218: Soldier Comes Home

Texas and Minnesota

Scott was in the Navy, served in Kenya and Somalia, then got out and worked as a cop on gang and drugs task forces all across the state of Minnesota. It sounds like he was a terrific cop – when I meet his brother he tells me that Scott “made more arrests than his whole department put together.” He worked undercover, ran CIs against the Latin Kings when they made an incursion into Minnesota. His conversation is full of little tidbits of very useful cop talk – the detail that it’s car key fobs that are bugged most often, the techniques for hiding in plain sight when you’re tagging along with your CI. “You get to be real good at acting,” he says. He was running cases all over the state, had some sort of additional responsibility that took him into the morgue all the time – was “surrounded by death,” he said – and then, about six or seven years ago he just snapped. He was doing a stop in a Somali neighborhood, his car was surrounded by a crowd, and he thought he was in Somalia and reached for his M4 and came to himself in the nick of time but knew that he was damaged goods. He tried to get the police force to put him on some sort of leave or run him through counseling but they wouldn’t do it, and eventually he just had to quit six years before his pension. He had always been a heavy drinker and now he simply switched to doing it full time. “It was pathetic” is his brother’s commentary. It was all day every day, sitting outside his house working through two packs of cigarettes and a liter of whisky. “Any little thing happens,” says the brother, “and he’s immediately getting a new liter.” Scott’s take is that he was going through extreme PTSD – in his mind, he was seeing dead bodies all the time, a mother and child he’d seen shot in Somalia, bodies from cases he’d worked on in the police force – and the alcohol did its work to some extent, helped to drive away the pictures. And then the alcohol was useful for another end, which was that he was secretly trying to drink himself to death. “I didn’t want to cap myself because of life insurance and if I shot myself I didn’t want it to turn into something against the NRA,” he says – a kind of hyper-consideration that I get used to around him – so suicide-by-alcohol became the way to go. He was getting very close, he says, he was like a few days away – his liver was failing, along with his pancreas, kidneys, heart – and then some chain of events that he doesn’t really understand compelled him to call a hotline and then brought him to Fort Endurance in Houston, a center for the treatment of veterans’ PTSD.

I don’t really want to cast him in the documentary film I’m working on about Fort Endurance because – how else to put it – Scott is really ugly. He’s thick and jowly, his features look like they were drawn by a five-year-old, his skin is a bit yellowed, and he has a very questionable mohawk. He checks exactly none of the boxes that you’d look for in documentary film – he’s not a person of color, not young or obviously dynamic, the line among the crew is that “television may not be ready for Scott” – but what can we do, it’s rare to meet somebody who’s as open as he is, who’s gone through so much and has come to a place of clarity about himself. On a previous trip, we’d filmed him at an equine therapy session, petting and washing a therapy horse named Gertie. It had been a matter of astonishment at the horse farm how much Scott and Gertie had connected and she whinnied a bit and seemed to stand taller when he was there, and he groomed her, washed her – “this is my favorite part of the day, my favorite part of the week,” he said – and told her about his traumas, his relationships with women. “And she understands,” he explained to us. He attributes this partly to her being Norwegian like him but mostly to her just being a very gentle spirit – and she turns directly to face him in her stall at the moment at the end of the session when he tells her that he has to leave now and will be leaving Houston as well and licks his hand and brings her nose very close to his.

