The Squad That Rebuilt His Ramp

A lawyer costs money we did not have sitting around, for one. But more than that, I had watched the VA system chew up eleven years of Marcus’s claims and appeals and paperwork, watched a good man get worn down by process more than he was ever worn down by the war, and I was not going to hand Preston Gage the thing he actually wanted, which was Marcus Trahan tangled up in forms and deadlines and somebody else’s office instead of standing in front of his own house. Preston wanted this quiet and procedural. I decided it was not going to be either one.

My daughter called that same night, the way daughters do when word travels through a family faster than the mail does. Her husband does paralegal work downtown, and she put him on the phone, and he was kind about it, and he was also wrong, in the specific way people are wrong when they have never had to live inside a problem, only read about one.

“Mom, you need a letter from an attorney by Friday,” he said. “Something with letterhead. That’s the only language a code office actually listens to.”

“I hear you,” I told him, and I meant it as courtesy, not agreement.

I sat at the kitchen table after I hung up with the phone still warm in my hand, and I thought about the eleven years since Marcus came home, the stack of VA forms that grew taller every spring, the appeal that took fourteen months over a knee socket that needed replacing in four, the hours on hold with a hospital billing office over a claim that was eventually approved and apologized for, eighteen months after the bill nearly broke us. I thought about what it does to a man, watching paperwork decide things that used to be decided by courage, and I understood, sitting there, that I was not willing to hand Marcus one more form to wait on. Preston wanted this fight to live in an office, on a timeline, where he had the advantage of patience and we did not. I was not going to let him pick the ground we fought on.

I did not call a lawyer. I called Gunny Ortiz.

Gunny Ortiz had been Marcus’s platoon sergeant in Fallujah, a gunnery sergeant with twenty-two years in the Corps by the time he retired, and the man who had, by Marcus’s own account, carried him forty yards to the corpsman with his own hands while the street was still hot. He lives two hours from us now, outside Kerrville, runs a small welding shop, and he has never once in nineteen years let a call from Marcus go to voicemail.