Scott D. McLean, MD

Last night I dreamt that I was seeing patients in the genetics clinic, opening doors and talking to kids and parents. I was at ease, happy. The light was good. My stethoscope was slung around my neck, a talisman perhaps, or a decoration, because I used it more often to confirm what I already knew from a careful history than to suss out a murmur or bruit or crackles in the lower lobes of the lung.

Then I woke up and remembered that I have been retired from clinical medicine for nearly a year. Retired from the Army almost two decades.

Next year I’ll start an MFA at Fairfield. One of the faculty there is Phil Klay, whose book, Redeployment, I am now reading as slowly as possible because I don’t want to miss anything. One of the chapters is set in Taji, Iraq, where I spent about a year – my boots on that ground from March 27, 2004 through February 21, 2005.

I have changed the way I read. I take a semi-sharpened No. 2 pencil to underline choice words and phrases and scrawl comments in margins. Before this year, I would never. I would think, “Perhaps this book will make its way to the Library of Congress, only to have the bespectacled librarian purse his lips and set the book, donated with such hope by Scott McLean, to the side, not even worthy of a donation to a used book store.” Now I scrawl. Wantonly.

Here is a section from Redeployment (for which I remind you is a book of fiction) that I marked up:

“I looked down at my hands, then back up at Zara. I didn’t know how to tell her what coming home meant. The weird thing about being a veteran, at least for me, is that you do feel better than most people. You risked your life for something bigger than yourself. How many people can say that? You chose to serve. Maybe you didn’t understand American foreign policy or why we were at war. Maybe you never will. But it doesn’t matter. You held up your hand and said, “I’m willing to die for these worthless civilians.”

At the same time, though, you feel somehow less. What happened, what I was a part of, maybe it was the right thing. We were fighting very bad people. But it was an ugly thing.“