Scott and Gertie

So whatever my misgivings about casting Scott in a central role in a documentary, this really is irresistible – an old vet, having burned through all of his relationships, on death’s door, finding peace by talking to a horse. And we come back for Scott’s ‘graduation’ – which is kind of a fancy way of describing his discharge from the facility. He had been there eight months. At the beginning he had been in a walker and couldn’t go up steps – his doctor thought he wouldn’t make it there and the Fort Endurance people had to make the case for his admission. And then he had walked eight miles every day back and forth across the parking lot of Fort Endurance and gotten himself into shape enough to lose the walker and to prepare for a major open-heart surgery. And now, having twisted his ankle and no longer able to do the walk, he spent the day mostly on the porch of the house he shared with six other vets, smoked cigarettes, served as a kind of elder statesman for the facility. He was on the lighter side of things here, a bit of an anomaly – he wasn’t court-ordered, he had never gotten into narcotics, he didn’t even curse, the result of a promise he had made to God when he was six, and he had somehow kept to that promise even when he was undercover until, finally, a Fort Endurance therapist convinced him that he didn’t really have to hold himself accountable to the vow of a six-year-old. Everybody seemed to like him – pointed him out to us as ‘having a good story,’ as ‘having come a long way.’ And, for graduation, he fully embraced the moment. He was the only one of the graduating vets to wear a suit and he received the loudest ovation, with whistling, etc, when he made his way to the front of the gathering hall for his speech. “I didn’t think I was going to make it here,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much in my life as I have here. I understood how toxic I was when I was in my addiction, I didn’t have worth. I used to wake up every morning pissed at God for having not died during the night. I didn’t think it was possible to change and I have. I love myself. I can’t even explain how happy I am.”

***

And, in the morning – 4am in the morning – he flies back to Fergus Falls in Western Minnesota near the North Dakota border. He really hasn’t been sure who’s going to meet him. There had been some hope his ex-wife would be there, but it turns out that she’s going to the lake that weekend. Scott gets it – “people take their lake time very seriously up here,” he says – and, in any case, he had really been a toxic figure for a long time, had, for instance, missed his daughter’s high school graduation while he was drinking outside the doorway of his house, and isn’t expecting much affection from anybody.

Scott reflecting before graduation

There’s a certain resignation between both Scott and his brother Frank when Frank picks him up. In the arc of our film, this is supposed to be a significant moment – soldier comes home – but they barely man-hug each other before they deal with the logistics of loading Scott’s bags onto the luggage carts. His features look like they were drawn by the same child that did Scott – although the child was maybe slightly older and more refined at the time of doing Frank. He speaks slightly more briskly and airily than Scott – he owns an excavation company, points to a fire hydrant when he’s asked what he does and says, “I did everything that goes underneath that hydrant,” and he has an entrepreneurial pace to him whereas Scott is more mumbly and guttural. Still, if there was any lingering question that they were brothers, a playback of a single conversation between them would cinch it. They spend every moment I’m around them arguing agreeably with one another.

The debates turn on things like whether to buy almond milk or regular, whether to get a chair that’s more comfortable for Scott or a recliner that will be more comfortable for guests. And Scott – ever-considerate – seems always to take the long view. He’s worried about the amount of water that’s wasted in making almond milk, he’s thinking that a recliner might be better for guests, and Frank defaults always to a brusque common sense. “I waste more water putting down a single hydrant than is wasted in a supermarket of almond milks,” he points out – and tells Scott to forget the recliner and get a chair: “What do you care if somebody else is uncomfortable?” And Scott, as agreeable as he is considerate, mumbles along his assent to each of Frank’s points.

The impression Frank gives is that he’s trying to settle in Scott and move on as quickly as possible – he’s an avid catfisherman, he has a major tournament tomorrow morning to prepare for – but it emerges, over the course of conversation, that he really has done a tremendous amount to prepare for Scott’s homecoming. He has taken care of Scott’s basset hound, Elise, for the last eight months and he has exhaustively fumigated the place and thrown out much of the old furniture and upgraded the bits that he could here and there – a new toaster, for instance. “Where’s my old toaster?” Scott asks but then has to agree with Frank’s point that the old toaster was falling apart, that the new toaster is better, that all the changes have been positive. “You couldn’t breathe in here, it was horrible,” Frank tells him. “And how does it smell now?” “Better, a lot better,” Scott has to concede.

