Driving up to Charlotte Hall, I tuned in to Paul Rausch’s daily tirade on the radio; Rausch had the 7:00 AM to 12:00 noon slot on the local country music station. His subject this morning was Jonathan Eckes, an English professor and some-time poet at the local community college. Rausch had been attacking the professor all week.
Eckes, a burly, bearded man, was a popular instructor—Professor Dos Equus, his students called him; his poetry workshops filled with girls with waist-long, ironed-flat hair and granny dresses, thin, earnest pony-tailed boys with tie-dyed shirts and John Lennon glasses, middle-aged women tightly clutching moleskine notebooks to their breasts, as nostalgic as Rausch’s paintball warriors for a past they had never experienced.
I knew Eckes and had done a profile on him the year before; the professor’s own life had cultivated and authenticated the image his students had of him. He had been a graduate student at Kent State when the National Guard had shot down students there, the acrid fumes of the tear gas drawing back like a curtain to reveal that Southeast Asian war suddenly coming home. Perhaps he had even knelt by the slain girl on the grass, saying, “too much.”
But Eckes had evoked Rausch’s specific wrath by publicly berating a local candidate for the county commission for the way he invoked his war service in Iraq and Afghanistan, displaying a campaign poster that proclaimed he would “Kill taxes like he had killed the Taliban” —“What does killing people there have to do with running a county here?” the professor had asked, and Rausch leapt for his heart, describing him on the air (as he was doing at the moment from my radio) as an ex-hippy who hated our troops, the same kind of scum who had spit on him, Rausch, when he came back from Vietnam. Eckes, Rausch said, had called the candidate “war-mongering military trash.” The latter phrase sprang purely from Rausch’s imagination; Eckes, who I knew as a gentle man, would, and never had, used such language. To his horror and constant worry, he had a rebellious daughter in an armored unit in Afghanistan. He dreamt her lying bleeding into the red earth as he’d once seen another girl bleed into the grass in Ohio. Rausch’s talent lay in understanding how to tap into his listeners’ need for simplicity, clarity and scapegoats, and Rausch couldn’t have found a better straw man than Eckes, as Abell Strait said, if he had harvested and dried the hay and fashioned it himself. I suspected that Rausch had come to believe Eckes actually had said that phrase, simply because it seemed to Rausch something Eckes would or should say. Though simply was probably the wrong adverb. I have a hard time accepting that anyone could lie that convincingly with so much conviction without at some level believing that what he was saying was real. The station was flooded with phone calls denouncing Eckes as a sniveling coward who denigrated men with the guts he would never have, who didn’t deserve the freedom other men were dying to preserve for him, etc. I always sensed a kind of pent-up, guilty rage in the reaction of Rausch’s listeners, a chance for them to get on some symbolic firing line with the sacrosanct “troops”, without actually putting their asses on said line, and no danger Eckes would lob anything back at them stronger than a sonnet. Even my newspaper, with its growingly geriatric demographic, was bombarded with letters. Those calling for Eckes to be fired were probably the kindest; the phone calls he received in his house and office threatened more than his position, and the email and twitter responses were vicious and invariably misspelled. You’re a fucking trader.
Eckes, protesting not so much the war as the way his words had been twisted and invented, had decided on another bit of sixties nostalgia: a teach-in concerning both the war, but also journalistic standards “in our day.” Rausch had started a campaign among his listeners, and when the meeting was held, they packed the small auditorium, wearing Right Stuff t-shirts, some inscribed “War-Mongering Military Trash and Proud of It,” and others with Eckes’ picture done like the image of Bin Laden, over the words Judas, and Traitor—spelled correctly. As soon as Eckes got up behind the podium, members of Rausch’s paintball club, in strategic places in the audience, rose and raised their paint guns. Eckes saw the barrels pointed at him, saw the flashes, heard the rounds whizzing past his head, splattering his shirt. Maybe he saw a girl, lying in the grass or next to a smoking, overturned Humvee, the blood flowing out around her head like spilled red paint.
Rausch was speaking now about flag burning. Thinking about Eckes, I had missed the segue, and it wasn’t clear to me if in fact a flag had been burnt. But as far as flag burning went, Rausch was against it.
I switched off the radio. Normally it would have slipped out of my mind, of no more consequence than the familiar scenery slipping past my window. The reason it didn’t happened later that day, when I would see Rausch at the V.A. Center, cradling a brain injured soldier in his arms and weeping, I have come to see that image as a counterpoint to a persona Rausch was fronting when he was on the air. It was something you learned and lived with, growing up in the South, or, I suppose, among the Taliban: the bravest and most generous and hospitable people in the world were still capable of saying and believing insane and terrible things, and would sometimes do insane and terrible things to sustain those beliefs if they were threatened by facts.

I was driving to Charlotte Hall to do an article about the V.A. Center for The Enterprise, our local newspaper (“I didn’t know the starship had its own newspaper, a friend of mine in D.C. would joke, ad nausea.) I was doing a series on three local veterans who had committed suicide after returning home from Iraq or Afghanistan: Jonathan Baird, Dallas Hollinger and Bilal Jafari. All of them had been treated in this facility and I had heard horror stories about V.A. facilities from my father and other veterans, but the Center was housed in a new brick building fronted by large windows that allowed the reception area to be filled with light.
The entrance hall was decorated with blown-up photographs of groups of soldiers or marines. I looked more closely at one: a unit of Marines in their desert camouflage and armor, their flag identifying them as Dallas Hollinger’s company. Signatures and comments from the men had been inscribed on the white space below the photo. Semper fi, Dudley Do-right. Get some, brother.
