The Evil Hours (41 page)

Similarly, the POWs that Zahava Solomon and others studied showed a capacity to adjust their internal emotional state and coping skills to different situations. They learned to look for things they could control within their environment. When they found those things, they exploited them. James Stockdale, one of the ranking POWs at the Hanoi Hilton, recalled the wisdom of Epictetus while he was in captivity, writing that “I remembered the basic truth of subjective consciousness as the ability to distinguish what is in my power from that which is not.”

 

Did I grow because of Iraq? I grew and I shrank. Parts of my mind that I didn't know existed before appeared. It was like waking up and noticing that someone has built a new addition onto your house during the night. I stepped into it and enjoyed the new space. But the other, older parts of the house looked different than they had before. Changed. With a darker coat of paint. I had to learn the new layout.

The war was awful, but it was like a refuge from real life in a lot of ways. Certain things were harder over there, but certain things were easier. In death's lengthening shadow, your life shrinks down to a few, very important concerns. Like a leaf held up to the light, you see life as a series of branching veins. A lot of ridiculous demands and expectations that drive people crazy stateside don't exist in a war. You don't have to worry about how you look, for instance. Fretting over the kind of car you drive seems like the height of folly. In a strange way, you are free. The only thing you can lose is your life.

Living out of a backpack for months, I learned that I didn't need very much to be happy. I learned that most people waste their lives obsessing over consumer items that serve no real purpose. Once I was back in the world, this focus, this streamlining of life's priorities, gave me a new confidence. I carried myself differently, more assertively. There was a new faith, derived from a simple declarative statement that echoed in moments of pain and crisis:
Well, this sucks, but it's better than Ramadi
. I also learned how to ignore things that were beyond my control, like death.

But the war also gave me knowledge that I don't know how to live with. It taught me that the world is a dangerous place. That death is random. That governments lie as a matter of course. That time is elastic. That terror is relative. That truth is local, tribal even. That what is true in Baghdad isn't necessarily true in Ramadi. That what is true in Basra is almost never true in Ramadi. That things only seem absolutely true in Washington. That the closer you get to death, the harder it is to know anything for sure. The war was another world. A lot of things that happened there only made sense there. A lot of things that happened there made no sense at all, but they happened anyway.

Was this growth or just too much information?

The war gave me a kind of maturity, but it made me a child again. When I got back, there were simple human moments that I realized the war had taught me how to see again. Basic sights overlooked by people who had never almost died or walked through a destroyed city. My eyes seemed to work differently. They were hungrier, more sensitive to beauty. Flying over Greenland on my way back in 2004, I saw the glaciers, melting and wondrous and reflecting seven kinds of white, and cried. Before the war, I would have told myself it was only scenery. I became a watcher of night skies, of cloud formations, of shooting stars. The world had a music I'd forgotten how to hear. Whatever secret harbor of wonder, of childlike yearning for the sights of the world, that drains away as we grow up, had been filled again.

Then, just like that, the whole thing would flip, somebody would say something callous or ignorant, and I'd be angry again. Angry at the direction the world had taken. Angry at how stupid people were. How everyone seemed to have accepted the war, the wasteful, mammoth injustice of it, with a shrug.

Did being made crazy by this fact mean that I was actually going crazy?

I stewed on this for months. Was I mad or wise? Was this loss or insight? Stress or growth? In 2004, these were difficult questions to answer. Ten years later, I still don't have the answers.

Years before, in my youth, a friend asked me a question that I've never been able to shake. It was on Okinawa when we were lieutenants, full of ourselves, confident and feral. We were all so strong, and we knew nothing could kill us. At most of the parties on-island, I was among the quietest and most aloof. Others would be drinking and dancing, shouting nicknames at each other. I would be off in a corner, dabbling in unauthorized ideas with a friend who'd gone to Penn State. One night at the Kadena officers club, a classmate whom I hadn't seen in years appeared beside me.

