Consequence (31 page)

There are two pages of exceptions.

I tell my professor I am sick. I put away verb charts, lists of participles, and lexicons and board a train for Washington to meet with lawyers and CID agents in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. I disclose everything. I provide pictures, letters, names, firsthand accounts, locations, and techniques. I talk about Randy Kutcher, Mike Henson, John Blee, and Michael Bagdasarov. I talk about Brent and Jim. I talk about Tyner and Hoagie. I talk about Dent. I talk about Ferdinand. I talk about the hard site at Abu Ghraib, and I talk about the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I talk about what I did, what I saw, what I knew, and what I heard.

I mention the Palestinian chair. I tell the story about the mayor of Fallujah and what it looked like to see him sitting in the chair. One of the CID agents is skeptical. He says maybe I just didn't understand what was going on. He was in Iraq, too. He conducted interrogations. He says he worked in austere environments. Sometimes they had to build their own furniture. He wonders whether this was the case in Fallujah. I say, “Are you suggesting it was just a poorly constructed piece of furniture?”

I show them the photograph of me in Fallujah, crouching down next to the chair. The CID agent says, “Okay, I get it.”

The lawyer from the Department of Justice asks questions about Sergeant Hoagie. He wants to know more about the time Hoagie slapped a detainee. He says, “Was it an open-handed strike? Are you sure he didn't close his fist? What did it sound like when he hit him, a thump or a slap?” He returns to these questions time and again. He's frustrated. At the end he says, “There's nothing here, we don't have anything.”

My lawyers are happy. They say the meeting went well. They say I did well. I was honest and engaging. They say I even managed to win over the angry CID agent. They say, “By the end, they were even starting to like you.”

I am not prosecuted. No one from CACI is prosecuted. Nothing we did in Iraq was illegal. We tortured people the right way, followed the right procedures, and used the approved techniques. There are no legal consequences.

I ride the train back to Princeton. I start drinking more.

12.1

In September, there is an orientation weekend for the incoming class. We attend a chapel service, a speech by the dean, and a barbecue. At the barbecue, I meet Austin Ashenbrenner. He reminds me of Ferdinand. We become friends.

Austin grew up in Oregon and attended a Presbyterian church. There are Presbyterian pastors in his family. He likes church services with organs, not overhead projectors. He attended George Fox University, a Christian school in Oregon. After college he worked in youth ministry. Austin made the right choices, listened to the right voices, followed the right path. He will be a Presbyterian pastor. I will not.

Austin and I attend a peace rally at the seminary. It has something to do with torture. One of the professors running the event has read my op-ed in the
Washington Post.
It's the first time I agree to speak publicly at the seminary about my experiences in Iraq. The audience is made up of seminary students. I'll be attending class with them in the coming days. I give my speech.

I go home and read more emails.

Mr. Fair, your words are empty and hollow. I do not accept a single one of them. But let me offer you a suggestion if you want to do the honorable thing: kill yourself. Leave a note. Name names. Until that day, I hope you never sleep another hour for the rest of your life.

When the fall semester begins, I join one of the seminary's flag football teams. The league is in need of referees. I agree to volunteer. I show up for a game, don my striped shirt, and blow the whistle. Players from both teams are furious. I am a terrible referee. One player approaches me, grabs my shirt, pulls me toward him, and then shoves me to the side. “See, see, this is what they're doing. They can't do this. It's called holding.”

In Fallujah, I am grabbing a detainee, shoving him to the side, moving him through the line of Iraqis just taken from the battlefield. Some are still bleeding. One is missing part of his face. Well-dressed ones to the right, shabby ones to the left, faceless ones to the medic. The well-dressed ones are likely men of influence. The shabby-looking ones are the pawns. But the shabby ones never seem to understand directions. They just stand there looking dumb, so I grab them and shove them and push them.

I consider the student who shoved me. My heart is racing. I feel it struggle and thump inside my chest. I breathe the right way to get it back under control and I let the student walk away.

