Fort Benning

Outside Columbus, Georgia

2015

 

Staring up at the ceiling was getting quite boring. Staring at his arm, the pins and wires and bandages like something out of a horror film, wasn’t much better. He couldn’t get out of bed and walk around, couldn’t go for a run, couldn’t shower, couldn’t even piss on his own. This confinement was beginning to drive him out of his mind.

He was a man who was used to being active. He should have been in the field with his unit, should have been fighting the enemy of these glorious United States. He should have been doing anything but lying in a bed with his arm hanging from ropes attached to the ceiling, a tube in a place no man should ever have a tube.

They said he was lucky. Said it could have been much worse.

He couldn’t imagine anything worse than this.

A pretty girl in jeans and a blouse that was too tight and too short for his comfort had come into the room yesterday and tried to interest him in a bunch of gossip magazines. Like she thought a soldier would be interested in such ridiculousness! She held up a novel she swore was the bomb these days, a bestseller everyone was reading. They were even making a movie about it in Hollywood. Like that was impressive to him. He might be a country bumpkin, but nothing had ever come out of Hollywood that had truly impressed him.

She seemed desperate to find something to draw him out, to make him speak to her. Maybe they had some sort of bet going on out at the nurse’s station. Fifty bucks to the first person to get him to utter a word. He wasn’t interested in playing along, didn’t care about their concern. They weren’t the ones lying in this bed, waiting for the moment when the doctor came through the door and said they could do nothing more to save his arm, for the moment they told him they wanted to amputate. He would die if they did that.

What was a man without his arms? What was a soldier without his trigger finger?

They weren’t the ones who relived that moment in his dreams night after night, the moment the IED went off under the Humvee he was riding in. They weren’t the ones who remembered the joke Shaw was telling as the IED ignited underneath them and sent the entire vehicle flying into the air. They weren’t the ones who saw laughter turn to horror in an instant, who saw limbs torn from bodies, who saw his friends torn to pieces in an instant. They weren’t the ones who should be back there, finding the people responsible for that instant.

He needed to get out of this bed. He needed his hand to work. He needed to go back.

“Try this,” the girl had finally said, holding out a small pink iPod. “It was mine, but I don’t use it anymore. I have my phone and Spotify, and it just isn’t necessary anymore, you know.” She smiled kind of shyly. “There’s not much music on it right now, but you can ask one of the nurses to hook you up to a computer and iTunes, if you want.”

When he ignored her, she laid the device on a side table, the wires of a set of earbuds wrapped around it.

“I hope you feel better,” she finally said with a slight sigh, her fingers brushing against the hot skin of his good arm. He watched her walk away, thinking her ass was probably the best sight he’d seen in months. But then there was that tube…

He turned his head, looking to see if the device was still there. Music might be better than the drivel being broadcast on daytime cable. He could only watch Judge Judy so many times, you know?

He tugged the device toward him and managed to get the wire unwrapped from around it, slipping the earbuds into his ears with the one hand. He lifted it up and began scrolling through the music library. She was right, there wasn’t much on it. A couple of songs from someone called G-Eazy, a few from a group called Twenty-One Pilots, and then an entire album by Kat Carlisle.

Not his kind of music. He preferred Jason Aldean, Blake Shelton. Throw in a George Strait album, and he was perfect. But he couldn’t expect a teen volunteer at a base hospital to listen to that sort of stuff, he supposed.

He almost tossed the device back onto the side table, but decided music he wasn’t familiar with was better than absolute silence and his own thoughts.

He turned on the Kat Carlisle album. The first song started, the melody low and slow, the kind of music he imagined suicidal girls liked to listen to when they were home alone. He vaguely remembered one of the guys in his squad mentioning Kat Carlisle. Toliver. He’d thought she was hot. But then again, Toliver thought everything in a skirt was hot.

But then she began to sing, and…he could learn to like this sort of music.

His grandmother used to say this thing: That child has the voice of an angel. He’d never appreciated what she meant until he heard Kat Carlisle sing.

It wasn’t like this great epiphany. It didn’t cure his arm or take away his guilt. Her songs were beautiful and morose and the perfect soundtrack to his life in that moment. But they didn’t change his circumstances. They just made it more bearable.

And that was enough.