to discuss the last day of his tour of duty in Afghanistan, during which he was involved in a ferocious firefight and badly wounded. Over the course of three tours, he was awarded two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star Medal, but they provide him with no relief from his nightmares. Before he enlisted, he had a difficult childhood—he never knew his Vietnam-veteran father, and his mother drank herself to death when he was 15. He was taken in by a foster family, the Dunhams, in his teens. At Zilker’s encouragement, Robert decides to track down his surviving relations, aided by little more than his parents’ names and letters that his father wrote to his mother while serving overseas. Hutson palpably depicts Robert’s longing to get to know his family members, and, by extension, his desire to discover something new about himself: “now I was going to get to turn over all the pieces on the game board.” The author’s prose artfully balances a poetical sensitivity with the gritty anger of his protagonist. Also, his descriptions of military life—and of combat, in particular—feel impressively authentic. The novel’s chief source of strength, however, is the author’s literary restraint; it’s a study in the raw power of unsentimental expression, as well as an extension of Robert’s wounded laconicism. The book offers a sensitive look at the psychological ramifications of combat, raising tough questions without offering facile answers.

  “A poignant dramatization of the emotional fallout of war.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “As a veteran of every American war from Grenada to the current War on Terror, I found Sergeant Kent’s journey of self-discovery a model of self healing, applicable to all combat veterans, past and present. Valuable and entertaining reading for anyone who knows a combat vet and hopes to understand them better.”

  —Dennis Woods, CSM retired, author of Black Flag Journals

  “An intimate journey with a returning veteran who trusts no one, including himself. Hutson’s empathic narrative explores the psychological ramifications of war in a single voice that rings true, captivates and endears.”

  —Jeffrey Hess, author of Beachhead, Tushhog, and Cold War Canoe Club

  Finding Sgt. Kent

  by Raymond Hutson

  © Copyright 2018 Raymond Hutson

  ISBN 978-1-63393-622-5

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other – except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters are fictitious. With the exception of verified historical events and persons, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Published by

  210 60th Street

  Virginia Beach, VA 23451

  800-435-4811

  www.koehlerbooks.com

  For Joseph,

  my son.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Credits

  1

  It was quiet there, a constant rush of sterile air from the ceiling vents; too cool at night, the blankets so thin you had to ask for a few extras. Too quiet to sleep, mind like a deck of cards crackling in a shuffle of images: a cave, a barley field, a boy with goats, snarling dogs, dead people. Lots of dead people. Swollen, dismembered by a blast, rippling waves of flies.

  I’d cut the deck, shuffle again. Guys I’d shot; guys I didn’t but should have; guys maybe I shouldn’t have killed but squeezed the trigger anyway because the decision to stop was too hard to process. Guys in my platoon, and I wondered where they were now, where they had come from, but some were dead, and I’d talk with them as if they were still alive and try to remember how and where and what decisions that day might have made it turn out differently.

  Then the smell would come: rotten cabbage, old blood, sewer gas. I couldn’t nail it down. Soaked into my skin, waxed solid in my sinuses, it preceded me; others could smell it but said nothing. The air from the vents was odd, chemical by comparison, like the courtyard garden at Landstuhl, chlorinated and sweet.

  I’d fieldstrip an M4, clean, oil, reassemble, over and over in my head. The smell gradually turned to bore cleaner, CLP, which was a good smell, from a good time of day. It meant you’d lived and had time to clean your weapon. Then another picture would materialize, I’d sit up and suck a long breath, condition red. Eventually they found the right medication and sleep fell like a shroud.

  Down the hall a guy cried most of the night until they gave him something to knock him out as well. I had a window that didn’t open, a view of jack pines on hillsides five miles away, the glass woven through with a checkerboard of fine wire to keep it from breaking if you threw something at it, but the dishes were all Styrofoam, the furniture screwed to the floor, so there really wasn’t anything to throw. They turned down the hall lights at 2100; the room lights turned off, but the light in the latrine clicked on with any motion in the room, even a cough, so they could always see where you were. You couldn’t shut the door to the toilet because there wasn’t one, so it was noisy after dinner with everybody taking a dump.

  Above the sink was a mirror—not real glass but a wavy piece of polished stainless steel. Someone had scratched FUC across the surface, leaving plenty of room for a K, but maybe they’d been interrupted, or just forgot what they wanted to write. I didn’t look right in that surface; nothing did, details merging in a foggy glare.

  At 0600 the day-shift nurses arrived with voices like elephants, the glass doors of the nurse’s station slamming with each arrival, each departure, digging in purses for car keys or cigarettes as they rambled toward the ward doors and buzzed out. A food cart rolled past. After a few minutes Barb would stick her nose in, flip the lights on, and say something trite and stupid that she thought would put me in a positive frame of mind. Barbara Susskind, R.N. Barb. Like a thorn. I called her Sunshine.

