Chapter 43: Aftermath

It looked like almost the entire platoon had arrived, led by Lieutenant Southerland. They rolled up to the front gate, actually driving over various body parts as they did so and stopped. The crashed Apache blocked the way in. The first guys to come inside the compound simply stood there and stared at the carnage, though a couple of guys tossed their cookies. Eventually somebody noticed I was standing there and Southerland and another couple of guys ran over to me.

“Sergeant Reaper! Sergeant Reaper!”

I tried to point towards the bunker but started toppling over. Southerland grabbed me. I struggled back upright and pointed at the bunker again. Since I could only use my right arm and hand, and I had my Beretta in my hand, I was pointing it at the bunker. One of the guys from Second Squad grabbed it from me before I shot myself or somebody else. “The bunker...” I tried to say it clearer, but my voice was almost gone, and I couldn’t hear very well after the artillery barrage. “The bunker...”

Southerland ordered, “Help me with Reaper and get somebody to the bunker. NOW!”

I collapsed a second time and screamed as I landed on my shot-up leg. Then I rolled onto my broken arm and screamed again.

“It’s all right, Sergeant, we’re here, we’ve got you.”

It wasn’t all right. I had to get to the bunker. I tried crawling, but Southerland was in the way. “The bunker ... let me ... bunker...”

“We’ve got guys at the bunker, Sergeant. MEDIC!” He turned me over to another soldier and stood up.

I just tried to get to the bunker. Hands kept pushing me onto my back, and then things got very calm and black.

When I woke up, I knew I was in a hospital, but beyond that I was at a loss. I could look around and see some white walls, but not much else, and my arms and legs were strapped down. I drifted off and went back to sleep. I popped in and out of consciousness several more times before I was finally awake and coherent. I looked around and was by myself. “Hello?” My voice was raspy and weak, so I tried clearing my throat, but that simply made me cough.

That was sufficient, though. A nurse came from somewhere and smiled. I think she smiled, anyway, since she had a face mask on. “You’re awake? Sergeant Reaper, how are you feeling?”

“My guys...” I asked.

She grabbed a glass and poured some water in it, and then inserted a flex-straw. “Here, sip some water. You’ve been out for several days. Don’t try talking, just sip.” I did as I was told, and she instructed me to work my tongue around my mouth and swallow some of the water.

Eventually I felt well enough to speak. “Where’s my guys?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Sergeant.”

“My guys!” I demanded. I struggled to get upright, but pain shot through me, and I collapsed into the bed.

“Sergeant! Knock it off!” she ordered. I looked at her angrily, but she didn’t care. I kept my mouth shut. “Sergeant Reaper, I don’t know about your men. That doesn’t mean I don’t care. It means I just don’t know. We’ll find out for you. You have to be calm and behave, or you are going to take a nap until you do. Are we clear on that?”

I grimaced but nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. I know there are some people who want to talk to you, and they’ll probably know more about what happened. Right now, though, I need you to talk to me and tell me how you feel. Can you stay calm enough to do that?”

I sighed but nodded. “Yes, ma’am, sorry about that.”

“Forgiven. We’re on your side, Sergeant. Just let us do our jobs.”

“How bad is it, ma’am?”

She smiled at that. “Probably better than you have any right to be, Sergeant. I won’t go into it, but if you give me a few minutes, I’ll get you a doctor. Okay?”

“Not much I’m going to do about it if it’s not okay,” I replied.

“Just remember that!” she said, laughing. “Behave or I’ll make sure we use blunt needles and make ugly stitches.” She let me have some more water and then left.

The comment about the needles and the stitches reminded me of something my mother used to tell Jack and me whenever we got busted up playing football. I thought she’d like this nurse, whoever she was. In any case, there wasn’t much for me to do until she returned with a doctor, so I closed my eyes and rested. Better than I had a right to be could mean damn near anything, up to and including losing all my arms and legs. I wondered what Kelly would do when I told her I wouldn’t marry her and saddle her with a cripple.

I stirred awake when I heard a door open, and I turned my head towards it. My smiling and bossy nurse was there, along with a middle-aged guy with a stethoscope in his pocket. He must be the doctor. He was also gowned up and masked. They came closer and he said, “Sergeant Reaper, it’s good to see you awake. I’m Doctor Barclay. How are you feeling?’

