Redeployment(81)

“They kept changing the mission on us,” he’s telling me. “War’s end is a weird, weird time to be at war.”

We talk a little more, and when we hang up I stay motionless for a while, sitting in my bed in my dark room with the curtains drawn against New York, still huffing that same old glory in the air, the taste like that first time I got popped one good in the face during training and didn’t back down while my inner lip bled past my gums. That time. So I get up and go to my computer, where I’ve got my whole life in pictures and files, and I pull up Deme’s citation. “For extraordinary heroism while serving as a Rifle Squad Leader, Company K…” I tear up a little, like I always do. It was when I got choked up the first time that I knew I’d nailed writing the thing.

See, our unit had one no-shit hero. Hero like you read about, like you see in the movies, and that hero was Sergeant Julien Deme, and that sergeant was good, and that sergeant was brave, and that sergeant is dead, but most important, that sergeant was Boylan’s, and he’s the whole reason Boylan and me are tight, and why at two in the morning, drunk off his ass but full of plans to continue to drink away his deployment money and his demons, Boylan is calling me.

That’s Boylan’s motivation. I never knew Deme, so Deme is not why I’m answering the phone. James Vockler is why I’m answering the phone.





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I’d been 3/6’s adjutant, on my second deployment to Fallujah. Of all the lieutenants in that unit, Boylan was my favorite. Not the greatest at writing FITREPs or awards or doing any of the things that would bring him to my office—on a purely professional basis, he was a pain in the ass—but still, he was sweet. Sweet in that way that gentle giants sometimes are. Boylan had wide ears, a round, expressive face, and a stooped posture that seemed to be perpetually apologizing for the sheer monstrous size of him—arms thicker than my thighs, thighs thicker than my torso, a neck thicker than my head. Also, thicker than his own head. Boylan’s pride at the time was being able to do a quick six faster than any other officer in the battalion, sucking down beer quicker than I can drink water. He belonged more to the frat house than the battlefield, the ideal dudebro and the sort of guy who made girls feel comfortable because he’d always give the skeezy ones a good talking-to. He was also the only officer who never seemed to think that, because he was in the infantry and I was an adjutant, there was some huge penis differential between the two of us.

So when Deme died, Boylan came to me with the hopelessly shitty citation he’d written, begging for help. Deme had been shot trying to pull injured Marines out of an ambush, the sort of thing that, if he’d survived, would have certainly been Silver Star worthy. With Deme dead, the unit as a whole was talking Medal of Honor. More important, so was the battalion commander.

“I know it’s no good,” Boylan told me, clutching the citation. The two of us were alone in my office in Camp Blue Diamond, right outside of Fallujah but effectively in another universe from the violence Boylan lived and breathed every day. “I’m no good at these.”

It had been only a few days. There still wasn’t a clear account of exactly what had happened, and I had a distraught Boylan looking ready to go to pieces with only a thin plywood door separating us from the junior Marines who worked for me. It wouldn’t do to let them overhear an officer breaking down and weeping in my arms. That happened later, stateside, and it wasn’t pretty.

“You’re better than most,” I said, skimming the pathetic write-up. “You care.”

Therapist is not part of the adjutant’s responsibilities. I was supposed to handle the battalion’s paperwork: casualty reports, correspondence, awards, FITREPs, legal issues, et cetera. Difficult work, even if you don’t take into account that most infantry guys didn’t join the Corps to do paperwork and tend to suck at it. But mental issues—guilt, terror, helpless anxiety, inability to sleep, suicidal thoughts—that was all for Combat Stress.

“Most lieutenants,” I said, “when they get into their first firefight, they write themselves up for the Combat Action Ribbon immediately. I get it before the dust has settled from the IED.”

Boylan nodded his huge head with its large, childlike eyes.

“Their men,” I said, “that comes later. When they get around to it. But you’re the only guy, in either of my deployments, who ever put in all your men and forgot to write up yourself.”

“Deme has two kids,” Boylan said. He paused. “They’re too young to remember him.”