‘Because they were like me. They shared my purpose.’
‘Which was?’
‘To find the man who killed my wife and child. To find him, and to tear him apart.’
The answers were coming more quickly now. I was surprised, even angry at myself for letting this stranger get beneath my skin, but there was a pleasure in it too, a kind of release. Perhaps I was a narcissist, or perhaps I had simply not been so clinically incisive with myself in a very long time, if ever.
‘Did you feel that you had a future?’
‘An immediate one.’
‘That lay in killing this man.’
‘Yes.’
She was leaning forward slightly now, a white light in her eyes. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, until I realized that I was seeing my own face reflected in the depths of her pupils.
‘Arousal symptoms,’ she said. ‘Difficulty concentrating.’
‘No.’
‘Exaggerated responses to startling stimuli.’
‘Like gunshots?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘No, my responses to gunshots weren’t exaggerated.’
‘Anger. Irritability.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sleeping difficulties.’
‘Yes.’
‘Hypervigilance.’
‘Justified. A lot of people seemed to want me dead.’
‘Physical symptoms: fever, headache, dizziness.’
‘No, or not excessively so.’
She sat back. We were nearly done.
‘Survivor guilt,’ she said softly.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Yes, all the time.
Carrie Saunders stepped from her office and came back with two cups of coffee. She took some sachets of sugar and creamer from her pocket and laid them on the desk.
‘You don’t need me to tell you, do you?’ she said as she filled her cup with enough sugar to make the spoon stand upright without a hand to support it.
‘No, but then you’re not the first one to try.’
I sipped the coffee. It was strong, and tasted bitter. I could see why she was adding so much sugar to it.
‘How are you doing now?’ she asked.
‘I’m doing okay.’
‘Without treatment?’
‘I found an outlet for my anger. It’s ongoing, and therapeutic.’
‘You hunt people down. And, sometimes, you kill them.’
I didn’t reply. Instead, I asked: ‘Where did you serve?’
‘In Baghdad. I was a major, initially attached to Task Force Ironhorse at Camp Boom in Ba Qubah.’
‘Camp Boom?’
‘Because there were so many explosions. It’s called Camp Gabe now, after a sapper, Dan Gabrielson, who was killed at Ba Qubah in 2003. It was basic as anything when I got there: no plumbing, no a/c, nothing. By the time I left there were CHEWS, central water for the showers and latrines, a new power grid, and they’d begun training the Iraqi National Guard there.’
‘CHEWS?’ I said. I felt as though I were listening to someone speaking pidgin English.
‘Containerized housing units. Big boxes to you.’
‘Must have been hard, being a female soldier out there.’
‘It was. This is a new war. In the past, female soldiers didn’t live and fight alongside men, not the way they do now. It’s brought its own problems. Technically, we’re barred from joining combat units, so instead we’re “attached” to them. In the end, we still fight, and we still die, just like men. Maybe not in the same numbers, but over a hundred women have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and hundreds more have been injured. But we’re still called bitches and dykes and sluts. We’re still open to harassment and assault by our own men. We’re still advised to walk in pairs around our own bases to avoid rape. But I don’t regret serving, not for one minute. That’s why I’m here: there are a lot of soldiers who are still owed something.’
‘You said you started at Camp Boom. What about after that?’
‘I was seconded to Camp Warhorse, and then to Abu Ghraib as part of the restructuring of the prison.’