“I don’t know yet. How bad was I hit?” I asked.

“I told you he was feisty,” commented the nurse.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“As far as you’re concerned, I’m the evil nurse who can make your recovery a living hell!” she replied. Then she smiled and added, “But you can call me Nurse Judy. My name’s Brentmeyer, Captain Brentmeyer.”

I looked over at Doctor Barclay. “Bossy, isn’t she?”

“The best ones usually are, son. So again, how are you feeling?”

“I’ll know better when I figure what had to be cut off.” I wasn’t sure how bad I was hit, but my legs seemed like they were gone, or at least my right leg was. The second seemed to be there, but I couldn’t move it.

“Calm down, Sergeant. All the pieces are still there. You’re just in really bad shape. Now, if you’ll give us a chance, we can sit you up a bit more and you can see for yourself.” He motioned to Captain Brentmeyer, who went around the bed and hit a switch on the bed, and it raised up a few inches more. Then he pulled the sheet up and showed both my legs still in their normal position, though both were heavily bandaged. “Now, will you calm down and cooperate with us? Please?”

A wave of relief washed through me. I could go home and marry Kelly after all! She wouldn’t have to deal with a cripple. Suddenly I wondered about something even worse. What if everything was still there but wouldn’t work any longer? What if I was a paraplegic or a quadriplegic? “How come I can’t feel anything?”

The doctor and nurse looked at each other, and then he said, “As far as we know, you don’t have any neurological problems.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ballpoint pen. “Tell me if this hurts.” Without much further ado he poked my right foot.

“Hey!”

“You felt that? Good!” He kept poking me and we quickly determined my arms, legs, hands, and feet were all still functioning. “Now, you want to tell me what’s going on?”

“Yeah, it’s just ... I’m engaged, Doc, but I told my fiancée I wouldn’t marry her until I was out of the Army, and I had made it home alive without ... well, with everything still in one piece. I wasn’t going to stick her caring for a cripple.”

He rolled his eyes and muttered, “Oh, good Christ!” He looked at me and said, “Well, everything is working fine. Her biggest problem is that she’s going to be marrying an idiot!”

For the first time, I felt like laughing. “I’ve told her that before. So’s my mother.” I looked over at Nurse Judy. “She’s an ER nurse herself.”

“At least somebody in the family has brains,” she told me. “Now, for the last time, will you settle down and tell us how you feel?”

“Yes, ma’am.” With that I told them that I mostly just felt a lot of pain, in my arms and legs and my back, and a bit of a headache. “What’s wrong with me? Where am I?”

Barclay sighed. “You’re at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, in Landstuhl, Germany. You were flown here from Baghdad three days ago.”

“Three days!” I just gaped at that.

“Sergeant, I have the unhappy mission to tell you that you actually died,” I stared at him, as he smiled. “Sort of, anyway. You were in terrible shape, you actually bled out there where you were hit, but they managed to get some plasma into you and do CPR on you in the chopper and get your heart started again. You are very lucky, very lucky indeed!”

“I died?”

“Well, a little, anyway.” He smiled. “One of these days you’ll land in front of St. Peter, and you can tell him you’ve already been there before.”

That totally stumped me. I looked at him and asked, “What’s wrong with me?”

“What isn’t?” commented Barclay. “You were right about your arms and legs. After they got you back to Baghdad and stabilized, you spent almost a day on the operating room table getting bullets and shrapnel pulled out of you. They actually were operating on you with an X-ray machine next to you so they could take quick photos and find more things to remove. I’d have to go over your records, but you have hundreds of stitches holding you together right now. You’ve also got breaks in all three bones in your left arm, along with your left collarbone. You had a compound fracture of your right fibula, that’s the smaller of the two bones in your right calf. Once you were stable, they put you on a transport here to Landstuhl.” He went into a little more technical detail, but that was the gist of it.

“What day is it?” I asked.

“It’s Monday, June Eleventh. Right now, you’re in the Intensive Care ward, but we’ll probably move you out of here now that you’re awake,” he said.

“When can I get out of here?” I asked.

