The Evil Hours (20 page)

Some researchers look at nightmares as playing a potentially beneficial, integrative role, helping the survivor to make sense of what happened or to construct meaning out of the chaos of war and other traumatic events. Zahava Solomon, a pioneering Israeli researcher, describes one such case in her 1993 book,
Combat Stress Reaction:

 

Something of the working-through process can be seen in a repeated nightmare of Eli, who developed PTSD after participating in intense fighting in the Lebanon war. Among the many harrowing experiences that he underwent, one that cut very deeply was of being shot at by 10-year-old “RPG kids,” named after the [
sic
] automatic weapons they carried. What made this experience so terrible for Eli (and other Israeli soldiers who described it) was not only the inherent threat of injury and death but also the moral conflict it evoked in these soldiers, who were trained not to harm children. With the onset of his PTSD, Eli began to have repeated nightmares of RPG kids shooting at him; these were so frightening that he would jump out of bed with the image before his eyes. The nightmare appeared with all sorts of variations, quite frequently at first, then less and less so. Parallel to the decrease in frequency, a process of working through took place in which Eli found “practical solutions” to the problem. In the early versions of the nightmare, he generally stood by helplessly as he was shot at. In later versions, he took cover or cocked his weapon.

 

Sometimes, in the darkness of dreams, traumatic events can fuse with the present, creating a kind of permanent midnight; past and present become one, and it is the life itself that is enshadowed. One comments on, ridicules, ironizes the other. “Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever,” wrote Tim O'Brien in
The Things They Carried
, perhaps the best novel to emerge from the war that produced PTSD, a novel that, as many critics have pointed out, repeatedly embodies and enacts the disorder in its 224 pages.

In the winter of 2007, while writing a series of stories on the surge in Iraq, I began to have dreams involving my old rifle platoon. In the dreams, my Marines are on patrol with me, asking me why I was doing this or that while we walked the streets of Ramadi. Sometimes they are with me in a Sea Stallion getting lit up over Fallujah, the air outside the crew chief's window bright with tracers. Sometimes my radioman, a thin reed of a man named Dougherty, is behind me in the Humvee in Saydia. I'm driving. He doesn't say anything. He just looks at me. His eyes are more than enough.

Perhaps no one has inhabited this shadowland of dream and reality more completely, or imbued it with greater meaning, than Siegfried Sassoon.
For decades after World War I, Sassoon continued to dream that the war was still going on and that he would be called back to active service. After leaving the army, he moved back to the English countryside, published several books, joined the Labour Party, became the literary editor of the
Daily Herald
, began a close friendship with E. M. Forster, fell in love with a man, finally marrying a woman named Hester. But it was the war that stayed with him, it was the war that populated his dreams. Indeed, Sassoon spent the rest of his life writing about the war and the youth that led up to it, a period from 1895 to 1920. In a trilogy of autobiographical novels, culminating in
Sherston's Progress
, whose pages provide the title of this book, he revisited the earlier stages of his life, with the war and Craiglockhart serving as the turning point. As a writer, Sassoon turned this backward-looking impulse to good use, though the perversity of what he called “my queer craving to revisit the past and give the modern world the slip” was not lost on him.

These types of obsessions and revisitations all highlight the degree to which many survivors remain in a liminal state, alternating between
now
and
then
, between
here
and
there
.
The veteran, the rape victim, the repatriated political prisoner all carry aspects of the trauma with them forward into the present. This is another way in which the literary habits of describing a traumatized person as being “haunted,” or “unstuck in time” (to use Vonnegut's phrase from
Slaughterhouse-Five
), are consistent with how post-traumatic stress is physically experienced by the survivor. When I speak of liminality, I mean it not as the fancy of a poetic imagination but as a state of being with a clear biological correlate: in the instance of the rape victim, whose nervous system reverts back to the traumatic state—mobilized to confront an attacker, the adrenaline flowing, the heart rate elevated, the pupils dilated—there is an observable physiological manifestation of this liminality. Herein lies the problem: the liminal person who returns to society (physically at least), with what one anthropologist described as “more alert faculties” and an “enhanced knowledge of how things work,” possesses a knowledge that is of little use in the everyday world.

These facts alone may explain some of the pain that survivors feel upon return. They aren't merely seeing things that others don't, they are, at varying times and to varying degrees, living in different times and in different places. Like Billy Pilgrim, the main character in
Slaughterhouse-Five
, who survived the bombing of Dresden only to lose his footing in the universe, they have become “spastic in time.” Dizzied by these spasms in time (and space), they lose the normal narrative compass that most people rely on to guide them through their lives, the compass that tells them where they are and what they need to attend to.

Eric Leed, a historian at Florida International University writing about World War I, spoke of veterans as being trapped in a kind of “No Man's Land,” applying the military term for the terrain between friendly and enemy lines. Having been unmade and remade by the war, paradoxically disgusted and defined by the slaughter of 1914–1919, the veteran was, in Leed's view, “a man fixed in passage who had acquired a peculiar ‘homelessness,'” belonging neither to the war nor to the society he fought for.
As Leed points out, many veterans remained transfixed by the image of this shadowland for the rest of their lives. In 1965, one such veteran wrote that “in fifty years I have never been able to rid myself of this obsession with no-man's land and the unknown world beyond it. On this side of our wire everything is familiar and every man is a friend, over there, beyond the wire, is the unknown, the uncanny.”

To Leed, this betweenness wasn't simply an obsession, it was a complete reshaping of the survivor's identity. “The figure of the veteran is a subcategory of what might be called ‘the liminal type.' He derives all of his features from the fact that he has crossed the boundaries of disjunctive social worlds, from peace to war, and back. He has been reshaped by his voyage along the margins of civilization, a voyage in which he has been presented with wonders, curiosities, and monsters—things that can only be guessed at by those who remained at home.”
While Leed's focus in
No Man's Land
is on the World War I veteran, it is not hard to imagine how this state of liminality, this feeling of apartness, pertains to survivors today. As one female Iraq veteran explained to me, “I feel like a Martian.”

