The Prison Book Club (16 page)

Meanwhile his mind was on men who had some of the toughest jobs going: soldiers. For book club that month we were reading Sebastian Junger's
War
, an account of the journalist's fifteen months embedded with a U.S. Army platoon on the front lines in eastern Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. Like Ben, some of the soldiers in
War
had difficulty imagining a return to normal life. He reflected:

The book makes me feel like I'm in the action on the Korengal Valley with the platoon. As I hear the story of the soldiers and how the war has psychologically caused them trauma, I lay on my bed thinking *as much as we try or at least as much as I* try to suppress the fact that I'm institutionalized, I know I am. You don't spend 4 yrs. in one place and it doesn't affect you.

It was a Saturday morning as he wrote that, with its curious asterisks. Weekends were very different on the range from weekdays. “The feeling is a peaceful one because you don't have many inmates getting up in the morning on weekends. That is one of the unwritten prison rules: all is quiet until noon, and then the jungle is awakened.”

When we met in mid-October, with a strong turnout of sixteen inmates, the men in the book club were disappointed to learn that Carol couldn't attend. Derek would be facilitating the meeting in her place. I didn't think much of it at the time. In fact, I could see why having a guy at the helm for a discussion about what it's like to be a front-line soldier would be good. As a Mennonite, Derek grew up in a tradition of pacifism and non-violence. But as a professional radio broadcaster, he could be agnostic on the subject of combat.

“The Second Platoon of Battle Company, 173rd Airborne,” he said as we all got comfortable in our seats. “The Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, which is, as those of you who've read the book know, a valley near the Pakistani border about six miles long. One of the deadliest places on earth. It's a funnel of money and troops for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The U.S. Army put these platoons—three of them—on a hilltop, without women, without hot food, without running water, without communication with the outside world or any kind of entertainment for over a year. It's quite a story. So I had a lot of thoughts about it and I'm sure you did too.” Without women. He didn't say that as though women were army kit. He was reflecting the author's comment that these front-line units had no women soldiers at that time.

I looked over at Derek. He'd delivered a suspenseful introduction, but I knew that he was sleep-deprived and his eyes sagged in a way I'd never seen before. Without his energy to direct the discussion we could lose control of the meeting.

And then things took a turn for the worse. “
War
is not like a page-turner,” Dread announced, his knit Rasta tam exposing more of his dreadlocks than at previous meetings.

Grow-Op agreed. “I only made it to the third chapter.” Book club meetings that started this way usually petered out pretty fast.

But then Lenny, one of several new black inmates who turned up that day, gave the group something to discuss. “For the most part in war you're sitting around,” he said. “You're hating on each other. And there's very few actual moments of real war. And then it sucks. You're not thinking about ‘O Canada,'” he said, singing the title of the Canadian anthem. “That's not what it is. It's like ‘oh shit' in a moment in time.” He was able to capture in fresh words how Junger portrayed the platoon's long lulls and sudden firefights— trumping the language of the old adage about war being “months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.” He understood like a book reviewer, but spoke like a rapper.

“War is bad but it's not all bad,” said Derek. “At one point in the book, I made a note, ‘Why do men fight?' It does give them meaning and purpose and a sense of bonding with their brothers. They were protecting their tribe, their group, their gang, whatever you want to call it.”

“It gives you insight into how loyal the soldiers are to each other, like how they risk their life to save somebody without any qualms,” said Dread.

Junger's research on the military group dynamic is fascinating. In the book he cites a mid-1950s study in which paratroopers who were part of a tightly knit group were shown to experience less anxiety jumping out of an airplane than those who were only loosely connected. The bonded soldiers worried more about living up to the expectations of their peers than about their own safety.

“I compared it with being in prison,” said Gaston, his brush cut almost bristling. “Because, again, you're isolated from women, they didn't have their families around. Nothing. And when there was no fighting, they didn't all get along. They were at each other. Which is similar to prison.” However, he expressed regret that inmates did not bond in the same way as the soldiers. “There's so much bullshit around these places instead of convicts coming together.”

Peter, Gaston's recent recruit, offered his own reflections on that point. “You know as convicts, we don't really need a reminder of what we can be reduced to, because we're in here, obviously. We're supposed to be civilized and advanced, and yet we still can be reduced back to that.” “That” being the actions that landed them in prison.

The discussion was providing clues to how hostile the prison could be outside of our protected little book club. It was so abstract, it didn't make me nervous. On the contrary, I was impressed with how the men mapped the book against their own lives and how they had an impulse to seek improvements in prison culture.

Then, when there was a brief lull, I raised the topic of fear. “I was really interested in what Junger had to say about how the heartbeat rises during fear, how it obscures your judgment and ability to react,” I said. “What do you think?”

“You think of your own person,” agreed Ben. “Gunfire goes off and you freeze and the body reacts after.” I certainly remembered that my brain overrode my fear response in those first few seconds of the mugging.

“There's
supposed to be
no fear,” said Dread, who I'd noticed over the months often challenged Ben, his unit mate. Dread seemed to see Ben as teacher's pet. “I've seen guys who sacrifice their own life for the other guys in the group. Everybody has that in them. You don't have to be an animal to have that—just the love for your battalion members.”

That's when Derek pointed out that Junger talks about courage being love. We sat there trying to wrap our heads around the idea. Dread said it was like running out into the road to save your child. And I reflected on Junger's point that the loyalty and bonding among the platoon was also what made the loss of a fellow soldier so psychologically traumatic. It created cohesion in the field for the military, but devastated the individual soldier in the long term. Some of the men in the prison, who had been in gangs, wore tattoos of fellow gang members who'd been gunned down. It was the same sort of thing.