“Sergeant, you are going to be in a hospital for quite a while. As it is, we are just waiting for you to stabilize before we send you home. You won’t be back at your unit for months,” he told me.

That brought me back to reality. My unit? I didn’t have a unit anymore. They had all died at Outpost Whiskey. I had nothing to go back to.

I almost missed what the doctor was saying. “Sergeant, there are some people who want to talk to you about what happened. I just want you to know that you’re going to be fine again. Yes, you’re hurting, and it is going to take a long time to heal, but you will heal. Just give it some time.”

“Yes, sir.”

I lay there for a couple of hours, wondering what would happen to me next. I had lost an entire rifle squad. What was the punishment for that? Court martial? Prison? Firing squad? It would have been better if they had just let me die there with the rest of my men. I kept seeing that final sight of the collapsed bunker. It was probably a good thing my arms were bandaged and strapped down, because I would have tried to do something otherwise. I ignored the nurses who came in and swapped out IV bags and took blood samples and did other hospital-type stuff.

Mid-afternoon I received a visitor. At first, I didn’t recognize him, but it turned out to be our battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Barstow, dressed up in a hospital gown, with gloves and a mask on. I didn’t even recognize him until he pulled the mask down. “Sergeant Reaper, it’s good to see you again.”

“Colonel Barstow?”

“That was one hell of a job you did the other day, Sergeant. I wanted to come by and tell you that before you went home.”

“Sir? What are you doing here? This is Germany! What...”

I could see him smiling under the mask. “The battalion will be rotating home in a few days, and I decided to go through Germany first. I wanted to see you and thank you.”

I just shook my head. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Whatever for, Sergeant?”

I looked at him strangely. “Sir, I lost the squad! I lost an entire rifle squad! They should have left me out there with them!”

“What in the ... Sergeant Reaper, you didn’t lose the squad! You saved it!”

“Sir? They all died! They were in the bunker when it was hit! I called in the strike! I killed them!”

He reached out and touched my shoulder, but it was my left shoulder and I flinched. “Sorry about that. No, son, you saved them. They dug five men alive out of the bunker. One of them died later, but that’s not your fault. You saved them, Sergeant Reaper! You saved them!”

I just shook my head. “I saw the bunker, sir.”

“Sergeant, I am not lying to you. The pilot and the gunner in the Apache? They’re both alive. So are Specialists Givens and Montoya. They pulled Corporal Fox out, too, but he died afterwards. I’m told he had been wounded getting the men into the bunker. He never made it off the operating table. Sergeant, you saved them!”

Listening to the casualty report was the last straw. Terrence Hollis, DeFrank Shaniq, Nanda Devi, Tomas Gonzalez, and Riley Fox. Out of eight of us, five had died, including my best friend in the world. I just started crying. Barstow left the room, and a few minutes later Nurse Judy came in and put something into my IV, and I went to sleep again.

I was a little calmer the next day when I woke up. There was a new face to see me when I woke, a large guy with a beard underneath his surgical mask. “How are you feeling, Sergeant Reaper?”

“Okay, I guess. Who are you?”

“My name is Doctor Steven Perlmutter. Your doctors asked me to talk to you,” he replied.

“Why?”

“Maybe because of my specialty. I deal with cases of stress. I’d like to talk to you about that if you’d let me.”

“Uh, okay.” Who was this guy, and what kind of stress? Suddenly it hit me, and my eyes popped open. “You’re a shrink! Oh, sorry, Shrinks don’t like to be called that, I heard.”

He smiled and nodded. “I’ve heard the term before, Sergeant. Don’t sweat it. I’ve been called a lot worse.”

“Huh. I’ve never been to a shrink before. I guess that means I’m crazy, right?”

He shrugged. “Do you think you’re crazy?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Besides, if I was crazy, wouldn’t I say I wasn’t? Or something like that? Who wanted me to see you?”

“That’s not important right now. Let’s just say that several people asked me to talk to you. A lot of people care for you, Sergeant Reaper. Why do you think they wanted me to see you?”

I sighed and looked away, but there wasn’t really anything else to look at. I turned back and said, “Probably because I said I killed my squad.”

“Tell me about that.”

He led me through what happened at Whiskey. I told him about the guys who died, and how I had to call in a strike on the compound. I told him about seeing the collapsed bunker, and how it was my fault. Eventually I wound down, and he had a chance to talk again.

