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| Illustration by Mark Satchwill |
Both Sides Now
By Katherine Tomlinson
Illustration by Mark Satchwill
It was the kind of California day Ron Zubic liked best, warm and windy after two days of rain, a soft sun falling on his face like a kiss..
Zubic’s best friend, a native Californian, complained about the sunshine all the time. “It depresses me,” he’d say. When Zubic had laughed at him, Terry had shown him a printout of a news story on CNN about summer-onset Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Zubic had not been convinced.
“It says here it only affects one percent of the population,” he’d pointed out.
“What, you don’t think I’m special?” Terry had countered, but then he’d laughed, bitter humor being his default option for dealing with unpleasant topics.
It was no joke, though, how he started getting depressed and agitated the hotter it got. By June Terry would be damn near suicidal and there would be nothing Zubic or any of the guys could do.
Gene Burkhart had tried to get him into some kind of treatment but the VA system just wasn’t set up to handle anything but the basic alcohol- and drug-related problems. Not that those programs helped anyone either.
Kids were coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan so fucked up nobody was going to be able to fix them. And a lot of them kept getting sent back or kept going back out of some sort of screwed-up sense of honor. And that was fine with the Army until someone went nuts and started shooting women and children.
And then nobody wanted to know.
It had been the same way a generation ago.
