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Ms. Stack is a contributing Opinion writer.

ROBSTOWN, Texas — Le Roy Torres came home from his deployment in Iraq with a sickness he could neither explain nor shake: crushing headaches, fogs of vertigo, an increasingly harsh cough. Doctors shook their heads, prescribed ineffective antibiotics and, finally, to Mr. Torres’s deep mortification, suggested psychiatric medication.

It took years of tests to prove what Mr. Torres suspected: His lungs and brain were damaged from exposure to military burn pits, a crude garbage disposal method in which all manner of plastics, medical waste and equipment are splashed with jet fuel and set ablaze, sometimes next to troops’ sleeping quarters or work stations. Burn pits were a standard garbage disposal method used by the U.S. military during the early years of the post-9/11 conflicts; their aftereffects are still emerging.

The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates about 3.5 million troops have been exposed to burn pits since 1991. Many veterans blame the noxious smoke for ailments ranging from shortness of breath to rare cancers.

But this was still a new and controversial idea back in 2008, when Mr. Torres came home to these lush farmlands outside Corpus Christi. He resumed his job as a state trooper but found himself hamstrung by symptoms that surged and faded, forcing him to miss shifts. One day, racing after a suspect, he felt vertigo so intense, he thought he was having a stroke.

Mr. Torres couldn’t patrol anymore but says he nevertheless fought to keep his job, submitting a list of duties he could still handle. His bosses, he said, insisted he patrol and suggested that if he couldn’t do the job, he should resign. He handed over his badge and gun and later sued the Texas Department of Public Safety, saying he was discriminated against for his military service. (A brief filed by the Texas attorney general flatly denies discriminating against Torres or any other veteran.)

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear some of this story on March 29, when justices consider whether Mr. Torres can sue a state government under federal laws shielding troops and veterans from job discrimination and retaliation. Texas has maintained that the doctrine of sovereign immunity provides states with protections from federal lawsuits. Mr. Torres counters that the government’s need to wage war effectively, a rationale for the anti-discrimination law, supersedes states’ rights. The case is expected to clarify the employment protections of tens of thousands of reservists and National Guard members working for state and local governments.

No matter how the court rules, Mr. Torres’s ordeal raises a question for the national conscience: Who should pay for our nation’s wars? This is the central problem lacing through the biography of Mr. Torres, a stolid and soft-spoken man who has repeatedly trekked to Capitol Hill to push for veterans’ health care. When war follows the troops home, when their lives or livelihoods are wrecked, who should settle the bill?

“I always understood if I got shot, at least they’d take care of me, or if I’m an amputee,” Mr. Torres told me. “It never crossed my mind I’d have this invisible wound. It felt like, ‘We’re going to dispose of you like trash because you can’t do it anymore.’”

After years of rejecting the overwhelming majority of claims that mentioned burn pit exposure, the Department of Veterans Affairs last year announced that veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan with certain respiratory problems would be eligible for medical and disability benefits. The department has also proposed adding some cancers to the ailments covered. A pair of congressional bills would provide benefits for a much broader range of conditions covered and open health care access to millions of veterans exposed to toxic substances.

President Biden, who has linked burn pit exposure in Iraq to his son Beau’s death from brain cancer at 46, has been pushing for research and treatment. The comedian and activist Jon Stewart also took up the cause after meeting Mr. Torres and his wife, Rosie.

Yet the question of money rankles. Lawmakers and aides muttered about the price of the bills when I followed Mr. Stewart through the pandemic-eerie marble halls of Congress last spring. And some Republicans cited costs this month when they voted against spending an estimated $300 billion over 10 years on burn-pit-related care and disability.

But few lawmakers fretted over expense this month when Congress approved more than $782 billion in military spending — the largest Pentagon budget in generations, despite the recent U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. We can pay for a theoretical war that doesn’t yet exist, it seems, even as we haggle over outstanding bills from wars already abandoned.

Up to half of each year’s military budget goes to defense contractors, including KBR, which operated many of the burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Torres is familiar with KBR. He was among more than 800 plaintiffs who sued the contracting conglomerate in a class-action lawsuit seeking damages for burn-pit-related illnesses. KBR fought the sickened troops up to the Supreme Court and prevailed when the court let stand a ruling that private contractors were protected by the same immunity that covers the military’s battlefield decisions.