“Sergeant, let me say a few things. First, if you are worried you are going crazy, or have already gone crazy, stop worrying. You’re not crazy. You have what we call ‘Survivor’s Guilt’, but that’s not crazy. It happens to a lot of people, not just soldiers, but people who have been through something awful and can’t figure out why they lived, and others didn’t. It happens to people in airplane crashes who don’t understand why the guy next to them died and they survived. Why did they survive when the boat sank and somebody else drowned, but they didn’t? Why did a hostage in a bank robbery die and the guy next to him live? This has nothing to do with what you did or didn’t do at Outpost Whiskey. It happens to soldiers and civilians alike. Do you understand that?”

I nodded. I had heard of it before. “Yeah, I suppose.”

“Okay, again, that does not make you crazy. That makes you human. Now, just as important, there are things you can do, things we can do, to help you with this. However, the first step is to recognize you have a problem. I don’t think it’s a serious problem, though, not in the sense that you can’t be helped. There are lots of things we can do, and as long as you are here, we’re going to do them.”

“Uh, okay.”

“Finally, here’s the important thing. This is one of those things where we start saying somebody really is crazy. It is not uncommon for people who suffer from survivor’s guilt to think suicidal thoughts. Tell me, have you thought anything like that, anything at all? I want absolute honesty!” Perlmutter said.

I looked away, but then turned back and shrugged. I just stared at my feet. “Yeah, some.”

He let out a breath. “Good!”

I looked at him, startled. “Good?”

“Yes, in the sense that you gave me an honest answer. I’d have been very worried if you had said you hadn’t thought that sort of thing. Being honest about a problem is the first step to getting a handle on it.”

I blinked in surprise at that. “Oh. I never thought about that, at least for going crazy.”

“Like I said, you’re not crazy, not at all. Now, I have other patients to meet with today. I’ll give some people the good word that you’re not as nutty as a fruitcake, okay?” he told me.

“It’s good that you’re so technical, Doc.”

He smiled. “Makes life simpler, doesn’t it? In any case, part of the therapy for survivor’s guilt is to understand precisely what happened. You might not like it, but there are going to be some people who will want to question you about what happened at Outpost Whiskey. It might be painful, but you need to talk to them. Can you do that?”

I shrugged again, as best I could. That was painful on the left side, with my busted arm and collarbone. “Sure. What’s the worst that could happen? If I screw up, will they send me to Iraq?”

“That’s the spirit!” He stood up. “We’ll talk some more, Sergeant. In the meantime, let me see about getting you out of here and into a normal room.”

“Thank you.” I watched him as he left. I didn’t know what to make of this. He said I wasn’t crazy, but then why was a doctor for crazy people going to treat me? I might not be a genius like Kelly, but I was smart enough to know the answer to that question. Still, he was good about getting me out of intensive care. Nurse Judy and Doctor Barclay checked me over that evening, and I was moved out of Intensive Care to a private room. They also unstrapped my right arm, so I could move it around some and scratch. It wasn’t as boring that way, either, since with a useable right hand I could hold a book or magazine and be able to read. Mostly, though, I slept.

The next morning, I was introduced to several officers from G-2, military intelligence, a pair of majors named Kinsley and Montooth, who had flown in from Baghdad. Now that I was out of Intensive Care, they didn’t have to gown up to see me. These guys were a lot better than the last G-2 major from Baghdad I had met, Halstead; they were human. They brought with them several briefcases with recon photos, and they even had a laptop computer that could play movies and audio on it. Very high-tech stuff. I had to go through the entire night with them, the attack, where everybody was stationed, and so forth. They had diagrams of the compound drawn up as well as photos, and I marked on them where each of us was, and when. They played back audio recordings from the radio calls I made to Anaconda Three. At the end, they even had overhead video from a drone, and photos of the compound the next day, after the attack, showing the utter carnage.

The debrief took three long days, and it was utterly exhausting. Of course, I was so weak I fell asleep several times. One of the more interesting questions Major Kinsley asked was, “Sergeant Reaper, what was the one thing that stood out most in your mind about the attack? If you had to use one word, what would that word be?”

