The Evil Hours (2 page)

The war had hurt me. I wanted the country to feel some of that hurt. Part of me needed to see that, to remind me that the war had been real, not just something I saw when I closed my eyes. I needed to know that the experience had meaning and that the death I had seen really mattered. What I saw instead was people commuting to work and going to the mall, the gym, and the health food store, making their bodies perfect, exactly as they had before. The yellow ribbons I saw seemed almost like a taunt, a challenge to all the horror I'd witnessed.

I learned very quickly that talking about the war wasn't just pointless but actually damaging in its own right. I could barely begin to describe what I had seen before I would be interrupted by a racist comment about Arabs or by someone stopping me to explain how the war had just been about oil all along and that the important thing, really, was to develop alternative energies so that we could divest from the Middle East. After a while, I realized that the problem wasn't just that they didn't understand the war but that they didn't want to understand it. What I had to say was not only inconvenient to their peace of mind but a tangible threat to it. Americans could no more cope with the reality of the war than they could with the reality of particle physics. Not only was it beyond their ken, but the fact that it might be beyond their ken was beyond their ken. Trying to cut through the various layers of incomprehension, I was confronted by further obscenities. If, by some chance, I could get someone to listen to me about what I had seen in Iraq, they would end up looking at me like I had a speech impediment. They'd meet my eyes, and I'd get The Look, a sort of mirror image of the famous Thousand Yard Stare from World War II, a look that told me more about American innocence than I ever wanted to know. More than once I was asked if I'd killed anyone over there. At times, my sense of alienation was so strong I seemed almost radiant with it, as if a stranger could look at me and tell that something was wrong.

Sometimes I would start to shake when I thought about the war—how wrong it was, how many childish mistakes had been made, how no one in power was held accountable, and how tens of thousands had died in the service of some Beltway egos—or the people who had died in the service of nothing at all, owing to the simplest accidents of space and time. One unit I was with north of Fallujah had lost a guy who was killed while using a Port-a-John in the middle of the night. He'd gone out to take a shit and, out of nowhere, a single mortar round came in and ended him. It was the only incoming they'd taken in days. How do you go about telling a guy who is alive only because he didn't use the shitter at the wrong time that he ought to go back home, go to school, get married and mortgaged, have kids, and commit to the world when he knows for a fact that nothing in this world is real except chance? That his continued existence, his dreams, his plans, his hopes for the future are the product of invisible, ever-changing odds, odds that could shift and turn on him at any moment? What place did human reason have in this world really, after you'd seen what war could do to it? The lesson taught by the war was clear: to be human is to be small, powerless, and subject to the forces of randomness.

Every veteran knows this.

Knowing this is what makes it hard to step onto airplanes. Knowing this is what makes it hard to stand in large crowds. Knowing this is what makes it hard to drive a car.

“The war itself was a mystery. Nobody knew what it was about, or why they were there, or who started it, or who was winning, or how it might end. Secrets were everywhere—booby traps in the hedgerows, bouncing betties under the red clay soil. And the people. The silent papa-sans, the hollow-eyed children and jabbering old women. What did these people want? What did they feel?”; so wrote Tim O'Brien in his novel
In the Lake of the Woods
, a book that traces the aftermath of the Vietnam War through the flashbacks of a traumatized veteran.

Still, at other times, I found myself in pain, missing the field, missing the Marines and the excitement, the profane beauty of their words, the mid-patrol trance I'd slip into, the bump and grind of enemy contact, the feelings I'd had in a place where every second could either save you or kill you, where even the smallest gesture took on a certain weight because you knew it might be your last. Instead, people back home just looked at me as if there was something wrong with me, a look that cost me nothing to return.

That these two worlds, war and home, could be kept isolated, one living in almost perfect ignorance of the other, was an obscenity surpassed only by the obscenity of the war itself. The war had been difficult, but there seemed to be meaning in having survived it. Coming home and feeling the dullness of people, the pride they took in their ignorance, seemed to diminish that meaning, as if it had only been a bad backpacking trip overseas that I'd come back from. How could this be allowed to happen? Could a war really be called a war if nobody back home gave a shit about it? In time, I resolved to hate the country I'd once served: the fat, sheltered land with its surplus of riches, its helicopter moms and real estate agents—narrow-minded, smug, and only dimly aware of any lives other than their own.