Javier picked up on Derek's point. His ambered voice conveyed authority, and the others often fell quiet when he talked, perhaps because they liked the sound of it. Sometimes when the men took turns reading aloud passages from an upcoming book, they asked Javier to read more than one. “To me it seems a lot of these guys join up the army for a sense of security because when they first go to the army they're nothing,” he ventured. “They're scared, and then they get teased, and then they get beat up and then they develop this killer, you know, instinct, right? They don't even know why they're going to war—they're just going there to fulfill some sense of family, some sense of security and when they get there they transform.”

“What's interesting to me,” said Derek, “is when it comes time at the end and their tour is up, most of these guys don't want to leave.”

Ben jumped in, saying, “Because they have no reason to. They got immune to it.”

“They got immune to it?” asked Derek.

“Yeah,” continued Ben. “Just like you could be in here. Institutionalized. As in, like, ‘Yo, I don't wanna leave.' Because you can't be somewhere four or five years and say you're not institutionalized. Just like how they are in the war. They're only there for fifteen months and they don't even wanna leave. Just because of going back to a normal settin' of life.” Ben had been reflecting on this theme in his journal. Now he was trying it out with the guys.

“That's what the author says,” continued Javier. “Like guys who've been in prison for so long, the only thing they have left is prison.They have nothing else to look forward to on the street.This is where they're shinin'. This is where most of their goals are.”

Not everyone bought into Ben and Javier's hypothesis.

“I think I disagree with that,” said a man named Quincy, looking directly at Ben, his voice rising, his limbs tightening as though readying for a physical fight. He was an average-sized inmate in his twenties who seemed to be anchoring a contingent of the new black attendees.

Then everyone began talking at the same time and Derek had trouble restoring order. “Hang on,” he said. But they ignored him.

Carol, I thought. Where are you?

Eventually a nasal voice rose above the others. It was Lenny. He shored up Ben and the “institutionalized” side of the argument, then added: “If you go to the hole and stuff like that in terms of relatin' to prison, you go back to a baser humanity. And there's less anxiety because you're not held to a certain standard, you know what I mean.” Was he saying that it was a relief to go to the hole, to segregation, because once you were there, expectations of you were lower? “The only thing that's expected of you in war,” he went on, “is to take care of your friends and kill, right. I could imagine that providing some kind of security, not security but, um … ” I assumed he was looking for a word like
belonging
.

But Derek filled in a different word. “Or is it excitement?” he asked. War, according to Junger is “insanely” thrilling.

“Yeah, that too, right,” said Lenny. “I mean how many of us could say we'd been in a fight and not felt some kind of excitement in it? Like even when it's done, after you win, that's exciting and that can be addicting in itself. And this is on another level, right?” He looked around the room for confirmation.

But Quincy wanted to draw the discussion back to institutionalization. “Just a question,” he said, swivelling in his chair to speak to Ben again. “What do you consider ‘institutionalized'?” Then looking to Ben's supporters: “What do you guys consider ‘institutionalized'?”

“I mean, you can't function outside,” said Javier. “When you step outside, you can't function.”

Quincy ignored him. “How long have you been in?” he asked, looking again at Ben in a manner that was challenging and unfriendly.

“I've been in 'bout four years, right.”

“Are you saying you're institutionalized?” echoed Dread, always willing to gang up on Ben.

“Hell yeah,” said Ben. “Because I'm getting up every time the same morning and—”

“That's just a set routine,” said Quincy, responding before Ben had even completed his sentence.

“But mentally it bothers me,” said Ben. “I could say that, ‘Yo, I'm here and I'm only in this place right now for the time being.' But just that routine that I go by, day by day. I'm institutionalized, bro. I'm not going to deny it. I am. Because if I go to the caf and don't see my coffee in the mornin' I'm probably like, ‘Yo, what the hell's going on?' I'm gonna freak out.”

“When I first started my bit, it bothered me,” said Grow-Op. “It doesn't bother me no more. That's the thing of being institutionalized. You get a routine and it's like a purpose.” In the book, he said, the soldiers were nothing before they joined up. “Some of them would still be on the streets. So it's kind of like it's a purpose for them.”

Everyone talked at once. I reflected on how Derek was proving that he had a knack for asking questions that were relevant to the men, even if it led to a verbal melee. This must be what it's like in an unsupervised argument in prison, I thought. If Carol had been there, likely she would have corralled the discussion sooner. But I was grateful for that brief window into their world, that glimpse of “the jungle” Ben had referred to.

There had been other book group gatherings at Collins Bay in which the men had taken control. Before I joined, during a discussion of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel
The Road
, the guys told Carol to be quiet until they had exhausted the topic they were discussing. These were brief glimpses into the way that disagreements can become dangerous in prison. I didn't feel personally threatened during the discussion of
War
, but I sensed that Ben might be vulnerable, and that Quincy's barrage of questions masked a rage that could erupt.

After the meeting, a new fellow came up to me and asked if he could be one of the book club members writing a journal. Word seemed to be getting out about the journal writing. He was a fidgety West Indian man in his twenties with eager eyes and densely tattooed arms. He introduced himself as Deshane. “I write songs and stuff,” he said. I said he'd have to write about the books too, and he said he would. I had the chaplain search a blank journal that I happened to have in my satchel. It had gone through the X-ray machine earlier and the chaplain gave it the thumbs-up. I handed it to Deshane and watched him walk away happily, his small frame bouncing.

Then I spent a few minutes with Gaston. He must have been wondering if his personal campaign for self-improvement, which he'd pitched to Carol and me last month, was already more than he could handle. Carol had brought him a stack of classics of American literature that Dennis Duffy had recommended. As well, he had his prison job, courses and the next book club book to read. And now it was time for me to load him up with one more thing: a journal. He took it from me and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”