“You have to go through two checkpoints.”

“Yes. I did that.”

“Just a moment, sir. I will direct you to the person in charge of this.” The major backs out of the room, careful of Thomas.

Men appear as if from the air and they push him down and keep him down and he smells the floor wax and sees what could have been his life in so many ways, if he hadn’t joined up and had remained home with Ruth and learned, himself, the old songs and ways they had started to teach him when he was young. Or if he’d gone along with the others and killed the children and women and the old man who was left behind and gone on to another village and done it again and lived or died with his troops, burning things behind him, keeping a souvenir here and there. And he could have gone home with them, found a job or two, drank a beer together with his buddies, watched a ball game, run for tribal council, the state legislature, or some other branch of a government just like this one where he is held down.

When his records come up on their computer, a voice from out of the sky like god’s voice, says, “Hell, why do you want to turn them in?”

“I didn’t earn them.”

“Weren’t you wounded? It says you were wounded.”

They already have his information. He thinks about the scar across his middle, the bleeding leg he’d thought was an artery and tried to hold together, the impact to his neck and arm which he didn’t even know about because of the blood on his leg. It made him sweat now to think of it. He kept it out of his mind, in one of the corners in a bundle he made called shrapnel and suddenly he weighed so much. “Yes sir, I was wounded.”

He is moving closer to words, to truth. “But I wasn’t killed or missing. I killed the wrong people. I stayed.” Tears began in eyes that had forgotten to dry. “I killed Americans. It was supposed to be a raid. It went wrong. And we were in the wrong place. I tried to tell them. I had the map in my hand. And we were supposed to kill the children and I said no.”

Time passed even if it didn’t seem to. He was sitting now. By then the doctor was there. “They say that a lot, you survivors. Did you know that? But your records say you already told the doctors. They told you that what you did was right by military law. The simple rules of engagement. But it was common then, you know. It also says you had a head injury.”

“But I did it. I knew what I was doing. They were going to kill innocent people. I left my own tags there so everyone would think I was dead, too. I ran away. I didn’t go home. I couldn’t. It was a choice, don’t you see?”