The Evil Hours (6 page)

Sometimes, and particularly with respect to traumatic narratives, these stories take the form of portents and premonitions, as if the trauma in its unalloyed power is able to reach forward through time, disrupting the present; in
The Hour of Our Death
, Philippe Aries observed that in Arthurian mythology, “death does not come as a surprise, even when it is the accidental result of a wound or the effect of too great an emotion, as was sometimes the case. Its essential characteristic is that it gives advance warning of its arrival.”
Western literature, he points out, is full of such warnings: auguries, omens, doppelgangers,
memento mori
, reminders to the faithful that death is forever on the horizon. In the
Chanson de Roland
, the stories of the Round Table, the knight Gawain is asked, “Ah, good my lord, think you then so soon to die?” Gawain replies, “I tell you that I shall not live two days.”

 

Have you ever been blown up before, sir?

 

Had I remembered the soldier's question simply because of what happened next? Because of some need to make a meaningful story out of a meaningless event?

To scientists, these sorts of ideas are typically viewed as examples of
apophenia
.
An extension of the normal human impulse to find patterns in life, apophenia is an aberrant form of sense-making that can, in its extreme form, merge with the pathological, as in paranoid schizophrenia. The classic example of apophenic thinking that is usually given is that of the NASA scientists who in 1976 discovered a geologic formation on the surface of Mars that seemed to resemble a human face. Some observers saw this as evidence of intelligent life on Mars, a greeting card left on the surface of the red planet by a previous civilization. More recent images from the Mars Explorer show that the apparent face was, in fact, the result of unusual light conditions at the time of the initial photographs, and it is actually shaped more like a lump of cookie dough.

Over my months in Iraq, I became obsessed with the idea that there was something behind apophenia, reasoning that because being close to death necessarily heightened one's perception, then the right sort of person in Iraq might be in a position to achieve a higher form of consciousness, almost like a physicist staring into the glow of a particle accelerator. It was this line of thinking that kept me coming back to the war, year after year, to the bewilderment of my friends and colleagues. In my own peculiar way, I felt like the German painter Otto Dix, a veteran of World War I, who wrote, “I had to have that experience: how someone near me suddenly fell and was finished. . . . I am a man of reality. I must see everything. I need to experience all the abysses of life. That is why I volunteered.”

Later, this habit of needing to see everything, of trying to make sense of my experience through intense examination, came to dominate my postwar existence. In time, I came to think of myself as devoted to a sort of Kabbalah, a cult of one whose mission it was to discover what the others had missed, the pattern hidden in the loom, the hand of God, if you will. This habit of rumination, of pattern seeking, of needing to make sense of it all, is present in everyone, but it can kick into overdrive in the wake of trauma.

It was this type of obsessive sense-making, of unintentional apophenia, that vexed Freud when he first observed it in the dreams of World War I veterans, an observation that changed the course of psychology. In
On Metapsychology
, written not long after the guns had fallen silent, Freud saw that sufferers of war neuroses “were endeavoring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis.”
(In some translations of Freud's work, this phenomenon was even referred to as “fate neurosis,” because it seemed to dominate his patients to such a degree that it became a sort of destiny, a pattern of trauma and retrauma that seemed likely to govern the rest of their lives.) Prior to the war, Freud's theory of the unconscious had been dominated by what he called “the pleasure principle,” the idea that all people ultimately desire the gratification of their biological impulses, the need for sex and the need for mastery of their environment. The idea that some people would obsess over such unpleasurable memories flew in the face of everything that Freud believed. And as he observed, the call of such moments becomes something akin to a moral obligation, in the way that some widows are drawn to the graves of lost spouses. One can see this sort of obligation in the words of the poet Wilfred Owen, who in a letter to his mother shortly before his death wrote that “I confess I
bring on
what few war dreams I now have, entirely by
willingly
considering war for an evening. I do so because I have my duty to perform towards War.”

This sense that the life-threatening experience is “unmastered” or somehow beyond the survivor's control is one of the central problems of post-traumatic stress.
Normal, nontraumatic memories are owned and integrated into the ongoing story of the self. These are, in a sense, like domesticated animals, amenable to control, tractable. In contrast, the traumatic memory stands apart, like a feral dog, snarling, wild, and unpredictable. This is, in part, what the psychoanalyst I interviewed meant when he said that “trauma destroys the fabric of time.” These unincorporated memories insist on being noticed, and in their insistence, they come to haunt the minds of survivors, destroying their perception of time.

In
Slaughterhouse-Five
, Kurt Vonnegut's novel about World War II, it is the main character's near-death experience during the bombing of Dresden that causes him to “come unstuck in time.”
Over the course of the book, which one VA administrator described as “the ultimate PTSD novel,” it is as if the space-time continuum has been destroyed along with the city of Dresden. As far as the protagonist Billy Pilgrim is concerned, that is certainly the case. The novel opens: “Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between . . . Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips aren't necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.”

One of the perceptual mechanisms that can cause people to become unstuck in time, preventing the incorporation of experiences into the normal web of memory, is what psychologists call dissociation, essentially a splitting of the mind in two. An altered state of consciousness, dissociation allows you to distance yourself when a life-threatening situation occurs, as when a driver suddenly sees his car from a distance, almost like a spectacle in a theater, with a sense of being an observer rather than a participant. This was, in fact, a common refrain I'd heard from soldiers in Dora when they described the combat they'd been through—“It felt like I was watching a movie.” One particularly bloody day was insistently referred to as the “
Black Hawk Down
day,” as if the only way it could be recalled was through the narrative frame of an action movie. Curiously, this distancing seems to hold even after the event. “Our own death is indeed, unimaginable,” Freud wrote in 1915, “and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we can perceive that we really survive as spectators.”
Such existential threats must be mutated, converted, or otherwise altered so that the mind can continue to exist.

