Collapse Of A Supersoldier

Here's another one of those stories that begins quietly and then builds to a stirring conclusion.

Matthew Teague: We should have seen the demons in Andy about the time he pulled out his night-vision monocular and crawled under my house. Instead we just stood around in the dark.

That was seven years ago. Andy Kubik had recently returned from Iraq and dropped by for lunch because a mutual friend thought we might get along. Stationed at an Air Force base nearby, he rumbled into my small Alabama town on an enormous black Harley, like Thor returning from war. Even before everything that followed, even before the cracks started to show, Andy seemed like a man formed from two conflicting types of clay: the heroic and the vulnerable. The godlike and the human. He removed his helmet and goggles, revealing his curled blond hair, and transformed into something smaller and quieter, apologizing for the noise before he dismounted.

After lunch that day, Andy spent three nights on our sofa, which spooked my wife. Relax, I told her. This guy's a war hero. One of the greatest alive, maybe.