The Moth (26 page)

I did realize on that trip that I had to get my shit together. I had to be someone who—when this kid was old enough to ask questions—was worthy of being asked.

I went home, and I stopped doing all of those horrible things to myself. I made better friends and started building my own family of supporters. Eventually I got better, and every year in August I would visit them, and every year it was a little easier to talk, and it was a little easier to share, and it wasn’t so terrible when people stared at me and said, “You look just like him.”

When he was turning nine, I realized I really needed to change. I was invited to a meditation seminar about an hour north of Portland, and I went with two of my best friends. We were given homework. We were asked to bring something we needed to get rid of, and I had a lot to get rid of. But the one thing that I had to really get rid of was this concept, this idea that I was Henry’s mother (that’s his name, Henry), because I wasn’t.

There’s a big difference between the person that gives birth to you and the people that raise you. I knew that from my own life; it just took me a long time to learn that lesson for myself.

After the shedding and meditation, we went to Portland. It was the first time I brought friends with me. It was the first time I didn’t second-guess myself every time I spoke to them. It was the first time I didn’t stop myself from touching him. I realized this meditation hadn’t changed me as a human being, it had just changed my perception. It had changed how I saw them, because I realized these people—these wonderful people who did such an amazing job raising this brilliant kid—had given me the only blueprint I had. They had given me the foundation for what a family should be, what love was and loyalty, and what a mother could be. What two moms could be. I left
there, and it was the first time I did not cry all the way till Boston and scream until New Jersey.

The year he was turning ten, I found I was pregnant again, but this time it was so different because I had spent these years trying to build a real family. The people in my life were so excited because this baby was the first in our family of friends. I was still poor, and I still hadn’t completed my formal education, but I wasn’t alone. I had this wonderful family of friends; and they called, and they wrote, and they put ads on craigslist, drove all over the tri-state area, and filled a storage space with so many baby things that I had to give away two of many things.

When my daughter was born, this birth was also well attended. So many people were there that they had to turn people away at the maternity ward. Everything was so different.

Henry carries a picture of Asha in his wallet. (I named her Asha; it means “hope” in Sanskrit.) My son will be fourteen this year, and in April, when Asha turned four, he came with his mother, Gretchen, to our house and shared our home and stayed with our family and all the people that chose to be there, and I watched him hold her and play with her. I saw them as part of my family for the first time, really understanding that they were part of me too. I watched this beautiful, brilliant, strong boy carry his beautiful, brilliant little sister and realized that he had become a part of the net that would hold her up.

Carly Johnstone
is a work in progress, please excuse the mess.

SEBASTIAN JUNGER

I
first went to war when I was thirty-one. I grew up in a wealthy suburb. I spent my twenties writing short stories and trying to wait tables. And I got to thirty, and I guess the best way to say it is I didn’t feel like I was a man. And I thought war would be exciting and intense, and that it would transform me in some way.

So I got a backpack, and I put a sleeping bag in it and some notebooks and pens and a few thousand dollars, and I went to Bosnia during the civil war, to Sarajevo, to try to learn to be a war reporter.

And war was all those things that I thought it would be. The thing about war is it does not disappoint, but it’s also way more than you bargained for.

For example, this: the first time I saw a dead body, it wasn’t a fighter. Most of the people who die in wars are civilians. It was in Kosovo during the civil war. It was a girl, sixteen, seventeen years old. And I always imagined that she was probably really beautiful. She’d been taken by Serb paramilitary forces, and they took her up to a field above a town called Suhareka. And
they did whatever they did to her, and then they cut her throat.

And when I saw her, it was a couple weeks later. It was summer. It was hot. And the only way you could tell she was a girl, or really even human, was that you could still see the red fingernail polish on her nails. That girl stayed with me for a while. She was more than I’d bargained for.

I remember the first time I prepared myself to die. I was in Sierra Leone during the civil war. And I’d been out at the front lines, and it was getting pretty bad out there, and I was trying to get back to Freetown. I got in a jeep with a few Sierra Leonean soldiers who really weren’t good for much, and with a couple of journalists, and we were driving down this empty road, back towards Freetown, and these rebels stepped out of the jungle in front of us, with their guns leveled at us.

We came to a stop, and we just stared straight ahead while they argued about whether to kill us.

And I tried to get ready. I was hollow. I was numb. And I didn’t have any grand thoughts. I just kept thinking,
I hope this doesn’t hurt.
That’s all I thought. And the guns were pointed at us. I saw the little black hole that the bullet comes out of. At one point a guy racked his gun and started to shoot, and another guy grabbed the barrel and jerked it up. It was like that for fifteen minutes, while all these little black holes were staring at us. And I thought,
There’s eternity inside those holes. They’re so small—the thickness of a pencil—and eternity’s in there.
And I couldn’t bring myself to look at the rebels.

For some reason, they didn’t kill us, and we drove back to Freetown.

And I kept going back for more. I kept going to more wars. I felt like there was something I needed to understand about
war that I didn’t understand yet, and I kept looking for it. I kept going back.

I remember the first time I froze in combat. You know, you go to war, you think you’re gonna be brave. If you don’t think that, you probably don’t go to war. And sometimes you are brave, but then other times you’re not. And so this time I was out at a small American outpost in Afghanistan, an outpost called Restrepo, a twenty-man position up on this ridge. They were getting attacked all the time.

But this day it was really quiet. Hot. Nothing was going on. I was leaning against some sandbags and some dirt flew into the side of my face. And what you have to understand about bullets is that they go much faster than the speed of sound, so if someone shoots at you from four hundred meters, five hundred meters, the first thing that happens is you ask yourself,
Am I getting shot at?
Because the sound the bullets make when they go past you is pretty subtle. And then the gunfire arrives a moment later.
Yes, I am getting shot at.
And then everything goes crazy.

