The Things They Cannot Say (22 page)

But Tailer's post-conflict stoicism may be based on a different and more unique model, that of a people descended from a history of genocide, and it may render a different outcome for him as well.

“My father, for example,” says Tailer, “lost everything he had and buried his entire family. A person can go nuts from a single incident like I described of his background, but my father kept on living. I don't think that what I did in the army, with all the trauma, was more than what my father experienced. There's no comparison. Everybody deals with what he's got. Good or bad. I look at it less from emotion, although I get more emotional hearing other people's stories than my own, like my father breaking down over seeing a starving child but not over his own starvation. You push things away because you have to and you disconnect from the emotion and work from your intellect. Maybe it's genetic. If my father could deal with his situation, I can deal with mine.”

And even though his father's experience highlights for him the necessity of Israel's existence as a Jewish homeland, Tailer says it also has been a lesson in fairness and tolerance for him. He does not hold his father's history as an excuse to hate or punish Arabs, even those who are fighting against him.

“I get crazy if I see someone mistreating another person. It doesn't matter if it's an Arab or not,” says Tailer. “It drives me crazy because of knowing what my father was subjected to. I was very clear with my soldiers: no violence or raising a hand to anyone and honor the other person. There was no veering from procedure among my staff or my soldiers. They knew I would lose my cool if that happened. I was very cut-and-dried on that issue. No wild west. We do what we have to do, go in and get out. The border can be messy and things can get violent but if you don't need to be violent for the mission, that's where the boundary lies. I don't tie in the Palestinian history to my father's. Their story is about nationalism and independence and not about genocide or murdering a nation. There's no connection between the two histories whatsoever,” he says.

While he and his father were closer to the political right during their younger years, they've moderated and both agree that a two-state solution, one Jewish, one Arab, is the only chance for peaceful cohabitation in the region.

“After I went into the army I never feared Arabs, and that's not from a macho place. I understood with time the differences in mentalities the two sides have. I don't fear them,” says Tailer. “I have a lot of Arab friends. I'm not afraid. I don't hate. I'm not willing to put myself into the realm of hatred. I'm not willing to hate them because that's the lowest form of emotion I could have. It's not a logical feeling, it comes from emotion, and I'm not willing to conduct my affairs from an emotional place. I had no Arab friends during my childhood. The concept of the Palestinian problem formulated after the military service when I realized that to be right about this country isn't enough. I defined it out of my world of values: to continue to maintain a Jewish state with a Jewish majority state to protect us, we must turn into a two-state solution. I must say that I have concluded that not from the Palestinian distress that surely exists, but mainly the emerging reality of an ongoing conflict unbridgeable between the two [Palestinians and Israelis].”

With his last fight four years behind him, Tailer is and has been back where he prefers to be, in the realm of his family. While he may get excited talking with members of his unit, remembering the stories of their past exploits, this is where he lives, in the civilian world, working, taking care of his family, taking long runs with his dogs, dozens of kilometers, alone with his thoughts. While Tailer says he prefers to look forward, it is his family's history and his own memories that have informed him of his duty, his sense of belonging and of who he is and where he should be.

“I also have the feeling that this is the only country for the Jews . . . I know what can happen to us without a country. I know it's very important for us to stay here and see our future and children's futures here. And that's not from a place of idealism. It's because I know what could be. I see it through my father's history. Living somewhere else is not an option for me.”

Even if that requires that he continue to live fused, both soldier and civilian, waiting for the next call-up. Or that years from now, if the conflicts are not resolved, his son may also have to do the same.

Corporal Sebastiaan Schoonhoven Royal Netherlands Army

11th Air Mobile Brigade

The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (2004 and 2006)

Chapter 11: Into the Deep

All of us soldiers know what it's like to kill, but it's easier to talk to people that have been there. Most people don't know what happened over there. I like that not everyone knows. I'm here for my rest. I'm trying to forget it.

A
t a dive spot called Karpata on the island of Bonaire, there's an old anchor in about thirty feet of water embedded in the rock and coral that some believe was a ship's last effort to steady itself in an unyielding storm but that eventually snapped under the strain of wind and waves.