I thought for a second and knew exactly the word to use. “It was professional. That’s the word I would use. Professional.”

The two officers debriefing me looked at each other, and then Kinsley asked, “Explain that, please.”

“I was thinking it even during the attack. Whoever was leading the attack knew what they were doing.”

“How so?” asked Major Montooth.

“Well, take your average hajji attack. Anywhere, not just along Route Indigo. These guys run around like chickens with their heads cut off, screaming la, la, la at the top of their lungs, going ‘ Allah Akbar!’, and shooting their AKs in the sky. Zero discipline, zero training, zero brains. Maybe they get lucky and take somebody with them, but the only reason they win is that there are so many of them and so few of us.”

“I’m following you. And this time?”

“Somebody on the Iraqi side knew what they were doing. They had training and they had combat experience. They blocked our reinforcements, used a combination of artillery, infantry, and missiles during the assault, and even had a contingency anti-aircraft capability. The individual hajjis might have been useless, but they were being led by somebody who knew what he was doing, and they must have had radio communications to coordinate it all,” I told them.

The two officers looked at each other and nodded. Major Kinsley said to me, “Sergeant, you sure you don’t want to go career? You get a degree and I’ll put you in for OCS myself. That’s a smarter analysis than I’ve heard from some West Point grads.”

“No, sir!”

They smiled at that, and then Montooth pulled a photo out of his briefcase and slid it over. “Did you ever see this man?”

It was a picture of a slender man with a bushy mustache in the uniform of an Iraqi Army officer, though I couldn’t read the insignia. “No, sir. Who is he?”

“That, I believe, is your opposite number. That is Colonel Nasim Tikriti, ex-Iraqi Army. He was in the Republican Guard. Since the Army was disbanded, he has been working with various insurgents and Islamists to develop the kind of fighting force you ran into the other night. We have radio intercepts that have been positively identified as Tikriti during the battle. You held your own against a short battalion of their best. Congratulations. He has been known to personally behead prisoners while they are still alive. You were playing against the varsity.”

I gulped at the thought and stared at the picture. A small battalion? I had a total of eight guys that night! Jesus! “A small battalion?” I said, sputtering it out. That was unbelievable. “We only had eight guys! None of our outposts have more than a dozen!”

They both nodded. Kinsley said, “Yeah, but that’s the total including the blocking forces. Figure three companies’ worth, but most of that was tied up blocking Route Indigo and running the mortars and anti-aircraft missiles. They’ve counted over eighty bodies around Whiskey and are pretty sure there are more. That part is still going on. Your battalion was delayed going home to be part of the response.”

“Oh?”

“You know that your platoon leader brought in a reinforcement convoy, right?” I nodded in understanding; I remembered everything. “What you might not realize is that we also flew in another entire platoon from Baghdad. Nobody wanted to let anybody get away. They kicked in a lot of doors and rounded up some very suspicious people.”

“This Tikriti guy?”

“No, sorry, he’s still out there.”

I grimaced at that. Major Montooth said, “Sergeant, let me just tell you that no matter how much you might think you are somehow to blame, or that you did something that got your men killed, the only person saying that is you. Look at it from my point of view. This Tikriti fellow managed to cobble together several hundred fighters into some semblance of a combat force, something beyond the usual nut jobs you described earlier. They were probably looking at Outpost Whiskey as an easy job, a milk run, good practice for something bigger down the road. Instead, you basically destroyed them as a fighting force. It’s hard to say what the total Iraqi casualties are but a common figure is three or four wounded to one dead. Work out the numbers. There are hundreds!”

“It goes beyond that, Sergeant,” added Kinsley. “These groups very much rely on the personal leadership of the guy in charge. By causing so many casualties when they should have walked right over you, you brought Tikriti down in their eyes. He is weaker now, not just in the forces available, but in his personal stature and authority. It won’t be easy for him to try this again. It will take longer, and he won’t have as many soldiers. This will save lives in the future; you can count on it.”

“I don’t know what to say. I just don’t know.”

They didn’t have too many more questions, and that was it for them. They thanked me for helping and said that they hoped I got better soon.

