Thank You for Your Service by David Finkel Page B

shared another fucking word with her.”
    He is crying. Three guys are standing up now, moving around, unable to sit still.
    “Anything else for this gentleman?” the session leader asks, and when there isn’t anything else, a third soldier takes his place at the head of the table and begins reading a story about a day his unit came upon a burlap bag and opened it to see what was inside. “It was an Iraqi chopped up into pieces,” the soldier reads. “So they called me over to police it up. I said, cool. Fuck it. I’m a medic. Oh well. I did it. Don’t getme wrong. It’s not like I picked up a fucking Dumpster full of dead bodies. It was kind of fascinating to me, really interesting seeing a dead human, especially in pieces. To see the lifeless eyes, and the end of life, was amazing. Even with all the war wounds I’ve seen in my lifetime,” he says, and goes on about being a medic, and seeing bodies chewed on by dogs, and “the smell, the fucking smell,” and what he did one day to an Iraqi as a result of all that. “There were times as I would render aid to soldiers, the platoon leader said, ‘What about the Iraqis?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ as I took my time to get to them, and it was a long time. As a medic I should take care of people, but I was pissed. So I would just take my time. To make it short, I gave this one guy a needle decompression for the hell of it. I know it hurt. But fuck it. As far as I knew, he had helped emplace a fucking IED. Did I care? No. Do I care now? No. Was that right? Fuck it.”
    Silence.
    Everyone’s twitching now.
    “I know what you mean,” another soldier finally says. “We never had any remorse for anybody we saw dead. Because fuck it.”
    “I guess I’m trying to learn compassion again,” the medic says.
    “We used to occupy an Iraqi police station,” Nic says, “and every once in a while, the Iraqi police would bring in dead bodies, a couple of dead bodies, they’d throw ’em in the back of a truck, bring ’em in, shit like that, and at the time, this was the beginning of my deployment, we’d all run down there and go take pictures. You know? And one guy his head was chopped off, his body was all bloated and shit because it had been sitting in raw sewage, you know? And now I can’t get those images out of my mind. At the time, though, it was: Yeah, this is so cool. This is so cool. I mean, what were we thinking? Why did we even want to go look at that shit? You know?”
    “Yeah, I just remember this one time, I don’t talk about it, I got a picture of it,” another soldier says, describing a day he found a skeleton, mostly bone, still some skin, and he picked up a piece of it. “The femur or something like that. I got pictures of me looking like I’m taking a bite out of it,” he says. “What was I thinking?”
    “Exactly,” Nic says. “I had a hard drive that I destroyed. Pictures and stuff like that, next to dead bodies, shit like that. Horrible, horrible stuff. Horrible stuff. Us hanging out with dead bodies. At the time, I mean we were rockin’ and rollin’, we were mean mean killing machines. Now I look back and I’m like, God, what were we doing? What were we thinking?”
    Everyone is talking now except for one sweet-faced soldier who looks to be the youngest of all and is suddenly shaking. His eyes flutter and roll back in his head, and he blinks them back into place. He holds up his right hand, watches it tremble, and grabs it with his left hand until whatever is happening passes through him. He takes a sip of soda. He is steady again. But not for long, because as the medic starts talking about the next thing that happened to him, he tears up, grabs some tissues, and covers his face.
    “And it really hit me when I saw my first baby come in burned” is what the medic is saying. He is no longer reading, just talking, surely a step toward habituation. “Dipped in boiling water and skin sloughing off,” he says. “And you know what? I got to