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English to Thai: Thank you for your service General field: Art/Literary Detailed field: Poetry & Literature
Source text - English you could see it in his nervous eyes. You could see it in his shaking hands. You could see it in the three prescription bottles in his room: one to steady his galloping heart rate, one to reduce his anxiety, one to minimize his nightmares. You could see it in the screensaver on his laptop— a nuclear fireball and the words fuck iraq— and in the private journal he had been keeping since he arrived.
His first entry, on February 22:
Not much going on today. I turned my laundry in, and we’re getting our TAT boxes. We got mortared last night at 2:30 a.m., none close. We’re at FOB Rustamiyah, Iraq. It’s pretty nice, got a good chow hall and facilities. Still got a bunch of dumb shit to do though. Well, that’s about it for today.
His last entry, on October 18:
I’ve lost all hope. I feel the end is near for me, very, very near. Darkness is all I see anymore.
So he was finished. Down to his final hours, he was packed, weaponless, under escort, and waiting for the helicopter that would take him away to a wife who had just told him on the phone: “I’m scared of what you might do.”
“You know I’d never hurt you,” he’d said, and he’d hung up, wandered around the FOB, gotten a haircut, and come back to his room, where he now said, “But what if she’s right? What if I snap someday?”
It was a thought that made him feel sick. Just as every thought now made him feel sick. “You spend a thousand days, it gets to the point where it’s Groundhog Day. Every day is over and over. The heat. The smell. The language. There’s nothing
sweet about it. It’s all sour,” he said. He remembered the initial invasion, when it wasn’t that way. “I mean it was a front seat to the greatest movie I’ve ever seen in my life.” He remembered the firefights of his second deployment. “I loved it. Anytime
I get shot at in a firefight, it’s the sexiest feeling there is.” He remembered how this deployment began to feel bad early on. “I’d get in the Humvee and be driving down the road and I would feel my heart pulsing up in my throat.” That was the start of it, he said, and then Emory happened, and then Crow happened,
and then he was in a succession of explosions, and then a bullet was skimming across his thighs, and then Doster happened, and then he was waking up thinking, “Holy shit, I’m still here, it’s misery, it’s hell,” which became, “Are they going to
kill me today?” which became, “I’ll take care of it myself,” which became, “Why do that? I’ll go out killing as many of them as I can, until they kill me.
“I didn’t give a fuck,” he said. “I wanted it to happen. Bottom line I wanted it over as soon as possible, whether they did it or I did it.”
The amazing thing was that no one knew. Here was all this stuff going on, pounding heart, panicked breathing, sweating palms, electric eyes, and no one regarded him as anything but the great soldier he’d always been, the one who never complained, who hoisted bleeding soldiers onto his back, who’d suddenly begun
insisting on being in the right front seat of the lead Humvee on every mission, not because he wanted to be dead but because that’s what selfless leaders would do.
He was the great soldier who one day walked to the aid station and went through the door marked combat stress and asked for help and now was on his way home.
Now he was remembering what the psychologist had told him: “With your stature, maybe you’ve opened the door for a lot of guys to come in.”
“That made me feel really good,” he said. And yet he had felt so awful the previous day when he told one of his team leaders to round up everyone in his squad.
“What’d we do now?”
“You didn’t do anything,” he said. “Just get them together.”
They came into his room, and he shut the door and told them he was leaving the following day. He said the hard part: that it was a mental health evacuation. He said to them, “I don’t even know what I’m going through. I know that I don’t feel right.”