Frank has made some more subtle preparations as well. He has packed off their mother – who lives across the street – for a week’s holiday. She has been so devoted to Scott that she has been a major enabler of his drinking. “She’s the kind of person that, if we robbed a bank, she would say it’s the bank’s fault for not having enough security and for carrying too much money,” Frank tells me – and Scott, in the depths of his addiction, had manipulated her good nature egregiously, sending her on liquor runs when he was too drunk to do it himself, having her ferry him to and from the bar. And Frank had really tried to sell the house, knowing that the house itself is a significant trigger for Scott – and his inability to do so is weighing heavily on him. The reality, he says, is that they just couldn’t afford to do it – it would be hard to come up with something cheaper than this place, the low-slung white house, almost perfectly featureless.

And I do get his concern – this seems like a very difficult place to be in sober. Nobody exactly faults Scott for his initial impulse of how to fill up the hours of the day, and, without that, it’s not so simple to come up with a viable plan. At Fort Endurance, there has been great attention to this sort of scheduling – to make plans for thirty days out, for sixty, for ninety, etc – but sitting at the kitchen table and going over what he’s written down Scott seems, a bit disconcertingly, to be drawing some blanks. There’s walking the dog, there’s the AA meeting at 7 in the morning, there are meds to take, there’s a difficult question of how much of the news to watch – he had largely been shielded at Endurance but says he can’t really do without and dutifully, at Frank’s suggestion, writes down that he’ll limit the news to an hour per day. And then – what? He’s very prone to anxiety and large groups of people can be a trigger. He’s basically flat-broke – somehow both military and police service haven’t added up to any viable pension and he’s working on a GoFundMe just to pay for transportation to his surgeries. So it’s pretty much just that, prepare for the surgeries and rely on the new-found sense of grace, and a lot of meetings, to make it through each day. “You’re looking a little overwhelmed,” Frank says. “You’ve got to take it easy. You’ve got to remember that you’ve got nothing to do except to look after yourself.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Scott says.

But Frank isn’t such a great spokesman for calm and relaxation – that’s not his persona – and he paces agitatedly around the fumigated living room, says, “I just don’t want to have done all this for nothing, that’s all I’m saying,” and Scott, over his handwritten schedule, mutters, “Yeah yeah, I get you.”

***

It’s kind of an odd split screen for me, seeing Scott on the one hand through the eyes of Fort Endurance, where he has really been a model citizen and inspiration and the eight miles a day of parking lot walking have entered into community lore, and on the other through the eyes of Frank, who had last seen him as the neighborhood drunk, the family embarrassment. And in the little cigarette confessionals I have with Frank while Scott is off walking the dog or picking up a bag he left behind at the airport, there’s the curious sense of having been privy to a whole side of Scott that Frank is completely unaware of. It’s clear that he really has been trying. He spends time at the VFW and hears the war stories of the broken-down vets there and says, “But I’m the one who has to deal with all of it.” He’s been the one who’s had to pick Scott up on the street when he’s “broken down crying for no reason” and led him back home. But the ethos at least in their family, or more likely in their part of Minnesota, is to not talk about anything. “I don’t know why we have to be so tough here – it’s just stupid,” he says. And what he’s obviously missed is the side of Scott that’s stunningly lucid – holding forth on the porch of the group housing at Endurance or in the counseling sessions, the way he talks about the hyper-vigilant mode he was in all the time, about the pictures of dead bodies that cycle through his mind, about the long struggle for self-acceptance. As far as Frank is concerned, Scott is hopelessly damaged goods and has been for years. “When your brother’s not your brother anymore you just kind of give up on him,” he says as we’re smoking. And he tells the story of the time he came over and found Scott surrounded by his guns with bullets in the chamber and had to kind of wrestle them away from him – and Scott did try to stop him but, fortunately, was drunk enough that he didn’t put up all that much of a fight. “When I took the guns – that’s what we’ve always done together – that’s like saying you’re done now, you don’t get these anymore, anymore,” Frank says. There’s no question, Frank acknowledges, that he saved Scott’s life by doing that – wouldn’t leave the house until he called the suicide hotline and then he “broke down crazy” over the phone – but he sounds kind of pissed off about the whole thing. There was the feeling when Scott was shipped off to Fort Endurance that that was the last anybody would see of him – Scott himself expected that that would be the end of it, he didn’t think his body would hold up all the way to Texas – and nobody seemed actually to take into account the possibility that he would return months later with a new lease on life. “He’s done so much stupid, weird shit,” says Frank. “My wife – my ex-wife, whatever – says I can’t bring my kids here. And, unfortunately, he thinks everything is going to be hunky-dory with his kids and I told him, I said, it’s just not, dude, you were gone.”