  From the breakfast room you could look about ten blocks east through a residential section of low, one-story ranchers built in the Fifties, asphalt shingle roofs and big backyards, a pale-yellow house I estimated at about 200 meters. At 250 meters, a white house with roses between the sidewalk and the curb. Someone’s grandmother watered them each morning about 0730, the trees moving with a southwest breeze, five to ten knots, one minute of angle. A 7.62 round would drop about four inches at that range. I had no notions of killing the woman, just a game I played with myself.

  My foster dad used to take me deer hunting each fall, said I was a natural. I could almost see the course of the bullet—the fall with gravity, its gentle arc in a crosswind, a single motion born in a thought, a gentle squeeze, the flash of a primer, and everything that followed until the impact with flesh.

  “What are you looking at, Mr. Kent?” Sunshine hovered by my shoulder.

  “Roses. Down the block there.”

  “You like roses?”

  It was a diagnostic question and I ignored her. She loitered a moment and
moved away.

  Cheerios every morning. Hard to fuck up Cheerios. Get the oatmeal and you’d have to hold the bowl down with one hand. All the coffee you wanted—but all decaf. Marsden the Mormon would have been happy there. Saw him sitting in the dark dining room when I was admitted. He saluted, a casual wave, really, and I nodded. Marsden would have been ecstatic just to be alive.

  Guzman landed opposite me at the next table, flopped his fat arms on the surface, shook his Indian hair out of his face. We usually kept a wide perimeter. The ward was designed for thirty patients, but we were twelve.

  “Zilker got in your head yet?” he asked.

  Stony Dr. Zilker; penetrating but neutral, you couldn’t stare him down. One time during the first couple of nights, he was standing in my door, motionless, silent.

  “He get in yours?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He said it was fuckin’ scary.”

  Nurses talked. Guzman was there four or five times a year. If he ran out of meth or couldn’t make the rent, he’d show up and say he was going to hurt himself.

  “Guzman, you such a badass. How come you can’t take out one parasitic junkie?”

  “Who?”

  “One in the mirror.”

  If he were for real, he would have put the hurt on me. He spotted another table and picked up his tray.

  After breakfast, I’d walk the ward twenty-two times, use the toilet, throw a pillow at the base of the room door to hold it shut. I’m not modest, just feel vulnerable with pants around my ankles. I’m still getting used to the freedom of sitting on a toilet without thirty-five pounds of body armor hanging on my torso. You couldn’t just take it off and lay it on the floor.

  One of the latrines in Camp Eggers had a drawing on the back of the stall door of our commander in chief, grimacing, wearing body armor, full field pack, Kevlar helmet propped on those huge ears, his skinny little lawyer-ass crushed against the seat, VP trying to help him to his feet.

  Keeping Zilker at bay was easy at first. I didn’t talk. No talking and the process stopped, whatever he wanted anyway, like a potato in a tailpipe. “Indifferent,” I’d said. It was the only word I’d given him, and I was bluntly honest. I felt indifferent about the things I’d done, and the things that had been done to me.

  “You could be in jail right now,” he said at the first interview.

  I didn’t look at him, had nothing to say.

  “Machinery of the law isn’t that sensitive. You just got lucky.”

  “You think I should be in jail, sir?”

  “I think that would be a waste.”

  I stared at my feet.

  We were on our third week of such nonsense when it became clear that the nurses were telling him that I could talk, that I joked with them, that I was, most of the time, appropriate.

  A new tablet, a little blue one, eventually appeared in my morning med cup, and an hour later at the interview Zilker opened with, “Today we’re going to cut the bullshit.” But he didn’t seem angry about it, sort of friendly and matter-of-fact, and it seemed like a pretty good idea. The whole world seemed a friendlier place for a few hours.

  –––

  It was labeled Lounge, but wired double-glass windows separated it from the hall. The doorknob didn’t lock on the inside. There were six padded armchairs of blond oak around a matching table. A sofa, one cushion stained. The nurse let me in. Zilker arrived at 1000 hours. He moved like a younger man, but the nurses said he was in his seventies. Ruddy faced, half bald, with a well-trimmed silver beard. A somber Santa Claus. He asked me to close my eyes, breathe deep, and think of something tranquil. I thought about snow and told him this. Snow falling through the pines. A hillside thick with trees, pines. Snow.

  “What are your goals for today, Mr. Kent?” He always started like that.

  “To convince you I’m well, sir.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “Someone thought so, sir.”

  “You don’t need to call me sir. You’re discharged. Honorably, at that.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He rubbed his closed eyes like he was weary of this chase, which hadn’t started yet today but would, like it had for three weeks. He was a patient sonofabitch.

  “Three tours, two Purple Hearts. A Silver Star, charged the enemy in a cave in 2002, killed eight insurgents, wounded.”

  “I fell into the cave, sir. Chasing one guy. Other seven were a big surprise.”

  “Likely saved your platoon.”

  “We were better riflemen.” It was true. Taliban shot from the hip, spray and pray. If Allah wanted you to die, their bullet would find you.

  “Then an Article 93.”

  “It was dismissed, sir.”

  “I know.” He sat up straighter, opened his eyes. “Which is all the more reason you should be able to talk about it. The incident that landed you here has been dismissed too. You don’t have any trouble talking about that, do you?”

