He pressed his eyes against the heels of his hands. Rubbed them hard.
I thought I was going to explode waiting to hear. Even though most of me already knew.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said, dropping his hands to the table again. “This is so stupid. I can’t believe I’m about to tell a bunch of people that I did something this stupid. But I guess this is the place for it, right? Because it was definitely the drugs that made what I did so extra stupid. My life would be so different right now if I hadn’t been so loaded in that moment. But I was, and time is never backing up again, and I’m never getting my foot back, and I just have to live with that.
“Here’s the part where the scag messed me up. Here’s what I thought I was about to do. I thought I could put a bullet hole through my foot. You know. Just a hole. And in time it would heal. Maybe I’d have to have surgery to sew all those muscles and tendons back together. And physical therapy to walk normally. But I figured it would be enough to get me home. And I’m not saying I thought very clearly about all those details right then, but hopefully you know what I mean. I just figured I could hurt myself bad enough to get home but not enough to totally change my life forever. But it was a really stupid, really loaded set of thoughts. Because here’s what I forgot to consider. It was a point-blank shot. I’d seen bullet holes made by M16s. More than I could count. If I hadn’t seen so many of them, I might not’ve been so desperate to get out of there. But I wasn’t considering that those bullet holes were shots fired from a long distance. They were not point-blank shots. This was a point-blank shot. I was too loaded to understand that it was about to shred my foot so badly that some amputation would be required.
“And there’s another thing I messed up on. I didn’t take into account that it would be pretty obvious what I’d done. Somehow I thought I’d be scooped up with the other wounded, and that would be that. We’d all be treated as having been injured in the firefight. But I guess the army’s not that stupid. And also it’s possible I might not’ve been the first guy to go to such lengths to get out of there.”
I sat, listening to an invisible echo of his words around the room. I looked at the faces to see if they were judging my brother. They weren’t. Not as far as I could tell. They were listening. Just listening.
My brain filled with the image of myself in Connor’s bedroom, holding that gun and box of bullets in my hands. I remembered that feeling—the one where you’d thought you knew, but now that you really knew, it was just a whole different game of cards.
But my brother was still sharing.
“So that’s my message about drugs if there’s anybody in this room who needs one. Probably mostly just me, right? I mean, they really make you that stupid.
“But, you know what? It’s a weird thing to say, but I think if I had it to do over again, I’d still do it. Bad discharge and all. Permanent maiming and all. Because I got home. I might not’ve gotten home if I hadn’t. I think about it sometimes, and I feel bad for the other guys. The ones I left behind over there. I feel like I let them down. And it’s true, I did. But I made this huge sacrifice to get out of there. If they decided it was worth half their foot, they could get out, too. Sometimes I think that. Other times I think I’m the biggest jerk in the world, and I’m not sure which is true. Both, maybe. Maybe both parts of the thing are true. But it’s not like I left them undermanned over there. They’ll just draft somebody else to take my place . . .”
He trailed off, and his face looked shocked. Like I was watching the blood drain out of it.
“Oh hell,” he said. “I never thought of that. That’s another thing I get to feel terrible about. I’m not trying to justify myself to you. You can think whatever you need to think about me. Hell, there’s nothing you can call me that’s any worse than what I call myself every day. But I’m just going to say this, and it’s not an excuse. It’s just the damn truth. What did they think would happen? Take a bunch of guys straight out of high school and send them into that hell. Take away everything that was ever familiar to them and tell them to kill and die, to watch their friends dying in horrible ways all around them. We were kids. We thought we were men until we got there, and then once we were there, it was so clear that we were just kids. I know there are plenty of guys who handled it way better than me. But how can you put kids in a situation like