At the apartment, I yell. I yell about the student who shoved me and how I will kill him. I yell about other things too. Eventually I turn on Karin and start yelling at her. I say something terrible. I leave to buy whiskey.

12.2

In November 2007, I sleep in Karin's hospital room at Princeton University Medical Center's maternity ward. My newborn son sleeps in a small crib at the foot of Karin's bed. He is two days old. Karin is recovering from a Caesarean section. I wake up and look at my son, and I think I've made a mistake. I think the decision to start a family is another wrong path; a symptom of my instability, another poorly planned transition, another closed door. These are terrible thoughts, but they wash over me uncontrollably. It occurs to me for the first time that I am sick in a way that has nothing to do with heart failure. I am lost, and I will never get back. I need to get out of the way.

In Karin's room in the maternity ward, with my son lying at her feet, I think it is time to kill myself. I am interfering with too many other lives, too many other paths. I've been in Karin's way for years, holding her back, preventing her from moving forward while I looked backward and tried to salvage what was already gone. I do not want to be in my son's way. I do not want to interfere with his path. It is time to die. My son is two days old when I hear my first call to suicide.

12.3

In the spring of 2008, I attend a conference entitled No2Torture at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia. The conference is attended by notable members of the anti-torture movement within the Presbyterian church. The speaker list includes Lucy Mashua, a torture survivor from Kenya. She endured female circumcision along with additional abuse for speaking out. She is there to speak for the victims of torture. I am there to speak for those who tortured them.

Everyone else at the conference is defined by a stance against interrogation and torture. Some have written books or published academic papers; some for nonprofits. They know a great deal about the Geneva Conventions, or the United Nations Convention Against Torture, or even the Army's field manual on interrogation. In fact, they know a great deal more than I do about the legal definition of torture and the country's policies on interrogating detainees.

We break into small groups. Each group has a large placard identifying its purpose. My placard reads “Victims and Perpetrators.” Lucy, the victim, sits across from me. We are surrounded by other participants who want to hear what Lucy and I have to say. We say nothing. A photographer approaches. We stand for a picture. People gather to watch. Someone says it is a vision of heaven: victim and torturer hand in hand. We are not hand in hand.

Back at Princeton, Karin and I sit in front of our apartment with our young son. Another couple walks by with their two-year-old boy. The husband is a teaching assistant in one of my classes. They stop to talk, and in the background, the two-year-old stands by the side of a busy road, drops his pants, and urinates on a large sycamore tree. The parents are embarrassed. They have just returned from a weekend camping trip where his father taught the son how to pee in the woods. I say, “He's just following orders.”

A few minutes later, the mailman comes by and hands us a batch of magazines and letters. There's a postcard from one of Karin's friends who works for the State Department in Kenya. The postcard is a photograph of him dancing with a group of Kenyans dressed in traditional clothing; his arms are thrown in the air, his legs lifted off the ground. Karin hands me the picture and laughs. She says, “There's something you're not cut out to do.”

I yell. Although I have yelled at Karin before, it's never been like this. I am wild and full of rage. I see fear in Karin's eyes, and it makes me angrier. I tell her it is her fault for making me angry. It is her fault that she is afraid. I say, “Who the fuck are you to tell me what I can't do?” We go inside, where the yelling continues. My son is crying. I put him down for a nap and return to yell at Karin.

The next day, when I'm sober, I concede that I cannot be a Presbyterian pastor. I concede that I can't fix what went wrong at Abu Ghraib. I concede that I need to start letting other people tell me what I can and can't do. Karin says, “Let's just go home.”

12.4

Near the end of the spring semester in 2008, as Karin and I are making arrangements to move back to Bethlehem, the dean sends me an email. An alumnus of the seminary has read my articles and heard an interview I did with a local NPR station. Apparently I said something worrisome about anger and alcohol. The dean copies two of her secretaries on the message. I don't know the secretaries. In the email, the dean says the alum is concerned about my safety as well as the safety of other students at the school. The alum wanted to make sure everyone was safe, so he asked the dean to contact the office of student counseling to be sure I was getting the help I needed. She did. The dean says that normally things wouldn't work this way, but “your case is unique.”

