Bringing his truck to a stop, Stoner sat quietly in his seat for a moment and thought. Given a chance, he could have dealt with any of those nightmares, singularly or together. If only he’d been allowed by his Creator to keep his health, Stoner was sure that he could have held things together, to have soldiered on and keep both his sanity and family. But like countless others, he was denied that opportunity by the onset of a series of nebulous and ill defined conditions that eventually became known as Gulf War syndrome.

It crept into his life slowly, unnoticed at first. For him it was like an unending bout with the flu. He was never really outright sick, but neither was he free for more than a few days of misery that alternated between sweats and chills. First the military physicians, and then those at the VA after he was medically discharged, explained away Stoner’s continuous ill health with any number of theories, none of which solved his problems. Even his own wife, worn thin by his continuous complaints, did little to help. “Dale,” she’d scream at him in frustration, “it’s all in your head. You’ve got to pull yourself together. Forget about the Gulf and get on with your life.” And though he tried, tried with all his strength, he found he was unable to overcome either his chronic illness or those terrible visions that he kept locked away inside where no one could see them or be hurt by them.

As bad as his separation from his wife was, the unkindest cut of all came in the fall of 1996 when the Department of Defense, after denying the existence of Gulf War syndrome, suddenly announced that yes, an unknown number of soldiers had been exposed to chemical agents during the Gulf War. To Stoner the admission that some of the illnesses experienced by Gulf War veterans could have been related to service there, after the government had denied any connection between the two for so long, was a breach of faith. Hadn’t he done his part? Hadn’t he fulfilled his obligations to his duly appointed superiors and the people of the United States in the belief that they would, if necessary, support him in his time of need?

The memory that no one had done a dammed thing to help him provided the last spark of anger he needed to carry him through the next hour. Like vets from the Vietnam War, Dale learned the hard way that those whom he thought he was protecting and serving wanted nothing to do with the human wreckage left in the wake of war. People such as the arrogant young professional who had been driving the metallic blue German import had their own lives to live, narrow and self-centered lives that left little time for those who had shouldered the rifle when duty called and suffered for their efforts.

Once on the loading dock, Stoner dropped the hydraulic gate, opened the rear doors of his truck, and climbed in. Mechanically, he began loading the heavy-duty four-wheel cart. As he had done so many times before in his mind, Stoner stacked the boxes made to hold five thousand sheets of copier paper in a predetermined order. Carefully he placed the boxes he, himself, had packed in the center of the cart. A small arrow, all but unnoticeable unless you knew what to look for, pointed outward on one side of the box lids. These would all be stacked in the center, four high, and surrounded by boxes containing real copier paper.