I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 Read online

  “Sergeant Spencer, you have the forms.”

  “Major, they’re sending him books in Braille every two weeks. Is he supposed to learn Braille with his elbows? It’s completely safe, UL-rated, and there’s an outlet in reach of the cord. I’ll buy it with my own money and install it myself.”

  “Sergeant, fill out the forms.”

  *****

  The SFAC, Soldier Family Assistance Center, kept getting TTOs for the captain’s wife, Alice, and the girls. They flew them in and put them up at Mologne House. Captain Sam had no discretion if and when his wife was coming up to the ward, but he refused to go down to the third floor, knowing very well that children couldn’t come up with her. Under-fourteen not allowed, for their own good.

  Alice gave Spencer more background in a few minutes than the captain ever told about himself. “I married him for his big heart and his mind. He still has those. If he wasn’t so damned stubborn, we could figure out the rest. Sergeant, Sam and me, we can figure this out. I’m strong. The girls are strong, too. Help him get past worrying about us so much. We’re going to be OK. OK?”

  Spencer found himself listening to Alice the next day, too. Captain Sam had wanted to become a teacher, “possibly even a college professor.” Every so often he would let slip that he had a dream of teaching at West Point.

  “But then he fought in Fallujah. After that, everything changed. He called it their Alamo. Fallujah wasn’t all IEDs and hit-and-run attacks. Sam said that they held their ground. Insurgents with small arms and homemade bombs fought the best-trained army on Earth to a standstill. They had no food and no water and still they fought. One night he had his unit translator write out a note saying ‘God respects all brave men.’ Sam taped it to a carton of MREs and somehow got the carton with the note over to the insurgents.

  “He wrote me that not a single shot was fired at his unit for the next 24 hours. But then what he did got up to brigade and his colonel found out and went ballistic. He threatened to have Sam court-martialed for aiding the enemy. Can you believe that? Right there, right in the middle of the battle,” she said.

  “It was OK to kill them, but showing the enemy a little respect? No way. All the talk about winning hearts and minds. Right. Didn’t matter that the shooting stopped. The army couldn’t let it happen. Sam’s immediate superior at battalion intervened, thank goodness. The major told the colonel that Sam sent over pork rations to attack their morale. So he got out of it, but he wasn’t the same. Not after. He’d had it with the army.”

  She looked around her at the ward, at the posters on the walls and the shiny linoleum and nurses trotting along in their scrubs, and sighed. “He’d be whole and home if they had court-martialed him,” Alice added.

  He got it. About the MREs and the note. After that, Spencer found himself listening more deeply and more often when the captain spoke. Talking, too. A lot of times he thought that about the tribesmen in Afghanistan, fighting on guts and belief. No satellite photos. No drones. No air support. Sleeping under rocks on freezing windswept hillsides. Eating only the food they could carry, if there was food to be had.

  The captain was right about a lot of stuff. But he was wrong about Alice. Alice and the girls deserved a chance, too. Only nothing he could say could convince the captain to think about going home.

  *****

  Captain Sam never did talk about what happened. His eyes. His hands.

  After a long run, four miles Spencer figured, Spencer held the water fountain handle and Captain Sam sucked down about a gallon and then put his face and his head under the spout.

  East of the hospital and rehab buildings a huge hundred-year-old oak tree became their favorite resting spot. The two of them cooled off after runs in the shade of its long limbs. Spencer lead Captain Sam up to the trunk and the captain pressed his back against it and slid down until he was sitting on his butt at the base. He drew up his knees and closed his eyes.

  “How did it happen?” Spencer asked quietly.

  Captain Sam recalled it in vivid color but Spencer wasn’t certain that he was going to say anything.

  “I’m four hundred yards out, above and away from the action,” Captain Sam explained, finally opening up. He never said where, but Spencer didn’t interrupt to ask.

  “I was observing and reporting back to battalion. I can see everything from where I am. There were two jihadi jackrabbits with AKs waiting behind a half-wall. My four-man recon patrol was moving right at them. I couldn’t raise them. Communications crapped out. All I could do was watch.”

  “You didn’t have a sniper?” Spencer challenged. Hell, it was only four hundred yards.

  “No, no sniper. Christ. They had to have had a spotter somewhere, because these two waited until my guys were inside twenty yards and then they stuck their rifles around the wall and loosed a couple bursts. No aiming. Teasing. They took off running and it was on. Marty Seagull, my platoon sergeant, Jaime Estavez, his corporal, this little Guatemalan who was always playing guitar and singing songs in Spanish, and two specialists. They were sucked in hook, line, and sinker.”

  Spencer thought about his own guitar. He hadn’t seen it since the medivac to Bagram. He wondered a lot about where it had ended up, but he said nothing.

  “Do I wait for the Black Hawks?” the captain continued. “No! There’s an M11647A1 there so I jump in and floor it like I’m Bruce Willis. I should have waited, but these are my guys and I’m watching them heading out to get themselves killed. So, of course, what happens? Ragheads lured the little fish to bring in the big ones. Completely predictable bullshit. I chased their chumming right into an IED that blew the six-ton Humvee flying twenty feet in the air.”

