The Evil Hours (7 page)

My eyes adjusting, I looked through the window and saw that the homes to our left were still burning, the smoke migrating over the blacktop. It occurred to me that someone ought to be shooting at us from behind the wall of smoke. This thought began to irritate me. We were off the script, somehow. This was supposed to be an ambush, so why wasn't the enemy playing its part and finishing us off? With all of our attention focused inward, on the bomb that had just gone off, we were in perfect position, practically begging to be annihilated. As if by magic, just then a line of muzzle flashes began winking at us through the smoke almost whimsically, like carnival sparklers. I sat there for a moment, bracing for the bullets' impact. My ass welded to the seat, I was trying to believe in what was happening: any moment now and it would be over. The agony of the end, it seemed to go on forever. There was a moment of regret, clouds of dust billowing from the houses.

Blinking, suddenly I felt different, as if a long moment had passed in my head. I looked over at the houses, and I realized that no one was shooting at us. We were safe and yet all was profane, all was going and coming at the same instant.

And just like that, I got pissed. Here I was, trapped in a Humvee full of buffoons who were practically begging to be murdered by a bunch of half-assed insurgents. Was there ever a bigger ship of fools?

“Why the fuck isn't someone busting down doors, looking for the trigger man? Where the fuck is the Bradley? Why hasn't someone launched the QRF?” I yelled at no one in particular, using the military term for the rescue squad that every unit kept on standby in case of attack.

Vollmer turned his head around. “Everyone okay?” he yelled. He didn't seem to have heard a word I'd said.

I patted down my legs, first doing a quick once-over, then squeezing near my groin, my armpits, and my neck for the arteries. Remembering the dick-shot soldier in Dora, I double-checked my crotch, just to be sure. All clear. I got my gear in order and found the door handle with my hand, just as a reference point. I looked over at Reaper, somehow making out his eyes burning red through the haze. He was cursing violently. “Two months left in this bitch and then this!” And so on.

“Everybody stays in the vehicle! Nobody gets out!” Vollmer yelled at no one in particular. Then he was yelling up at the gunner, craning his neck up into the turret, asking him if he could see where the smoke was coming from. The gunner didn't say anything.

As John le Carré observed, somewhere in every bomb explosion there is a miracle.
For some, it is the tiniest of details that saves a life: the shrapnel that penetrates a guy's helmet only to exit the other side, leaving him unscathed. With every IED that went off, there were a dozen stories, some dark and some redeeming and transcendent, but all of them flew in the face of human reason. The year before, I'd interviewed a navy corpsman who told me about a Marine who'd been killed in Fallujah the same hour that his son was born back in the States.
Our miracles were more common. The first was the twelve inches that saved Reaper, sending the force of the blast through the trunk of the Humvee instead of through his ass. The second miracle was that somehow everyone in the Humvee was deafened by the explosion except me, even though it had gone off less than three feet from where I sat.

At some point, I can't remember when, someone from the Bradley ran up to our Humvee and doused the flames with a fire extinguisher. A second later, he wrenched open the door and yelled, “You morons, there was a shitload of machinegun ammo in the back that was on fire.” Before the soldier could get another word out, Vollmer hollered at him to get back in the Bradley before someone took a potshot at him.

This seemed to wake Vollmer up, and he yelled at the driver to put it in drive and take us back to the patrol base. The driver did as he was ordered, though Vollmer had to yell at him twice to be heard. It was then that we discovered our next problem: the IED had destroyed our right rear wheel, and when the driver floored it, nothing happened except the grinding of the wheel rim inside the remnants of the tire. It took forever, but somehow the driver, alternating between forward and reverse, was able to extract our Humvee from the blast crater and aim us toward home, toward our patrol base, which shone in my mind now like a holy city.

Somehow we got back safely, somehow the Humvee held together, somehow no one else decided to light us up, somehow we managed to not hit another IED on the way. My memories of the drive back are erratic, like snapshots in a lost photo album. There were checkpoints manned by Iraqi soldiers that we ignored, local traffic moving blindly through the streets oblivious to our presence, the ruined rim of the Humvee grinding on the pavement.

