A CLOSER LOOK AT WHEN ADAM SCHUMANN WENT TO WAR
It’s one of those forgettable moments in a movie. A soldier, returning from war, gets off a plane and hands his weapon to another soldier checking him in.
“Sgt. Schumann, welcome home,” the other soldier says. The scene is in a movie called Thank You for Your Service, which is based on a book I wrote about Adam Schumann, a now 36-year-old veteran whom I met in 2007 when I was reporting on the Iraq War.
A battalion of some 800 soldiers, one of whom was Schumann, entered the war. Most were 19 and 20 years old, and they had an air of invincibility, which lasted until the first of them was killed. Then came a second death, and a third, and soon the invincibility had been replaced with a soldier’s knowledge of what heartbreak can feel like, followed by a deepening anger, followed by a coarsening of their souls.
I know this because I was with them for most of their deployment. On Sept. 4, a roadside bomb blasted into five soldiers in a Humvee. Three died on the spot, a fourth lost both his legs, and a fifth lost all his limbs and was burned everywhere, surviving somehow for four months before his mother sent out an email saying, “Duncan would have been twenty years old tomorrow — he will be forever nineteen now, and forever missed.”
On Sept. 22, when another roadside bomb killed another soldier, the cruel twist this time was that as soon as he returned to base, he was going to call his wife, who a few hours before had given birth to their first child. And on Sept. 29, another roadside bomb killed another soldier, a death that was the ruin of Schumann.
That soldier was the battalion’s 11th soldier to die, and after the memorial ceremony, a little lost myself and in search of something encouraging, I asked around for the name of a great soldier to talk to. “Schumann,” someone said. “If he’s not our best, he’s one of our best.”
One quiet day, I went to find Schumann, who turned out to be a gaunt, haunted-looking man sitting alone on his bunk. He was about to go home. He was midway through his third deployment. He had been in combat for a thousand days. “I’ve lost all hope,” he had written in his private journal a few weeks before. The dead man was James Doster, who had taken the seat in the Humvee that Schumann was supposed to be in, but wasn’t in because of his declining mental health.
He was a man tormented by that, and also by something that had happened toward the beginning of the deployment, when a soldier on a rooftop was shot in the head by a sniper. Schumann had hoisted the soldier onto his back and carried him down three flights of stairs the blood coming out of the soldier’s head kept flowing into Adam’s open mouth as he gulped for air.
Schumann arrived at a little airport in Kansas. No soldier was there to greet him, only his wife, Saskia. He’s a skeleton, she thought, feeling whatever hope she had flowing out of her.
Meanwhile, I decided to write a second book, Thank You for Your Service, the one upon which the movie is based.
Adam is at its core. There are others: Amanda Doster, James Doster’s widow, whose shame was that she couldn’t stop missing her husband. Tausolo Aieti, whose shame wasn’t about the two soldiers he saved from a burning Humvee, but the one he didn’t save and who kept showing up in his dreams, on fire and saying, “Why didn’t you save me?”
All of them in their own ways were versions of Adam, who, as the years went by, was sinking deeper and deeper into his own shame until a day when he ended up in the basement of his house, a shotgun jammed into the underside of his chin. Saskia begged Adam not to kill himself. What saved him from killing himself, Adam would say later, was the sound of his son in another part of the house, waking in his crib from a nap.
Somehow, the book ended up in the hands of Steven Spielberg, who wanted his company, Dream Works, to make it into a movie.
Nine years had gone by since Adam’s homecoming, and on this day, the scene being filmed was its movie version.
Here came Miles Teller as Adam Schumann, walking across the tarmac. Here was Teller, handing his weapon to the soldier checking him in. And here was Adam, taking that weapon, and looking up at the fictional version of his wounded self.
“Sergeant Schumann, welcome home,” he said.