'I need to blaze my own trail'
He'd worked until midnight, drank late-night beers with the boys, and as a mid-winter dawn broke, Andy Wilson stood in the rutted parking lot of a dingy after-hours bar, pointing his gun at a man who had pushed him too far.
"I snapped the other night," Wilson wrote in a mid-February e-mail. "I went out after work on Saturday and a friend of a friend decided to try to tell me what to do. I pulled my gun on him, fired a shot, and have no regrets."
He was lying about the last part.
Wilson had purposely aimed high and wide, and he was frightened and embarrassed by what he'd done. He apologized, drove the man home, and when he recounted the incident later that week to his veterans support group, he was inconsolable.
"He curled up in a ball and just cried," said Will Thiery, a Desert Storm veteran who coordinates the weekly sessions at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Dayton. "He lost it."
More than a year after returning from Iraq, Wilson was barely hanging on. The smiling, hopeful 30-year-old student who had begun classes at Wright State University in early January had grown sullen and isolated. It didn't take much to set him off.
"One day I'm cool," Wilson said. "The next day I want to lock myself in the attic."
His complex relationship with his mother was wearing him down. His $6-an-hour job at a drive-through convenience store near the college was hardly inspiring. And his weekly stint as disc jockey at the campus radio station hadn't blossomed into a more regular gig.
The medicine chest in his apartment was now stocked with pills to battle sleeplessness, anxiety, and depression. Zoloft. Trazodone. Clonazepam. Risperidone.
"I feel sedated all the time," he said. "It's like I'm not even living life anymore."
Or worse -- descending back into a life he thought he'd left for good.
When he was a teenager, Wilson was never quite sure who would greet him when he got home at night.
Mom or Mary?
Mom -- the woman who cooked his meals, took him on weekend outings, and could make him feel loved -- was rarely there.
Mostly it was Mary, the addict and self-described "gutter rat" given to fits of rage and binges that left her young son to fend for himself.
Now, it was Mary Jones who wondered which version of her son was coming for dinner.
Some 18 months after Staff Sergeant Andrew M. Wilson's Bradley Fighting Vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb in Baghdad, killing his friend, Jeremy Regnier, she could not be sure whether to expect Andy or Drew.
Andy is the unfailingly polite, hard-working veteran determined to get his degree and help raise his young daughter.
Drew is the profane and bitter young man with a clenched jaw and hair-trigger temper.
"There's an Andy and there's a Drew," his mother said. "I can tell as soon as he comes to the door."
Her son's self-assessment was even more blunt.
"How many times did you hear about the crazy uncle back from the war?" Wilson asked. "Now, I'm the crazy uncle."
When he stood guard at the main gate at Baghdad International Airport, Jolly struck up a joshing relationship with a smiling man he knew only as "Mr. Ali," who passed Jolly's checkpoint daily. One morning, Ali presented him with the ring which he said had belonged to his son, an Iraqi soldier killed in combat. He insisted that Jolly take it.
"At first I didn't want to," Jolly said. "But he wanted me to have it. You can tell it hasn't been worn a lot. He probably got killed pretty young."
On a late-winter afternoon of fruitless bass fishing and pool-hall beers at the Hoosier Bar & Grill with his father and grandfather, Jolly fingered the ring. It was a reminder of his combat service. A reminder he didn't need.
One recent night, he said, Jeremy Regnier came to him again in a dream. The old friends and comrades were engaged in some friendly rough-housing.
"We were wrestling and I kept trying to get a hold of him and I couldn't get a hold of him," Jolly said. "It seemed like real long but it probably just lasted a few seconds."
But after a winter of unemployment, of emotional disarray, and financial distress, there were also intimations of hope. His bloodshot eyes had begun to clear. His headaches, while still frightful, were responding to medication. He'd taken the test for the local fire department, and was working odd jobs. And his extended family was there when he needed them. He frequently did.
"It's going to be a gradual process," Dr. Matthew Caldwell told him in an examination room at the VA Medical Center in Indianapolis. "You're just going to gradually get . . . healthier."
Jolly, in a pale-blue hospital gown and a Red Sox cap, nodded in approval and broke into a grin.
"I feel better," he said. "A lot better."
Still, he was cautious. "You know," he said later, "I don't think things will ever be the same."
He had learned, like Andy Wilson, that even a good day is followed by night.
"Me and Carman went to go to bed the other night and for some reason . . . I just hauled off and punched the wall," he said in April. "She's like, 'You're going to end up doing that to me.' But it's never happened."
"That's the wrong decision, Andy," Regnier said he told him. "Next time, stop. Think. Back away. Walk away. Remember what you're out for. You're out for your daughter now."
Theirs isn't a father-son relationship, though Andy sometimes describes it that way. More like a protective teacher and grateful student.
"I feel like I owe Kevin so much," Wilson said. "So much."
And Kevin, for his part, feels the need for the connection as well. Andy can't bring back Jeremy, but it helps that Andy looks up to him like a son.
"It's not even a question of being able to fill his shoes or stepping into his shoes," Kevin said. "It's filling a void in my life."
Wilson knows to call whenever he feels the darkness growing, feels Drew overtaking Andy inside. They talk two or three times a week. There is something about the sound of Kevin's voice on the other end of the line that helps, he said.
Indeed, as winter melted into spring, Andy Wilson had weaned himself off all medication except Zoloft, an antidepressant. He considered changing career paths, weighing a career in teaching instead of broadcasting. He'd found himself a new companion, an impossibly cute mixed-breed puppy. "Friend," he called him.