At Texas A&M, Jon had been a model cadet and was my perfect foil: a leader where I had always been a misfit. He and I had both been on the freshman drill team, a unit that began every practice with everyone doing a thousand sit-ups in sets of a hundred beneath an upperclassmen's dorm window. At the end of fall semester, I quit the team and Jon had gone on and distinguished himself, eventually being invited back as a coach his sophomore year. Our senior year, he had commanded the honor guard for the governor, a position that came with privileges and a stipend. He was one of a pack of young men who held all the top billets in the Corps of Cadets, guys who ran around campus from activity to activity, already fully vested in life at nineteen. Fated to run the world, or at least a sizeable chunk of it, his luck had changed at Quantico.

During a live-fire exercise in the woods, there had been some confusion, and another lieutenant had shot him by accident between the shoulder blades. The bullet, on its journey through his body, a journey that I think of sometimes as a kind of odyssey, had taken a nasty turn, ricocheting off his collar bone, zigzagging through his neck, eventually exiting his cheek, leaving a long, brutal scar across his face. I hadn't seen him in years and assumed that after the accident he'd left the Corps.

Needless to say, Jon had changed. At A&M, he'd been top of the heap, and he knew it. Cocky and with a hint of cruelty that is often the mark of the professional military man, he had never been a close friend. The man before me now seemed softened, chastened. After catching up for a few minutes, he asked me in a quiet voice, “Why are you here?”

“Here, what do you mean
here?
Like Kadena?”

“The Marine Corps.”

I gave him a look of disbelief and made some evasive reply, but the question chilled me. He knew the truth. He knew that on a certain level the Corps was just a pose for me, that I was watching the drama of it from a distance, not letting it touch me. That it wasn't fully real to me yet, that it was play.

He had spoken to me as a seer, a man who had crossed a certain kind of threshold. When I think of him, I imagine him looking back over his shoulder from a distance, wondering when the rest of us will catch up. Among my college classmates, he had been dealt the worst hand by far. What had happened was wrong and grotesquely unfair, but it had happened just the same. And yet through some alchemy, Jon had been made better, more thoughtful, more perceptive. The bullet—his bullet—had taken things away, but it had given him things, too.

I am often asked if I regret going to Iraq or if I regret going into the Marine Corps. And it's odd, because I can without too much effort imagine alternative universes for practically every historical scenario in the world—a world where the United States never enters World War I, a world where Saddam has the WMDs, a world where the battle of Fallujah never happens—but I have never been able to build a counterfactual world where I do not go into the Corps, a world where I don't get the letters USMC tattooed across my back, a world where I don't get on a plane and go to Iraq. I can even imagine a world where Erica doesn't disappear to Vegas and we stay together and get married, but I cannot see the me who doesn't go in, who doesn't go over and get blown up and almost shot down.

I'm a writer. I have studied the mechanics of fiction at the graduate level, learned how to create and nurture alternate worlds in my own head. But there's no alternate nonwar world of me.

In short, there's no counterfactual of me.

It's somehow too much to ask, to make a life without a war in the middle of it. It's a little bit like what Freud said about trying to imagine your own death: it's beyond my ken. It's like a death in that it's the absolute unknown, it opens a window to the world and lets every possibility in. It's too much. When I start to think about it, my brain just goes to static, like a radio turned to a dead station. In every inner universe I make, I do go in, I do go over.

But let's call this what it is: a failure of imagination on my part.

I know I am not normal in this way. I know some people who can't stop their brains from tackling all the possibilities, who are terrorized by their counterfactuals, guys who after one bad episode or another see their insides turned into tape loops, tape loops with questions on them. Questions like
What if? What if? What if?
What if?
or, worse yet,
Why didn't I? Why didn't I? Why didn't I? Why didn't I?
playing over and over in their heads. In between the questions, there are worlds. Worlds where they aren't so afraid. Worlds where they aren't so tired and falling asleep during security halts that they take the longer, more tedious, safer way back to their patrol base. Worlds where their best friend lives. Where he walks past the IED buried in the side of an irrigation ditch. A world where he goes back to the barracks at San Mateo, where he gets out of the Corps, takes a job at a coffee shop in Tucson, goes to Pima Community College on the G.I. Bill, eventually gets into U of A down the road. Or a world where the IED hits another guy in the patrol. Or where they take a long security halt at the turnaround point, take a breather, and everybody lives because they're not so wasted.