I read those legal files, including the deposition of a retired U.S. commander paid by KBR to testify. I’ve talked to scientists who said their V.A. supervisors suppressed and censored research that suggested links between burn pits and illness — even as the V.A. was rejecting claims with the excuse of insufficient research.

The stonewalling of veterans is, in a sense, unrelated to the case before the Supreme Court. But to Mr. Torres and other veterans in similar straits, another avenue for possible restitution hangs in the balance. And while the broader story of how he lost his job will be irrelevant to the justices, it’s still worth telling.

Mr. Torres, now 49, was an unexpected child in a family of migrant farmworkers and Pentecostal preachers. His parents met picking cotton in Arizona; his mother, who had been told by doctors that she couldn’t get pregnant, considered her son a prayer-manifested miracle. She would eventually believe she heard the call of God and open a church in a small trailer out in the farmlands.

Mr. Torres was raised to value toughness and discipline. He doodled tanks and helicopters, dreamed of war and dragged himself to school even when he was sick, he recalled, because he wanted the attendance prize.

“I was brought up to embrace the suck,” Mr. Torres said. “Suck it up. Drive on.”

Mr. Torres met his wife, improbably, at a V.A. facility in San Antonio, where he regularly took his father, a Korean War veteran, to see an eye doctor and where she worked as an administrative assistant. Soon the two were dating.

They married, blended their three children from previous relationships and settled down on a rural plot belonging to Mr. Torres. Mrs. Torres, who grew up in the city, cried when the gravel road ripped apart her high heels, but she was in love.

“I said, ‘Sure, I’ll go anywhere,’” said Mrs. Torres, now 47. “He’s such a blessing, such a good soul, a beautiful soul. I’d go to the ends of the earth for him.”

There were football games, family parties, church. Torres, who had joined the Army Reserve in 1989, worked as a state trooper and studied for his master’s degree. He was part of a security detail at George W. Bush’s second inauguration.

On Sept. 11, Mr. Torres watched the towers burn on television and passed through a chain reaction of emotions and conclusions. He knew that war would likely follow and that his life, as a reservist, was about to change. Despite his childhood fantasies, he felt no eagerness to volunteer. Life was full, his family needed him, and he was serving the community through his job. The call finally came in 2007: He had 30 days to prepare to go to Iraq.

When I visited the Torres family, we drank coffee at the kitchen table while a hard wind came off the Gulf of Mexico, shoving the backyard swing and snapping the American flag over their door. They chatted relay style, one picking up when the other faded.

Mrs. Torres is the kind of woman who used to be called a pistol, compact and definite, prone to straight talk and bursts of emotion. Next to her, Mr. Torres is physically looming and deeply calm. When he can’t recall a word, he rubs his leathery face with big hands and looks at his wife as if to say, “You tell her.” And Mrs. Torres obliges, taking over the narrative while her husband nods along with a look in his eyes that approaches wonderment.

When they described the day Mr. Torres was called up, tears spilled down their cheeks. I asked: Why that memory, of all the difficult memories?

“It’s so emotional because I feel like he never came back,” Mrs. Torres said. “Part of him stayed there, you know?” Mr. Torres gazed tenderly and helplessly at his wife. The fact that he was lost irretrievably in the war sat between them as an undisputed fact.

The first time he climbed off the bus onto the base in Iraq, he recalled, the stench of acrid smoke filled his throat, carrying a note he recognized: burning tires. He’d arrived at Camp Anaconda in Balad, a forward operating base notorious for operating the largest burn pit in Iraq. Beau Biden also served in Balad, as did many other veterans who would later report failing health. Thick, slimy ash clung to the air-conditioner units, Mr. Torres recalls; jogging on the track left him hacking up phlegm.

Within a month, the first symptoms appeared: pressure on the chest, stomach tied in knots, a thickening aura followed by the sensation of someone clawing at the base of his skull. He was quarantined over Christmas for fear he’d caught a virus; base doctors waved off his concern by saying it was the “Iraqi crud.”

