able to speak to the doctor in charge, so I can’t tell you how he’s doing, but I’m sure his folks would let you go see him now that he’s in a regular hospital.”
Radke asked me to write down the address, and the name of the doctor, and promised he’d stop by as soon as he had time. “It’d be better if he was at the VA on account of the insurance, but I know you went out of your way getting him out of that hellhole. Well, you didn’t ask me here to rant and rave. What did you want to know?”
“When Chad and Nadia were arguing, it sounded like a couple in the middle of an angry divorce. But John Vishneski says Chad didn’t know Nadia.”
“I don’t think he did.”
Radke drained his bottle and signaled to Gerri for a second. She had it on the counter almost before his hand went down.
“So what were they fighting about?”
“Her drawings. He told Marty and me they gave him flashbacks.” Radke drank most of the second bottle in one big gulp. “It was something to do with what went wrong when his unit was on the road to Kufah.”
“What was that?” I prompted when he fell silent.
“You ever been in a war? It’s nothing like what they show on TV or video games. You’re tired all the time. You’re scared, you don’t know who’s a friend, who’s an enemy. If fighting starts, it’s not organized. You don’t always know where the shots are coming from and, if you shoot back, will you hit your own guys? Maybe it was different in World War Two, but in Iraq—even me, I was in Support, but I still got caught in a couple of gun battles because there aren’t any lines, yours or the enemy’s.”
He shredded his napkin and started laying pieces out on the counter as if he were trying to establish some real battle lines. I shook my head at Gerri as she started toward us.
“Is that what happened on the road to Kufah?” I asked.
“Chad couldn’t say, even at the VA when we were with one of those counselors. We got five sessions! Five sessions to undo five years of war!” Radke snorted in derision. “Chad lost his whole squad. That’s all he ever said, not any details about how it happened. You know what that’s like? Guys you been eating and sleeping with, suddenly they’re lying dead all around you. They sent him home after that for four months, then he had to redeploy. And he was fine, he said, as long as he was over there. But once he got discharged, once he got home, he couldn’t take being around civilians. No one here gives a rat’s ass about what we went through. It’s hell to be there, to be going through it. But it’s a hundred—no, a million—times worse to be here where no one cares.
“‘I lost my whole squad on the road to Kufah,’” he mimicked in a savage voice. “‘Bummer, man. But what about American Idol?’ And the women are worse!”
“How’d you end up at Club Gouge?”
He gave me a sidelong look, checking me for signs of shockability or maybe prudery. “We heard this gal sits naked on a stage. And the drawings . . . It was something to do.”
I’d printed out a copy of Alexandra Guaman’s yearbook photo. I pulled it out and showed it to Radke.
“She was Nadia Guaman’s sister and she was killed in Iraq. She wasn’t with the Army, though—she worked for one of the private security firms. Hers is the face that Nadia kept painting on the Body Artist. I wondered if Chad knew Alexandra Guaman in Iraq.”
Radke shook his head. “He never said. It’s like I told you, it’s a big country. And it’s not just we’re a big Army, but the contractors . . . You know they have more contractors than Uncle Sam’s soldiers over there? Some guy, he said, ‘Iraq isn’t the war of the willing, it’s the war of the billing.’ And until you’ve seen it, you don’t get it! The contractors, they’re everywhere, building crappy housing for us, good shit for themselves. They’re hustling a buck at the PX; they’re taking convoys around. We’re busting our asses for base pay, and we have to protect the contractors, who are drawing double overtime doing less work than we are!”
His voice was starting to rise again so I broke in. “What would Chad say after you