One memory remains clear, however. I could feel Reaper's eyes on me, and when I glanced over at him, he let me have it.

“What the fuck are you doing here anyway?” he yelled. “I don't fucking get it. They must be paying you some serious bread to be here.” He turned his head away but not before I got a look at his eyes, which blazed with a sort of fury. It was like the IED had soured things between us, and whatever connection that had existed had been destroyed in the blast. There was an unmistakable tone of disgust in his words. He began again. “You're a reporter, man! You could be anywhere, and of all the places in the world, you chose this one. I have to be here. I don't know if you've noticed, but none of us wants to be here in this bullshit. You think I'm here because I love America? Dude, I joined the army 'cause I'm poor. I joined the army 'cause I had nowhere else to go.”

I started to answer him but gave up. What could I say? The blast had shaken me enough that I could barely think straight, let alone argue coherently, and what really was the point in trying to argue with a Humvee full of deaf soldiers? And besides, he had a point, and even though it wouldn't sink in for years, I didn't have any words for him. Turning away, I looked out the window and watched the hot city stutter past. Reaper had been wounded three times before and had handled it with equanimity, or so I had been told by his buddies, but there was something about my presence in Saydia, on this particular patrol, that seemed to have pushed him over the edge, as if the IED had shaken loose some secret doubts within him, as if he couldn't fathom what sort of person had so little use for his life that he would voluntarily go to a place like Baghdad in the middle of a war.

Later, I would realize that Reaper had been on to something, that this was exactly what it was all about, this and several other things. I was here to cover the war, it was understood, but why was it understood? The war had granted Reaper a certain measure of early wisdom, this much I had seen prior to the explosion. Now, shaken by this fourth near-death, he had aimed some of this wisdom back at me, and it hurt, though it took a long time to understand why. Maybe he wouldn't have said anything under normal circumstances, maybe he shouldn't have. The IED had stolen so many things, including his restraint. Or perhaps this was a gift, really, the gift of candor, the bomb's final miracle.

When, after what seemed like hours, we made it back inside the wire, I looked up and saw the sign again.
EVERYDAY IS DAY ONE
. I looked away as quickly as I could. One part of the war was over, another just beginning.

Thirty minutes later, I was back at FOB Falcon, in an air-conditioned surgical clinic, having my head examined. A week after that, I was back in California.

2

W
E ARE BORN
in debt, owing the world a death. This is the shadow that darkens every cradle. Trauma is what happens when you catch a surprise glimpse of that darkness, the coming annihilation not only of the body and the mind but also, seemingly, of the world. Trauma is the savagery of the universe made manifest within us, and it destroys not only the integrity of consciousness, the myth of self-mastery, and the experience of time but also our ability to live peacefully with others, almost as if it were a virus, a pathogen content to do nothing besides replicate itself in the world, over and over, until only it remains. Trauma is the glimpse of truth that tells us a lie: the lie that love is impossible, that peace is an illusion. Therapy and medication can ease the pain but neither can suck the venom from the blood, make the survivor unsee the darkness and unknow the secret that lies beneath the surface of life. Despite the quixotic claims of modern neuroscience, there is no cure for trauma. Once it enters the body, it stays there forever, initiating a complex chemical chain of events that changes not only the physiology of the victims but also the physiology of their offspring.
One cannot, as war correspondent Michael Herr testifies in
Dispatches
, simply “run the film backwards out of consciousness.”
Trauma is our special legacy as sentient beings, creatures burdened with the knowledge of our own impermanence; our symbolic experience with it is one of the things that separates us from the animal kingdom. As long as we exist, the universe will be scheming to wipe us out. The best we can do is work to contain the pain, draw a line around it, name it, domesticate it, and try to transform what lies on the other side of the line into a kind of knowledge, a knowledge of the mechanics of loss that might be put to use for future generations.