One of the most commonly reported forms of dissociation is that of time seeming to move differently, as if the brain is processing the world at a different speed than before. For most, this begins at the moment of maximum danger. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced trauma describes the world beginning to move in a kind of “slow motion.” Aron Ralston, a hiker exploring the slot canyons of southeastern Utah in 2003, was trapped beneath a huge boulder. He wrote about the rock rolling toward him, saying that “time dilates, as if I'm dreaming, and my reactions decelerate,” and in his memoir,
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
, Ralston describes the entire process as seeming to happen in “slow motion.”
One Marine I interviewed from the Gulf War recalled being under fire and how the tracer rounds seemed to be crawling through the desert air toward him like fireflies. His left leg, which was poking outside of the Humvee he was riding in, suddenly felt like it was on fire, as if he'd been hit already, even though the rounds had yet to reach his vehicle. Instinctively, he pulled his leg inside the vehicle before the bullets zipped by. All of this happened in under a second.

Dissociation can also take on more extreme forms that seem downright supernatural. One study conducted by the U.S. Navy on survival school trainees found that under extreme stress, more than half of them reported experiencing “unreal events that could not be accounted for rationally.”
Stories of dissociation have a substantial place in the canon of war literature. Michael Herr, in
Dispatches
, his classic work of Vietnam reportage, describes the combat he experienced at Khe Sanh: “It came back the same way every time, dreaded and welcome, balls and bowels turning over together, your senses working like strobes, free-falling all the way down to the essences and then flying out again in a rush to focus, like the first strong twinge of tripping after an infusion of psilocybin . . . And every time, you were so weary afterward, so empty of everything but being alive that you couldn't recall any of it.”
Dissociation of this sort leads to some of the most intimate, deeply personal experiences that a person can undergo, and descriptions of it are filled with the language of the infinite, as if in moments of trauma the universe pulls back the curtain for a few moments. Herr's
Dispatches
echoes with such glimpses of dark wonder: “the rapture of the deep,” “time outside of time,” and describing “stories you'd hear out of a remote but accessible space where there were no ideas, no emotions, no facts, no proper language, only clean information.”
It is little wonder that such states of consciousness continue to haunt the minds of survivors of extreme events.

Dissociation is not a bad thing in itself. People often “space out” in moments of stress, finding themselves obsessively staring at a wall calendar during a tense conversation or being captivated by thoughts of old lovers during a turbulent airplane ride. Psychiatrists think that dissociation may, in fact, have a protective, opiate-like effect on the brain, shielding consciousness from the pain of hideous events. (Herr seems to allude to this idea in the final pages of
Dispatches
: “Opium space, big round O, and time outside of time, a trip that happened in seconds and over years.”) But if the dissociation is profound enough and becomes chronic, it can create problems down the road. As the popular neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks observed in
Hallucinations
, “the dissociations of PTSD are of a more radical kind, for the unbearable sights, sounds, smells, and emotions of the hideous experience get locked away in a separate, subterranean chamber of the mind.”

PTSD is often thought of as being a syndrome of remembering things too well, of the memory working itself into a kind of frenzy, overrecording events that are best left forgotten.
In fact, in the case of peritraumatic dissociation, or dissociation during a traumatic event, the opposite may be true. It is almost as if the threatening event remains underexperienced or misremembered because it's so toxic. Too hot for the brain to handle, the experiences get stashed in a dark corner of the warehouse, off on layaway, the mind seemingly oblivious to the interest that accrues. This inversion of the expected logic remains one of the paradoxes of survival—that which was unperceived returns to haunt, as if to reiterate Nature's first commandment: Thou Shalt Attend to Danger. As Ben Helfgott, a concentration camp survivor, put it succinctly, “The ones who ‘forget,' they suffer later.”

 

Sometimes I can remember the explosion, sometimes I cannot. When I think of it quickly, I can recall the sound, but if asked to recount the story of being blown up, all that comes back is a kind of mental static, as if my ears are still waiting for the noise to arrive. My first stable memory of “my” IED is of Vollmer in the front passenger seat, snapping his head back and yelling stupidly “What was that?” as if it weren't obvious. We were on terror's clock now. Disoriented by the smoke from the burning homes and trapped in a cul-de-sac, we had backed over an IED hidden in the trash on the side of the road.

The force of the blast rocketed past Reaper's right ear, buckling the metal behind his head. I looked at him, his head wreathed in smoke, and felt alien and empty inside. When I turned my head back, it was like I wasn't there anymore. I suddenly saw myself as if from behind, floating above the whole scene. There I was, sitting motionless in my seat, my black digital camera resting on my leg. The ghost-me hovered there, unable to move or to speak, unable to connect with that other person, as if an invisible wall had been thrown up between us. In the air behind my head there was no sound, just an underwater rush, like I was swimming inside the explosion, holding my breath and waiting to come out the other side. In later years, I would come to see that there were two of me created in this moment: the one who heard the explosion and knows it fully, and the other, more slippery one, harder to make out, who did not hear. Which one was the real me, which one the imposter?

The moment passed, and when it was over, I was back in my seat again, just as before. Time hadn't slowed down so much as it had become denser, richer in detail. I sat up and looked around. I could see that we were on fire and that thick smoke was pouring into the cabin from a gash in the metal behind Reaper's head. He appeared to be okay, and looking past him, I could see the smoke moving in a thick current, like a wide mountain stream, the edges curling, the center continually flowing. Segments seemed to break off and reach out toward the front of the cabin in long articulated arms. Elaborate curls were born like small galaxies in the darkening air, thickening and stealing light as they turned.