The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (27 page)

The next morning at breakfast, another man in the unit whom Ziv recognized as a fellow skeptic said to him, “Do you remember last night when we were all competing?” They couldn’t believe themselves. What was scary to Ziv was how little it took to buy into the chauvinism. “I’m not going to put down anyone who crosses moral lines,” he said years later. “I understand how you can do it,” he added.

One advantage of being a paratrooper was that it insulated you from the intimate realities of occupation. “I didn’t put people under curfew; I didn’t abuse women at roadblocks; I didn’t do any of that,” Ziv said. Occupation duty, he imagines, “would have punctured the bubble much earlier.” Instead, his unit took missions like dashing over the Jordan River late at night to raid a base. They zipped in and out of the lives they affected: “It’s like getting bin Laden—the poor man version.”

On later missions, he came closer to those lives. Assigned to a unit enforcing a curfew in Gaza, made to face the human reality of the conflict, he “freaked out” and recoiled. He couldn’t get himself to do it. He volunteered instead to wash pots and scrub floors in the unit’s kitchen. He got out of the army in 1971, traveled to Europe for several weeks with his girlfriend, returned home, and enrolled in university.

On Yom Kippur in 1973, the holiest day in Judaism, Ziv was hanging out with some of his theater buddies. They had put on a play together earlier that year, an avant-garde work starring Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, exploring their differing perspectives on the 1947 UN resolution proposing the partition of the region. The group had stayed in touch and reunited every so often. At this particular reunion, they found themselves desperately hungry. They decided to drive toward Ramallah in the West Bank, Ziv said, because it was Yom Kippur, “which is the most horrible day in Israel because everything’s closed.”

As they drove, the radio brought the news that Israel had been invaded by its Arab neighbors and was at war. The Jews and Arabs in the same car were now on different sides of the line. Everybody knew they had to return to their corners: the Palestinians in the group back to their families, the Israelis to theirs. The troupe exchanged tearful good-byes. Ziv phoned his parents to ask if they had heard. They told him that a man had come to the house with an order summoning Ziv back into service.

Ziv took a bus to Tel Aviv. “All through the bus, I’m saying, ‘I should defect. I really should defect,’ ” he said. For the rest of the ride, he played the scenarios in his mind. He’ll go to the border and escape; he’ll fly away quietly. But what would happen to his parents? What would people think of the family? “Everybody will look at me, the worst of the scum,” he said. “The country’s invaded, and I am defecting. Can you imagine a worse crime sociologically?” Once again, he yielded.

“I mobilized,” he said. “And that I always will remember, and that was haunting to me—because there was such a discrepancy between what I should do and what as a person I can do. And how weak I became, or how meek I was forced to become, because of human reality.” He counts it the worst day of his life.

When the conflict subsided, Ziv applied for permission to leave Israel. He fibbed, saying he needed only a short break to get over war
trauma. “I knew it was a total lie, that I would never come back, even if it was violating the law,” he said. The documents signed, he bought a plane ticket to America and flew there in April 1974, to enroll as a student at New York University. There his interests would evolve from theater to documentary filmmaking. In project after project, he would probe the question of why some people, under some conditions, cross moral lines.

In 1982, he returned to Israel for a short visit. War had broken out again that June, when Israeli forces had invaded Lebanon. Ziv received an assignment from CNN to go there with a camera. He went into Lebanon twice. By the second trip, Beirut had been fully besieged, and Israel would soon be held responsible for the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Ziv returned to his father in Tel Aviv and told him something, long in coming, that closed the circle of his relationship with Israel: “I said to him, ‘Father, this is Warsaw.’ And I said, ‘Don’t give me bullshit. This is Warsaw. I mean, ghettoized, exiled people who are terrorized. I don’t see how you can make a distinction, an intellectual distinction.’ And I don’t think he ever argued. My mother erupted, but he didn’t argue. But he gave me this look which was very bewildered.”

Ilan Ziv never lived in Israel again.