  Sprinkles of these pictures dropped through the captain’s mind like tiny fragments from the IED. Shards of plastic had stuck like porcupine quills into the mush where he had always had eyes. He knew they were destroyed. Knew instantly. But he didn’t even know his hands were gone, not then. He knew only bandages.

  It took a month before he could piece words into sentences.

  “Almost 5,000 Iraq-Afghanistan soldiers have lost feet and legs,” Captain Sam told him. “But IEDs and mines blow upward. They either kill you or blow off your lower limbs. Just 280 upper limbs have been blown off or amputated. Through the whole of Iraq and Afghanistan both. If they counted by the limb, I’d be a shy one percent of that total. I may be the single casualty in the entire military with both eyes and both hands gone. A freak event. They don’t even have an official designation; I am rated an ‘MLD,’ Multiple Loss Dysfunction. Sounds like mild, doesn’t it, ‘MLD’?”

  “Did you save your guys?” Spencer asked.

  “Yes. Estavez came home a citizen. That’s something, I suppose.”

  “Damned right it is! That’s valor, Captain.”

  “A silver star for hands and eyes? It’s stupid, is what it is. Dumb-ass trade-off. That valor you’re talking about, that ‘be all you can be’ BS that makes us go across the globe, is marketing. We should be turning our guns back on the chickenshit greedy assholes who sent us there.”

  “Four men are breathing ‘cause of you, Captain, and that is a fact. You did that.”

  “We fought a rich man’s war,” he said, “fought by everyone except the rich.”

  Spencer let it in one ear and out the other. Captain Sam ranted a lot.

  “Jonathan, I know you want to go back. Would you tell me, please, what are you going to accomplish? You and me, our families, the guys who fought beside us, our kids and their kids, killing and dying and getting fucked up and burning through trillions of dollars for Iraq and for Afghanistan. Trillions! For what? Trillions in public debt dollars that rich assholes turned into billions in their own private cash. They’re real life people living in mansions and flying private jets. They cost me my life and I don’t even know who they are! That pisses me off
! Why don’t we have a government that tells us that stuff? Explain that to me, would you, ‘cause I want to know!

  I want my girls to be able to afford college. That money could be student loans, money for veterans, money for roads and bridges and curing diseases,” the captain said.

  “Shouldn’t we at least know who they are? Rob a bank, go to jail. Own a bank, rob everybody.

  Nobody ever looks into the really colossal crimes happening right in plain view, Jonathan. I know where I’d start looking. If I still had eyes I’d start with two angry old bastards worth billions who get off on playing this country like a fiddle with all their bullshit institutes and behind the scenes string-pulling. Follow the money!”

  “Why don’t we get a couple soft-serve ice creams,” Spencer suggested. “I’ve been thinking how I can set up your strap so you have it on your own. It’ll be good.”

  “Jonathan, I’m talking about this whole country and you’re wanting ice cream.”

  “Yup. It’s hot out.”

  *****

  Two days later, under the big oak tree, Spencer framed his own idea: if they were “wounded warriors,” then shouldn’t they be reconnecting with the warriors inside them? They had wheelchair basketball. Why not martial arts? Teach krav maga. Teach stick fighting. Show a guy with no legs how to crush through a pelvis with one blow. Spencer had the captain stand up and worked him through the basics: balance, centering strike energy, elbows/forearms/knees, straight kicks. Throat, sternum, pelvis, knees.

  After a half hour he had the captain energized, animated and positive.

  A krav maga program would work alongside rehab and vocational counseling, Spencer suggested to Major Davies. “Help the men feel powerful again, then maybe writing resumes and applying for jobs, the stuff you keep pushing, would be easier, too. “

  “Resources are limited, number one,” Major Davies responded. “Number two, these men need to fit in, not get instruction for how to act out.” She said that getting them thinking like warriors was a form of cruelty. Their war was over.

  “Major,” Spencer argued, “they’re truly scared of the war that begins when they leave here.”

  Captain Sam tried telling the major “You get us into Group and you say we need to support one another, but then all we talk about is how each one of us is going to handle it after we’re out,

  “All that advice about staying away from booze and drugs, about breathing and counting to ten and not hitting our wives and our kids… that’s all about staying small. You don’t get it. You can’t make a man a warrior and then take it away without putting something strong into that black hole. Demons breed in that hole.”

  She closed like a steel vault. Spencer saw it. Captain Sam felt it and heard in her voice that they were wasting their time.

  “Captain, we were talking about krav maga,” she briskly reminded him. “I am forty percent over capacity. What we can achieve is small steps, and without cooperation we won’t even achieve those. Keep it clear, finite, and fixed in the achievable and I’ll work with you, but knowing how to fill out a job application will help these men. Teaching bar-fighting tricks won’t.”

  “I’m talking about really supporting one another. About organizing,” Captain Sam yelled back. “But you can’t talk about that, about real change. That’s rocking the boat.

  “Your attitude is nothing new, Major. Governments have been afraid of veterans for three thousand years. Two millennia ago, Julius Caesar was taking stolen land back from rich Roman senators and giving it to Roman army veterans. The vets earned it, but the Senate stabbed him to death.”

