Redeployment

The narrator is woken by a phone call from Kevin Boylan, his old captain in the Marines. Boylan says he is coming to New York to “get blacked the fuck out” (237). He just got back from Afghanistan. The narrator tells Boylan that he got a job with a law firm, and Boylan is proud of him, saying that he made the right choice when he got out. The narrator thinks about how easy his experience had been: “My Iraq was a stack of papers. Excel Spreadsheets. A window full of sandbags behind a cheap desk” (238).

After they hang up, he reads a document on his computer, a citation about Sergeant Julian Deme. He wrote it and tears up a little while reading its opening description of Deme’s bravery. He says that Deme is why Boylan is calling but that someone named James Vockler is why he answered the phone when Boylan called.

The narrator is an adjutant on his second deployment. Boylan is a lieutenant who asks him for help writing a citation for Deme after he is shot and killed while trying to pull Marines out of an ambush. Boylan writes a terrible citation for him, and the narrator offers to help. His job as adjutant is to do the battalion’s paperwork. He tells Boylan that he is the only man who has ever written up everything about his team and forgotten to include himself. He says that Boylan needs to write about what a great Marine Deme was and what brave things he did, not about what a wonderful guy he was. He says he has enough to work with and offers to write the citation.

When he talks to the men from the battalion, he learns enough to write the citation. James Vockler, the man Deme died saving, had been shot. Deme pulled him to safety, then went back for two other wounded Marines and was killed by a shot to the face. It turns out that Vockler’s helmet had been shot. He had been knocked out and had landed behind a trash can. He had not needed to be rescued, but he does not know this. The narrator writes the citation anyway, enjoying the craft and hoping that it will win Deme the Medal of Honor.

When Vockler got home, he immediately began preparations to go to Afghanistan. He talks to the narrator about paperwork and requests to go to 1/9, the most dangerous area with the most fighting.

The narrator sees Vockler again at a ceremony when Deme is awarded the Navy Cross. He sees him for the last time the day Vockler leaves for Afghanistan. The narrator is discharged three weeks later. One night he checks a website called Defense Link to see if anyone he knows has died. Vockler had been killed a week earlier in Afghanistan. The site links to a YouTube video of Vockler’s wake. The narrator thinks he sees Boylan in the background, but the video quality is too poor for him to be sure. Afterward, the reality of the separation from his old life hits him: “As I lay on my mattress, struggling with a violence you might as well call grief, I realized why no one had thought to inform me of Vockler’s death. I was in New York. I was out of the Corps. I wasn’t a Marine anymore” (258).

He goes to a documentary with a banker named Ed. The film is about veterans dealing with civilian life. After, he thanks the documentarians for making it. He is suddenly fighting back tears and goes to the bathroom to hide it. Ed does not ask him about the incident.

At NYU, the narrator begins to date a woman who tells him that she was abused as a child. She says she feels safe telling him because “you’ve got PTSD too” (260). He doesn’t tell her that he doesn’t have PTSD and that her experiences were far worse than his. He thinks about some of the injured Iraqis he saw after suicide bombings, how “[a] human being in enough pain is just a screaming animal. You can’t get there with pleasure. You can try, but you can’t” (262).

A year later, he has broken up with the woman, and it is two weeks after Boylan’s phone call. Boylan arrives. He has a staff job in Afghanistan and is pudgy and soft. The narrator has never seen him like this. He takes Boylan to a bar and buys him drinks. Boylan is drunk quickly and begins asking him why he left the Corps. The narrator reminds Boylan that they have already discussed that. They return to his apartment, drink whiskey, and watch war footage on YouTube. The narrator asks Boylan if that’s what it’s like actually being in combat and shooting at people. Boylan says no and refuses to say more or to tell the story of how he won the Bronze Star.

After Boylan passes out, the narrator describes a scientific experiment in which a bee is given nectar. As the bee drinks, they cut away sections of its abdomen, so it never fills up. Because its thirst is never sated, the bee continues to drink until it starves to death. He splashes whiskey on Boylan, hoping that he will wake up.