The Ghosts We Carry

The ghosts follow him, though most people can't see them. They sit in the empty chair across from him at breakfast. They ride shotgun on long drives. They stand at the foot of his bed on sleepless nights. Not metaphorical ghosts. He's too literal-minded for that. These are the actual dead, preserved in his memory with high-definition clarity.

But most persistent are Kuhns and Kinslow. They visit him more frequently than the others, their presence particularly acute during his morning shower as he brushes his teeth. A peculiar habit he's maintained for years: the water cascading over his shoulders as he methodically cleans each tooth, feeling the shape of them under the bristles. The tactile sensation inevitably conjures thoughts of Kuhns, of the teeth that should have been in Ramadi instead of his own.

The story of his teeth is not merely one of cosmetic insecurity, but of survival and guilt. After his first tour in Iraq, the Army had stationed him in South Korea on a Combat Observation Lasing Team. As team leader, he had responsibility for two soldiers, a position that offered relative safety. Then came that night in the town. TDC. Fueled by alcohol and the reckless energy of young men at war with boredom.

The blackout drinking. The arrest by South Korean police. Something about a spoiler torn from a civilian car. He can't remember if he was the one who did it. The absurdity of it: a decorated combat veteran, survivor of the invasion, brought low by a car spoiler and too much soju. If there was a cosmic joke being told, he was the punchline.

His punishment seemed calculated in its cruelty. Removal from his COLT team. Reassignment as a forward observer with Baker Company, 1/503rd Infantry, just as they prepared for deployment to Ramadi.

What haunts him most is who replaced him. Sergeant Kuhns, a soldier whose face has become inextricably linked with his own in his memory. Kuhns had the same dental condition, the same crowded teeth, though unlike him, Kuhns laughed freely without shame or self-consciousness. It was like looking at an alternate version of himself. Same teeth, different soul.

Or maybe the same soul, just distributed across two bodies by some clerical error in the cosmic bureaucracy.

In Ramadi, the divergent paths created by that one drunken night became starkly clear. While he navigated the urban hellscape with Baker Company, Kuhns took his former position with Zimmerman and Kinslow, operating the same Humvee he had once commanded. Then came the day that permanently altered the geometry of his guilt.

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An Iraqi insurgent dropped a grenade through the turret of that Humvee. Kuhns and Kinslow died instantly.

The knowledge is unbearable in its simplicity: it should have been him in that vehicle. Had he maintained discipline. Had he not gotten blackout drunk. Had he not participated in the vandalism, or failed to prevent it. He would have been in that turret instead of Kuhns. The same grenade would have fallen, but different blood would have been shed. His life was purchased with Kuhns' death, a substitution he never consented to but cannot escape.

The ghosts don't speak. They don't need to. Their presence is communication enough, a constant reminder of debts that can never be repaid, of the random cruelty of survival, of the ways we continue to exist in the spaces left by the dead. They are not accusatory. That would be easier to bear. They are simply present, witnesses to the life he continues to live, the opportunities he continues to have, the breaths he continues to take because someone else stopped taking theirs.

Sometimes, in the darkest hours of night, he finds himself mentally apologizing to Kuhns. Explaining the dental work. Justifying the continued pursuit of improvement. Seeking forgiveness for the crime of still being alive and trying to make that life better. These one-sided conversations never reach a conclusion, never provide the absolution he seeks. How could they? The dead don't answer. They simply watch with patient, eternal attention as the living continue their temporary dance across the earth's surface.