  “Captain,” Major Davies griped, “you need to stop this appeals nonsense and go home. Go home and organize all you want.

  “What are you doing here? Appealing your PEB. You have full benefits for life? Don’t you realize how ungrateful you are acting? How many men would kill for the benefits you won’t accept!

  We have a program in place here. It doesn’t include martial arts, or bidets, or Julius Caesar either. Go home! That’s your reality. Final. Period.”

  *****

  Captain Sam pressed his back into the tree trunk and pulled his legs up to his chest. Get him talking politics and he wouldn’t stop talking, but mentioning even the idea of him having a home or any future with Alice and his girls and he snapped shut like a bear trap. Spencer caught how he always turned away; even without eyes, he was looking somewhere else.

  “Look at what you’re able to do, Cap. You’re dressing yourself. You’re feeding yourself. You run my ass into the dust. Couldn’t you maybe just give it a chance at home? You can read books on tape. You can still teach or do radio. You can run and dance and tell the girls bedtime stories. Dude. Yeah, it sucks, but get out and do the stuff you keep talking about. Hell, run for Congress!”

  “Congress!” Captain Sam scoffed. “What, so I can do nothing just like the rest of them? So I can play the north pole-south pole charade like corporate-owned Democrats and Republicans? Red states and blue states both made to look a thousand times more different than they really are. Money isn’t red or blue, it’s green. I can see that and I don’t have eyeballs.”

  “Then go and change it,” Spencer urged. “You say corporations are killing more people than wars. Go after them! You say billionaires are buying our democracy. Go after them!”

  “Jonathan, do you ever listen to anything I say?” Captain Sam shot back. “The American Legislative Exchange Council alone writes a thousand times more legislative bills than any elected politician. One lawmaker against that is like a ditch digger up against a bulldozer! Besides, I’m blind and I have no hands, or did you fail to notice?”

  Spencer got nowhere trying to change the subject. Ranting about politics again. Captain Sam even floated a crazy idea that every vet who was going to kill himself anyway ought to put on a suicide vest and take out a bunch of rich people with him.

  “One vet every hour,” Captain Sam said. “That would change things.”

  Spencer laughed it off. “We don’t get 72 virgins, Cap. Our guys don’t off themselves to get to Paradise for jihad. Besides that, how would you ever reach them? Take out an ad in Stars and Stripes?”

  *****

  While the two of them were sitting on the grass, sweating and breathing hard after a two-mile run, eight laps around the track, they talked.

  “We are either warriors, teachers, nurturers, or healers,” the captain told Spencer. “Whatever other title or rank we have is just splitting hairs. We’re one of those or we’re nothing, just taking up space.

  “This country has three times as many billionaires now as when you, YOU, first went to Afghanistan. Eight hundred new billionaires. How many of them are warriors? Teachers? Nurturers or healers? They’re thieves!”

  Man, I’ve been a warrior for a long, long time, Spencer thought to himself. Don’t tell me that we’re all being used, that the wars were for nothing, that they were about money and nothing else. I don’t want to hear it!

  What he wanted was to get his PEB done and to get back to his real life. In Afghanistan.

  He was meant for war. He knew that. Sitting on lawns had his mind was drifting to the soccer kid in his red Manchester United shirt. He was thinking about him too much, and about Miller, too.

  Captain Sam asked him point blank “Are you going to find Miller and kill him? Is that why you want to go back?”

  Spencer never gave an ounce of energy to imagining revenge, but if that was how the captain could make sense of his plans, that was ok. Captain Sam, a great man, and that piece of shit Miller were actually on the same page about the war, but Spencer never told that to the captain.

  How could he explain that he was made for what he did, that what he brought to the table and a million dollars worth of training went into a purpose? He, MSJS, might well be the best in the world at
what he did. The missions were fact, objective proofs. That was something. That had significance.

  In the quiet of the night he also sometimes asked himself what else did that say about him, that he was better at war than anyone else he had ever seen? It did stuff to him, to his insides. There were periods he couldn’t take a crap for weeks. His insides were too tied up. He could have taken the bus down to visit or had his dad drive up; Jack was only two hours away from Walter Reed, but that never happened. From Afghanistan, he couldn’t make himself call Jack, not even to say he was OK. Life outside war was what was really scary. How fucked up was that?

  “Just 85 people in the world have more money than the lowest 3.5 billion people,” the captain continued. “The more the rich take, the faster everything falls apart. They can’t justify that, Jonathan, not even if they own the Supreme Court, the government, the police, the intelligence services, and everything else. Which is exactly why the rich are consolidating power. They know they can’t take everything and then expect to hold onto it for long. But they can’t stop themselves.

  The captain continued: “Jonathan, consolidation is the one fundamental flaw of tyranny. When the people fight back, and they will, concentrated power also concentrates the targets. There is no changing things from the inside! We are supposed to be one man, one vote, but that’s over and it’s not coming back. Oligarchs, all over this planet they’re strangling democracy like boa constrictors.