The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  Back in 2004, when he first looked at Stroman with that focus, he saw none of the callousness and cruelty he had been expecting: “Everything broke down from the first meeting, because he’s a complete mess. He’s a completely helpless mess—crying, like, ‘Oh my God, I prepared for this interview,’ and now he’s collapsing.” Stroman just talked and talked, telling Ziv as much as he could think to ask: “I mean, the guy is not lying; he’s just dangerously honest. Which is very kind of amazing. So he proceeds to tell me how he was going to go to Dallas malls. I mean he tells me stuff that he shouldn’t have told me. And he tells me he was very confused. But he’s also very charismatic, he’s very engaging, and the eyes are very twinkling.”

  Ziv was not the first person to be charmed blind by Stroman. You could ask Tena or Tom Boston or any of his kids. But Ziv was also a seasoned, worldly documentary filmmaker who knew what he was doing and wasn’t easy to dazzle. There was just something in this man that defied his expectations. Throughout the interview, Stroman cried and fretted that he’d messed everything up. Ziv offered him a mulligan: “I said, ‘You know what, I promise you I’ll come back.’ ” Did Ziv make that offer because he needed more tape? “No,” he said flatly. It was because something strange and ineffable happened between them that day: “I wanted to come back forever.”

  ILAN ZIV LIKED to think of himself as a man not easily enchanted—certainly not by a murderer. What happened with Mark was different. It perhaps had to do with his discovery that the line separating him from Stroman wasn’t as thick as he would have liked to believe.

  The history that primed Ziv for their encounter preceded his birth. Ziv’s father had grown up outside Warsaw in the 1920s and ’30s, an assimilated Jew in a mixed apartment building in a religiously diverse neighborhood. When Hitler invaded Poland, the father realized with shock and bitterness that no one regarded him as the Pole he had always known himself to be. Neighbors were betraying Jewish neighbors, ratting out Jewish friends, watching as Jews were sent off to the ghettoes. “It’s this personal betrayal and an identity betrayal,” Ziv said, “because he was a Pole.”

  His father, then sixteen, disguised himself as a Polish gentile, assumed a false identity, and escaped to Romania. He ended up, by a trail of disguises and deceptions he remains loath to detail, in Israel, and eventually in the Tel Aviv suburb of Afeka, where Ziv grew up. Most of his father’s relatives weren’t so lucky. “Eliminated,” Ziv said simply.

  This particular level of proximity to and distance from the Holocaust shaped the young Ziv’s worldview. It left him consumed by the question of why his father’s neighbors had betrayed him. It also, he figures, left him less ardently nationalistic than he might otherwise have been.

  “I never grew up with Auschwitz stories, with the horror of the death camps,” he said. “I never grew up with that. I grew up with a surreal escape story.” The names to be mourned were names he had never known in the flesh. The losses fed endlessly repeated gossip: “I grew up with who fucks who, who was a closeted homosexual, who stole from who. But nobody exists.”

  The Holocaust suffused the atmosphere of Ziv’s schooldays. He still remembers the school pausing instruction to broadcast reports of the Eichmann trial over the loudspeakers; Ziv was eleven. “Everything was Holocaust,” he said. “It was a degree of obsession at that time in my childhood.” And he understood that many of his neighbors and classmates had lost much more than he.

  As he came of age, he sensed that there were two ideological roads available to an Israeli seeking to make sense of, and transcend, recent history. There were, of course, many trails in between, but to him it was a real fork. One road was hard-core Zionism and nationalism. It was the more particularized interpretation of the history of their people: a systematic attack on Jewishness that had to be answered by a systematic assertion of Jewishness. The other road was built on a more universal reading of what had occurred: the Jews, like so many other peoples in history, were victims of “chauvinism,” as Ziv put it, and of the abuse of power; they must now stand with anyone anywhere threatened by chauvinists, caught under power’s jackboot. “You can come out to Jewish nationalism and I shall fight and never again,” he said. “Or you can come out so sensitive to human-rights violations.”

