“Then the world blew up and I was upside down. Saw the road through the windshield, smelled the gas. Todd had been blown out of the vehicle. His door was gone, armor and metal blown off at the hinges. A blessing, because the Humvee doors liked to lock up in a blast, could trap you inside, where you’d cook. I couldn’t get my restraint off. It was stuck and I had one shoulder dislocated and the other wrist fractured. My limbs would not answer my will. I thought my back was broken. I struggled in place, felt the gas spilling onto my legs. Prayed and screamed. Screamed and prayed. The world went whump and the Humvee shivered, then Todd was back inside but he couldn’t get the damned strap off either because the latch had melted. He started sawing away at it with his utility knife. The vehicle was almost fully engaged by then. A pyre. Todd kept crawling outside for air, then back in to help me. Face black and his hair scorched. I remember that. He finally collapsed my bad shoulder and pulled me outside into the dirt. I rolled around like a dog to put the flames out. Heard the sniper fire but I couldn’t get my legs under me. Figured my spinal cord was ruined. Todd ran to some K-rails for cover. I felt abandoned. I knew it was just a matter of time until the snipers got me.”
I imagined big, confident, above-it-all Todd Spencer proned out behind the K-rails. He’d gotten Morrison out of the frying pan but into the fire. Then barreled away through the sniper rounds to safety. Did that make him half hero and half coward?
“Air support finally showed up and the snipers got blown to kibble and bits,” said Morrison. “The convoy circled back to us, got Todd and me into a truck. The pain was not of this world. Nothing compares to being burned. Nothing. It changed my life far beyond the booze and narcotics. I remember the corpsman shooting me with morphine and he couldn’t figure out why I was still awake and wailing. He hit me with another pen and the next thing I knew I was in Germany. I wake up in Germany often.”
He held up the remote again and opened the blinds a little more, and I saw Morrison’s violently cabled flesh. He looked monstrous but somehow undefeated.
“How did the pain change your life?” I asked. “Beyond the bourbon and the pills?”
“It made me realize that character is not fate and fate is not character. I had a high school English teacher who taught us the exact opposite.”
I thought about that for a beat. “Spencer got the Silver Star for saving your life.”
“I wanted him to have it. I was learning to embrace the life he’d given me, while detesting the man I’d been changed into. This thing you see...” He set down the remote on the coffee table and opened his empty hands as if presenting himself to me.
In that moment I wondered if war-hero Congressman Todd Spencer hated himself.
“Todd could have been anyone,” said Morrison, reading my speculation. “The least of my concerns was who pulled me from the fire, and if he could have done better. Could I have done better? A burning man cannot always defeat a military-grade body harness that’s been soldered shut by an explosion.”
“So, your fate was not your character? And Todd’s fate was not his?”
“Far from it. And that is a central truth of life. Clearly proven by war.”
I thought of Todd Spencer’s eventual fate in Fallujah, the IED that blew his foot and lower leg off not three weeks after his act of alleged heroism.
“What do you know about the missing wife?” he asked.
I told him of Julie Spencer’s gambling and shopping enthusiasms, the psychotic breakdown she’d suffered two years past, her drinking. I noted the stress of Julie being her husband’s reelection campaign manager, and the concerted Democratic efforts to unseat him in the coming election.
“I’ve donated to Spencer’s campaigns over the years,” said Morrison, his thin voice shivering in the air conditioner’s hum like a stalk of wheat in a breeze. “Modestly. He doesn’t stand for my politics, but he’s a brother and a marine and he saved what’s left of me.”
“No contact with him since Fallujah?”
“None. Some memories you don’t want to see, face to face.” Another dry sound that might have been a chuckle.
“What are your politics, Mr. Morrison?”
“I have none in a partisan sense. It’s liberating. It frees one up to begin at the beginning.”
“Of what?”
“Everything.”
Another long moment of air-conditioned quiet. Morrison was still, hands on his knees, a black-clad apparition with a voice. Then he slowly reached up and took the sunglasses off. Dark eyes in a face that looked like a heated thing, still melting.
“What did you bring home from the war, Mr. Bear?”
“I left as much as I could over there.”
“Oh, but there’s always something that follows you back. Like a dog that will do anything to remain with you. It doesn’t have to be a ruined face like mine, or a blown-off leg like Todd’s.”
I nodded and thought back to Queens. Hot and crowded and beginning to boil with hate. The door-to-door searches. All of us hot to find the Blackwater killers, and Fallujah turning against us like a rising tide. I remembered a small home, one of hundreds, the smell of lamb and coriander and cumin. Dark inside. Always dark inside. Then sudden movement, face-close fire, muzzle flash and the air thick with lead and gunpowder and screams. Jordan down behind me. Medina in the doorway. By the time I got back to him Medina was still where he had fallen, floating in blood. It seemed to take us forever to shoot those people. Another forever to drag Medina back inside, out of sniper sight. Forever again to get off his helmet and pack the hole in his chest with a roll of QuikClot. Him staring straight at me as his eyes fogged over and his body seized and went still.
“I lost Medina,” I said. “A good man. We entered a dwelling and met heavy fire.”
“You lost him?”
“He was lost,” I said, picking my words carefully so as not to adjust in any way the memory that I had built for myself. My accounting. My truth. “And I was there. I replay those minutes sometimes. Often.”
Medina. Could I have done more?
“You replay them, the minutes, looking for what you did wrong,” said Morrison.
“Correct.”
“And if you don’t find anything at first, you keep replaying them again and again. Looking for something new. The smallest thing you could have done that would have changed the fate of Medina.”
I nodded.
“You torture yourself with a changeable truth.”
I took a deep breath and shifted in my chair. “I would like for there to be an answer. As to whether or not I was at fault.”
“And why it took you so long to do things, while Medina bled out?”
I felt my chest hitting my shirt. I listened to the air conditioner in the half-light of the bungalow. Saw through the blinds fractured images of children jumping into a swimming pool.
“Which leads us to the curse of the living,” said Morrison.
“Yes. Why him but not me?”
“Which should be embossed on our motto right beside Semper Fi.”
“I thank him in my dreams,” I said. “Medina. He always accepts.”
“We were the lucky ones,” said Morrison. “We have managed to move forward.”
I nodded again.
“Please give Todd my best wishes,” he said. “Tell him I bear no grudge for what he did or didn’t do.”
I took a stool in a bar called the Roost, just off Christmas Circle in Borrego Springs. Ordered a double vodka on ice and knew there could easily be more before the sun had set on this day. Who knew? I might even spend the night.