And he was considering a dramatic move -- to Littleton. Squinting into a blinding setting sun in his small living room in suburban Dayton, Wilson said he had had enough with his hometown and wanted to take Kevin Regnier up on his standing offer to help him make a fresh start in the mountains of northern New England.
"There's just nothing here," he said. "I can't grow any more here."
There was another reason to consider a move: He thought Kevin needed something from him, needed to confront him directly about his son's death and about the heavy responsibility Wilson feels for it.
"I want him to come out and yell at me and say, 'Why [expletive] did you put my son up there?' " Wilson said. "It wouldn't bother me one bit. I'm expecting it. I think he'd feel better if he did it."
But where Andy saw hope, Dustin Jolly saw risk.
When Wilson told Jolly about his plan to move, his old Army friend urged him to reconsider. It was time, Jolly said, to move beyond a past that haunted them both.
Since their discharge from the service in mid-2005, Wilson and Jolly had checked in on each other, but had met only once -- just before Christmas at an Indianapolis restaurant for chicken wings, beer, and commiseration that lasted all night long.
On a sun-splashed weekend in late April, they met again, exchanging hugs and high-fives in the tiny parking lot of Jolly's single-story apartment building in Bloomington. Their familiar war-buddy bravado slipped smoothly into gear, and they kidded each other about traces of gray hair and expanding waistlines. "I've put on some weight," Jolly says as Wilson playfully pats his belly. "So have I," Wilson conceded.
The reunion -- over leisurely meals and late-night games of pool -- culminated in a family celebration on the eve of Jolly's 27th birthday, Wilson lit the candles on the cake. He told his old driver how happy he was to see him surrounded by a family that clearly loves him.
"I'm on the outside looking in when it comes to family," Wilson said. "I'm Oliver Twist. I'm looking through the window saying, 'Man, that looks nice. I wish I had some of that.' "
And in the months ahead, he would get his wish.
In late summer -- for the first time in eight months -- he saw his 4-year-old daughter, Ayana, again, a weekend arrangement that would become part of his hopeful routine. So determined was he to make the visits work, that when his new job at a local post office interfered with that weekend time with her, he quit.
"I have to earn her respect through life," he said.
His grandfather, Edgar, marveled at how unabashedly the wiry child would slip between his legs and lay his head on his grandfather's chest, a tender display that the boy did not surrender to adulthood.
"Oh, he could be a devil," said Edgar Regnier, 85, who marched with Patton's Army during World War II. "But I loved him."
Two months before he died -- home on leave -- Jeremy kissed his grandfather's forehead and said he did not expect to return home from the war in Iraq. And, during a hike through the mountains of Franconia, Jeremy told his father to put money away to pay for his sister's education and to look after the men he served with, Andy and Dustin.
So when Amanda Regnier walked across the stage in Littleton, N.H., in June to collect her high school diploma, the moment carried a poignancy beyond the normal pomp and sentiment.
Edgar Regnier sat beaming from his folding chair on the gymnasium floor. And Andy Wilson, standing in the nearby bleachers, snapped digital pictures, flashed a thumbs-up, and later hugged the jubilant graduate on the high school lawn.
"Job well done," Wilson told the young woman Jeremy had bragged about during nightly patrols in Baghdad.
Wilson, who had arrived from Ohio a few days before to help Kevin Regnier prepare for the graduation, trailed a small caravan of cars from the high school commencement to Glenwood Cemetery, where Jeremy Regnier lay under a charcoal headstone.
As Amanda, dressed in white cap and gown, and her family, hugged and sobbed at the grave site, Wilson stood alone 15 yards away, his hands hooked into the waist of his blue jeans, his head slightly bowed.
"Jeremy should be here," he said softly. "I'm the consolation prize."
By now, Wilson had discovered the merit to Jolly's advice about relocating to New Hampshire. Living where Jeremy had lived, he knew, was not the answer.
"I love it up here. But I need to blaze my own trail," he said. "Jolly was right about that."
Later that day, as graduation party guests drifted in, and hamburgers and hot dogs cooked on nearby grills, Kevin and Andy sat under the shade of a tree in the Regniers' front yard and recalled the moment they met at Fort Hood 15 months before on the day the First Cavalry troops came home.
"He was afraid that we were going to blame him," Regnier said. "How are you going to do that?"
As Regnier spoke, Wilson surveyed the scene unfolding on the sun-drenched lawn. Toddlers chased balls. Twenty-somethings chugged beer. Jeremy's aunts and uncles prepared a bountiful buffet. And Edgar Regnier stopped chomping on his cigar long enough to smile for a picture with his granddaughter the graduate.
This family of the soldier who died had given Andy new reasons to live.
"I'm just so grateful for every one of these people here who have accepted me in this manner," he said. "Because they don't have to. They sure in hell don't have to."
As Wilson moved out of the shade and into the sunshine, he said he would begin the long drive back to Ohio later that afternoon.
But the next day was Father's Day and, coincidentally, Kevin Regnier's 47th birthday. So, instead, he stayed.
And on Sunday morning, as the Regniers began to stir after a long day of celebration, they awoke to the sounds of Andy Wilson in their kitchen at work, preparing a big country breakfast.
Thomas Farragher can be reached at farragher@globe.com. Dina Rudick can be reached at drudick@globe.com. 