Until Tuesday by Bret Witter, Luis Carlos Montalván Page A

parents and their friends. They smiled and patted me on the back, telling me sincerely how proud they were. It felt nice to be appreciated, but after that night, I couldn’t sleep. I stayed awake for days, trying to shake the images, and when I finally did fall asleep I was troubled by dreams. I drove to Miami with an Army buddy but developed a splitting headache that kept me on edge. Silence descended; I felt separated from the world. When I recovered, I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to go out on the town. There were beautiful women walking around the pool at the Clevelander Hotel all day, but I was distracted by my thoughts. All I wanted to do was drink.
    Back at Fort Carson, I continued to drink. I was sucking down half a bottle of Motrin a day, but it was no longer dulling the pain. By the afternoon, I usually had a headache, and the migraines were sometimes so bad I threw up half of the night. Even on good nights, I only slept three or four hours, wracked by back spasms and vertigo. I started drinking at night, alone, trying to knock myself out, and waking up most mornings so sore and stiff I could barely get out of bed.
    My marriage died. We had dated for two years and were married by a justice of the peace in a park near Fort Knox, Kentucky, shortly before I deployed overseas. Amy wanted to be there for me and I wanted to be there for her, but in the stress of preparing eighty soldiers to deploy to Iraq, I sent her away. She was hurt and lonely and soon, she told me, fell into depression. I was obsessed with my work, and in particular with a refugee crisis: ten starving Indian nationals who had been beaten and robbed by the Syrians, and I was ordered to deny aid to them. The U.S. Army didn’t want to establish a precedent, but I was the one who had to look those men in the eye. I defied orders and saved the Indians by arresting and feeding them, but I couldn’t save my marriage. I received one letter from my wife during the first half of my tour; when I was wounded, I didn’t even call her. I called Mamá instead. I thought I could save my marriage when I returned to the United States. I spent the first few weeks in Colorado writing emails and calling. The day before the slide presentation with my parents, I traveled to Maryland, where my wife was living, and met her at the Applebee’s near Arundel Mills Mall. I was desperate to reconcile, but within ten minutes I knew it was over, and we ended up drinking our sorrows instead. I drank those sorrows for weeks, sucking them down with Motrin and regret.
    I wasn’t the only one in trouble. When we learned the Third Cavalry was on short rotation stateside and we were going back to Iraq in the spring, soldiers scattered. I mean, they just disappeared. They left the Army, or they transferred to other units, anywhere they could find a place. A few were cowards or shirkers, but most realized they weren’t in any condition to go back. There was no counseling in those days, no attempt to deal with the psychic wounds of war, and my troop was unraveling: fighting, drinking, splitting with wives and girlfriends, arguing about everything and nothing at all. There was a burst of thrill seeking—driving fast, jumping out of airplanes, rampant sex—anything to restart the adrenaline pumping. Pfc. Tyson Carter, one of my workhorses from Al-Waleed, lost a leg in a motorcycle accident. Another soldier was arrested in Colorado Springs; I drove there in the middle of the night to prevent him from being jailed. Being a leader of men in the Army is an honor, but also a responsibility. There’s no nine-to-five, home to the family and forget about the office, like the civilian world. My life was intertwined with my men, and their off time was my responsibility too. We joked about bad dreams, about drinking too much, about how none of us could drive under a highway overpass without switching lanes, even in traffic, because we didn’t want to give the bomber on the bridge an