fore succumbing to the pain of his wounds, turning very frightened and fixing his confused gaze on me.
“Detective Cross?” the young officer said. “Where am I, sir? What have I done to deserve this?”
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Seeing how unhinged Officer Carney was acting, the psychologist in me wanted to believe that he might have no idea of the things he had done. But the detective in me was much more skeptical.
“You saying you don’t know why you’re here, Officer?”
“Where am I, sir?” Carney asked again.
“Psych ward, St. Elizabeths Hospital.”
“Psych?” he said, puzzled again. “No, that’s not…No, I’m…I’m good. I, I checked out. I’m good. I’m good.” He started to cry and then looked at me again. “They said I was good.”
“Who said you were good?”
“Naval doctors. VA doctors. They cleared me years ago, said I was fine. No problems with the baseline. None.”
“You mean a concussion baseline?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Tell me about the IED in Afghanistan.”
“But what have I done, sir?”
“We’ll get to that later, Officer. Where was that bomb?”
On a road southwest of Kandahar, deep in Helmand Province nine months into his tour of duty, Corporal Carney was riding as a top gunner in an armored car leading a line of trucks carrying supplies for several forward bases. The IED had been buried in the shoulder of the dirt road and detonated as he passed.
“Nothing hit me,” Carney remembered. “No shrapnel or powder residue, just the explosive force, the waves of it going through my head. It was like I was there, alert, scoping for Taliban—hoorah—and then I wasn’t. Woke up like thirty hours later on a medevac flight to Ramstein with a piece of my skull riding beside me.”
Doctors told Carney he’d been bleeding from his nose and ears, and that he’d sustained a moderate closed-head brain injury. They’d removed the piece of skull to relieve pressure. After an initial recovery and second surgery to reattach the skull section in Germany, he was shipped on to the Balboa Naval Medical Center in San Diego, where he underwent extensive therapy.
“Five months and they said I was good to go,” Carney said. “And I was. Went back to my unit, and was crushing PT in like a month.”
“But you tried out for Force Recon and were denied?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They give you a reason?”
“Given my medical history, Detective, they said they did not want to chance it.”
“Make you angry? Sad?”
“Both,” Carney admitted. “But I was only twenty-three. I could see an entire life out there before me. Still do. Please, Detective Cross, what did I do to get me put in here?”
It did me no good to hold back any longer, so I told him.
Carney became nauseated and vomited. “No,” he moaned. “No, I couldn’t. I would never do…” He looked up at me in abject despair. “Oh, my God, sir, what kind of monster have I become?”
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