All Is Not Forgotten(39)

I did not presume to know which memories were hiding in Sean’s brain, or Jenny’s. It was a fact-finding mission, and it had to be done carefully. I have alluded to my concerns about suggestions becoming memories themselves during reconsolidation, and how this can corrupt the process of true memory recovery. You can see how this could happen, can’t you? What if I told Sean his friend died in his arms before he himself lost consciousness, how blood was flowing from his mouth as he tried to speak, and how terror flooded his eyes? A hand reached out and grabbed hold of his left arm, and maybe a cry of pain made him shiver with his own fears of death. And then he looked down and saw his right arm mangled, flesh spilling out between shattered bones and ligaments, and he knew he would never be whole again. You can see how he might come to think these to be true and then to wonder if he witnessed them and finally to feel and see them as actual memories.

Sean and I gathered the facts. We collected reports from the field, interviews with other soldiers who served in that area and had been inside that town. Sean spoke to the marines who saved him and the interrogators who eventually captured some of the insurgents and could describe what they looked like. We even had pictures of some of them, the ones who were killed. Sean had low-level security clearance. But the soldiers were willing to bend the rules for him. I believe the process of talking to these soldiers, of reconnecting with “his people,” was therapeutic in and of itself. He felt he had them on his side. He also had his wife and his son and his family. Now he had me.

Soon, he would have Jenny.

We were able to reconstruct the mission from the original plan. Sean remembered much of the plan, and we presumed that he had followed his orders in the field. We used a computer program to construct a virtual image of the town—like a video game. It is amazing how realistic these images are now. And then we worked, sometimes for hours at a time, walking Sean through the virtual village, his comrade beside him. We played audio taken from documentaries, the sound of the dirt crunching beneath his boots, the short, concise messages coming through the radio. The audio re-created what was heard during his actual mission. Sean would fill in the blanks with actions he knew he would have taken. I would read from the script we’d re-created using every piece of information we had gathered. Nothing else was added.

“You turn the next corner. There’s one shot heard in the distance.”

The audio would play the shot being fired.

“Medic! Medic! Oh f*ck! Fuck! Miller down! Miller’s down, man! Medic! Oh, f*ck no! No!” I would read the script.

My heart jumps out of my chest, but I keep my shit together. Stop dead, back against the wall. Look up to the rooftops, look in windows. Shooter couldn’t be this close, but there could be another one. They know we’re here. Maybe knew all along and were just waiting. That thought must have come. Valancia would be shitting his pants. This was his first real mission, and he was a little bit of a *. We keep moving.

The session would go on like this until we got to the place where the bomb went off. We had an actual image of that street and the red doorway where he and Hector Valancia were found. The marines did not find any debris indicating where the bomb had been hidden. There was speculation that it had been cleared before they arrived. It had taken close to twenty minutes to secure the area. They were both presumed dead.

“There are people on the street. You’re getting close to the red door. The red door is the location of the insurgent you’ve come to capture or kill. It’s just you and Valancia now. Six men are down. The marines are on the way.”

Valancia’s telling me to pull back. I know he is. I can picture him, his face. He’d be tugging at my sleeve, saying something like, “This is no good, man. No good.”

“Let’s be clear, though. You don’t remember him saying that, but it’s likely he would have wanted to leave.”

Yeah. More than likely. We’d been in there for five minutes, and we had six men down. Valancia would cut and run. I know what I’d be thinking.

“What is that?”

Kill this motherf*cker or die trying.

“And Valancia would follow you?”

Sean would pause here, close his eyes, and swallow it down. Yeah. He would follow me. And then he would get his f*cking head blown off.

We would go through the data we had, reliving each moment the best we could. Looking for these memories, these files, was maddening at times. It was like looking for lost car keys in a cluttered house. You retrace your steps, try to recall the last time you used them. You tear up the place, looking under couch cushions and carpets and in the pockets of every jacket and pair of pants. Sometimes we found traces, the equivalent of loose change. He remembered Valancia tripping in a small hole along the dirt road. And the smell of meat cooking, though he could not recall looking for its source, something he surely would have done. An open window, perhaps. But the big event had evaded him. Evaded us. At least with car keys, you know they didn’t “vanish into thin air.” With Sean’s memories, and later Jenny’s, there was always that possibility, and so we never knew when it was time to stop and give up the search. I will just say that the process of looking seemed to help both of them, and this made it easier to continue the work.

There were fifteen seconds between Sean’s radio report that they had a visual on the red door and the next communication. That second report, the last one, indicated that there were seven civilians in the street, women, children, old men. Sean said this would have made him extremely nervous. That he would have been tempted to turn back then.