RETURNING TO NEW YORK
after his first interview with Stroman, Ziv thought to himself, “I’m a friend of a murderer now; God help me.” He wasn’t a friend friend, but Ziv had made a commitment. He continued his research and returned a few months later for a second conversation. Arriving at Polunsky, he underwent its particular rituals once again. Your license-plate number and name are radioed to the staff inside to establish your identity. You are searched. You can take inside only your car keys and $20 in quarters. With that, you can buy snacks for your chosen prisoner—a task with its own protocols. You put the money into the vending machine, and the Visitation warden gathers the items, places them in a brown paper bag,
and gives them to another warden, who gives it to the prisoner, who by now has been brought from his cell by armed guards and made to sit opposite you on the other side of the glass. Your four-hour slot begins.

This second meeting pushed Ziv further away from objective filmmaking and into a peculiar friendship. It led to a correspondence by letter, with Stroman writing often and at length in his loopy handwriting, and Ziv regularly apologizing for being too busy to respond substantively. When Ziv discovered an online service that allowed him to e-mail Stroman and have those messages turned into letters, a brisker back-and-forth ensued.

They talked, in person and in writing, about Stroman’s past and Ziv’s, about the nature of hatred, about what makes men the way they are. The more they talked, the more Stroman reminded Ziv of something aching and unutterable within himself. “I have the victim and the victimizer in me a little bit,” Ziv said. His life story began with his people being betrayed and murdered; then, in a blink of history, enough had changed to turn Ziv into the killer. “I understood the victimizer perspective,” he said, “and I understood how you could become the victim.” This duality attracted him to another, differently divided soul.

In his subject’s life Ziv saw a mirror image of the American dream that Stroman’s victims had been pursuing. There was some truth in that idea. For those whom the economic dream had deserted, the consolation could be to belong to some walled-off culture or group—bikers, rednecks, Peckerwood Warriors, loud and proud Texans, True Americans—that not everyone could. If you were a native-born white male in postmillennial America, it was possible that you felt the country stagnating more acutely than most. Because however grim it was out there, however scarce the work, however hard it was to get hours, however high one’s debts stacked, if you were a woman or black or gay or an immigrant from some punished republic, this time was very likely a better time for you than your parents’ time.
Your personal liberty had grown enough to distract you from the nation’s broader situation. Your individual graph swung up and to the right, even as America’s plateaued.

Somewhere down the line, only because the gods have a sense of humor, a leftist peacenik from Israel developed empathy for a right-wing, swastika-tattooed white chauvinist from Texas.

Ziv was taken with Stroman’s boyhood stories of abuse by his stepfather, Wallace. “He didn’t like kids too much,” Stroman said in one of their conversations. “I remember the day that he hit my mother, and I jumped up and I told him that was it, you’re not gonna do this no more.” Stroman confirmed his sister’s memory of being sexually abused, including once overhearing Wallace say to her, “You know you liked it, bitch.” Diverting attention from his own racism, he complained of having racists for parents: “I married my wife—she’s Spanish—and they disowned me because of a Spanish woman.”

Ziv wanted to know when Stroman began to drift in the direction that would eventually lead to the Row. Others had their favored theories—it was Shawna’s departure; or there had always been something wrong with him; or it was meth; or it was finding a girl of his in bed with his buddy. But Stroman had his own preferred moment. He attributed it to when he found out about his father.

He was still a boy, on the cusp of adolescence, hanging out at his grandfather’s one day, and one of Grandpa’s friends, a guy named Eddie Stroman, kept calling him “son.” As Stroman told Ziv, “I said, ‘I’m not your son!’ And my grandfather said, ‘You know what? Let me tell you a secret. You can’t tell nobody.’ He said, ‘That’s your dad.’ ”

“So my whole life I’m letting this man, Wallace Baker, abuse me,” Stroman said. “Thinking he’s my father. Kick me, thump me in the head, do all this stuff. And then I
find out that this man’s my father.” He explained how the revelation shattered him: “The people I’ve trusted my whole life turned out to be a pack of liars. You know, you grow up trusting your mother, your grandmother, and your grandfather, and you believe everything they say, and then when you find out that your whole existence has been a lie, it’s shocking, very shocking.”

From that moment, he said, “I automatically rebelled.” It was not long thereafter that Stroman had spied that silver pickup truck, with keys lying invitingly in the rear bed, and taken it for a spin. After that incident, Stroman said, “it’s my mother and stepfather who put me in a boys’ home, thinking it would straighten me up. And from then on shit just went downhill.”

