2005

2005 is the year in which the narrator’s intention to join the Army becomes a concrete enlistment process, beginning with recruitment in Ohio and pointing toward a combat assignment. Its significance lies in the distance between the institution’s practical promises—benefits, aptitude-based choice, and a medical role—and the later scenes of battlefield care, death, and responsibility that shape his experience of military service.

Recruitment at the Start of the Year

In the first week of 2005, the narrator arrives at the recruiting center as a potential recruit at a moment when the war is making enlistment harder. News reports have been describing young people sent into the field to be killed or maimed, and recruiters are struggling to find enough applicants. Kelly, the recruiter, treats the narrator’s interest as a welcome break: the narrator’s aptitude results place him in the 85th percentile, and good results on the official exam could let him choose a specialty. Kelly is visibly excited by the prospect of signing him up quickly.

The recruitment process mixes institutional salesmanship with blunt physical screening. Before the aptitude test, Kelly has the narrator demonstrate twenty push-ups and twenty sit-ups, then run two kilometers on a treadmill. The narrator wears Vans and has trouble keeping his pants up, but manages the tests. At Kelly’s desk, urine-test cups sit in a drawer; after the narrator’s test comes back clean, Kelly describes the benefits he receives, including a government car, housing allowance, and health coverage. These material advantages make military service sound like a job with concrete rewards, even as the news from the war exposes its risks.

Enlistment and the Medical Specialty

The narrator tells his parents that he plans to go to the recruiting center for physical and other tests on Thursday, and that, if they go well, training could begin within two weeks. He expects to have a list of preferred duty stations and believes he is likely to receive one of his top three choices, keeping him near Ohio and able to visit home often. He also mentions a life-insurance benefit of $300,000 if he opts for the additional payment. His parents consider his plan foolish but do not prevent him from pursuing it; his father asks whether there is anything else he would rather do. The narrator insists that the decision is his.

At the Thursday screening, he learns that he is color-blind. That does not disqualify him from 91W, one of the Army specialties still open to color-blind recruits. The explanation he receives is that medics already know what color blood is. The detail makes his chosen path feel at once peculiarly suited to his limitation and unmistakably tied to bodily injury. The medical occupation is presented as a specialty he can enter, but its central subject—blood—will soon cease to be an abstract qualification.

From Fort Hood to Echo Company

The narrator later describes Fort Hood as bleak, a desert-like environment that seems designed to instill a sense of fatalism in young people. The 4th Infantry Division assigns him to an armored battalion organized into mixed companies: two armored, two infantry, a mechanics company, and supporting and command elements. The medical section is initially part of the command and logistics company, where he could have remained in a medical-support role.

He dislikes the section’s older personnel and the jargon they use, and asks to join a company expected to go into combat. He is assigned to Echo Company, moving from the medical section into the infantry. That choice gives the year’s recruitment decision a consequential direction: the narrator does not simply enter Army medicine in a rearward or support capacity, but becomes an infantryman whose medical responsibilities will be exercised amid combat.

Combat Care and the Weight of Retrospect

In a later combat scene in Iraq, the narrator is responsible for treating a wounded young man after Dallas runs past his line of fire and the rest of the team shoots. The casualty lies barefoot, with blood on a white undershirt. The narrator packs gauze into an apparent abdominal wound, covers it with plastic and tape, and asks Sullivan to hold the dressing while he searches for an exit wound. Finding none, he cuts away the man’s sweatpants and tries to locate the bullet’s path. The practical confidence implied by his medical specialty gives way to uncertainty about what the injury requires.

The narrator later identifies what he believes he did wrong: he should have used more gauze, packed the wound completely, and laid the casualty on the injured side. Instead, he forgets the positioning and offers an explanation about raising the man’s feet partly because he does not know what else to do. The casualty’s eyes roll upward; an attempt to start an IV fails because his veins are flat. The narrator’s account therefore measures the distance between being designated to provide care and being able to save someone under battlefield conditions.

After the man dies, the narrator places his body in a body bag. A woman from the house tries to reach it; soldiers push her back, and she falls to her knees, repeatedly throwing dirt over her head and striking her face against the ground. A pregnant young woman and two boys also cry out. As soldiers carry the body away, the older woman follows and tries to take hold of the bag. The narrator is close to breaking down when automatic AK-47 fire begins and the group disperses. Sullivan later tells him that the woman was struck by friendly fire that morning. The delayed confirmation turns a scene of grief into a further burden of uncertainty and culpability.

That burden also informs the narrator’s confrontation with a lieutenant. He accuses the officer of ignoring his warnings about entering soft ground, recalls that the unit became stuck, and says that four soldiers were killed. Then the narration corrects the accusation: the lieutenant did not kill them, and the men were acquaintances rather than close friends; in the narrator’s revised account, the unit would have been killed had it not become stuck. The correction does not erase the force of the outburst. Across the scenes associated with the narrator’s military passage, 2005 is not only a date for enlistment but the starting point of an experience in which promised purpose and training meet confusion, loss, and the difficult work of remembering what happened.