“They sent it from Iraq,” a voice said behind him. “I had it blown up.” The director, George Groves, was a Vietnam veteran like my dad. He had gained weight since the last time I had seen him. The gain had the odd effect of making him look more like his own son.
We shook hands. “Hello, Hunter,” he said. “Good to see you.”
Groves’ son, Martin, had been one of my best friends in high school. It was a little easier now, I understood, for gay kids—they even had a club at the school—but when Martin went through, there had been enough residual homophobia around, especially among the more rural, religious kids, to make for some uncomfortable situations. It helped that Martin was big—he hit 300 pounds in his sophomore year and was a linebacker on the football team—in the sense that other students didn’t mess with him, but when he had come out, several members of the team, black and white, had objected to his continued presence (“I aint taken showers with that faggot”). I had written an editorial in the school paper, decrying prejudice, etc. That night, I’d been invited for dinner at the Groves’ house. Afterwards, Mr. Groves had taken me out on the deck, as if I were a suitor he needed to caution, and thanked me for the editorial. “Not just for defending Martin and being his friend. But for allowing me to confront my own unease about my son’s sexuality.”
Martin’s other talent, besides football, was singing–he had one several county and later statewide contests and was on Broadway now, singing in “Rent.” I asked Groves how he was doing in New York.
“Splendidly.” He beamed. “We caught the show last weekend.”
A vet rolled by in a wheelchair, the stumps of his legs still in casts.
“How goes, McElroy?” Groves asked.
“Can’t complain,” the man said. His left ear was covered in white gauze. He looked at me and grinned. “Well, I can complain. But then I won’t be perky. That’s the order of the day,” he explained. “Perkiness. Perkiness under fire.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
“Tell you, they’re rebuilding my ear,” he touched it, “with skin from my ass. It’s like now I can’t say, you know, ‘that’s no skin off my ass.’ I find, you know, I resent that. Know what I mean, doc?” he asked Groves. “Like, the limitations of it. A certain narrowing of options in my life.”
“Poor baby,” Groves said.
“See, there you go,” he said to me. “Tough love.” He looked up at me again. “Hey, you know the Marines’ hymn? Doc here was a Marine.”
Another vet had wheeled out next to McElroy. His left leg and arm were gone, though the arm had been replaced with a prosthetic device from the elbow down. His nose was also covered with a large dressing. He touched it with one of the prosthetic fingers. The device made a whirring sound.
“Mr. Ratliff,” Groves said. “And how is your perkiness level?”
McElroy patted Ratliff’s stump. “We be brothers, doc and friend.” He nodded at me.
I introduced myself.
“Hunt her what? No, no, man; I’m just fucking with you.” He turned back to the other patient. “Rat and me, we’re brothers.”
“Comrades in arms,” Ratliff said, raising his stump.
“Ass brothers,” McElroy said, pointing. “Building his nose with the skin off his ass too. What we got in common.”
“Ass hats,” Ratliff said.
“Hey, you know the Marines’ hymn,” McElroy asked me again.
Before I could answer, he and Ratliff began wheeling away in unison. “Him, him, fuck him,” they sang. McElroy looked back over his shoulder. “Not to worry, doc. We good. We in our safe space, your doc-ness. We’ll write it all up in our After Actions.”
They disappeared down the hall, singing.
“Welcome,” Groves said to me. Then to the question on my face. “After Action Reports. What we call their journals. The terminology is military; we encourage them to free write against the rigidity of that kind of language. The just-the-facts flatness of it.”
It seemed a good opening to tell Groves what I was trying to do. My own After Action report on the suicides.
He frowned. “Is that something you should be doing?”
I answered the question he hadn’t asked. “My dad was different. The cancer had…it was a choice he made. Had the guts to make.”
“Well, good on you, Hunter. I’m glad you’re doing it. Someone should be telling their stories.” He kneaded his forehead with two forefingers. “I felt so damn helpless when they took their own lives. Do you know the statistics?”
“Yes. Listen, the journals you mentioned. The After Actions. Would the three of them…?
“They are not something I could let you have. Even if I had them.”
“You don’t have them? Did they go to the families?”
“The thing is, I couldn’t predict it, not with any of them. Bilal Jafari, in particular; I thought she had the support.”
He hadn’t answered me. I didn’t press it.
“I thought they all did. Their families. Nobody in this county would spit on them.”
“Yes. And she, Bilal, also had a cultural and religious framework that should have helped her deal with it. But they’re all so isolated anyway. Individually wrapped, as it were, unless they are with each other. It’s as if they have to have their own language….” He shook his head. “It was no different than us.”
“Does that help you here–your own experience?”
“Oh yes,” Groves said. “It’s a real comfort, knowing we’ve learned so much.”

On way out, walking with Groves, I passed an open door. A kind of keening wail was coming from inside, and when I looked I saw Paul Rausch sitting on a bed next to a patient in blue pajamas. Rausch has red hair, a sharp nose and a thin face that always made me think of a fox.
“He comes most every weekend,” Groves said.
The man had a shaved head with a large crescent shaped pink scar, as thick as a worm, on the right side of his head. The wail stopped, and the man started making a kind of mewling sound, his lips bubbling with saliva, a thread of it dangling down over his chin. Rausch was holding him, his arms around his shoulders, rocking him back and forth, a look of transfixed tenderness on his face. Tears were streaming down his cheeks.
“There, there,” Rausch was saying. “There, there.”