Virtually every survivor of trauma, whether or not they experience diagnosable post-traumatic stress, returns to the regular world and quickly recognizes that things are not as they were. People behave differently. There is an element of strangeness, a sense, often uncommunicated, of being marked by a kind of scarlet letter, even if one has not violated any moral code. In fact, in these situations, one's degree of innocence or complicity in events can seem almost beside the point, as if one's luck or simple fate is what is at stake. Often this change of perception is expressed in physical, spatial terms, as if the scope of what has transpired is so vast that it serves to alter one's material position in the world. One British World War I veteran described his postwar existence as one lived in “a mental internment camp.”
Alice Sebold, in her bestselling memoir
Lucky
, which describes the aftermath of her violent rape at age nineteen, looked out at the faces of her college classmates less than an hour after she had been raped and saw that she “was now on the other side of something they could not understand. I didn't understand it myself.”

This palpable sense of not belonging, of being “on the other side of something” after trauma, has in fact been widely noted.
Anthropologists who study tribal societies describe this state as one of “liminality,” which comes from the Latin word for “threshold.” Arnold van Gennep coined the term in his 1908
Rites of Passage
, a book that draws on his studies of the tribes of southwestern Africa.
The liminal state, as observed by van Gennep, was thought to be “dangerous” and “precarious” because of its social ambiguity and the conflicting, paradoxical demands it placed on both the individual and society. In tribal society, liminal states, such as adolescence, were punctuated by ceremonies designed to “accompany a passage from one situation to another or from one cosmic or social world to another.” Weddings, graduations, bar mitzvahs, and quinceañeras are all examples of van Gennepian rites of passage, which end dramatically and decisively with the person's new status made clear to the community. Yet as Victor Turner, an influential anthropologist, pointed out, the modern world has no such “rites of incorporation” to mark the transition from the underworld of trauma to the everyday world, saying, “The liminal persona, in this case the returning veteran, is not alive, not dead, but somehow both and neither.”

 

It wasn't until the summer of 2009, some two years after Saydia, that I got the first hint that I was “on the other side of something.” I was in a theater watching an action movie with my girlfriend when a black curtain fell over my head. The world disappeared for a few minutes. Looking around, I noticed that I was pacing the lobby of the theater, my head on a swivel, looking at people's hands to make sure they weren't carrying. My mind had gone dark, but my body was back in Iraq.

I managed to slip back into the theater and sit back down next to my girlfriend. I looked around to see if it had happened to anyone else, but they were all engrossed in the movie.

“What happened?” I asked Erica, who seemed as confused as I was.

“There was an explosion in the movie. You got up and ran out of the theater.”

Soon after, I began to have dreams with explosions in them. Sometimes they were about Saydia. Sometimes innocent items exploded more or less at random—an apple, a garbage can, a box of Chinese takeout. Over time, I began to see that Saydia was beginning to infiltrate the present, albeit in a slightly disguised form, as with the exploding garbage can, which I understood to be related to the loud garbage truck that jolted me awake every Thursday morning. My dreams about Saydia were frightening, but I sometimes saw them as a kind of debriefing, a way of examining different versions of the past, and as meditations on what had happened, or might have happened, in the street that afternoon in Saydia. Sometimes the gunner was decapitated by the blast. Sometimes a machinegun opened up from the neighborhood and wasted us all. Frequently, a member of my old Marine platoon was in the Humvee next to me, watching, shaking his head in disgust, or providing a sort of color commentary on the action.

