The Evil Hours (3 page)

It was a rotten deal, no doubt. Yet something in me knew that Erica had been capable of this sort of thing all along. That she would surface with a phone call from Vegas seemed somehow in character for her. I had always admired that hint of the femme fatale in her, so what right did I have to be surprised? I knew in some objective way that I had seen a lot of awful things happen to a lot of people, so when chance turned on me in the form of a capricious woman, it wasn't entirely unexpected. This world was designed from the ground up to hurt us, to break us, all of us, into the tiniest little pieces. What made me think I was so special? Who was I to think that I should be spared? That was like going out into the rain and expecting to not get wet.

There had been other reasons, other complications, to be sure. I was a working writer, a career choice that often came with an unspoken vow of poverty, which put a lot of pressure on our relationship. The writing, whatever else it did, took me to the same place that a lot of veterans ended up: the dark cave of my head, where the only sound was the echo of my own voice. It takes a long time, too long, to learn that the brain's job is to hide the truth of trauma from you and that no amount of thinking, however penetrating and well informed, is going to help you locate it. Nobody ever said that nightmares tell the truth, or even a portion of the truth, though their allure is that we think they do.

I can see now that Erica was simply unprepared for what was coming, the sheer weight of all my unprocessed dread. Not that I was prepared. Who could be? I'd been surrounded by death for so long that I'd forgotten how to live. Living, I was learning, was harder than just surviving. It reminded me of something I'd heard a Vietnam vet say: just because your body was safe didn't mean that your mind was. I had been changed and expanded by the war, but it was an expansion that seemed to have put me out of balance with the world, with Erica. I hated her for leaving, but what could I do?

 

Relationships, when they end, are not unlike car crashes. Hidden energies only hinted at in regular motion are violently released, demolishing the carefully constructed bodies we depend on every day. With Erica gone, everything became more difficult. I felt for the first time that I was alone in dealing with all the pain and uncertainty in my life. My nightmares and general disaffection with the world seemed to double. Occasionally, at sunset, I would hear the Muslim call to prayer, even though I lived dozens of miles from any mosque. As a journalist in Iraq, my greatest fear had always been that I would be kidnapped and tortured. In Erica's absence, this healthy awareness of my surroundings blossomed into a consuming paranoia that I was being followed whenever I left my apartment.

The morbidity of my imagination was astonishing: disaster and loss were my constant companions. The war had taught me some things about physics, and my mind transformed this knowledge into a series of visions: cars exploding on peaceful residential streets, IEDs welded to innocent light poles, helicopters losing power and crashing into suburban canyons. Sometimes it was willful, and, wondering what residues of the war remained, I would create my own daydreams of destruction. Surveying a bustling mall scene, I would call IEDs into existence, watching as a fireball erupted into the air, eviscerating the shoppers. Wherever I went, there seemed to be legions of amputees, reminders of wounded Marines I'd seen, limbs I'd almost lost. For reasons beyond my ken, when I looked at perfectly normal people, my mind would begin to subtract limbs from them. An arm resting on a hip became a mangled memento of an IED in Ramadi, of the machinegunner I'd seen lose a hand near Karma. Everything became a reminder of death's omnipotence. It was as if my mind was insisting that the war be brought home and that true peace was an obscenity, an affront to life's stark reality. And, always, there were the awful mornings when, suddenly awake, I would wonder where Erica was and why there always seemed to be a helicopter hovering over my apartment.

There was a time when I believed that there was only a certain amount of suffering that a person should expect in life. Essential to this belief was the idea that a person returning from war was basically owed a measure of easy happiness from the world, a peace dividend if you will. As a former Marine who had been in and out of a war zone for years, I felt entitled to my own peace dividend. In the courtroom of my mind, I decided I had suffered enough. The end of my relationship with Erica shattered this illusion, and in the winter of 2010, after finding myself out of work and adrift for a number of months, I began searching for a new way to understand what I was going through, an explanation for why I seemed to have lost control of my memories, why I felt stuck in time, why I couldn't sleep, why I was angry all the time.

