Free Thank You for Your Service by David Finkel Page B

profound need, or just the desire to again wear shoes with laces, he begins doing that right away.
    He writes about his anger:
    I feel myself slowly losing my cool. I try so hard to be polite to everyone but I don’t know how much longer I can do it. I am trying to let this anger out bit by bit but it’s like holding up a dam with my mind, letting bit by bit out to keep it from going over the edge or breaking all together. Have I gone past that point where there is a safe way to get all this out without losing control? I am beginning to feel not. I feel it’s gonna happen soon. It’s just a matter of who says the wrong thing at the right time.
    He writes about a mission:
    We were supposed to hit the house around 0300 hours. Our trucks dropped us off about 3 blocks from the target house and they proceeded to set up an outer cordon … I told the team to stay tight we are gonna move fast. I went straight to the door and hit the door with my boot right on the sweet spot. The door flew open without much noise. My team moved into the house. Not much furniture. Just rugs, a cabinet or two, a kitchen and one bedroom on the first floor. We stacked on the door. The other team started up the stairs to the second floor. My SAW gunner kicked the cheap wooden door half cracking the wood and me and one other soldier moved inside. The door flying open woke the man, his infant and wife all sleeping in the bed. His wife started screaming. I shoved my barrel in the man’s mouth and turned on my SureFire. His hands shot straight up. I had the other soldier get the wife and baby out of the room. I grabbed the man by the throat and dragged him into the courtyard making sure his head met every wall or doorway. We then zipcuffed him and tied a blindfold on him. He was wearing nothing but boxers and a t-shirt. We then threw him inthe back of a humvee head first, not a fun way to land when your handcuffed behind your back.
    He writes about a nightmare:
    The anti-nightmare meds are not working. I was on a patrol last night and we entered a school, same as one from our deployment, but as we were clearing the school I went into an all girls class and in real life they just screamed but in my dream they screamed and I opened fire killing the whole class. What that is about I do not know. I am angry I have these dreams, I am angry they don’t stop. I miss my pleasant dreams of my past.
    He writes about the night Cajimat burned to death:
    Then I saw the fifth soldier who wasn’t pulled out. I was so preoccupied with my close call earlier I hadn’t put 2 and 2 together when the call came over the radio, “4 casualties medevac’d.” What was left of his skeleton was hanging out of the driver side door, his helmet a different color possibly fused to his skull and his IBA and plates which made up his torso, or what was left of it. That image still haunts me, it changed me. I don’t know how many others saw that as we turned our trucks around but all I wanted was death and violence from then on. To me this is where I lost my old self.
    He writes about another nightmare, or starts to, but doesn’t finish because it is day sixteen now, and he has made it past Level I, past Level II, and arrived at Level III. He can wear shoes with laces. He can shave unsupervised, and go to the Loaf ’N Jug. He’ll finish writing later when he’s alone again, but soon he’ll be getting his first visitor, Sascha.
    What he has written so far:
    What the fuck is going on in my mind. Last night I was sitting in bed and looked across the room to a chair in my room and there was a young girl covered in blood. What happened after that I don’t remember.I was told a full scale panic attack. This is not the first time I have seen dead bodies. For awhile I used to find dead Iraqis floating in my bathtub. Why they were in the bathtub I will never know.
    I FEEL SO FUCKING VIOLENT RIGHT NOW.
    It was an eight-hour drive from Fort Riley to Pueblo, and for a pregnant woman in a