Thank You for Your Service by David Finkel

compact car Topeka would have been easier. But Sascha made the drive without hesitation. She needed to see if this program she knew nothing about was helping. In Kansas, he’d been taking forty-three pills a day for pain, for anxiety, for depression, for nightmares—were there fewer pills now? Was he still having flashbacks? Thrashing around in his sleep? Sleepwalking into closets, looking for his rifle? Could he now start telling her what had happened during the war? And could she tell him about what was happening to her? She’d had a dream the other night that was the worst dream she’d ever had. She’d given birth, and for some reason she had taken the baby and put it in a pressure cooker, and then she had woken up from the dream, terrified and alone. Could she tell him that soldiers aren’t the only people who have nightmares? Was he ready to hear that?
    She gets to Pueblo, checks into a hotel, and waits for visiting hours to begin. Nic, meanwhile, is being given his medications. Antidepressants. Mood stabilizers. Pill, water, swallow, pill, water, swallow, all under the observation of a nurse who after the last pill checks Nic’s mouth to make sure he swallowed them all. The pills are kept in a locked room behind the main desk along with cigarettes, which are doled out on breaks. When Nic is done, he is replaced by another soldier, and then another, twenty-three PTSD cases in all, including one who was blinded in an explosion and is being guided by a dog. So many soldiers with psychological injuries envy soldiers with physical injuries because those soldiers can see evidence that something is really wrong with them, but what to make of this poor eyeless soldier who doesn’t even get that benefit? The soldiers are especially tender with him. So is a nurse who walks over to him, not with pills, but with some donated items. “You hit the jackpot,” she says, placing them in his hands. There is a tube of shaving cream.There is a small bottle of body wash and a small bottle of shampoo. He runs his fingers over the labels.
    “Suave,” she says.
    “Fantastic,” the soldier says, smiling like he’s the luckiest blind man in the world.
    “Smoke break,” one of the other soldiers hollers now. “Smoke break.”
    “Level III smoke break,” a nurse calls out, checking the time. The smokers with Level III privileges are led out by an escort who has a key to unlock the door, and soon after they return, all of the soldiers go into a conference room for a session that their daily schedule lists as CPT Group.
    It’s a therapy session scheduled to last an hour, and the model for it, much like Topeka’s, is to get the soldiers to think about what happened to them by reading from their journals and talking with one another until they are no longer avoiding the subject. Of all the treatment protocols being used for PTSD, this form, called Cognitive Processing Therapy, is regarded as one of the more effective, but that doesn’t mean the hour will be easy. Doors have been punched after these sessions, furniture has been tossed, and walls have needed to be patched because at one time or another every one of the soldiers in this place has felt fucking violent.
    “All right. Everybody pay attention, and don’t talk when others are talking,” says the staff member leading the session, seated at the head of a long table. He thinks for a moment. “Also, don’t fart,” he pleads, and with that out of the way, the first soldier starts reading.
    He is a soldier who spent his war looking for hidden roadside bombs. “This is just something that’s been on my mind for quite a while,” he says. “It’s entitled Bombs Bombs Everywhere.” He sits at the head of the table with his journal, reading slowly, and if this were happening anywhere else guys would be laughing at him, or throwing beer bottles, or doing whatever it would take to get him to be quiet, cut it out, shut the fuck up, but they’re all here, in this place, in