Thank You for Your Service by David Finkel Page A

this room, and when his voice cracks as he says, “I still see the bombs, I see bombs all the time,” a few of them duck their heads because of what they’re seeing, too. “Make it stop,” he reads. “Make the bombs go away. I don’t want to see them anymore. How do I become normal? How can I stop seeing bombs?”
    He looks up from his journal and sees who is listening to him. Heads hang. One guy is in sunglasses. Feet are tapping. Legs are twitching. Another guy presses his hands between his knees and then stands up from the table, too nervous to sit. Nic is standing, too, at the far end, and he asks the guy who has been reading, “What kind of vehicle were you driving?”
    “I was the Husky guy.”
    “The Husky’s the big one?” Nic asks.
    “It’s the vehicle that goes in front of the convoy.”
    “You were in Iraq, right?” another guy asks.
    “Yes.”
    “Were you hit?”
    “Yeah.”
    “It’s hard being the first one,” someone else says, another Husky driver, an Afghanistan guy, “because, I mean, you have the whole convoy coming behind you, and if someone behind you gets hit, you feel bad because you’re supposed to be the one to find it.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Let’s talk about habituation,” the session leader says. “Think about when you guys go see a scary movie. The first time you see a scary movie, at least for me, it sucks. I get home, and I have nightmares, and I’m frustrated, and I don’t sleep well, and just whatever because I’m a wuss at scary movies. If I go see the same scary movie the next day, and I go see it a third day, the third day, it’s still a little bit scary, but it’s not getting to me as bad. The fourth and fifth day is when I’m starting to sit there and I’m actually starting to get a little bit bored. The tenth time I see that scary movie, I’m like, okay, cue Freddy Krueger, here’s the cheerleader who gets her neck cut off, here’s the blood, and now the chain saw, and I’m getting bored. It’s the same principle with explosions for you guys. If you guys can go to a place and have the experience repeatedly and stay with it until it starts to dissipate, that’s when the explosion starts to be less and less impactful. It’s called habituation. To habituate. Make sense?”
    And it does make sense until the next soldier starts reading what he has written. “Here goes,” he begins. “I personally never shot a roundinto somebody but goddamn if I didn’t see my fair share of deaths, charred bodies, and dismembered—” He pauses for a moment, and when he resumes he describes the thing he is trying to habituate, a day in which he discovered a pile of skulls. He had no idea what to do, he says. He didn’t know who they were. Insurgents? Victims? Men? Women? He decided that taking them back to the base was the right thing, so he picked them up, skull by skull, loaded them into his vehicle, began driving, and then, near the base, pulled over. “What the fuck was I doing?” he reads. “I kicked them off. I booted the skulls into the ditch next to the road, and drove through the gate thinking, ‘Fucking ragheads.’ ”
    “That story right there,” Nic says. “Would you tell your wife that story?”
    “The first time I ever told my wife about an Iraq incident was two weeks ago,” he says.
    “How’d she take it?” Nic asks.
    “She started crying,” he says. “She said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ She didn’t know.”
    “I think the fact that she took it like that? That shows right there how much she cares about you,” Nic says.
    “If you told her that story and she started crying, be grateful,” someone else says. “I told my wife some of my stories about my experiences, and her response to me was ‘You knew what you were getting into when you signed on the dotted line and I don’t feel sorry for you.’ And you know what? That fucking killed me. She didn’t give a shit about me. When she said that to me, I turned to the bottle, and I never