Ziv asked about his time in the custody of the Texas Youth Commission.

“Sheesh,” Stroman began, for once short of words. “At age twelve and thirteen years old, it’s a—you grow up quickly. Especially here in Texas. Texas is notorious for their penal system, and it’s just—you know.” He cleared his throat. “I witnessed things that I shouldn’t have seen at an early age.” He declined to go further down that hole.

In one of their conversations, Ziv asked Stroman about his love of guns. Where did the obsession begin?

“I’m an American,” he said, grinning wide. “American dream, you know.” Asked to elaborate, he added: “You know, right to bear arms—it’s in our constitution, you know.”

Ziv asked about Stroman’s history of nightmares, which others had spoken of in interviews.

“Oh, I’ve had nightmares since I was a kid,” Stroman said.

“You never went to counseling?” Ziv asked.

“No, sir.”

Their conversations meandered far and wide, and Stroman told Ziv not just about his demons but also about his taste in music and tattoos and all things Confederate. Somehow this led an immigrant to understand Stroman’s intolerance as a worn-down native’s desire to claim a sphere of his own. “You might find it abhorrent, but that’s culture,” Ziv said later. “It’s part of somebody’s pathology to be different—to be a rebel.” Ziv was struck by the absence of community in Stroman’s milieu: people unable to lean on those closest to them;
people whose lives had become too chaotic to raise good children; people attached to few of the binding agents—family, company, union, church—of an earlier time. Ziv compared Stroman’s world to the wreckage of the car-building communities he had surveyed when shooting a film in Flint, Michigan. There almost all the good jobs had gone, but he sensed some enduring mutuality. “Where Mark comes from,” he said, “there was nothing.”

It was not that Ziv excused Stroman: “I said, ‘Mark, if there was no death penalty, I would vote for you to be life without parole until your last day on earth. Because,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, but you’ve got to pay. I’ve seen what you’ve done, and you’ve got to pay.’ ”

From time to time, Ziv returned to the subject of that frenzied month. “You accept that what you’ve done is wrong?” Ziv asked.

“Yes. Yeah, I know it is. I mean, yeah, taking a human life is wrong. But at that time, man, I was doing the right thing in my mind. I really was.”

Ziv asked what Stroman would say if addressing not a filmmaker right now but one of the women he had made a widow.

“I’m sorry for causing her grief,” Stroman said. “That’s just what bothers me, because I know I have caused these people pain and misery. This whole September 11 thing has just devastated everybody’s lives, and then here I am—I step in and become an American terrorist and start wanting to shoot everybody of the Middle Eastern descent. I had no idea this guy was from India, you know. That was the biggest mistake of my life, you know—for the pain that I’ve caused their children. That’s what bothers me; it bothers me at night. Because I know that what I’ve caused my family is doubled on theirs.”

But then Stroman quickly turned around to argue that he should not be killed, despite all this: “The State of Texas is saying, ‘It’s not right to kill.’ So to punish me, to show me it’s not right to kill, they’re going to do the same thing I did—a revenge killing. Makes a lot of sense to me. You know, those terrorists who flew that plane
in there—that was a revenge-type vendetta. I did the same thing. I started killing people from the Middle East. Oh! The State of Texas says you can’t do that; killing’s wrong; we’re gonna strap you down; we’re gonna kill you. The cycle never ends. The men that attacked the Trade Center in the ’90s? Enemy combatants to this country.” He still thought of himself as their patriotic inverse: “I’m an allied combatant.” This thought seemed to lead to an idea: “I’m a combatant to this country, but they want to execute me. You’ve got young men dying over there every day in war. I’m sitting here perfectly healthy. I want to go over there and give my life, but they want to strap me down, pump some poisons in me, to show me and the public it’s wrong to kill.”

During one of their conversations, toward the end, Ziv asked Stroman if he’d like to use the video camera to record messages to his children. Ziv promised to edit the tapes and send them to the proper addresses.

Mark choked on his own feelings for a moment. He told Robert, Amber, Erica, and Cassandra that he loved them. That he was sorry for the pain he’d put in their lives, for quitting on them when they most needed him. He was crying. His voice was too broken with sobs to make out the words. Ziv offered him another take.