If you follow the chain from the anchor's eye over the reef's ledge it will lead, like an earnest promise, into the secrets of the deep. On this day, the waves are choppy as we make our surface swim to the spot above where we know the anchor to be. We give each other the signal to descend, thumbs pointed down, and then drop beneath the surface like pebbles sinking in a pond. There's a small pressure against our chests as we displace the increasingly colder and darker water around us.

We are slightly flared, like free-falling skydivers, but the only air we can feel is in the high-pressure cylinders strapped to our backs and the nitrox bottles clipped beneath us on the D-rings of our web harnesses, which, with 32 percent concentration of oxygen, will be toxic at the depth we're going to but life-sustaining in the shallows of our decompression time, once—if—we make it back up.

For my friend and me, fellow dive master and former sniper in the Dutch army Sebastiaan Schoonhoven, this is not just a foolish endeavor but nearly an idiotic one, yet we feel compelled to do it anyway, to test our courage, to test our limits, to flout the laws of physics and physiology, lab mice in control of our own destiny, trying to learn how far, how deep, you must go to finally forget.

S
choonhoven is the first person I meet when I arrive one early May morning in 2009 at the Bonaire dive shop where he is already a dive master and where I will be training to become one.

“Can I help you?” he asks me warily as I walk around the open foyer area, before the other employees get there. He and I each came to this rocky, scrubby little island in the Dutch Antilles under different circumstances but for similar reasons: we are seeking some closure to the wars that still haunt us.

As a sniper, or, as the Dutch say, a long-distance shooter, with the Netherlands army's 11th Air Mobile Brigade, he was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. But he's happy to draw the distinctions between us. Within minutes of learning about our common conflict zones he tells me, without a whiff of irony, “I hate journalists.”

“Get in line,” I tell him. It's not like I haven't heard the sentiment before.

Over the next few weeks I only see Schoonhoven sporadically, as he's the shop's primary boat driver and dive master, while I, as a forty-six-year-old man, begin my Karate Kid–type diving apprenticeship, in which I paint, fill air cylinders, haul empty tanks, repair scuba gear, fix boat docks and even serve rum punch for Monday-night appreciation mixers with the customers, all in exchange for the knowledge and training I need to become a dive master myself.

For me, as I mentioned earlier, it's a useful and voluntary exile from my Los Angeles home, following the slow, whimpering death of my last relationship, and an attempt to outrun my growing sense of self-hatred stemming from the mistakes I feel I made as a combat correspondent.

Schoonhoven's circumstances are similar only in the sense of needing an urgent escape from bad judgments. Following his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Schoonhoven became increasingly restless.

“I needed to drink and drink, one beer after another,” he tells me one day while we're filling tanks together at the shop, “just so I could fall asleep.” I'm thoroughly familiar with the process. Insomnia and alcohol and drug abuse are the holy trinity of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Later, after he begins to trust me more, Schoonhoven tells me over a few beers after work at a bar called Cities that back in Holland he had started drinking more heavily, using recreational drugs and getting into fights.

“It's exciting,” he says after taking a sip of his beer and looking out over the water, almost nostalgic. “You're all pumped up and hitting each other but don't really feel anything because of the drinking and other things.”

But Schoonhoven knew he couldn't continue this way for long. Since he was also newly married, he had to be concerned with more than just himself. When his wife, Carolien, a schoolteacher, was offered a job teaching in Bonaire, the couple thought that leaving Holland might be a good way to give them both a fresh start. She would teach, he would drive a boat and lead divers underwater and both of them hoped they could leave the wars behind.

I
t takes nearly two months of our working the shop together, but Schoonhoven finally decides he trusts me enough to tell me about his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. In that time we've become drawn to each other in the way of those who share an uncommon experience. It's a tentative friendship at first, between an ex-soldier and a journalist, but the bonds are forged in a number of ways: through the small talk we make while delivering air tanks to other locations in the shop's pickup truck, through fixing and repairing things together, but perhaps more so when he shares the bounty of his natural abilities, giving me tips for finding the boat underwater before I lead my first dive and also teaching me how to drive and dock the boat without pulling up short or smashing into the pilings. We've also discovered that we share a mutual interest in the kind of diving that will eventually cause both of us a lot of grief—going deep.