  Perhaps it was the abstraction to him of his family’s loss, but from the time of high school Ziv found himself among the universalists—a position, as he put it, of “refusing to trust chauvinism and nationalism.” An assumption of that worldview was that Nazism wasn’t wholly exceptional, that it was the extreme expression of a potentiality that lay within all people. It was something that could hijack you or me, a German or, yes, even a Jew. This belief was the seed of Ziv’s career, though he didn’t realize it at the time. If we all harbor the germs of evil, why do they infect some of us and spare others? Is evil always a choice, or can it at times be explained by context and circumstance?

  As a student at Ironi Yud Daled High School in Tel Aviv, Ziv applied these still-forming ideas to his editorship of the student newspaper. When the 1967 war broke out, he figured he should dedicate the paper to the conflict and publish Palestinian voices, so readers would hear both sides of the story. “Over my dead body” was the headmaster’s response. Ziv considered raising money and publishing the newspaper anyway, for the students of other high schools, as a public service.

  Then, at seventeen and a half, he graduated and was drafted into the military of a country, his country, whose growing nationalism made him wary. Israel was turning in that direction after the Six Day War, in which it had more than tripled the territory it controlled. Ziv, feeling lonely in his convictions, was mobilized to an elite reconnaissance unit under the Central Command called Sayeret Haruv. In 1968, he finished basic training and deployed with his men with a mission to prevent the Palestine Liberation Organization from infiltrating the West Bank. Ziv suppressed his opinions as best he could in that time. It could really mess you up to keep thinking about how you were against the mission. And he found in the physical challenge of combat an outlet for his competitiveness.

  At times, he felt himself flirting with that invisible line, at risk of becoming what he had once assailed. One night a commander offered a deal to Ziv’s unit: for a certain number of Palestinian infiltrators killed (Ziv couldn’t recall the precise bargain), the responsible team would get a week off. “We were lying on these bunk beds in the barracks—it was a desert down in the valley—thinking, ‘Who’s going to get the chance to do it?’ ” Ziv said. “ ‘Will tonight be the night that we get it?’ Because a week off was a big deal, a really big deal—Tel Aviv, your girlfriend, cafés, life.”

  The next morning at breakfast, another man in the unit whom Ziv recognized as a fellow skeptic said to him, “Do you remember last night when we were all competing?” They couldn’t believe themselves. What was scary to Ziv was how little it took to buy into the chauvinism. “I’m not going to put down anyone who crosses moral lines,” he said years later. “I understand how you can do it,” he added.

  One advantage of being a paratrooper was that it insulated you from the intimate realities of occupation. “I didn’t put people under curfew; I didn’t abuse women at roadblocks; I didn’t do any of that,” Ziv said. Occupation duty, he imagines, “would have punctured the bubble much earlier.” Instead, his unit took missions like dashing over the Jordan River late at night to raid a base. They zipped in and out of the lives they affected: “It’s like getting bin Laden—the poor man version.”

  On later missions, he came closer to those lives. Assigned to a unit enforcing a curfew in Gaza, made to face the human reality of the conflict, he “freaked out” and recoiled. He couldn’t get himself to do it. He volunteered instead to wash pots and scrub floors in the unit’s kitchen. He got out of the army in 1971, traveled to Europe for several weeks with his girlfriend, returned home, and enrolled in university.

  On Yom Kippur in 1973, the holiest day in Judaism, Ziv was hanging out with some of his theate
r buddies. They had put on a play together earlier that year, an avant-garde work starring Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, exploring their differing perspectives on the 1947 UN resolution proposing the partition of the region. The group had stayed in touch and reunited every so often. At this particular reunion, they found themselves desperately hungry. They decided to drive toward Ramallah in the West Bank, Ziv said, because it was Yom Kippur, “which is the most horrible day in Israel because everything’s closed.”

  As they drove, the radio brought the news that Israel had been invaded by its Arab neighbors and was at war. The Jews and Arabs in the same car were now on different sides of the line. Everybody knew they had to return to their corners: the Palestinians in the group back to their families, the Israelis to theirs. The troupe exchanged tearful good-byes. Ziv phoned his parents to ask if they had heard. They told him that a man had come to the house with an order summoning Ziv back into service.