The dean has no right to ask whether I'm in counseling. It's an incredible breach of trust. She has even less right to reveal my counseling status to other employees of the seminary. It's unprofessional. It would be an embarrassing oversight at any place of employment. At a seminary, it's inexcusable.

I'm furious. But I'm angry all the time now, so I'm not sure whether my anger is related to the email or just my usual condition. I know Karin shies away from confrontation, but I also know she is capable of nothing but honesty. She may hold back and say nothing in order to avoid confrontation, but she'll never make something up. So I show her the email from the dean and ask her what she thinks. To my surprise, she is furious. She is angry for me, and she is on my side. I call my counselor. I leave a message. I say, “I have some concerns. And Karin does, too.”

The seminary agrees to set me up with a private practice in Princeton. They cover the costs. The practice conducts an intake interview. The head counselor calls the next day. She offers to see me personally.

We leave Princeton in June and return to Bethlehem. The dean's email serves as a convenient excuse when people ask why I left seminary, but in truth it had nothing to do with the decision. I'm not sure what there is for us in Bethlehem, or what will come next, but at least Karin will be near family and friends. I don't know how to stop drinking and I don't know how to stop thinking of my son as just another closed door. I don't know how to move forward. But I know that Karin stood behind me at seminary when the people who should have been caring for me abandoned that responsibility. As everything else begins to collapse, Karin steps forward to protect me.

 

13

In 2010, Karin and I drive to the south side of Bethlehem to visit a friend. We drive past a portion of the old steel mill that is decorated with Chinese writing. Hollywood used the buildings while filming
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
in 2008. The filmmakers needed an appropriate setting to re-create a deteriorating Chinese industrial site. Army Blackhawk and Apache helicopters flew over the Lehigh River. Simulated explosions lit up the old blast furnaces. Actors dressed like soldiers ran down the streets. For a few nights, Bethlehem sounded like Iraq.

We pass by the old ore crane that still dominates the landscape near the river. My four-year-old son thinks the crane looks like an old railroad bridge. He likes the big red neon sign on the crane that says “Sands.” The casino attracts Chinese immigrants from New York City who ride the bus to Bethlehem. The bus companies offer complimentary tokens for the casino, but the Chinese immigrants don't use the tokens. They spend the night in the bus terminal, sleeping in the shadows of the old blast furnaces, then ride the buses back to their neighborhoods and sell the tokens. None of them spend money in Bethlehem.

13.1

At First Presbyterian Church, our son sits between us. He is five now. We do not send him to the nursery or Sunday school. I don't know what they'll teach him there, and I want him to learn how to worship in the sanctuary. I want him to know how to sit still for an hour, sing the old hymns, experience the liturgy, and learn the Lord's Prayer. I want him to be comfortable in the quiet. I want him to be Presbyterian.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is considering changing its rules to allow for the ordination of gay pastors. This makes me proud, but a number of Presbyterian congregations are unhappy with the change. The First Presbyterian congregation in Bethlehem is one of them. They're considering the first steps associated with leaving the denomination.

I attend a town hall meeting at the church with my father. Like me, he is concerned that the church will leave the denomination. The voices that oppose gay pastors sound angry and unwelcoming. It doesn't feel like the church he has known for more than forty years. Grandmother is still alive. She is concerned as well. We agree that this is not the church of our ancestors.

Sometime later the church joins an organization called the Fellowship Community. It will not allow gay pastors. Karin and I send letters to the church. We rescind our membership. For the first time in twenty-six years, I am no longer a member of a Presbyterian congregation.

13.2

In the summer of 2010, I ride the bus to the Port Authority in NYC and attend my first class of New York University's writing workshop for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. I meet Matthew Mellina. He reminds me of Ferdinand. He is large and friendly. He is young, in his twenties, but he looks much older. Our sons are the same age. He and the mother are separated. We both did things in Iraq. We both write. We become friends.