We share a need for danger, like so many in the aftermath of combat, as psychiatrist Jonathan Shay noted in
Odysseus in America
: “Prolonged combat leaves some veterans with the need to live on the edge, to pose the same question to the cosmos over and over again: yes or no?”

S
chool was never an easy fit for Schoonhoven. Intelligent but dyslexic, he had a hard time with the standard book-work curriculum. His parents divorced when he was three, creating for him some lingering anxiety and restlessness. At times, he could be a troublemaker at school, getting caught smoking and fighting one too many times and finally kicked out at the age of sixteen. It was, his mother figured, a good time for him to live with his father. Perhaps time with an adult male role model might help him straighten out. The move seemed to work. Schoonhoven went to culinary school and became a chef. Food wasn't about reading and studying. It was real and in front of him, something he could manipulate with his hands, at which he had always been skilled. After graduating, he got a job at a top restaurant in the city of Eindhoven, where he worked for three years. He did well and made money, but as often happened with him, he became bored and restless again. Then he decided there was one job that might be able to keep his interest: becoming a soldier in the Royal Netherlands Army.

He joined in January of 2003 on the buildup to the American-led invasion of Iraq, which would begin later that spring. It was a war the Dutch government would support with words and troops. After completing a fitness test with high scores, he was given a choice of units. He chose the most frequently deployed in the Dutch army, Air Mobile, with their distinctive red berets. He was trained to fire Dragon antitank missiles and by March 2004 was deployed with his unit near the village of al-Khidr in southern Iraq. It was a relatively short deployment of only four and a half months. But while guarding a bridge one day, two men on a scooter drove by and lobbed a couple of hand grenades at the Dutch soldiers. The explosion killed a Dutch sergeant. He was an experienced soldier who Schoonhoven says helped him with his training and whom he often looked up to as a role model.

“I was fucking angry after the attack,” Schoonhoven tells me over beers at Shoreside Restaurant in Bonaire's capital of Kralendijk. “All we did later was sit on the base after.” With no retaliation for the grenade attack, Schoonhoven says he became more and more frustrated. But the unit never got their chance to hit back before being rotated home to the Netherlands.

Despite his anger at what had happened in Iraq, Schoonhoven was discovering something else about himself in the army—he fit in.

“For one of the first times in my life, I felt like I belonged,” says Schoonhoven. “Dyslexia, all the other stuff, didn't matter anymore. I was in charge.”

But that didn't mean he stopped getting in trouble. Back in Holland, Schoonhoven's anger simmered. In the barracks he would listen to Nirvana with his fellow soldiers, go out drinking and get into fights. After getting arrested during one of the fights, Schoonhoven knew he had to straighten up or risk losing the only place that really felt like home to him, the army. After being back from Iraq for almost two years, he decided to focus on soldiering. He tested so well on the shooting range that they offered him a chance at long-distance shooter school. He jumped at it. During the training he learned camouflage, stalking and the Zen of breathing, but most of all he learned patience, something that didn't come easy for the then twenty-three-year-old. This carried over to the other parts of his life as well, allowing him to deepen his relationship with Carolien, the girlfriend who would shortly become his wife.

In July 2006, with his newly acquired sniper training, Schoonhoven and his 11th Air Mobile Brigade headed to war again, but this time to Afghanistan.

“When I left this time, I knew something was going to happen,” Schoonhoven says. “I told Carolien, ‘This time we're going to fight.' ”

The Dutch deployment to Afghanistan in 2006 was concentrated in Uruzgan Province, north of the restive cities of Helmand and Kandahar, former Taliban strongholds and still rife with sympathizers.

The fifteen hundred Netherlands troops were the seventh-largest contingent of the NATO-led multinational force in Afghanistan and had a mission statement that put as great an emphasis on building community as providing security. But Schoonhoven hoped this deployment would turn out different than in Iraq; there he had felt powerless, almost locked down on base, after the killing of their sergeant. While he didn't go to Afghanistan looking for revenge, he was prepared to fight. It wouldn't be long before he got his chance.