  Ziv took a bus to Tel Aviv. “All through the bus, I’m saying, ‘I should defect. I really should defect,’ ” he said. For the rest of the ride, he played the scenarios in his mind. He’ll go to the border and escape; he’ll fly away quietly. But what would happen to his parents? What would people think of the family? “Everybody will look at me, the worst of the scum,” he said. “The country’s invaded, and I am defecting. Can you imagine a worse crime sociologically?” Once again, he yielded.

  “I mobilized,” he said. “And that I always will remember, and that was haunting to me—because there was such a discrepancy between what I should do and what as a person I can do. And how weak I became, or how meek I was forced to become, because of human reality.” He counts it the worst day of his life.

  When the conflict subsided, Ziv applied for permission to leave Israel. He fibbed, saying he needed only a short break to get over war trauma. “I knew it was a total lie, that I would never come back, even if it was violating the law,” he said. The documents signed, he bought a plane ticket to America and flew there in April 1974, to enroll as a student at New York University. There his interests would evolve from theater to documentary filmmaking. In project after project, he would probe the question of why some people, under some conditions, cross moral lines.

  In 1982, he returned to Israel for a short visit. War had broken out again that June, when Israeli forces had invaded Lebanon. Ziv received an assignment from CNN to go there with a camera. He went into Lebanon twice. By the second trip, Beirut had been fully besieged, and Israel would soon be held responsible for the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Ziv returned to his father in Tel Aviv and told him something, long in coming, that closed the circle of his relationship with Israel: “I said to him, ‘Father, this is Warsaw.’ And I said, ‘Don’t give me bullshit. This is Warsaw. I mean, ghettoized, exiled people who are terrorized. I don’t see how you can make a distinction, an intellectual distinction.’ And I don’t think he ever argued. My mother erupted, but he didn’t argue. But he gave me this look which was very bewildered.”

  Ilan Ziv never lived in Israel again.

  RETURNING TO NEW YORK after his first interview with Stroman, Ziv thought to himself, “I’m a friend of a murderer now; God help me.” He wasn’t a friend friend, but Ziv had made a commitment. He continued his research and returned a few months later for a second conversation. Arriving at Polunsky, he underwent its particular rituals once again. Your license-plate number and name are radioed to the staff inside to establish your identity. You are searched. You can take inside only your car keys and $20 in quarters. With that, you can buy snacks for your chosen prisoner—a task with its own protocols. You put the money into the vending machine, and the Visitation warden gathers the items, places them in a brown paper bag, and gives them to another warden, who gives it to the prisoner, who by now has been brought from his cell by armed guards and made to sit opposite you on the other side of the glass. Your four-hour slot begins.

  This second meeting pushed Ziv further away from objective filmmaking and into a peculiar friendship. It led to a correspondence by letter, with Stroman writing often and at length in his loopy handwriting, and Ziv regularly apologizing for being too busy to respond substantively. When Ziv discovered an online service that allowed him to e-mail Stroman and have those messages turned into letters, a brisker back-and-forth ensued.

  They talked, in person and in writing, about Stroman’s past and Ziv’s, about the nature of hatred, about what makes men the way they are. The more they talked, the more Stroman reminded Ziv of something aching and unutterable within himself. “I have the victim and the victimizer in me a little bit,” Ziv said. His life story began with his people being betrayed and murdered; then, in a blink of history, enough had changed to turn Ziv into the killer. “I understood the victimizer perspective,” he said, “and I understood how you could become the victim.” This duality attracted him to another, differently divided soul.

  In his subject’s life Ziv saw a mirror image of the American dream that Stroman’s victims had been pursuing. There was some truth in that idea. For those whom the economic dream had deserted, the consolation could be to belong to some walled-off culture or group—bikers, rednecks, Peckerwood Warriors, loud and proud Texans, True Americans—that not everyone could. If you were a native-born white male in postmillennial America, it was possible that you felt the country stagnating more acutely than most. Because however grim it was out there, however scarce the work, however hard it was to get hours, however high one’s debts stacked, if you were a woman or black or gay or an immigrant from some punished republic, this time was very likely a better time for you than your parents’ time. Your personal liberty had grown enough to distract you from the nation’s broader situation. Your individual graph swung up and to the right, even as America’s plateaued.