Everyone does this. We all build counterfactuals out of our lives, even when we don't realize it. What if I didn't have that last drink? What if I'd taken that job in Baltimore? It is possibility that kills us in the end, sheer chance, a kind of optimism that tells us that anything is possible. Life doesn't work this way, but we wish it did. We wish that life could be lived with the benefit of hindsight, with wisdom coming when it should. We wish we could go back and marry the right girl. We wish we could go back and take that test again.

I would not go through another war again. Yet I know that another one is coming. Another war is coming, and no one can do anything about it. In every world my mind makes, a war comes. Even now, it is making itself ready. Thinking about this, I recall what Heraclitus said:

 

Justice in our minds is strife

We cannot help but see

War makes us as we are.

 

War has made me as I am.

And there's a kind of beauty in that, or at least a kind of order, something that helps me make sense of the world.

To me, asking
Do you regret going to Iraq?
or
Do you regret going into the Corps?
is almost like asking
Do you believe in God?
It's a really big question, a question that many people can answer with ease but one that tells you a lot about that person, how they see the world, how they see the role that fate plays in human life. But when I think about it, what I usually say is this: I believe in nature. I believe in brokenness. I believe in wholeness. I believe in whatever it is that connects the one to the other. I believe in it in the way that a geologist believes in the mutability of hills, of waterfalls, of beaches. It just is. I went in and went over because the situation seemed to demand it. It was a similar attitude that some playwrights in ancient Greece took, a kind of tragic realism, of staring into the abyss of terror and suffering as a way of affirming life. To fully appreciate the joys of this world, one must understand how temporary they are, how fragile human existence is.

“Beneath those stars,” Melville wrote, “is a universe of gliding monsters.”

On the way back from my first trip to Iraq, I was chatting on the tarmac of an airfield near Fallujah with an old Marine buddy I'd chanced into. He'd left the infantry and become a helicopter pilot, and it was like he was a different person now. He was a guy who knew how to do all that incredible stuff up in the air, miracles really. I was trying to imagine him in the cockpit when we got the word that some “angels” were arriving and for everyone to get in line. I stood beside my friend while he saluted. Then I learned what they meant by “angels.”

Two aluminum coffins with American flags stretched over them were being hoisted into the back of a C-130 by a forklift.

“Angels” were corpses.

A few minutes later, when we were about to load up on the plane, the crew chief stopped me and said, “Sir, I'm gonna need to get your camera from you.” He was the first of three guys to tell me that photographs weren't allowed on the flight, including a major who, when we were halfway to Kuwait, unstrapped and walked the length of the plane to deliver the news.

I can see now that this tarmac was a kind of dividing line, a demarcation between one world and the next. On one side of the line, real people got blown up and shot in the face. Real people got mortared in the shitter and drowned in filthy canal water inside overturned Humvees. On the other side of the line, people referred to the dead as “angels” and made sure that no one took photos of them. Here was where the language changed. Here was where certain facts became unspeakable. Here, then, was where a certain kind of alchemy began, an alchemy that changed the facts of life and death, the horror of daily life in Iraq, into a kind of Sunday-school story.

What became of that world on the other side of the line? What became of that way of being, that way of feeling, that time, that history? What became of the Marines whom I sang the theme from
Aladdin
with on the way to the ambush site in Saqliwiyah? What became of the sergeant from 1/1 who cursed me in the hotel? What became of Reaper, the philosopher of Saydia? What became of the soldiers who jinxed me? Called out my fate like it was a common fact?