Free Thank You for Your Service by David Finkel

sees him from a distance. Sometimes he sees him close up. “Why didn’t you save me?” Harrelson is always asking as he burns. Sometimes Tausolo understands that the person really asking the question is Tausolo himself.
    The interview is nearly over.
    “Three deployments?” an officer asks.
    “Yes,” Tausolo says.
    “At your young age?”
    Tausolo shrugs.
    “Thank you. That’s all I need,” the officer says, and a few minuteslater, Tausolo is out in the hallway watching the woman approaching with the decision.
    “All right,” she says. “You were accepted.”
    Davison hits Tausolo on the chest. “All
right
!” he says. “That’s it! Here we go! Get it fixed!”
    He hugs Tausolo while Theresa, wary, tired, takes it all in from a distance. “I just hope. I just hope,” she had said the day before Tausolo came home from Topeka, and she wonders now: Is this how hope feels?
    “I don’t know,” Tausolo says. He is driving back to Geary Estates. He needs to pack for Samoa. He needs to patch the living room walls. He needs to fix the bedroom door. He needs to look at himself in the mirror each morning and tell himself he’s worth something, like the Vietnam guy learned to do. He’s a hero, after all.
    He drives past a sign announcing that it’s Suicide Awareness Month at Fort Riley.
    “I don’t know,” he says again. “But right now, I feel better.”

4
    The way it worked was that they joined the army because they were patriotic or starry-eyed or heartbroken or maybe just out of work, and then they were assigned to be in the infantry rather than something with better odds like finance or public affairs, and then by chance they were assigned to an infantry division that was about to rotate into the war, and then they were randomly assigned to a combat brigade that included two infantry battalions, one of which was going to a bad place and the other of which was going to a worse place, and then as luck would have it they were assigned to the battalion going to the worse place, and then they were assigned to the company in that battalion that went to the worst place of all. If you listen to the eulogies, so much of war is said to be accidental. Poor Harrelson. Wrong place. Poor Cajimat. Wrong time. But to a member of Bravo Company, which spent fifteen months in a sorry, bomb-filled neighborhood called Kamaliyah, the war felt eventually like the wrong everything. Adam Schumann and James Doster were in 1st platoon. Tausolo Aieti was in 2nd platoon. And Nic DeNinno was in 3rd platoon, where he thought of himself not as starry-eyed but as a patriot, a true patriot, and then he punched his first civilian in the face, and then he pushed his first civilian down some stairs, and now he is back in the United States, crying and saying to his wife, Sascha, “I feel like a monster.”
    He is in Pueblo, Colorado, in a twenty-three-bed psychiatric facility called Haven Behavioral War Heroes Hospital. It’s on the top floor of a six-story building, where the exit doors are bolted and the windows are screwed shut to keep patients from jumping out. This is day seventeenfor Nic. He was sent here from the Fort Riley WTB because his mood swings and talk of suicide had become so alarming, and he has eleven more days here before he’s supposed to go back.

    Nic DeNinno
    Twenty-eight days, then, total, to get it fixed, as Sergeant Davison would say, and if war is accidental, so is what happens afterward. Tausolo got Topeka when he needed critical treatment. Nic is getting Pueblo. Both programs claim to be successful and use similar treatment models. But they are different in basic ways, and with more than two hundred programs across the country at this particular moment claiming to help soldiers, the army has yet to figure out which ones are more effective. Topeka is a seven-week program. Pueblo is four weeks. Topeka is part of the VA system. Pueblo is private and for-profit. Topeka mixes Iraq and Afghanistan soldiers with