Healing Sgt. Warren

Chris Goffard: Jonathan Warren walks through the maze of corridors until he finds the little room. Anxiously, he puts on the earphones and adjusts the wraparound visor. The image before him is crude: Road, desert, truck.

Describe that day, his therapist says.

We drove up in a Humvee…

No. Tell it as if it's happening now.

We are on a black route. The worst kind.

He isn't sure he can trust his memory. He knows he was in the commander's seat, right front. Scott Stephenson, his best friend, was sitting behind him. They had been inseparable since they enlisted two years earlier, the God-fearing California surf punk and the half-crazy Kansas street kid. They bunked together, drank together, learned to shoot together. They were lost boys reborn as hard Army muscle, shaved heads in Kevlar helmets, feeling as bulletproof as their steel-plated, 12,000-pound truck.

Staring into the visor, Warren studies the computer simulation of gray pavement stretching before him. He knows what lies down that road, amid the flames and churning black smoke: the test his whole life was supposed to prepare him for. For years, he's fled the memory, drinking until he can't recognize himself, smoking pot until he's numb, swallowing pills until he can sleep.

Now, the therapist insists that he slow the memory to a crawl, uncoil it, examine it inch by inch.

(thanks, Mark)