Heaven Should Fall - By Rebecca Coleman Page 0,139

one, the same as everybody else. The same as me, or Leela, or Elias. As good a man as Dave was, even the help he offered me had not been purely selfless. He welcomed the excuse to bring me back, and not just because I was a hard worker, either. I think I had known that, in the packed-away part of my heart, for a long time.

And I could find a way to make room for it. Because grief always gives way eventually and cracks open into something new, the way my mother had once stood beside a highway with me, looking out over a thunderstorm, knowing it was time to usher in a change that would make things better. It was my turn now, and I could do the same—for the sake of my child’s life, yes, but also for mine.

It’s not too much to ask of a person. It’s love, that’s all.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from The Kingdom of Childhood by Rebecca Coleman.

Author’s Note

The first stirrings of this story entered my mind over a late-night dinner with a friend at IHOP. The friend and her former husband had both been in the army—she was still on active duty—and had each served in Iraq. Sitting across from me with her hands wrapped around a cup of hot cocoa, she began a slow and heartbreaking reflection on the end of her marriage. As she described her then-husband’s transformation from a loving partner to a man who struggled to put his harrowing experiences behind him, and the toll that it all had taken on his psyche and their marriage, the war finally came home for me. I know many people in the military, but very few who are on the ground in a war zone. I’d heard about post-traumatic stress disorder, but overall I had been very insulated from soldiers’ experiences and those of their families. Yet as I listened to my friend that day, I started to put together how far-reaching are the effects of PTSD, how devastating and how permanent. There was no optimistic hook to this story, where the soldier ends up running a marathon and becoming a motivational speaker, nor the defining end point of a suicide or line-of-duty death. There was only a quiet and ordinary loss that went on and on and on.

Over 212,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have been treated by the Department of Veterans Affairs for PTSD, but because half of vets seek health care elsewhere, the number affected is likely far higher. Soldiers affected by PTSD may experience flashbacks, feel tremendous anxiety and hyper-alertness, and suffer from intense feelings of guilt, all of which make it extremely difficult to function in society the way they did before the war. Recently, greater awareness and greater focus has improved some services for soldiers with PTSD, but many soldiers and their families continue to find the treatments offered to be inadequate or superficial. The suicide rate among combat vets is already alarming, and it is rising. As the drawdown continues and more and more soldiers come home, the United States and its allies will be faced with societies that include more than two million veterans of those wars—and by VA estimates, more than one-quarter of those men and women experience PTSD.

I don’t have any illusions that Heaven Should Fall represents anything more than my imaginative ideas about one soldier’s, and one family’s, experience. To do justice to those who served, I researched extensively to be sure Elias’s symptoms, his feelings and his experiences of war would be as credible as possible. I spoke to soldiers, read accounts written by those with PTSD, watched videos of patrols in Afghanistan and sought out affirmation of the smallest details, and sometimes made sweeping changes to accommodate some aspect I’d gotten wrong. At the end of it, quite honestly, I loved Elias more than any other character in the book; if I have made any errors in the physical details, I apologize, but I most of all hope the emotional details of his story tell the truth.

I encourage anyone who is moved with compassion for our veterans and their families to support organizations such as Disabled American Veterans, which offers the Veterans Crisis Line in addition to its plethora of other services to wounded soldiers. And in the difficult economic climate that exists at the time of this writing, I hope that our legislators will be mindful of the fact that cuts to