  I had been waiting in the lounge of a restaurant, a nice place I’d become a regular at, to meet a girl from Match.com. No-show. I went out the back and some jerk was trying to break into a car, had himself a slim jim, just popping the lock open, and I nailed him, tied his hands to the car door, when the police roll up. It turned out the guy was getting into his own car, had locked the keys inside. I was in some kind of mood, so they arrested me, figured out I was a vet that wasn’t quite right, and dumped me at the VA hospital. The guy turned out to be another vet and dropped charges. Zilker heard all of this, twice.

  “They tased you, Robert. They don’t do that just because somebody’s in a bad mood. You were probably scaring them.”

  “Pepper sprayed me too.” You get teargassed in boot camp, though, and learn to deal with it. I rubbed my chest gently, a little scab there from one of the needles. “When am I getting out of here?”

  “You think you’re ready to leave? You still can’t talk about your last day in the field.”

  He had me. If I’d had a flak vest on, I could have walked away. I would have walked, if they hadn’t pushed my buttons. Since I got back it feels like everybody wants to push my fucking buttons, push each other’s buttons, everybody with some arrogant fucking attitude, trouble just staying out of each other’s faces. Kids are the worst.

  “Robert? Let’s try something easier. Talk about growing up. Why’d you join the Army?”

  I looked at him. Innocent enough; he just wants to know. “My mother died. Right after I turned fifteen. Didn’t have anyplace else to go.”

  “You didn’t join when you were fifteen.”

  “Of course not. Had a foster family through high school. The Dunhams. They didn’t have any money for college for me.”

  “They treat you well?”

  “Wasn’t too bad. Mr. Dunham worked for the border patrol; didn’t talk much. Taught me how to play chess. John, his son, was a jock. Three of us went up in the hills once on horses, spent the weekend, Mr. Dunham pointing out what he knew about the stars, and every tree we passed. John was bored, rolling his eyes”

  “You get along with John?”

  “He had to share his room with me. Resented it. Pulled my bookmarks out, put my dirty underwear back in the drawer, forgot my name when his friends came by. Treated me like somebody with a disease. Had a little sister, Kaye, about nine. Got into my suitcase a few times, but overall she was a nice kid.”

  “Mrs. Dunham. Was there a Mrs. Dunham?”

  “Yeah.” The couch in the lounge seemed so available. I stood, walked over, lay down and stretched. Zilker turned his chair and smiled. “Comfortable?”

  “Yeah. Very.” The cushions enveloped me. Great little blue pill—nothing could harm me on that couch.

  “Good. You were going to tell me about Mrs. Dunham.”

  “Janice. Janice Dunham drove a Volkswagen Thing she’d painted pink. She was younger than Mr. Dunham, ran five miles a day, did yoga. Incredible cook.” Must have been my second autumn with them. Back seat full of groceries, top down, helping
her carry bags into the kitchen. I relived that afternoon, smiling to myself. Several minutes passed.

  Zilker cleared his throat.

  “Had a nice body in a grown up, happy kind of way. Read a lot. Novels mostly. When I started picking them up she made a point of tossing them on my bed when she was finished.” I yawned. “We’d talk about them sometimes.” I closed my eyes. “Symbolism. I remember once she asked me if the Judge in Blood Meridian was a symbol of Uncle Sam.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “No, I said. I think it’s pretty plain he’s the devil.”

  “I haven’t read that one.”

  “Total, total fucking war.” I felt adolescent saying it like that, and I didn’t want to talk about the book anyway. The couch didn’t want me talking like that either. It felt nice not being angry; I hadn’t been so un-angry in years, good things coming back. Hadn’t thought of Janice in a long time.

  “Once, after she’d had a couple of glasses of wine, right before I graduated and I’d already announced I was going in the Army, she hugged me. We were in the kitchen and Mr. Dunham was out of the house somewhere.” I opened my eyes. “Not the kind of hug moms give their sons. Firm, fingers down my chest as she let go. My God, I remember how she felt. The lightness of her scent.”

  Zilker sat up, pen drooping, pad in the other hand. “Anything else between you?”

  “No. Christ no! She was my new mom. I just remember thinking, Going in the Army, I’ll find somebody like her someday. Wasn’t going to settle for less.”

  Zilker turned his watch face up, seemed surprised. “We’re out of time.”

  “She had a little streak of gray in her hair,” I added, about to describe the curl, the thickness, still on the couch, trying to remember what she smelled like.

  Zilker was already at the door but turned and ran his fingers over his head. “We all do. You might, too, if you’d let it grow out. Tomorrow, we talk about your mom.”

  –––

  After lunch I sat in the TV room, wondering if there was anything I’d told Zilker I could really be sure of, and watched Bridge on the River Kwai. One of those flicks where bullets don’t leave any marks, but I love Alec Guinness. Always imagined my father might have turned out like him if he’d lived. Guzman typically sat in the back and ad-libbed all sorts of stupidity and ruined TV for everybody, made farting sounds, talked about his dick if a girl was on camera, but that day he wasn’t there. Whatever Zilker had given me started wearing off, and my knee throbbed.