At Café Buenos Aires in Kralendijk, Schoonhoven grabs my notebook and begins drawing out what happened. He reiterates that he's better with his hands than with words, but that's been obvious, as he's never stopped talking with them since I first met him. He's entertained people with sleight-of-hand magic tricks and proved himself a handyman, skilled boat captain and dive master, and in the past a successful chef and sniper. He believes in the spatial rather than the verbal to get his points across. He does it again now, as he draws on the paper in front of me.

He takes my pen and, as if he were outlining the beginning of my last name, makes a giant “S” on the pad. “This is the road,” he says, setting up the story. Schoonhoven says his unit got a call in the early evening that the Afghan National Army (ANA) base nearby was under attack by the Taliban and in danger of being overrun. By the time the Dutch Air Mobile unit could get fully geared up and on the road, the Taliban had made a tactical retreat to nearby mountains. The ANA unit was still at their roadside post, a checkpoint called Chutu, also the access way to Forward Operating Base Hadrian, where the Dutch contingent was stationed. Schoonhoven tells the story in his own words and hands.

“The Taliban had retreated into the mountains, but we knew they were still watching us because we could hear them on their radio frequencies. We stayed there for one night and one day. After that our command told us we were not an occupying force but a protective force and told us to retreat to Camp Hadrian. But when we arrived back at the base we heard that the Chutu crossing was overrun by Taliban. That meant that the Taliban could infiltrate our area. The next day, we had the assignment to recon [conduct reconnaissance on] the road to Cemetery Hill. I was assigned with the infantry, travelling in a Mercedes-Benz soft-top truck. I was sitting in the back. We were the first vehicle. After us came two Patrias [Finnish-built armored personnel vehicles]. The rest of the platoon took another road to check out. While we were traveling we approached an S-turn.” Schoonhoven points to the paper with the pen. “At the end of the S-turn we could see three scooters coming our way. They suddenly fell to the ground. We thought it was an accident but the drivers and passengers immediately ran into the gully and opened fire. It all happened in a split second and was very confusing. The person in front of me, Sergeant Beekman, got hit. He dropped into the driver's lap and the gunner started firing his machine gun but there was a problem with the gun. At that point I tried to start firing, but bullets were flying everywhere and I could hear them buzzing near my head, only missing me by an inch. Meanwhile, the trouble with the machine gun was that a Taliban bullet had hit the lid and it got jammed. The gunner fixed the problem and started firing again. We wanted to get out of there because the distance between us and the enemy was only twenty meters. The problem was that the two Patria vehicles were behind us in the S-turn”—Schoonhoven draws their position on my pad—“so they could not offer any support and couldn't turn properly because the road was too small. So we were stuck between the Taliban and our colleagues in the Patrias.” He emphasizes the point by drawing their position on the pad, boxed in between the two. “Eventually the Patria drivers managed to slowly drive back through the S-turn in reverse, so we could retreat. While we were retreating I looked to the right and there were a couple of kids watching the fight, sitting on a wall, hands covering their ears while bullets were flying by and hitting the wall they were sitting on. Our driver tried to reverse, but we got stuck in a ditch. Sergeant Beekman, who was wounded, got out of the truck to guide us out of the ditch and I decided to jump out to stand between my colleagues and the enemy to support them. One of the Taliban was walking towards a wall with a small opening in it. He tried to aim at us through the opening and at that point I got a clear shot at his head and killed him. Just before I pulled the trigger there was a short moment when our eyes met. There were only ten meters between me and him so I could see the bullet entering his skull. Meanwhile the driver had managed to turn our truck in the right direction but not all the Patrias were reversed properly. While they were turning I walked behind the vehicles to protect them. Then I got into the car and we drove to a bridge, where we met the rest of the platoon and lighted up some cigarettes. Our medic looked at the sergeant's wounds and saw that fortunately his armored vest had saved him. We got into a defensive line and waited awhile for the enemy to retaliate, but they didn't show and we returned to base safely.”