When her husband made it home a year later, Mrs. Torres was euphoric. “He’s OK,” she thought. “He’s not missing a limb.” But he wasn’t OK. She’d find him curled around an ottoman, rocking back and forth, bandannas knotted tight around his head in an effort to squeeze out the pain. He suffered, too, from new, unfamiliar ailments: rectal bleeding, blackouts and, of course, that cough.

Frightened, Mrs. Torres turned to the internet. “Soldiers coming home from Iraq dying,” she typed into the search bar. This led to an electrifying discovery: Mr. Torres wasn’t the only one who’d come home with similar symptoms. She spent hours trading emails and talking to spouses, comparing symptoms and scraps of information from doctors, and soon she’d built a network that became Burn Pits 360, a scrappy nonprofit that has finally, after years of frustration, started to get traction with lawmakers.

By 2012, when Mr. Torres was forced from his job, his health had deteriorated. Mrs. Torres quit work to care for him and chase the paperwork needed to qualify for disability payments through the V.A. Mr. Torres was lucky in one narrow sense: In 2013 he finally received a then-rare acknowledgment from the V.A. that he’d been incapacitated by exposure to burn pits and began to receive disability compensation that now stands at about $3,000 a month.

By then, however, the couple had already spent their savings and started to borrow — loans from family members, ruinous advances from payday storefronts, maxed-out credit cards. Creditors were badgering them; they were about to lose their house. It would take years to dig themselves out of debt.

“No pay, no pay, no pay,” Mr. Torres said. “We kept falling more and more behind. My depression was spiraling. I didn’t know what to do.”

He reached a breaking point one night in 2016, as yet another headache gripped his skull.

He picked up a shotgun. Mrs. Torres heard him cock the gun, and she rushed at him, grappling for the weapon. The couple’s dog, a service German shepherd named Hope, ran in anxious circles, then grabbed Mr. Torres by the seat of his cargo pants and knocked him to the ground. The gun clattered loose.

This, too, they now count as a miracle.

“Who gives a dog wisdom?” Mr. Torres wondered.

How do you measure the damage of war when it’s done? The most severe harm lies in places that most Americans will never see — in the faraway lands we invaded, occupied and left behind, in shattered lives and traumatized communities that are not ours.

But the war comes back to us, too, embedded in the psyches and bodies of those who served. Mrs. Torres describes it in the simplest language of good and bad. The monster, she calls it. A kind of fogged evil that attached itself to her husband and insinuated itself into her home.

“This monster, this war,” she said. “It’s in our home. It followed him.”

When his mother slipped too far into dementia to preach, Mr. Torres got ordained and took over the ministry. Every morning, between checking the levels of his oxygen tanks and cooking breakfast, he reads devotions with his wife. On Sundays they are at church. It’s a small congregation, but Mr. Torres is ambitious; he believes the church will grow. He even managed to buy a small parcel of land by the highway, dreaming of an eventual expansion.

“The church is what has saved us from crushing into a million pieces,” Mrs. Torres told me. “It saved us in every way.”

It was Mrs. Torres who spotted a news segment featuring Mr. Stewart and his lobbying partner, John Feal. The two were discussing their fight for Congress to approve medical care for 9/11 emergency workers. She scribbled down Mr. Feal’s name and started sending him Facebook messages: “We need your help.” Mr. Feal, a tough-talking demolition expert from Long Island who lost a foot while working in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and emerged a relentless force on Capitol Hill, told me he recognized the indefatigable spirit of Mrs. Torres.

“When Rosie came to me for help, I saw me. I literally saw myself asking myself for help,” Mr. Feal told me. “I would’ve been everything I hated if I didn’t help Rosie.”

I’ve never heard either of the Torreses express any particular surprise at the many strange turns their lives have taken. They believe God chose them. They think everything that has happened, the painful and the promising, is part of a divine plan.

In a text this week, Mrs. Torres told me, with typical frankness, that she and her husband had just finished crying together in the kitchen. He was sick the day before, coughing up gray phlegm, and she feared his lung disease was progressing. But her husband, she assured me, would prevail. She ordered him a camp chair from Amazon so he could sit on the Supreme Court steps during the arguments.

“We don’t believe any of it is a coincidence,” Mrs. Torres said. “Even though it’s been such heartache and such a heart-wrenching trial God put us through, I believe we were chosen for a reason.”

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