Drop Your Helmet and Howl (Part 5 of 6)

A night spent drinking with young veterans suffering from PTSD

“The last thing I heard Caz say was, ‘I will find you, and I will kill you’”

-Peter Fielding, Benjamin Caswell’s best friend for 18 years

We arrive at Fielding and Kyle’s apartment a little after two in the morning, the two friends almost carrying each other into the house. Fielding goes to the kitchen to see if they have any alcohol left while Kyle turns on the tv and starts scrolling through the channels. I say I’m going to take a shower and he points towards the apartment’s one unoccupied room. Or at least recently unoccupied. Caswell had lived there before Kyle and Fielding told him they had to cut him loose if they were ever going to get better. Some of his things are still in the room, however, a bookshelf, a mattress, a few papers. On one of the shelves is a picture of the three of them on their annual float trip.

Fireworks trigger the soldiers’ PTSD, making Independence Day a difficult occasion, so every year they drive down to Arkansas, drive way into the back country, and go on a float trip using homemade rafts. The picture in Caswell’s room is of the three of them on a beach, Caswell holding the camera with Kyle and Fielding standing behind him. In the background, sticking out of the water, is their raft which sank about six miles into their journey. They swam to shore and decided to drink the beer they had brought, build a fire, and sleep on the beach before making the long trek back in the morning.

At two in the morning, Kyle woke up to see Caz standing waist deep in the water, yelling up at the stars. Kyle shook Fielding awake and the two of them watched as their friend screamed over and over again. As they watched, Caswell’s hand rose into the air and they realized he was holding their emergency flare gun. He fired it into the air, the light brilliant and pulsing as it rose above them, casting Caz into shadow as it flew higher until eventually fading out.

Caswell turned around and they watched as he reloaded the gun. Kyle and Fielding lay back down and pretended to be asleep while Caswell waded back to the beach. They heard him laugh maniacally to himself and watched as he pointed the flare gun at them, firing it and launching its cartridge, the flare passing less than a meter above their heads. He chucked the flare gun back into the sand and sat down, crossing his legs and staring out over the water. And there he stayed. Kyle and Fielding eventually got up and went and sat next to him. The three boys looking at slow moving water and a sunken raft while the rest of the nation set off mini explosions in their backyards.

There were signs, long before they ever returned home. Caz had always been the wild card, as Fielding puts it. On one of their first missions in Afghanistan, Caswell and Fielding were walking through a small village in the mountains. It was known to have strong Taliban ties, but for the most part the people had been outwardly friendly to the American soldiers. As they walked down the main street of the village, a bunch of the local children ran up to the two Oklahoma men.

“These kids, never seen a white person in their lives,” Fielding says. “You know what he said to these little kids? He looked at these little kids and he goes, ‘I will fuck your fathers and I will fuck your grandfathers, I will fuck your forefathers’ and these kids, their parents were probably Taliban, and Caz is the first motherfuckin’ white guy they meet. No wonder they hate us, you know?”

It was something that could be shrugged off, treated as a joke. But there were other signs. The week before they returned from their tour, Caswell bought hash off a Taliban dealer and never paid him, resulting in the Taliban putting a price on his head. He received commendations for rushing into a burning barracks and rescuing valuable equipment, but late at night he would tell Fielding he set the fire himself, placing the equipment where he knew he could find it. He said he knew no one would be in there. He said he didn’t even care about the commendation. He said he just wanted to watch the place burn to the ground.