He paused again. Long enough that I wondered if he’d ever restart himself. Long enough that I found it hard not to shift in my seat. Everybody else seemed to manage to hold still and wait. Then again, they weren’t his kid brother.
“I can’t believe I’m about to do this,” Roy said. “I really don’t want to do this.”
But then he did.
“I didn’t enlist like this other guy,” he said. “You could’ve held a gun to my head and I wouldn’t have gone over there. If I hadn’t been drafted, I mean. And I didn’t get hooked on the drugs the army gave us, either. I hated speed. I wouldn’t even take it. I didn’t tell anybody I wasn’t taking it. I’d just hide it in my cheek and spit it out later. It made me all jangly and nervous, like the top of my head was about to come off. Like I couldn’t make my stomach hold still. Hell, I felt that way anyway over there, all the time. I didn’t need something to make it worse.
“It was all street drugs for me. Except the word ‘street’ is an exaggeration. Most of the places they had us stationed didn’t even have streets. But you could always get scag, and it was strong and it was cheap. And it was heaven. You could be right in the middle of hell and smoke that stuff and feel like everything was just fine. And I was right in the middle of hell, so that was handy.”
He stalled again. Everybody waited.
My stomach knots were twisting into stomach double knots.
“I hate to say all this in front of my brother. I think he sort of looks up to me. And believe me, he never will again. Not after he hears about this mess. But I guess sooner or later I was going to owe it to him to tell him how it all went down.
“Okay. Here goes. Man, I hate this.
“I was smoking all the time. Not just to wind down at night like most of the guys. All the time. Even when I knew there might be enemy fire. I just couldn’t face it any other way. I knew I was a sitting duck, loaded like that. Sometimes I could barely raise my arms, so I wouldn’t have been any too quick to fire back in my own defense. I guess I just got to the point where I didn’t even care anymore. Like I couldn’t even care. I just didn’t have it in me to care. I was scared out of my skin, and I just wanted to go home.
“What I finally ended up doing, I’d almost done it a dozen times before. Just so I could go home. I just wanted a quick ticket out of there. But I didn’t do it. I mean, until the day I did. Because of the guys. The other guys. I figured I owed it to them to stay. Anything less just seemed so selfish.”
I got that all-over tingle again. Waiting to hear what “it” was.
“But then I got this letter from my kid brother, saying he loved me and wanted me to come home safe. He’d never talked to me like that before. I guess war pulls all kinds of stuff out of you that you didn’t even know was in there. Even if you’re not actually over there fighting it. It just takes a toll on everybody.”
Something came into my head. Something my brother had said to me the first day he was home. After he told me he’d gotten the last letter I sent him. The one he was telling everybody about now.
Why do you think it all came down the way it did?
That’s what he’d said to me. And then he’d gone on to avoid telling me how it all came down. I almost thought I knew parts of it, especially after I’d had that conversation about it with Mrs. Dinsmore. But I had not been able to bring myself to ask the details of how it all came down. I guess I figured I had no right to ask. It was his life. If and when he wanted me to know, he would tell me.
Now he was about to tell me. Now he was about to tell everybody in the meeting.
I thought, Oh, holy hell, it was all my fault. Whatever he’s about to say, it was all my fault.
“So, we got pinned down and ambushed, and I was loaded. Really loaded. I was flying. We were taking fire from what felt like every direction, and I could just as easily have passed out as fired back. And then somehow my unit got on top of the thing, and whoever was shooting at us stopped shooting and retreated, and I was alive, and, like . . . entirely unhit. And I still can’t figure that out. I mean, is it true what they say about God looking after fools and babies? Or was I keeping my head down without even knowing it because I was so loaded? I honestly have no idea.
“The details are just really fuzzy, and not because a little time’s passed. It was fuzzy while it was happening. I just remember I was sitting there on the ground. Afterward. And my rifle, my M16, was on the ground beside my right leg. For some reason that part was clear. That part is, like, tattooed into my brain. I had my right hand on the rifle. And there was a dead guy on either side of me. Both of them were guys I knew. Not like my best friends or anything, but I knew them. I knew they’d been scared, like me, except I think they both handled it better. But maybe I only think that because I’d been on the inside of myself and on the outside of them. But I knew they’d wanted to get home, just
