Redeployment(77)

“So you try to remember—”

“This way, it’s me remembering what happened,” Jenks says. “I’d rather that than be walking down the street and I smell something and the day remembers itself for me.”

“PTSD,” she says.

“No,” he says, his voice sharp, “I’m fine. Who wouldn’t have a few weird reactions? It doesn’t mess with my life.”

He taps his paper. “I’ve written this twenty times,” he says. “I always start with the explosions, the smells.”

I want to smoke a cigarette. I’ve got a pack in my pocket, my last from a carton I picked up visiting friends in the Carolinas. In this city, smoking’ll kill your bank account way before it kills your lungs.

“So you got knocked out…,” Sarah tries again.

“No,” I say. “He was awake.”

“I was frozen,” Jenks says. “My eardrums had burst. I couldn’t hear.”

“But you heard screaming?”

Jenks shrugs again.

“Sorry,” Sarah says. Jessie’s eyes are on Sarah. She looks unhappy.

Jenks goes back to reading from the papers. “I kept thinking, I can’t move, why can’t I move? And I couldn’t see, either. The only reason I can see today is I was wearing Eye Pro. I had shrapnel in my head, face, neck, shoulders, arms, the sides of my torso, my legs. I couldn’t see, but my eyes worked. I went black. I woke up, still on the road. The smells were the same.”

Your smells are off, I think.

“There was burning inside my body. The shrapnel in my skin and organs was still red hot and burning me from the inside while I burned from the outside. Ammo was cooking off inside the vehicle and one round struck my leg, but I didn’t know it at the time. Honestly, I was so out of it. I feel more sorry for the guys who had to rush in and treat me than for myself.”

This is Jenks’s standard line. It’s utter bullshit.

He turns to me. So do the girls. “It was what it was,” I say. “Not the greatest day.”

Jessie laughs. Sarah looks at her like she’s crazy.

“Memory gets really spotty after that,” Jenks says. “There’s this drug, Versed, it kills your recall. I guess that’s good. So this is all stuff they told me after the fact.” He looks down at his papers and starts flipping through while we all wait. I sip beer. Then he starts reading. “They pumped blood into me using a power infuser. At one point I lost pulse and went into PEA, pulseless electrical activity. My heart had electrical activity going on but not in an organized fashion, so it couldn’t form an effective contraction of the ventricle. It’s not a flatline, but it’s not good. They were pushing blood and epinephrine into me as quickly as they could. I was on a respirator. Earlier, Doc Sampson had put tourniquets on both my arms and everybody I talked to was very clear: Those tourniquets saved my life.”

“So—”

Jenks holds up a hand to shut her up. “What they are not clear about but what is very clear to me is that it was not just Doc Sampson who saved my life. It was the first guys who got to my vehicle”—he looks up at me—“the Marines who called in a nine-line. The pilots who flew out. The flight nurse who kept me alive on my flight. The docs at TQ who stabilized me. The docs at Landstuhl. All the docs at all the places I’ve been to stateside.”

Jenks sounds a bit choked up and he’s looking at his paper, though I know he doesn’t need it there. This bit hasn’t changed from the first draft. I’ve never heard him read it aloud.

“I am alive because of so many people. My life was saved not once, but repeatedly, by more people than I will ever know. They tell me I fought, kicking and screaming, before they drugged me. And some of the techniques that saved my life didn’t even exist until Iraq, like giving patients fresh plasma along with packed red blood cells to help clotting. I needed to clot, and I couldn’t do it with just my blood. I needed the blood that the soldiers and airmen who I will never know lined up to give me, and I needed the docs to have the knowledge to give it to me. So I owe my life to the doc who figured out the best way to push trauma victims’ blood, and I owe it to all the Marines that doc watched die before he figured it out.”

Jenks takes a pause and Jessie nods, saying, “Yeah, yeah.”

There’s a bit more to read, but Jenks very slowly slides the paper over to me. Sarah looks at Jessie with a cocked eyebrow, but Jessie isn’t looking at her.