 

Looking back on this post-Iraq, post-Erica period of my life, I'm reminded of Hemingway's early short story “Soldier's Home,” in which a World War I veteran, identified only as “Krebs,” ponders his predicament on the front porch of his father's house.
Over the course of the story, Krebs's obsession with the simpler life turns from a vague expectation into something like a mantra. “He did not want any consequences. He did not want any consequences ever again. He wanted to live along without consequences. Besides he did not really need a girl. The army had taught him that.” I, too, wanted a simpler, easier life like Krebs, a man whose odd remove from the daily course of life was something I recognized in myself. Watching the world go by from the porch, he thinks, “He liked the girls that were walking along the other side of the street. He liked the look of them much better than the French or the German girls. But the world they were in was not the world that he was in.”

Unexpectedly alone, unsure of the world I was in, I began, tentatively, even skeptically, to explore the idea of post-traumatic stress, first as a historical curiosity and then on more personal terms. Had I really been traumatized? I had paid almost nothing as these things went. Sure, I had nightmares and felt haunted by the past, but who didn't? PTSD? Wasn't that something homeless Vietnam vets had? I'd spent some time in Dora and Fallujah, been blown up and shot at a number of times, but I knew plenty of people who had seen far worse things than I had. However, as I would learn, one of the deceptive things about trauma is that it is usually pretty easy to find someone who has been through something even more awful than what you've been through and thus dismiss your own pain, needlessly prolonging the process. It's easy to find people to place at the top of the pyramid of loss—Holocaust survivors, Bosnian refugees, African child soldiers—but what about all that space below them? Who goes there? Who decides? It reminded me of something a veteran of the battle of Khafji once said to me, a guy who'd lost eleven of his buddies to friendly fire. “It was bad, but it wasn't like Stalingrad or anything.”

As a Marine lieutenant, I had always been told in times of uncertainty to go to the library.
Read. Get smart. Don't reinvent the wheel. Look at the history. It's likely that someone before you has faced the same challenges you face now
. So I went to the largest library within a day's drive of my house, in this case at the University of California, San Diego, and began methodically working my way through the stacks. What I found was surprising. PTSD may well be the Esperanto of psychiatry, but its research literature is remarkably chaotic.
Taken at a distance, the world of trauma studies resembled an arcade at the state fair. Along one side was a series of stalls populated by psychiatrists, psychologists, and neuroscientists, along the other were poets, memoirists, historians, and anthropologists. The barkers within each stall might call out to you, singing the virtues of their worldview, but there seemed to be little overlap between these various groups, let alone coherence. The result was a wash of statistics and anecdotes that offered no logical point of entry for the common observer.

As I would learn, PTSD, as it is understood today, is a very heterogeneous disease, essentially a junk drawer of disconnected symptoms, which include a numbing of the emotions, hypervigilance (always being “amped up”), social isolation, and a variety of intrusive manifestations, such as nightmares and hallucinations. The field of trauma studies embodies this fragmentation, with each subspecies of researcher rarely poking their head out of their own little stall (to continue the state fair metaphor). This sort of “silo-ing” of expertise is common throughout academia, but with the problem of trauma it is unusually counterproductive, because as Jonathan Shay, a pioneering trauma theorist, likes to point out, “trauma impacts the whole critter,” by which he means it affects every aspect of a person's life.

In the months that followed, I would enter therapy at the VA, take part in three research studies, visit three historical archives, and interview scores of researchers from across the country, looking for an answer to one question: What is PTSD? The more I looked, the more I found that my initial impression held true. Mental health is an unusually demanding and at times confounding line of work, but I was astonished to learn that few clinicians were familiar with the literature of the Vietnam War from which PTSD emerged, nor did they possess an even rudimentary understanding of the global War on Terror. One leading VA researcher I spoke to didn't seem to know where Fallujah was, nor, as I learned, had she ever read any of the work of Tim O'Brien.
Similarly, many of the leading historians on the subject remained willfully ignorant, and in some cases openly dismissive, of the scientific research relating to post-traumatic stress. One British author of an influential history of military psychiatry went so far as to brush off the neuroscience behind modern trauma studies as “completely dubious.”