Trauma is not exotic, nor is it something belonging only to poorer regions of the world. It is not unique to the modern era, and while history tells us our responses to it evolve, trauma itself, what one pioneering researcher called “the death imprint,” is immortal and ubiquitous. “Trauma is democratic,” Yale historian Jay Winter observed in a volume on the cultural history of World War I, as “it chooses all kinds of people in its crippling passage.”
It is little wonder that the ancient Greeks included a god of war in the pantheon of the universe: the historian Will Durant calculated that there have been only twenty-nine years in all of human history when there wasn't a war going on somewhere in the world.

The numbers are staggering: a 2010 study undertaken by the Department of Justice found that 18 percent of women in the United States have been raped and that around half of them will suffer from PTSD, some fourteen million women in all.
The most cited research study on the incidence of trauma, a sort of Census of Misery known as the
National Comorbidity Survey
(completed before 9/11), found that approximately 55 percent of the U.S. population will be exposed to at least one traumatic event in their lifetime in the form of military combat, rape, physical assault, natural disaster, or automobile accident, roughly the same number of Americans who own smartphones.
Alice Sebold, when asked why she chose to write about the rape and dismemberment of a fourteen-year-old girl in her bestselling novel
The Lovely Bones
, replied, “Because it's part of life. It's very much a part of the experience of what it is to live in this culture. It happens all the time.”
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Cormac McCarthy makes a similar point when he begins
Blood Meridian
, his dark masterpiece of violence in the American West, with a reference to a June 13, 1982, article in the
Yuma Daily Sun
that describes the discovery of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull that had been scalped.

Trauma defies description, but as an analogy it can be useful to think of it as a transfer of energies: like a bullet, it enters the body, angry, and with a surplus of power, eager to transmit it to whatever flesh it finds, doing its work and then exiting, leaving the troubled body behind, dragging a comet's tail of memory, hope, and innocence through the air, looking for another body to complicate.
Logic tells us that the larger the bullet, the greater the damage. In fact, one of the cardinal principles of modern trauma studies is built on this big-bullet little-bullet idea, which is what researchers refer to as the “dose-response curve.”
In plain English, the dose-response curve says that the more terrifying the event, the greater the potential for harm. To use a real-world example, the dose-response curve tells us that a thirty-one-year-old woman named Linda who is pinned beneath a heavy bookcase after an earthquake for an hour is more likely to survive without post-traumatic symptoms than if she had been pinned under a bookcase for twenty-four hours next to the body of her dead husband.

The dose-response curve explains a lot. It explains, for instance, the somewhat obvious fact that not all traumas are created equal and that trauma has a certain cumulative quality, in the sense that one terrible event can serve to “soften up” a person and make him or her more vulnerable to a later trauma. But as with all elegant theories, something gets lost in the translation to real life; some overlooked truth remains hidden. For anyone who has ever been to war or watched a brushfire consume the dreams and family histories of an entire suburb, the problem with this theory is obvious: How exactly does one go about quantifying trauma? What exactly qualifies as a “dose” in this theory? Put another way, exactly how many cc's of pain, loss, and moral vertigo can one fit into a laboratory beaker?

There is also the challenge of how to factor in the identity of the person undergoing such a “dosage.” As one Vietnam vet turned advocate practically yelled at me one day, “Combat doesn't happen to inert bodies, it happens to
people
.” In our falling-bookcase example, the question thus becomes:
Who is Linda exactly?
What sort of family does she come from? What sort of childhood did she have? A safe, protected one or one marked by sadism and abuse? Was she extroverted?
Open to new experiences and sensations? Was she someone who was easily hypnotized?
What happened to her immediately prior to the earthquake? To what degree was she exposed to the elements during her ordeal? Did she lose consciousness at any point? How did her friends and family, her social support system, respond after the temblor? And perhaps most importantly, what story did she tell herself in the wake of this seismic event? How did she incorporate the terror into the ongoing tale of her life? How did she go about creating a narrative from the disparate images of her actual experience, arranging them into a shape that she could recognize as uniquely her own?