Well. Fair enough. Part of the serenity that Scott seems to have reached in his time in Houston is to not expect to be forgiven by the people around him – to know that he was really and truly toxic for a long time and to not expect to be able to just undo the damage. It’s an interesting kind of composure – to know that there’s nothing really to look forward to, that key relationships probably aren’t salvageable, that he my likely be dead within the year from his heart surgery if not the failure of all of his other organs, but that he’s deciding to move forward anyway. “I’m good with it either way,” he’d told me in Houston about the heart surgery. “If it works out I can see my son’s graduation, can see my grandchildren, or else there’s eternal life – and there’s peace in that.”

As far as the narrative arc of our film, that’s the kind of statement that we’re looking to make. The film is about veterans – veterans in different stages of PTSD – and Scott occupies a very particular niche for us, the old vet at the end of the line, conversing with a horse, returning home to his basset hound, having destroyed all relationships and all career possibilities through the combination of PTSD and alcoholism but, in the end, achieving peace. That’s kind of how I pitched this shoot to our project’s funders, but, as all of us secretly know, that’s only part of the story. At Fort Endurance, ‘future-tripping’ is the term for extravagant planning – and Scott’s otherworldly serenity may well be a version of that. In Fergus Falls, with the spare house, the skeptical family, the empty hours – well, the feeling is that you really do need Jesus to keep walking the path. As Frank is leaving for the night, he asks about alcohol, makes sure that Scott doesn’t have access to anything. “Oh, I’m not even tempted by any of that,” he says. “The state where I am, I know that just one drink’ll probably kill me.” Although, of course, that’s less than completely reassuring – that property of alcohol being part of its appeal.

***

There aren’t a lot of flights out of this region and we end up having the morning to play with for filming purposes. We come by and, unfortunately, Scott has slept through his AA meeting – which seems like not a great sign, although he’s moving crisply through the rest of the morning’s schedule. He checks in with Frank, who’s caught a couple of fish although nothing very big, he walks the dog, he visits the tattooist – thinking to get a whole set of law enforcement tattoos on one arm, the ‘arm of the law,’ to complement the military tattoos on the other arm – he goes to Target to stock up on groceries and keeps it together when the cashier rings him up at a glacial place. “That’s already a big achievement for me,” he says. “Nine months ago I couldn’t have done that. I would have gotten angry and left everything there and gone off to drink.”

But as a crew we are actually getting a bit more agitated than Scott. The cashier at the Target had taken so long that there’s no time really for an interview back at Scott’s house. So we just drive to some park bench, sit him down, ask him how he’s doing and he says that it’s all daunting, of course, but that for some reason or other he isn’t worried about himself. “It’s like training in blackout rooms,” he says, “there’s zero light, absolute pitch darkness, and you have to communicate and get to the doorknob and open the door, and I used to dwell in the darkness all the time and I have to accept that and say, well, there’s light, what’s the next right thing, what’s the next step.” He’s very mumbly, he’s not easy to understand, but it’s obvious that he’s done a lot of work on himself and, when he speaks, it all comes tumbling out of him. “And now I live in the light and if that dark comes I can go to my beach, go to my sandy beach on the Pacific Ocean and meditate. And find the doorknob. That’s the analogy I use.”

Some names and identifying details have been changed for this piece.