Chapter 3: Vulnerable

"Every man is his own worst enemy."

There was not another e-mail from the man. Zack was disappointed. He thought…he thought he had made a new friend, someone outside the lab who was interested in him. That would have been an accomplishment, something to be proud of…. But no new e-mail awaited him on Monday. He checked all week, and still, nothing. He considered going to the sandwich shop alone, just in case, but in the end decided the food was not worth it. The last time he had been this disappointed was when...when he'd been sent home.

"Do you know why you're here?" The man looked tired. They all did.

"Yes, sir. I identify remains that are too badly damaged to be recognized by next of kin."

"No, not here in Iraq. Here talking to me. Do you know why you are here?"

"No, sir. I thought you would tell me."

"I've had another complaint." He picked up some papers from the table. "Doctor Addy refused to look at the amputee." He put down that paper, and read off the next one. "Dr. Addy ignored the questions we asked him." That paper was added to the stack. "Dr. Addy did not release the remains at the appointed time, but insisted on retaining them another day." Yet another. "Dr. Addy does not respond, even when given a direct order."

He looked back at Zack. "I get more of these every week. They're not going away. You're not learning. I'm told you're here because you want to be here. Is that true?"

"No, sir, I'm here because you called for me."

"Not here talking to me, here in Iraq! That's exactly what I mean." He jabbed a finger in the direction of Zack's chest, but he didn't touch him. "If you wanted to be here, you damn well should have made some effort to adjust to conditions here. But as far as I can tell, you think you're still in that lab of yours back in the US. You need to get your head out of your ass and look around. Do you see where you are?"

"I'm in Iraq and I'm talking to you, sir." Zack hoped they weren't going to define the word 'here' again; he had no idea which answer was right – it kept changing. And he had been making an effort; he used 'sir' when he was supposed to, and worked very hard….

"Yes, you're in Iraq. A war zone. Things are different here. You can't stick to your narrow job description and turn up your nose at what you are asked to do."

"The amputee was…alive. I only do dead people. I'm not that kind of doctor."

"You do bones. According to this, we wanted to know what he was hit with. No one was asking you to stitch him up or change his bandages. Just look at the damage like you do on the corpses."

"But, sir. He was alive. He was…screaming." Zack looked at him earnestly, willing him to understand. He didn't know how to express himself any more clearly.

"What are you, twelve? You may look like a baby, but you've got six years on some of the men going out on patrols. They come to see me when they shoot someone, and I send them right back out. You aren't the young one here, you aren't the baby, and you sure as hell don't have the raw end of any deal. If you're going to be a man, then you have to buckle down and deal with all the shit just like everyone else. You can't come in here and tell me you can't listen to a man scream. He can damn well scream if he wants to. You would, if it were your leg blown off." He looked at Zack for a reaction, but got none; mouth hanging slightly open didn't count.

He rubbed his forehead with his hand. Zack knew this could either be a sign of fatigue or displeasure. Maybe both? This man used lots of words, like Agent Booth, but not precisely, so it was hard to figure out what he meant. Zack knew he was educated, but it was hard to remember that sometimes.

"If it were just that, we could discuss this. You're a professional, and you can learn, in theory. But you keep screwing up. You aren't being a help here. I'm sure you're very good at what you do, but if you can't work with us, you're useless to us. This is a team, and if you're going to work with the military, you have to take a team approach. We don't have room for mavericks or loners. When we say we need the remains, it means we need to return them to the Iraqi families for burials - right away. Do you have any idea what it means to them to have bodies laying out, unburied? It eats away at them." Zack pictured maggots eating at an abdominal wound, and tried to figure out how that related to not getting buried. It was true that maggots would only be present if the flies had been able to lay their eggs, so it would make sense that there would be more if the body were out in the open...but that was more Hodgins' territory. "Makes them unhappy, makes them not so pleased with all we're trying to do here," the man continued, explaining. "Makes them lob grenades into barracks. Am I getting through to you at all?" Zack realized that 'them' referred to next of kin, not the bodies.

"I understand your concern. But if I don't have an answer, I can't write my report. I can't find the answers without the bodies. I don't mean to keep them; I work as fast as I can." What they were asking him to do was impossible; didn't they see that? It was very hot and the nights were noisy. He wasn't getting very much sleep as it was, and he couldn't afford to get any less. But he couldn't do shoddy work, either. That wasn't an option. And it took time to find out every detail about how a person died. Not all of them presented with a fatal wound from a bullet; some of them had been merely injured and buried alive in shallow graves. Didn't the families want to know that?

"And you get away with this insubordination back where you come from? You don't have to take orders from a boss who says now and means it?"

"Dr. Brennan understands my work. She taught me how to do it. We work very well together. She wouldn't want me to reach a conclusion without carefully analyzing all the evidence."

"And no one else has ever complained? No one else has ever told you that you are lousy at adapting?" Ah, there it was.

"Everyone except my mother says that," Zack replied immediately, though technically, it wasn't true; people worded it in different ways. Adapting was a goal that had eluded Zack for most of his life. He was often surprised at how quickly people figured out he couldn't do that. "But it is not a problem at the Jeffersonian."

"Well, you might want to think about why it is that you can fit in so well there, but the rest of the world doesn't know what to make of you."

"Make what of me?"

"I mean, that this is not the first time you've failed to assimilate, and you might want to figure out why that is, because otherwise, you are going to fail everywhere you go that is not the Jeffersonian. That is what I am saying. Do you understand now, Dr. Addy?"

"Yes, sir." Though to be fair, he had understood that from a long time before now. What to do about it was what he couldn't figure out.

"Pack your things."

"Sir?"

"You're going home."

What had he done wrong? Why didn't the man send him another e-mail? Hodgins had told him to pay attention to the other guy. Of course, he had followed up this advice with an injunction not to pay attention to the other guy, so Zack wasn't entirely sure how to take that. It seemed Hodgins didn't appreciate his observations, but wanted him to respond in some other way. As he thought back over their conversations, at the conference and the lunch, he realized he'd done most of the talking. Maybe he should have tried to listen more? But it was so hard to stop talking once someone got him started, and this new person always seemed so interested. He could listen while someone else spoke, he supposed, but he was bad at coming up with questions in a social situation. He never knew what to ask, and when he did ask a question, most normal people deemed it inappropriate. Hodgins would hit him in those cases, to let him know. He wasn't sure this man would do that.

It finally occurred to him that he could send an e-mail himself. But what to say?

Would you like to meet again? I won't talk as much this time. I'm not very good at asking questions, at least, asking appropriate questions, so you'll have to let me know if I say something wrong. I'd prefer if you not hit me. The sandwich shop is passable. There's another place I go to all the time – the Royal Diner. Let me know if you would like to meet there. On Sunday?

He read it over again. It seemed clear to him. If this didn't work, he would ask Angela what to do. But using resources available to him at the Jeffersonian to initiate or maintain friendships outside the lab would mean that he had failed to assimilate. Again.

Author's Note: I by no means intend to impugn Army psychologists. I do not know any personally, but assume they are much less gruff than the man I've depicted here. Even Patton got in trouble for telling a guy who was shell-shocked to pull himself together and get back out there, and that was during WWII. The only detail that is accurate is that men involved in a shooting are required to talk to either the psychologist or the chaplain afterwards, just like the FBI requires Booth to see someone after discharging his weapon.