  Somewhere down the line, only because the gods have a sense of humor, a leftist peacenik from Israel developed empathy for a right-wing, swastika-tattooed white chauvinist from Texas.

  Ziv was taken with Stroman’s boyhood stories of abuse by his stepfather, Wallace. “He didn’t like kids too much,” Stroman said in one of their conversations. “I remember the day that he hit my mother, and I jumped up and I told him that was it, you’re not gonna do this no more.” Stroman confirmed his sister’s memory of being sexually abused, including once overhearing Wallace say to her, “You know you liked it, bitch.” Diverting attention from his own racism, he complained of having racists for parents: “I married my wife—she’s Spanish—and they disowned me because of a Spanish woman.”

  Ziv wanted to know when Stroman began to drift in the direction that would eventually lead to the Row. Others had their favored theories—it was Shawna’s departure; or there had always been something wrong with him; or it was meth; or it was finding a girl of his in bed with his buddy. But Stroman had his own preferred moment. He attributed it to when he found out about his father.

  He was still a boy, on the cusp of adolescence, hanging out at his grandfather’s one day, and one of Grandpa’s friends, a guy named Eddie Stroman, kept calling him “son.” As Stroman told Ziv, “I said, ‘I’m not your son!’ And my grandfather said, ‘You know what? Let me tell you a secret. You can’t tell nobody.’ He said, ‘That’s your dad.’ ”

  “So my whole life I’m letting this man, Wallace Baker, abuse me,” Stroman said. “Thinking he’s my father. Kick me, thump me in the head, do all this stuff. And then I find out that this man’s my father.” He explained how the revelation shattered him: “The people I’ve trusted my whole life turned out to be a pack of liars. You know, you grow up trusting your mother, your grandmother, and your grandfather, and you believe everything they say, and then when you find out that your whole existence has been a lie, it’s shocking, very shocking.”

  From that moment, he said, “I automatically rebelled.” It was not long thereafter that Stroman had spied that silver pickup truck, with keys lying invitingly in the rear bed, and taken it for a spin. After that incident
, Stroman said, “it’s my mother and stepfather who put me in a boys’ home, thinking it would straighten me up. And from then on shit just went downhill.”

  Ziv asked about his time in the custody of the Texas Youth Commission.

  “Sheesh,” Stroman began, for once short of words. “At age twelve and thirteen years old, it’s a—you grow up quickly. Especially here in Texas. Texas is notorious for their penal system, and it’s just—you know.” He cleared his throat. “I witnessed things that I shouldn’t have seen at an early age.” He declined to go further down that hole.

  In one of their conversations, Ziv asked Stroman about his love of guns. Where did the obsession begin?

  “I’m an American,” he said, grinning wide. “American dream, you know.” Asked to elaborate, he added: “You know, right to bear arms—it’s in our constitution, you know.”

  Ziv asked about Stroman’s history of nightmares, which others had spoken of in interviews.

  “Oh, I’ve had nightmares since I was a kid,” Stroman said.

  “You never went to counseling?” Ziv asked.

  “No, sir.”

  Their conversations meandered far and wide, and Stroman told Ziv not just about his demons but also about his taste in music and tattoos and all things Confederate. Somehow this led an immigrant to understand Stroman’s intolerance as a worn-down native’s desire to claim a sphere of his own. “You might find it abhorrent, but that’s culture,” Ziv said later. “It’s part of somebody’s pathology to be different—to be a rebel.” Ziv was struck by the absence of community in Stroman’s milieu: people unable to lean on those closest to them; people whose lives had become too chaotic to raise good children; people attached to few of the binding agents—family, company, union, church—of an earlier time. Ziv compared Stroman’s world to the wreckage of the car-building communities he had surveyed when shooting a film in Flint, Michigan. There almost all the good jobs had gone, but he sensed some enduring mutuality. “Where Mark comes from,” he said, “there was nothing.”