Service Connected

Clarence Jenks is seventy-four and has been told no twice. He pumped fuel at Cam Ranh Bay for fourteen months, forty feet from a pump that never shut off, two hundred yards off a flight line. He never went to sick call, because nobody went to sick call about what everybody had.

The records are silent. The second denial says his job was not associated with a high probability of exposure to hazardous noise — a list somebody made long ago, not a verdict on him. The file wants two things: something that says it was loud, and somebody who was there. He has one whole name out of fifty-four years.

Bernard Hovda is eighty-nine, and he went on sick call. In nine years at this desk it is the sentence Joel Ackerman has most wanted to hear. March of fifty-six, Fort Knox, the low end of a generator off a truck bed, and a man who stood in the line and let somebody look at him.

It does not help. About eighty percent of the Army files for men discharged before nineteen sixty were in the part of the St. Louis records center that burned, and nothing had been copied. The center will search elsewhere — given a unit, a company and the days. He has none of the three, and no discharge paper either.

Glendon Kirkhoff is seventy-seven and has been up at four every morning since he was seventeen. He drove a truck in Korea for thirteen months, and he has had type two diabetes since the spring of two thousand eleven. His service record came down on a Tuesday. Four inches of it, complete, and not one gap anywhere.

The presumption that would settle the claim in a sentence is not about a country. It is about a strip of ground up along the north edge of one, and the assignment history says his company was stationed a long way south of that, thirteen times, in the same typed characters on the same machine. He says he ran the road north two and three times a week, as far as it goes. Nobody ever wrote down where a truck went on a Tuesday, and the office that will go looking through what is left answers sixty days at a time.

Erica Foltz is fifty-seven and came in about her mother. Nine pages from a care facility, seven of them done, and two lines that are not hers to answer. Army, eighty-nine to ninety-three. She was in Southwest Asia in ninety-one and does not talk about it, and she has stood up for a living ever since. In the doorway on her way out she says her back has been bad for fifteen years.

She is already service connected. A knee that went sideways on a set of wet steps stateside in ninety-two, written up at the time, granted in ninety-four and then evaluated at zero — no card, no check, nothing since. A disability proximately due to a service connected one is itself service connected, and the sentence does not say one that pays. What the file needs is somebody who wrote down, years ago and for some other reason, why she walks the way she walks.

Anthony Garber is forty-four, works nights ninety minutes northwest of Hazen County, and says he is not a veteran. He went home in the spring of two thousand six and did not go back, and the paper they gave him says how. He has never asked anybody for his own record, because he knows what is in it.

The name reaches Joel Ackerman on a half sheet of tablet paper, torn across rather than cut, out of a back room with a folding table, a shim under one leg, and photographs of men nobody living can name. The man who brings it has told every man with a bad discharge the same thing for thirty years and has never been told he had it wrong.

Under the discharge there is a second question, which the department decides for itself, out of the record, in another city. It is not the question the Army answered, and the discharge paper does not change.