The Evil Hours (21 page)

Since 2004, I have learned to trust people less. I have learned to trust America less. I worry that life is completely random, without center or cause, and that the world could blow up at any time. I drive slower, eat out less, drink more. I walk carefully over broken asphalt. I avoid crowds. I don't go to action movies. Sometimes, when someone is following me on the sidewalk, I stop and let them pass. Sometimes, maybe when I hear an old song, I find myself missing the old America, the one that existed before 9/11. Sometimes I find myself missing the nineties, me in my twenties, fresh out of the Corps and loose in the world for the first time.

Elise, my friend who was raped, said something similar. Thinking back on her wandering years, years when she'd forgotten how to trust people, when she'd chopped off all her hair so she could pretend to be someone else, she said something you hear a lot of trauma survivors say. She said, “I want those years back.”
Now, I can't say I feel exactly that way, in part because rape and war are two very different things to go through, and war is more than just terror. War is also thrilling and revelatory. War is an adventure. War is history in fast forward. But I want something equally impossible. I want a different world. A better, less venal world, one where stupid wars aren't started and then forgotten about when they lose their entertainment value, and sometimes I play a game with myself that historians like to play; it's called creating a counterfactual, a what-if realm where the Germans won World War II, Lee Harvey Oswald's shots missed JFK, or the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Gore instead of Bush.
You change just one thing and imagine the different world that would result.

And so I build a world where three Blackwater contractors don't get lazy and decide to take a shortcut through downtown Fallujah in March 2004 and get ambushed and killed and burned and strung up from the pedestrian bridge over the Euphrates west of the city. A world where their charred bodies aren't filmed, don't make the evening news back home, and don't cause the president to order the Marines into Fallujah to punish its citizens, against the advice of commanders on the scene. A world where we don't invade Iraq, a world without a 9/11, without a Gulf War, without an Islamic Revolution in Iran, without Allen Dulles in charge of the CIA in 1953, and so on.

It's fun to see how far you can take it, to see how they look, these alternate worlds. And it teaches you some things, too. It teaches you that the world depends, has always depended, on the smallest details, every single last one of them needing to happen the way they do so that the world ends up the way it does, to make us the way we are. Accidents. Statistics moving through space.

But in the end, it's still just a game, a dressed-up kind of nostalgia, and really it's a dodge, a way to not think about what's really bothering me, and sometimes I have to rely on my involuntary memories, memories I forgot I had, my dreams, my nightmares, to remind me.

Which they always do. Almost every night I'll have a dream about a thing that happened over there, a thing I'd forgotten about, something hilarious or cruel or wonderful a grunt said; the cigarette I shared with a wounded soldier from the 10th Mountain as we watched my first
shamal
come in, turning the sky blood red; the
Aladdin
songs I sang with a bunch of Marines in a seven-ton on the way to reinforce a platoon that had been wiped out near Saqliwiyah. Usually when it happens, I wake up smiling and excited because I know that I have the rest of the day, the rest of my life, to think about it, to figure out what it means. And then I thank God that I survived.

5

I. The Good War?

 

W
ITHIN THE HISTORY
of psychological trauma, the era that remains most shrouded in myth and misapprehension is World War II and its aftermath.
In the popular imagination, the war, which lasted from 1939 to 1945 and ended the lives of an estimated sixty million people, is still somehow remembered as “The Good War,” and the veterans who fought in it are generally regarded as having returned home, put their uniforms in the closet, and simply gotten on with their lives. For the United States, the war came on the heels of the Great Depression, and the soldiers who fought the Nazis and the Japanese came from a culture that had little patience for people who dwelled on their personal problems. Karl Shapiro, the poet laureate who served in the Pacific theater, described the group of young writers who'd fought, saying, “We all came out of the same army and joined the same generation of silence.”
Included in this generation of silence was J. D. Salinger, who in one of his early stories wrote that “I believe, as I've never believed in anything else before, that it's the moral duty of all men who have fought and will fight in this war to keep our mouths shut, once it's over, never again to mention it in any way.”

In America, stories of veterans who came home and kept their mouths shut are commonplace.
In
Flags of Our Fathers
, James Bradley describes how his father, who famously helped raise the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima, avoided discussing his role in the battle, instructing his children to wave off reporters and curiosity seekers with a cover story that featured him on a fishing trip to Canada. It was only after the senior Bradley died that his son, while arranging his father's effects, discovered a trove of old letters that revealed how much the war had tormented his father.

In October 1945, my maternal grandfather returned from the Pacific, where he'd served as a Seabee, and never uttered a word about the war. For most of her life, my mother knew almost nothing about her father's military service, never for instance knowing why he had a large puffy scar on his left hand, nor understanding why he never spoke of the war. This near-perfect state of ignorance reigned until 2011, when we requested his records from the military's storage facility in St. Louis. While no shocking revelations emerged from his personnel file (he spent most of the war on a tiny atoll in the middle of the Pacific; the scar on his left hand was caused by an accident with a power saw), it nevertheless highlighted the degree to which my grandfather had lived as a stranger to his family, silent and unknown. A cipher. “He came from the Midwest,” my mother explained. “People just didn't talk about their problems then. It was considered impolite.”

The refusal of the average veteran to talk about the war was one thing, but the larger, enduring problem with the trauma of World War II, historically speaking, stems from how this silence was viewed by the culture. As psychiatrist Judith Herman explains in
Trauma and Recovery
, “As long as they could function on a minimum level, they were thought to have recovered. With the end of the war, the familiar process of amnesia set in once again. There was little medical or public interest in the psychological condition of returning soldiers.”
Nearly sixty years after the Japanese surrendered, this idea that keeping your mouth shut helped you recover was still being promoted.
In the November 8, 2004, issue of
The New Yorker
, Malcolm Gladwell, in an article titled “Getting Over It,” examined the evolving attitudes toward trauma, utilizing Sloan Harris's iconic novel about a veteran turned business executive,
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
. At the beginning of the article, Gladwell posed the following question: “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit put the war behind him. Why can't we?”