This lack of synthesis also struck me as odd because, apart from my own personal difficulties, I began to see that much as shell shock (a sort of precursor to PTSD) dominated the post–World War I imagination in Europe and Great Britain, so the phenomenon of PTSD dominates our culture today. As a cultural meme, PTSD is everywhere now, an inescapable part of our historical moment. As an expression of deeper anxieties, it defines our era in a way not unlike female hysteria defined late nineteenth-century Europe, a reality that was not lost on Freud's contemporaries. As Otto Fenichel, one of Freud's protégés, put it, “Neuroses do not occur out of biological necessity, like aging . . . Neuroses are social diseases . . . corresponding to a given and historically developed social milieu. They cannot be changed without corresponding change in the milieu.”

It would be foolish to diagnose an entire nation with a mental health disorder, but as Susan Faludi points out in her 2007 book
The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
, the country as a whole continues to exhibit certain aspects of post-traumatic stress, including a compulsion to reenact the events of September 11 in movies and television as well as nurturing obsessions with homeland security and surveillance that, according to many military analysts, is out of proportion with the actual threat and smacks of a kind of national hypervigilance.
Moreover, the ongoing militarization of American culture—in the form of first-person shooter video games, the rise of the Navy SEAL “brand” in books, films, and other media, and martially themed endurance races like the Tough Mudder series—points to a fixation with the post-9/11 hyper-masculinity and ubiquitous violence reminiscent of the disorder.

In a related vein, some observers have drawn a connection between 9/11 and the recent helicopter parenting phenomenon, the overweening desire to protect our children from every conceivable danger to the point where we isolate them from the world and prevent them from having experiences that previous generations took for granted.
Others point to the rising popularity of zombies in books and films as being symptomatic of a kind of paranoid “cultural PTSD.” (Zombies are like terrorists in that they look like us but have been tainted by death and can seemingly strike anywhere and at any time, or so the thinking goes.) Indeed, one can quite easily construct an entire theory of recent American culture using PTSD as a nucleus, all without mentioning the tens of thousands of veterans and their families who suffer from post-traumatic stress or the millions of rape victims who live every day amped up, numbed out, and generally haunted.

PTSD has become a bit like Prozac in the nineties: if you hear about it once, you hear about it a thousand times. We live now in an aftermath culture, a culture where being traumatized is presumed to be the appropriate response to just about any overwhelming event. “These are the days after. Everything is now measured by after,” a character in Don DeLillo's 9/11 novel
Falling Man
says.
This leads to the bigger questions: Why now? Why in the United States, a country that is, by any standard, one of the least traumatized on the planet? Is there something about the War on Terror, a war that directly involves less than 1 percent of us, that has made us all a little nuts? Is there something about the larger war against Islamic extremism that has made us fear the outside world? If war is a kind of symbolic violence, is PTSD a kind of symbolic penance?
Do we so easily embrace the diagnosis out of a sort of “white guilt” about not having served overseas ourselves, as some have suggested? Or are PTSD and the threat of it simply another example of how modern therapeutic culture has forced its way into our lives and taught us how to perceive normal human adversity?

In trying to address these questions and balance the various academic disciplines that inform our understanding of post-traumatic stress, these pages may display a bias toward literature. Part of this is simply the result of my being a writer, but there is also the fact that for the bulk of human history, literature has been
the
primary repository of knowledge about war, famine, genocide, and natural disaster.
From
The
Iliad
to the Great War poets to the literature of the Vietnam War, writers have been wrestling—and wrestling quite well, I might add—with the mysteries of trauma. In a sense, nothing has changed, and today's trauma survivors can take great comfort in knowing that they are confronting the same horrors that Achilles faced four thousand years ago. Moreover, as practically any therapist will tell you, many of the long-term effects of trauma are the product of the emotional interpretations of events by victims—interpretations that are informed by the archetypal narratives that exist within a given culture, a process that is explicitly literary. As Robert Stolorow, an influential psychoanalyst, argues, “The experience of trauma is context-dependent,” meaning its essence lies in the subjective experience of the victim; in other words, their story as
they
tell it to themselves.