I had another conversation with Doctor Perlmutter. Some of what he told me made sense and reminded me of some past battles. I described how I had reacted after the attack on Camp Custer, when I received my first Silver Star, and how I had taken the blame for the losses. He smiled and said, “So if I have you right, you were taking the blame for guys being killed before you could even get to your post? That’s classic survivor’s guilt, Sergeant. It also tells me that you’ll get past this at some point, like you did then.”

“How do you get past it though? It’s not like I won’t remember it.”

“You’ll always remember it. You just will learn to cope with it a little better, and not let it control you.”

“I don’t know. Some days it feels pretty black,” I admitted.

“There will probably always be times like that, but they will be fewer and farther between, and you won’t think suicidal thoughts. Here’s something I want you to think about. One of the things that the Army looks for in selecting soldiers is teamwork and leadership. Tell me, were you ever on sports teams in school? You’re big enough to have played football or basketball.”

I smiled at that. “Football. I was co-captain on my high school team.”

“You guys any good?”

“We took the state championship my senior year!” Then I gave a wry smile. “Seems silly now, I guess.”

He nodded. “It may seem silly now, but I can tell you it’s one of the things that made you the soldier you are today. Being a good soldier isn’t just about knowing how to shoot or drive a truck or tank or fire a gun. It’s about teamwork and leadership. You know that because you’re a leader. The best soldiers are the ones who take responsibility, who set high standards for themselves, and who set high standards for others. Are you at all surprised when you feel like you have failed when the impossible happens? If you think about it, the Army wants the best, so we are selecting for people who will feel survivor’s guilt when the impossible does happen.”

I was going to have to think about that one. I wasn’t sure I was buying it, not totally anyway. The one thing I knew was that I just wanted to be alone for a while. Perlmutter visited me a day after the G-2 majors finished with me. “Sergeant, there’s not much more for you to do staying here in Germany. Medically speaking, you’re healing. You need to stay in a hospital for at least another month, but as far as your body is concerned, it’s all pretty routine. You’ve got to heal up, mend all the broken bones, and do enough physical therapy to be able to get around and get out of the hospital. Do you follow me on that?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve been injured before. When I was a teenager, I broke an arm and a foot and had to do PT after I got out of the casts.”

He nodded. “Same sort of thing. It takes time, but there is no reason for you to stay here and a lot of reason to go home. There’s probably an Army hospital a lot closer to your home than Landstuhl. Where would you like to go?”

That was a real stumper. No way did I want to go anywhere near the Army! I had disgraced myself and couldn’t imagine having to see any of the people I had known. That certainly ruled out the hospital at West Point, the Army hospital nearest to Fort Drum. I was ashamed, regardless of what Perlmutter might think; he hadn’t been there, he hadn’t promised to get his solders home, he hadn’t gotten them killed. I couldn’t face my family either so that ruled out the base hospital at Benning. I looked away from him and said, quietly, “Just send me to Walter Reed.”

“Grim...”

“Please. Do I have to go back to Fort Drum? I’m getting out now anyway. My commitment was up a few weeks ago. I can’t go back to my unit!”

“Grim...”

“Please!”

He sighed and nodded. “I’m going to mark that you need to see somebody there for your PTSD. Grim, this is something we can help with. Family is important for that.”

I didn’t budge, and he simply agreed to send me to Walter Reed. I didn’t know much about it, but I knew it was in Washington, D.C. and that was too far away from Matucket for my family to come looking for me. I just needed to be alone.

A day later I was packed up and shipped home. Doctor Barclay and Nurse Judy prepped me, but that wasn’t all that involved. They simply had to load me on a stretcher and tuck the sheets in around me. I still had IVs and tubes in me all over the place. They wished me luck and an ambulance took me over to the airport. The flight home was in a C-17 rigged as a hospital transport. That evening I was at Walter Reed in Washington. That was going to be my home away from home for the foreseeable future.

Once I arrived, I was checked in and assigned to a room. It was sort of like a regular hospital, in that it was a two-person room, although I was currently the only person there. The most notable thing about it, though, was that there was a telephone in the room. I couldn’t reach it, but it was there, and it was a vivid reminder that I was back home. Unlike Iraq, where you might have to wait to call home, at Walter Reed it was just a matter of picking up the phone and getting a dial tone. I had no excuse not to call home.