Until Tuesday by Bret Witter, Luis Carlos Montalván Page B

in bad shape, but like everything else in the Army, B Company was undermanned and the operations tempo too high. My job was to help train 650 newly commissioned officers for combat tours, but there were too few instructors to properly train that many leaders. I was hurting, most notably with a serious limp, and I needed to take care of myself, but it would have been irresponsible not to kill myself for those men and women bound for war, even though I no longer believed in the U.S. Army.
    No, that’s not right. I believed in the Army. I loved the Army more than ever, and I respected and cared about the men and women who fought for it. But I didn’t believe in the men running the Army or the civilians running the war effort. These junior officers were being sent to an undermanned and badly planned war; the least I could do was try my best to prepare them.
    I was angry. Looking back, that emotion probably defined that year of my life. PTSD is a dwelling disorder; it makes a person psychologically incapable of moving beyond the traumas of his or her past. The mess hall, the uniforms, the training exercises: they all triggered memories of my worst moments in Iraq. When I wasn’t distracted by work, I was lost in the past, trying to shift through the details and figure out where I had gone wrong. Betrayal and anger were my watchwords, feelings that never really left me, even in my best moments. But I also wheeled through cycles of outrage, frustration, helplessness, sadness at the loss of friends, guilt, shame, grief at the loss of my life’s work, and an ever-present bone-deep loneliness that seemed to entomb me like a ceremonial cloth.
    Alienated and haunted, I moved thirty miles away from my fellow soldiers to a trailer surrounded by a seven-foot-high barbed-wire-topped fence (it was already in place; the landlady had trouble with her convict ex-boyfriend). I was trying to wall myself off from the world, I suppose, but the present was already lost, and even in Salem, Alabama, the memories of Iraq came to bury me, triggered by everything from the smell of my dinner to a bird flying across the sun to the knife I kept always at my side.
    I didn’t run from the memories. Instead, I delved deep, continuing the research I’d started in Colorado, spending twelve hours a day training officers and eight hours a night studying government documents, a beer in my hand or a bottle of Bacardi on the desk beside me. Slowly, page after page, I turned my anger into righteous indignation, and then a call to arms to fight for justice and truth. I had been a warrior for sixteen years; this was a survival instinct. With a cause I believed in, a hidden part of me realized, I would never give in to hopelessness and despair. So I read thousands of pages of State Department and DOD reports, crunched thousands of numbers, and wrote out my thoughts, night after night, trying to figure out why the war I experienced in Iraq was so different than the one portrayed in the media—and so different than the victory we might have achieved.
    In January 2007, two days after George Bush announced the surge, a twenty-page condensed version of my assessment of what I had seen in Iraq ran in the New York Times as an op-ed entitled “Losing Iraq, One Truckload at a Time.” The essay focused on two things—tolerance of corruption within the American and Iraqi armies and lack of accountability by high-ranking officials—and caused quite a stir in the military hierarchy. I heard from dozens of active-duty officers who supported my conclusions, including several high-ranking officers I had served with. A faculty member at West Point suggested I apply for a professorship. I was invited to the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank “unofficially” developing the strategy for implementing Bush’s surge, where I participated in serious discussions with scholars and strategists like retired generals John Keene and David Barno and Gen. William