It was amazing what happened when you started doing the right thing.
He could see Midden and Peter inside the boat’s salon, talking quietly with Skinner, who lay wide-eyed and duct-taped on the teak floor. Skinner’s laptop was open on the chart table, waiting for the satellite connection.
The lights of Virgin Gorda were gone behind the headland when Peter came out of the salon with two cold bottles of Red Stripe.
He took a deep breath of the cool night air to settle the white static and closed the door behind him. “It’s done.” He handed Lewis a beer.
Lewis smiled, his tilted grin wide. “How much?”
“You won’t believe it,” said Peter. The breeze felt clean on his face, and the lights on the distant islands looked close enough to touch. The boat lifted on the waves and he felt his shoulders loosen and drop. “More than an honest man could make in a hundred lifetimes.”
“Never said I was an honest man,” said Lewis, his grin white in the dark night. “Four-way split, right?”
“Our deal was eighty-twenty, remember? Eighty for you, twenty for Dinah.”
Lewis shook his head. “I invalidate that agreement, motherfucker. Make it an even split, four ways. You, me, Midden, and Dinah.”
“What you do with your money is up to you,” said Peter. “I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“We’ll work that out,” said Lewis. “I got some ideas. Midden and Josie talking about the vet center, want to get it going for real.” Lewis flashed the tilted grin again. “Got some decent funding now. Do some good in the world. Could use us a jarhead.”
“I can’t spend the winter in Wisconsin,” said Peter. “If I’m stuck inside more than twenty minutes, I start climbing the walls. It took me eight Xanax to manage the plane trip here.”
“Got people you can talk to about that,” said Lewis, not unkindly. “Don’t have to be no permanent condition.”
Josie had told Peter the same thing, before she’d kissed him good-bye. She was staying in Milwaukee. She had work to do.
“Here’s the thing,” said Peter, and opened his arms to the warm Caribbean wind. A smile spread across his face. “Mostly I’d just rather be outside. Someplace where the weather isn’t trying to kill me.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The plight of America’s veterans is very real.
Most veterans come home and restart their lives. They go to work or school, reconnect with their families or start new ones. Thanks to improvements in battlefield medicine, more injured veterans survive their physical wounds than ever before.
But our country still doesn’t put enough effort into helping those veterans settle back into civilian life. There’s a great deal yet unknown about traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress, war wounds that are often not visible but can lead to significant challenges for those affected.
When I began researching this book in 2010, veterans had a significantly higher rate of homelessness and unemployment when compared to others of similar age and background. I’m glad to note that, according to 2013 reports by the Department of Veteran’s Affairs and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, these statistics are improving. But Stars and Stripes reported in 2014 that veteran suicide rates were actually getting worse, not better. Clearly these challenges are still substantial for everyone involved. For a country with our wealth, history, and ideals, we can continue to do better for those who have given so much to serve their country. On the positive side, many cities are making great strides in eliminating homelessness among veterans, although this remains an ongoing issue.
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I’m not an expert in veterans’ affairs. My primary goal is to entertain you, my readers. But if I’m lucky, perhaps the stories I invent will also have the ring of some kind of truth, will make you feel and think.
I made a point to avoid writing about Peter’s life overseas because I wasn’t there.
But in the years after 9/11, as the wars and those who fought them on our behalf became a significant part of the national conversation, I began to read and watch documentaries about service members’ experiences, both during war and coming home. I had friends and professional acquaintances and customers who’d been in the service, and talking with them illuminated a part of the American story that I hadn’t quite understood before.
Perhaps the most meaningful conversation I had was also one of the shortest. It was seven or eight years ago, but I remember it clearly.
I was inspecting a small older home for an Army veteran and his wife. He was at least fifteen years younger than me, back in the States for less than a month. He was smart and curious and polite.
When I learned where he’d been, I said to him, as I often did in the early years of those wars, “Thanks for your service.”
“Man, don’t say that.” He shook his head. “Don’t say ‘Thanks for your service.’ It drives me nuts.”