The bullet hit two inches from the side of my head and kicked dirt into my face. That’s what I had felt. What’s the angle of deviation at five hundred meters that gives you two inches to the right? You know, what’s the math on that angle? You don’t even wanna think about it, and then it’s all you can think about.

I was paralyzed. Bullets were coming in, hitting the ground, hitting the sandbags, smacking into everything. I was behind some sandbags.

And our gear was right over there, just a few feet away—cameras, bulletproof vests. We’re getting attacked from three sides. They’re coming up into the wire. It’s really bad, and we can’t get to our gear. There’s too much gunfire. And I’m paralyzed.

The guy I was working with, Tim Hetherington, a photographer—we were on assignment out there—he finally jumps across that gap. He throws my camera to me, and he throws my bulletproof vest. He grabs his stuff. He’s throwing ammo to soldiers because the soldiers are pinned down too. And he gets back, and I have my camera in my hand, and I start shooting; I start working. And then I’m fine. I’m not scared anymore.

Tim was an amazing photographer and obviously very, very brave—a lot braver than me—but he was also really thoughtful about war. I remember at one point he said to me, “You know, war might be the only situation where young men are free to love each other unreservedly, without it being mistaken for something else.”

That was Tim. And that’s why we were working together. We decided to make a documentary about this little outpost. We were going to call it
Restrepo
, and we were going to spend as much of the deployment as possible at this little spot on this ridge in eastern Afghanistan.

We were going to alternate trips, and I had torn my Achilles on this trip, so I had to go home to kind of heal up, and Tim took the next trip. He was on a weeklong combat operation up in the mountains on foot, a very bad scene; a lot of American soldiers got killed and wounded. At one point the American positions got overrun, and the Taliban dragged off a wounded American soldier at night, in the middle of a firefight. The US forces got him back, but it was bad out there—way worse than anyone back home really knew, you know?

And in the middle of all that, Tim broke his leg. He was at ten thousand feet, up on the Abas Ghar, with a broken leg, and the platoon was moving down the mountain all night long.

And the medic examines his leg and says, “Well, it’s broken,
and we can’t get a medevac, and we have to be off this mountain by dawn, or we’re gonna get hammered. Here’s two Advil.”

And Tim knew that if you’re not prepared to walk all night on a broken leg for the sake of thirty men, you shouldn’t be out there. And he did it. I don’t know how, but he did it. He got down off that mountain.

So we finished up our deployment—that’s how we started to think of it, our deployment. And the rest of it was okay. The worst was in the beginning, actually, and then we started making our film,
Restrepo
. And the film did really well.

It started with this scene, and it took me a long time to be able to watch it, actually. I would always close my eyes when it came. It was a scene where I’m riding in a Humvee (’cause I took the next trip after Tim broke his leg). And I’m riding in a Humvee, and all of a sudden everything goes orange and black, and the Humvee gets blown up.

The explosive went off under the engine block, though, instead of under us, so we lived. And that whole rest of the day, I was just on this crazy, jagged high. I mean, there’s nothing like not getting killed to crank you up. It’s incredible. And that night I just sank. I spiraled down into this black hole.

War is a lot of things. It’s incredibly exciting. I hate to put it that way, but I’m not up here to lie to you. It’s really exciting. And it’s really scary. And it’s really intense. And it’s really meaningful. But it’s also incredibly sad. And sadness is a kind of delicate emotion that’s easily trampled by other feelings, and that night I got in touch with the sadness of the whole thing.

Politics aside, just the fact that people are doing this to each other, it crushed me. And that sadness lasted exactly until the next time we got shot at. Then I was back in the game.

But I had the camera rolling when we got blown up in the
Humvee. And that bit of footage, I could not bring myself to watch, because when I tried to watch it, my heart rate went to 180. I just couldn’t do it.

But we put that in the beginning of the movie, and the movie came out, and it did really well. And Tim and I were just on this amazing ride, you know? It was incredible.

But the Arab world was in flames now, right? The Arab Spring was just this incredibly important upheaval in the world. And Tim and I were dying to get back to work, to get back out there, you know? We’re journalists. We decided to go to Libya to cover the civil war.

At the last minute, I couldn’t go, and Tim went on his own. And on April 20 last year, I got the news—through the Internet, on Twitter actually, which is a way I hope I never get bad news again—that my good friend Tim had been killed in the city of Misrata. An 81 mm mortar had come in and hit a group of fighters and journalists and killed and wounded a bunch of ’em. Tim was hit in the groin, and he bled out in the back of a rebel pickup truck, racing for the Misrata hospital.

And I felt nothing. I was hollow again, just like in that jeep in Sierra Leone when I was waiting to see if I was gonna die—completely hollow. I felt bad that I didn’t feel bad. I mean, I realized later I was in shock. And you know, the shock spares you for a little while the things you’re gonna have to feel later.

In the middle of that awful day I got an e-mail from a Vietnam vet that I’d met in Texas. Tim had met him too. He’d really liked
Restrepo
. He’d been through a lot of bad stuff, and he read my book and Tim’s book, and he liked our work. And he sent me an e-mail and said, “Sebastian, I’m so sorry about Tim, but I have to tell you something. It might sound callous, but I’ve gotta tell you. You guys, with your books and your movie, you
came very close to understanding the truth about war, but you didn’t get all the way. The core reality of war isn’t that you might get killed out there. It’s that you’re guaranteed to lose your brothers. And in some ways you guys didn’t understand the first thing about war. And now, Sebastian, you’ve lost a brother, and you understand everything there is to know about it.” And he was right. It wasn’t callous. It’s the truth. The truth can’t be callous. And now I know the truth about war, and I’m never going back again.