This change of identity also creates a dilemma for the society to which the survivor returns. As every military spouse can attest, the soldier who returns from war is different than the one who left, and it is perhaps this sense of a combatant's differentness that led the Israelites to impose a strict weeklong period of exile on warriors returning from battle, as described in the book of Numbers. (“Anyone who has killed someone or touched someone who was killed must stay outside the camp seven days.”)
Interestingly, in the cases of returning warriors and survivors of near-death experiences found in history, it is the survivor who is most often expected to do the work of the ritual cleansing. Having been “stained” by death or rape, the survivor is looked on as being out of place.

This deep sense of separation from the normal world, this sense of, in the words of World War I veteran Charles Edward Carrington, “possessing a great secret which can never be communicated,” leads to the awkward conversations and misunderstandings that survivors often report when they return home.
It is, as so many veterans have noted, as if they no longer speak the language of their countrymen. This language barrier, this inability on the part of the untraumatized to understand the existence of a place like No Man's Land, further alienates the survivor. It is this language barrier that makes it possible for an otherwise thoughtful person to openly question whether a rape victim might have secretly wanted to be violated, might have in some way “been asking for it.” It is this language barrier that makes an unbloodied suburbanite ask a veteran whether or not he'd killed anyone in Iraq.

To Leed, this liminal person, having journeyed to the boundaries of society and back, having seen it at its most extreme, has been granted a unique moral perspective. Examples of veterans, and of survivors of genocide and rape, who have become great critics of society abound. Indeed, as we shall see, the core group that fought to have war trauma officially recognized by psychiatry was a group of Vietnam veterans who, having taken part in war atrocities, felt compelled to make them known to the world. In Leed's view, “As a man who had lived for years in No-Man's-Land, he knew the nation and its pathologies from an exterior perspective.”

Though he wrote
No Man's Land
in the late seventies, Leed mentions Vietnam but once, quoting Chaim Shatan on how basic training is really about psychological restructuring, an argument that certainly rings true for me. Often my dreams about Iraq get mixed up with Texas A&M, where I enrolled in ROTC, first donned a uniform, first learned the Marine Corps hymn, and first chanted
Kill, Kill, Blood Makes the Grass Grow!
In that way, my dreams don't really belong to me, they belong to that No Man's Land that remains forever beyond my control, untamed, on the furthest margins of what might be called the self. They refuse my will, they touch and turn my past, they bend it into new and unforeseen shapes.

One of the strangest things about war is that you never dream about it when you're in it. Instead, you dream about holidays in the tropics, vast dinners with friends, the way your dad's Impala looked in the sunshine, old lovers. It's almost as if your mind knows the score, knows that you aren't ready yet, and so it serves up these terrific entertainments, even as the war seeps into the bloodstream, the veins and capillaries, the synapses. Later, sometimes much later, is when the dreams come, good and bad. Sometimes they feel like intel briefs, updates from the unconscious telling you what's up outside the wire, what really happened. It's like the old story told by Michael Herr about the bullet that almost killed him. The bullet came so close that he never even heard it, so close that it took ten years before the sound finally reached him. That's how it goes sometimes.
Everything is fine until it isn't
. Shit happens, but you're cool. Years later, in a Greyhound station in Green River, Utah, the fear finds you and changes everything.

Sometimes I think that's what happened to me in the movie theater that day. Before the movie, I'd had a good idea how close I'd come to dying in Iraq, all the close calls, the pizza box IEDs I'd run over that didn't go off, the booby traps I'd stepped around. But, really, I didn't know, or I should say that part of me knew, but I didn't know that it knew. The movie explosion was a reminder, an all too realistic one, almost like a dispatch from that part deep inside of me that had recorded it all: here is what it would've looked like. Enjoy.

One war-reporter friend of mine, who spent a year in Mosul with the National Guard before getting out and moving to Egypt to study Arabic, has one dream where he's helping insurgents bury IEDs under the streets of Baghdad.
When I asked him about it, he seemed to think that it had something to do with divided loyalties, about not always feeling like a “true” American, whatever the fuck that is, as if a conversation was happening between two very different chapters of his life, which is how I think life and war and loss work: your youth happens and you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out what it means.

It's a truism among psychologists that trauma messes with your sense of time, that it breaks your internal clock in some way. But to describe it as simply destroying your sense of time doesn't quite do it justice. Post trauma, there are probably as many experiences of time as there are survivors. I'm frustrated by the fact that I have essentially lost years to my obsession with the war. To say that I am “haunted” by it doesn't sound right to my ears, though in a certain sense it's probably true. Something I say to friends a lot is that it still feels like 2004, the year I first went to Iraq, the year that the biggest lies about the war began to unravel, the year of Fallujah One and Fallujah Two, the year of Abu Ghraib, the year that Bush was reelected, the year my relationship with America changed forever, the year that was so full it seemed to drain the entire decade. The year, as well, that I watched Marines from my old regiment being sent to die in the streets of Fallujah because of an incompetence and duplicity that make me so angry I can scarcely begin to describe them. There comes a point in every man's life when he sees that the magician's hat is empty, that the government and the church are run by fools, and that virtue is far rarer than he'd been led to believe. It was my misfortune to see this at a comparatively young age and in an unusually dramatic fashion, one that was not easily forgotten. To forget what had happened and who was to blame seemed like an affront to memory itself. Time stopped that year, and looking back, I can see that I wasn't really growing older so much as I was taking on a new version of time, a new way of being in the world.