The dreams usually ended the same way. Something would explode, unleashing a tidal wave of blackness that obliterated everything, and I would wake up with my heart racing. I was dead. This was what the blackness meant. The movie explosion had gone off, just as it had in Saydia, and it had given me a glimpse of my own death. But before things could go any further, my brain would shut everything down, like an overloaded electrical grid; everything would go dark, and then I would wake up. It was just as Freud had noted nearly a century before: one's own death is unimaginable.

For months after the movie, my unconscious debriefed me like this. It didn't happen every night, but it occurred often enough that sleep became an ordeal, something to be worked up to, like an athletic contest. It got so that preparing for bed was like getting ready for a night patrol. I would set my alarm, put up the blackout curtains, close and lock every door and window in the house, recheck them, and ensure that all the paths in the house were clear and all the shades were drawn. After all that, I would take my sleep medicine, usually a mix of prescription and nonprescription pills, depending on my mood, and then put my earplugs in and my blinders on and pray that my mind would behave itself for the next eight hours. Part of me got a black pleasure from it, as it made me feel that it was somehow an honor to be haunted, as if the war had touched me so deeply that it had granted me access to the darkest chambers of the mind. Part of me was ashamed of the dreams, of the realization that I was trapped inside a cliché: the veteran so obsessed with his own past that even his unconscious made love to it every night.

There were other hints that I was on the far side of something. These usually came in times of uncertainty or stress, such as when I received three ludicrously expensive parking tickets in a single week, when I got the cold sweats during a bumpy airplane ride over Cape Cod, or when I saw the fear on Erica's face whenever I got angry, which was often.

For several years after the war, Erica and I lived in a kind of postwar bliss, happily trapped in the time-capsule of our love. We had met before my final trip to Iraq, and I was immediately taken by her beauty, her wide-ranging mind, her joie de vivre, and her exquisite wit, which made her seem at times like a dame from a hard-boiled detective novel. From day one, we shared a bond that seemed immune to the normal laws of life and career. Coming home to her, my life seemed to make a certain kind of sense, as if the world had kept its promise. When she picked me up at LAX in 2007, I saw her standing behind a gate in baggage claim, blushing hotly, angry at me for the ordeal I'd put her through. Finally, she relented, greeting me with her trademark “Hey, bub!” and kissing me wildly.

Women have always played a pivotal role in the drama of homecoming from war.
In Homer's
Odyssey
, Odysseus's ten-year journey back from the Trojan War doesn't end when he sets foot in his hometown of Ithaca, but rather when he is finally reunited with his wife, Penelope. Men, left to their own devices, turn into emotional nihilists: wild, cruel, and death-obsessed. Looking back on those heady days after I returned from Iraq, I can see that the drama of my reunion with Erica was an elemental experience on par with the war itself, a struggle to reconcile the two halves of myself—the dark with the light, the hard with the soft, the very masculine stoicism that war demands with a woman's sensitivity. I'd always admired her tough exterior, but Erica's presence somehow had a softening effect on me in the months after I returned, almost as if her sarcastic demeanor allowed me to lower my guard. I couldn't relate to others after what I'd been through, but Erica had been in it with me from the very beginning. She had seen me preparing my gear for my long months in the field before I left. She had read my strained emails from Fallujah, listened to me on the phone from Baghdad as I tried to reconcile what I was seeing every day with what the media was reporting. It was as if I didn't need to tell her what I'd been through. She already understood, somehow. We had survived the war. Whatever followed would be child's play, surely.

Then, in 2010, right before the holidays, Erica disappeared. Her car was gone and there was no answer when I called her cell phone. Two weeks later, on Christmas Eve, she phoned from Las Vegas to tell me it was over. She was tired of my secrecy, she would explain later. “You go off into this other place, and it's like I can't reach you.” Oddly, this turn of events, while certainly disappointing, was not overly shocking to me, and even when it finally sank in that Erica would not be returning and that our pantomime of connubial bliss was over, I didn't cry. Tears had become something beyond my ability. In these sorts of situations, I did exactly as I had been trained: I went numb and waited for the time to pass. When I explained Erica's departure to my friends, their jaws hit the floor.
She just disappeared? Like
poof?
For two weeks? Not even a note?