The First Time I Saw Richard Carter

Oddly, the most important thing I saw is prologue. Unfortunately for Richard, it is a fact neither to be undone nor forgotten. For him, as for all of us, the past is—not was.

The first time I saw him, he was wading ashore with his Marine squadmates in Somalia. He was young, naïve, and optimistic. Like his country, he hoped to set things right.

I was with him too that day when death spun out of an alley, provoking the instant decision that destroyed most of what he assumed the world to be. His innocence evaporated in an obscene burst of automatic rifle fire. What he did not know, could not know at the time, was that he retained the essence of his integrity. Like the hope that Pandora loosed on the world, his integrity intensified his self-loathing and his guilt. He refused to consider that it was something that happened to him. For him, it was something that he did.

What I remember most vividly of the days that followed is Richard’s uncertainty. He was uncertain of almost everything, including his own sanity. Why wouldn’t he be? Willingly or not, he broke the oldest taboo. Circumstance, society, even God might forgive him, but he could not forgive himself.

Nothing made sense to him anymore because what he felt in that Mogadishu street wasn’t something a real man would feel—unless he was a monster.
It wasn’t because he pulled the trigger. It was because of the elation afterwards.

Richard is no monster, no matter how much he sees himself as one. But he has a demon, and its name is PTSD.

I watched him as he tried to come home.

And then he betrayed his “dream girl.”