‘There were four or five of them that spoke to the photographer, as far as I can remember. Tobias was among them. One of the others made the papers himself, a week or so later.’
‘How come?’
‘His name was Brett Harlan, from Caratunk.’
That name meant something. Harlan. Brett Harlan.
‘Murder-suicide,’ I said. ‘Killed his wife, then himself.’
‘With an M9 bayonet. Those were hard deaths. Specialist Brett Harlan, Stryker C, Second Saber Brigade, Third Infantry. His wife was on leave from the One Hundred and Seventy-second Military Intelligence Battalion.’
‘Damien Patchett served with the Second Saber Brigade.’
‘And so did Bernie Kramer.’
‘Who’s Bernie Kramer?’
‘Corporal Bernie Kramer. Hanged himself in a hotel room in Quebec three months ago.’
I thought of what Karen Emory had said to me: ‘They’re all dying.’
‘It’s a cluster,’ I said. ‘A cluster of suicides.’
‘So it seems.’
‘Any reason why that might be?’
‘I can give you general, but not specific. There’s a woman out of Togus, ex-military. Her name is Carrie Saunders, and I think she’d met both Harlan and Kramer. You should talk to her. She’s conducting research, and she came to me looking for some information: names of people who might be willing to be interviewed, both from my era and later. I gave her what I could.’
‘Bennett said that Carrie Saunders attended Damien’s funeral.’
‘She might have been at the church. I didn’t see her myself.’
‘What is she researching?’
Ronald finished his soda, crushed the can, and tossed it into a recycling bin.
‘Post-traumatic stress disorder,’ he said. ‘Her specialty is suicides.’
The sun rose higher. It had turned into a beautiful summer’s day, with clear blue skies and just the faintest of breezes, but Ronald and I were no longer outside. He had taken me into his small office, from which he was running Concerned Veterans of Maine. The walls were covered with clippings from newspapers, and tables of fatalities, and photographs. One, directly above Ronald’s computer, depicted a woman helping her injured son from his bed. The picture had been taken from behind, so that only the mother’s face was visible. It took me a moment to spot what was wrong with the photograph: almost half of the young man’s head was missing, and what was left was a network of scars and crevasses, like the surface of the moon. His mother’s face displayed a mixture of emotions too complex to interpret.
‘Grenade,’ said Ronald. ‘He lost forty percent of his brain. He’ll need constant care for the rest of his life. His mother, she doesn’t look young, does she?’ He said it as if noticing her for the first time, even though he must have stared at her every single day.
‘No, she doesn’t.’
And I wondered what would be better: for him to die before his mother, so that his pain could come to an end, and hers could take another, perhaps less wrenching, form; or for him to outlive her, so that she could have her time with him, and be a mother to him as she was when he was an infant, when the possibility of a life like this could only have come to her in a nightmare. The former would be best, I thought, for if he lived too long then she would be gone, and eventually he would become a shadow in the corner of a room, a name without a past, forgotten by others and with no memories of his own.
Surrounded by all of this, Ronald spoke to me of suicides and homelessness; of addiction and waking nightmares; of men left without limbs who were struggling to receive full disability from the military; of the backlog of claims, 400,000 and counting; and of those whose scars were not visible, who were damaged psychologically but not physically, and whose sacrifice was therefore not recognized as yet by their government, for they were denied a Purple Heart. And as he talked, his anger grew. He never raised his voice, never even clenched a fist, but I could feel it coming off him, like heat from a radiator.
‘It’s the hidden cost,’ he said at last. ‘Body armor protects the torso, and a helmet is better than no helmet. The medical responses are getting better, and faster. But one of those IEDs goes off beside you, or underneath your Hummer, and you can lose an arm or a leg, or take a piece of shrapnel in the back of your neck that leaves you paralyzed for life. Now you can survive with catastrophic injuries, but it might be that you’ll wish you hadn’t. You look at The New York Times, and you look at USA Today, and you see the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan rising in that little box that they use for the bad news, but not as fast as it once did, not in Iraq anyway, and you think that maybe things are getting better. They are, if you’re only counting the dead, but you need to multiply that figure by ten to count the injured, and even then there’s no way to tell how many are seriously wounded. One in four of those who come home from Iraq and Afghanistan needs medical or mental health treatment. Sometimes, it’s not available to them like it should be, and even if they’re fortunate enough to get a little of what they need, the government tries to shortchange them at every turn. You got no idea how hard it is to get full disability, and then the same men who sent those soldiers over to fight tried to close Walter Reed to save a dollar. Walter Reed. They’re fighting two wars, and they want to close the army’s flagship medical center because they think it’s costing too much money. This has got nothing to do with being for or against the wars. It’s got nothing to do with liberalism, or conservatism, or any other label that you choose to throw at it. It’s about doing what’s right by those who fight, and they’re not doing right by them. They never have. They never, ever have . . .’
His voice trailed off. When he spoke again, he sounded different.
‘When the government won’t do what it should, and the military can’t take care of its own injured, then maybe it falls to others to try and do something about it. Joel Tobias is an angry man, and it could be that he’s gathered others like him to his cause.’
‘His cause?’
‘Whatever Tobias is doing, it grew out of good intentions. He knew men and women who were struggling. We all do. Promises were made. They would be helped.’
‘You’re saying that the money from whatever they’re moving across the border was meant for injured soldiers?’
‘Some of it. Most of it. At first.’
‘What changed?’
‘It’s a lot of money. That’s what I hear. The bigger the sum, the greater the greed.’
Ronald stood. Our conversation was drawing to a close.
‘You need to talk to someone else,’ he said.
‘Give me a name.’
‘There was a fight at Sully’s.’ Sully’s was a notorious Portland dive bar. ‘It was after we buried the Patchett boy. A couple of us were in a corner, and Tobias and some others were at the bar. One of them was in a wheelchair, his trouser legs pinned up halfway to his groin. He’d had a lot to drink when he turned on Tobias. He accused him of reneging. He mentioned Damien, and the other guy, Kramer. There was a third name too, one that I didn’t catch. It began with R: Rockham, something like that. Boy in the wheelchair said that Tobias was a liar, that he was stealing from the dead.’