In fact, the evidence indicates that many World War II veterans were unable to put the war behind them. Millions of veterans were haunted by the war for the rest of their lives, returning to a culture that celebrated them in ceremony but preferred not to trouble itself with the messy details of their service. (The U.S. government encouraged this ignorance. In 1945, when the U.S. Army learned of John Huston's plan to screen his war trauma documentary
Let There Be Light
for some friends at the Museum of Modern Art, it had the film seized and banned, claiming that it violated the privacy of the soldiers shown.)
During the war itself, the incidence of psychological breakdown in the U.S. Army was three times that of World War I. Over half a million men were permanently evacuated from the fighting for psychiatric reasons, enough to man fifty combat divisions.

At the end of the war, General Eisenhower ordered a commission to look into these “lost divisions.” The authors of the official report, titled
Combat Exhaustion
, concluded that

 

there is no such thing as “getting used to combat” . . . Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure . . . psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare . . . Most men were ineffective after 180 or even 140 days. The general consensus was that a man reached his peak of effectiveness in the first 90 days of combat, that after that his efficiency began to fall off, and that he became steadily less valuable thereafter until he was completely useless . . . The number of men on duty after 200 to 240 days of combat was small and their value to their units negligible.

 

Most of these casualties didn't improve once they got back home, either. While the mental health of the Greatest Generation was almost completely ignored for thirty years, the few inquiries that were made showed a clear pattern of what today would be labeled “chronic post-traumatic stress.” One such study, published in the
American Journal of Psychiatry
in 1951, examined two hundred World War II veterans and found that 10 percent of them still suffered from “combat neurosis.” Subsequent studies into the traumatic experiences of World War II veterans in the eighties found some of the highest PTSD rates ever recorded.
One study, which zeroed in on Pacific theater POWs, discovered that nearly forty years after the war, more than 85 percent of them suffered from PTSD. In a 1987 study, eight out of ten former Pacific POWs had a form of “psychiatric impairment,” more than one in four had PTSD, and nearly one in five were clinically depressed. As Matthew Friedman, the first executive director of the VA's National Center for PTSD, explained, “World War II occurred in a different generation and society didn't acknowledge the psychological consequences of war in the forties any more than it did in the sixties . . . People [at the time] didn't talk about what they called ‘traumatic neuroses,' or combat stress . . . Yes, there were all kinds of dollars given to the VA, ‘hire a vet,' the G.I. Bill, the ticker tape parades and all that. But when you get down to the nitty-gritty, in terms of the nation's willingness to acknowledge the devastating consequences of World War II, that's only happening retrospectively.”
The postwar years were dominated by this paradox: Americans were, on the one hand, surpassingly proud and supportive of their veterans, but on the other, they took almost no interest in their inner problems. Part of this was just human nature. People simply wanted to move on, and if some vets were struggling, then that was their own problem, as it had been before the war and during the Depression.

If anyone embodied this paradox, it was Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier to emerge from the war. Born into a large sharecropper family in Hunt County, Texas, Murphy was abandoned, along with his siblings, by his father during the Depression, forcing Murphy to hunt game to put food on the table. After he was rejected by the Marine Corps because of his age, his sister helped him falsify the enlistment papers for the army. A supremely talented soldier, he was awarded the Medal of Honor after killing fifty Germans during the Allied invasion of southern France and was later profiled in
Life
magazine.
His battlefield prowess bordered on the mythic. One time, he'd heard that a group of officers was leaving on a reconnaissance patrol beyond friendly lines. Unbeknownst to them, Murphy trailed after the group. He said, years later, “I figured those gentlemen were going to run into trouble; so I tagged along, about twenty-five yards to their rear, to watch the stampede.”
When the patrol found itself pinned down, Murphy charged the enemy position, killing five Germans and wounding another three.

Back in the States after the war, Murphy found himself without any marketable skills and bored by civilian life. “War robs you mentally and physically,” he said in 1962.
“It drains you. Things don't thrill you anymore. It's a struggle every day to find something interesting to do.” He flirted with the idea of going back to school—he wanted to study veterinary science at Texas A&M—but his restless energy seemed to prevent him from settling into an academic routine. Like so many, he was tired and glad to be home, but he missed the war terribly and didn't know how to fill his days. Complaining that he couldn't find a job that left him any self-respect, he eventually decided that the only thing he had of value in a market economy was his fame. Exploiting the connections he'd made as America's most celebrated war hero, he managed, after a long struggle, to find work as an actor in Hollywood, eventually starring in dozens of films. In 1955, he even played himself in a movie based on his war exploits,
To Hell and Back
.

Despite his fame and outward success, Murphy struggled with his memories of the war and, according to his first wife, was frequently suicidal. For the rest of his life, he suffered from insomnia and nightmares. At one point, he became addicted to the sleeping pills the VA doctors prescribed him. Ten years after he returned from the war, he began sleeping alone in his garage in order to be farther away from the noises of the house. He traced this habit back to the war: “In combat, you see, your hearing gets so acute you can interpret any noise. But now, there were all kinds of noises that I couldn't interpret.”

As Murphy later admitted in interviews, the war had never really ended for him, and for years after it, he would criticize the army for the way it treated an entire generation of veterans, taking them from the killing fields of the war and dropping them into civilian life, equipped with little more than a bus ticket home. “They took Army dogs and rehabilitated them for civilian life. But they turned soldiers into civilians immediately and let 'em sink or swim.”