Thank You for My Service - Mat Best Page 0,8
were told that they were headed to Kuwait for the pre-stage of the invasion of Iraq. By this time Alan had been cancer-free for eleven months. The problem was, the military required you to be free and clear for twelve months in order to deploy, plus the notes on all his charts indicated that they thought he would need an extra year of recovery. So close, and at the same time so far.
Did Alan complain? C’mon, I think you know the answer to that by now. He handled his fucking business. The first thing he did was go through the standard military process, filling out paperwork, getting signatures, getting approvals to try and become deployable. Of course, since this was the military, things took forever, and it wasn’t until the day before his and Davis’s company was slated to leave that he found out it had gotten all dicked up and he had been denied. When he got the news, he tried another tack, making an appointment for a pre-deployment physical the next day to try to secure clearance through medical channels before his company’s plane took off from Pendleton Airfield.
“Sir, I gotta be with my platoon when they deploy today,” he told the military doctor.
The doctor nodded, seeing the eagerness in Alan’s eyes. “All right. Stand up, let’s have a look at you.”
As the doctor ran his exam, Alan passed everything. Then came the standard check of the lymph nodes, which is a dead giveaway for Hodgkin’s patients, even ones whose cancer is in remission. The doctor put both hands on Alan’s neck, lightly pressed on the lymph nodes, and promptly stopped the exam.
“How do your lymph nodes feel? Swollen? Sore?”
“Not at all. They feel good. I feel great.”
“Uh-huh. Because to me they feel swollen,” the doctor said in a serious tone.
“Well, I’m not sure what you mean. Like I said, I feel great. I was around a couple fellows who were smoking cigarettes last night, though. Maybe their secondhand smoke briefly polluted my lungs—”
“Son, that shit isn’t going to fly. You’re a recovering cancer patient, and your lymph nodes are swollen. I’m afraid I can’t medically clear you to deploy. I’m sorry.”
“But I’ve been done with chemo for eleven months—”
“It’s for your own good. I’m sure you’ll be fine for the next deployment.”
“Yeah, but my unit is leaving tonight.” Alan was persistent.
“My hands are tied. Sorry, son. Don’t worry, the war isn’t going anywhere.” He patted Alan on the shoulder with the maximum allowable amount of sympathy for an E-3 at the bottom of the Marine Corps food chain. Which is to say, none. The doctor walked out, leaving Alan momentarily dejected, then pissed. This was an “official” military determination that would get reported to his unit commander, which meant there was no way to get his name on that activation order or his ass on that plane.
For the ordinary person, this would have been the ballgame. But Alan isn’t ordinary. He is a master bullshit artist. He is the fucking Michelangelo of feces painting. In the parking lot outside the medical building, he called the civilian oncologist who had cleared him for SOI eleven months earlier. Alan explained the situation—well, a situation: He was about to leave on a “training exercise” that was only going to be “three weeks” as part of a “temporary deployment” to a place that was absolutely 100 percent not in a war zone, and he needed to get a physical because his military doctors wanted a second opinion in order to clear him. It made sense to the oncologist, as all good lies do to all people, and he agreed to see Alan that afternoon.
Alan’s oncologist was an hour and a half away and, with no military affiliation, had no clue what was going on or what was at stake. So when Alan got there, he nonchalantly walked into the exam room and made it seem like this was the most run-of-the-mill, check-the-box, stamp-the-passport visit in the world. Which it was—until he felt Alan’s lymph nodes.
“These seem swollen, Alan.”
Here’s the thing about civilian doctors who practice around the edges of a military population: They may be adjacent to our world, but that’s a lot different than being in it, and the truth is, they know fuck-all about how the military actually operates. So when a young, healthy-looking Marine walks into one of their exam rooms ramrod straight, confident, and unflappable, then lies right to their fucking face, they have no