Annistyn Baddley WTF??? is this a joke???
August 23 at 5:43pm • Like
Courtney Hollingsworth serious?
August 23 at 5:43pm • Like
Tanya Harris For reals y’all. Baby’s up, baby’s walking.
August 23 at 5:44pm • 26
Shannon Fisseau OMG!!!!
August 23 at 5:44pm • Like
Laura Tickle that is Awesome!!! #trulyblessed #godisgreat
August 23 at 5:45pm • 2
Tammie Floyd Grimshaw am i really seeing wht im seeing?? txt me NOW
August 23 at 5:47pm • Like
Jay Carmean Hollllllllyyyyy shit. :o)
August 23 at 5:50pm • Like
Brooke McElwrath Yay!!!
August 23 at 5:50pm • Like
Destiny Nettles How’s Cam doing that?
August 23 at 5:51pm • Like
Ricky Necaise wat up
August 23 at 5:52pm • Like
Nadara Beaugez Tammie Floyd Grimshaw just called me. I cannot BELIEVE what I’m looking at and also that it happened on same day as Randy Beaugez and I’s 1st anniversary!! Greatest day EVER.
August 23 at 5:53pm • 4
Ashtyn Dugas so confused…how is he standing???
August 23 at 5:54pm • Like
DeAnna Sumrall #truemiracle #goarmy
August 23 at 5:56pm • 3
Joey Mauffray No way thje fucking Obummer-run VA did that shit, tell your bro call me
August 23 at 5:56pm • 1
Skyler Huey at ease private cuz YOU…ARE…HEALED!!!!
August 23 at 5:57pm • 2
Heath Quave No one ever ever doubt the power of prayer ever again. I’m crying tears of joy for you and your brother. This is a true miracle. This is beyond comprehension.
August 23 at 5:58pm • 13
Ronda Varnau girl that is so unfuckingbelievible OMG
August 23 at 5:58pm • Like
Kimberly Ladner Power of GOD.
August 23 at 6:01pm • Like
Michelle Kuhn Girard so happy for you!! wow!!
August 23 at 6:03pm • Like
By the time the following comment appeared, almost eight hours later, 294 people—almost double the total number of Tanya’s Facebook friends—had posted comments on the photograph:
Jesse Castanedo Dear Tanya Harris I’m a reporter for the Sun Herald and would like to speak with your brother asap if that would be ok. My number is (228) 896-2100.
August 24 at 1:32am • Like
Cameron didn’t see these. Tanya read some of them aloud but rarely, she recalls, did his responses rise above grunts or snorts of semi-acknowledgment or the occasional inquiry about names churned up from the past (“Ol’ Skyler, damn. He still dating that stripper chick?”). Mostly, she says, Cameron stared at his legs, with a not-unhappy frown, as he raised them, twitched them, rubbed them, squeezed them, jolted them, bent them—as though constantly subjecting them to a battery of tests designed to verify and then re-verify and then verify again the actuality of what’d occurred, as Lazarus might’ve kept pressing a palm to his chest to feel the impossible thumping therein.
In other ways the evening was routine. Cameron washed down his scheduled meds with Bud Light. Tanya ordered some delivery po’ boys which they ate while watching an episode of Extreme Weight Loss. Tanya’s phone kept ringing and dinging until Cameron barked at her to silence it and then it just buzzed buzzed buzzed buzzed buzzed. They watched two episodes of Ice Road Truckers: Deadliest Roads but not in their usual way, not with Cameron swishing his head and sounding yawps of astonishment at the crazy risks the show’s drivers took. (Tanya once asked her brother how someone who’d ridden Strykers up mountain passes laced with IEDs could be so blown away by truckers navigating ice roads. Without looking over and without a second’s thought he answered, “Aw, you can do anything when you ain’t got the choice not to.”) Instead they half-watched it, with Tanya monitoring her phone and Cameron his legs. Then she made for her bedroom, circling back to give her brother a long embrace, and afterward Cameron felt himself alone in the blue-lit smoke of the room, alone with his legs.
“People don’t understand,” he’d say about this moment later, “when you’re paralyzed, your legs are there but they aren’t there. They’re yours but they’re not yours.” About his restored legs, strangely, he felt similarly: that they, too, were not quite his, that what was powering them was independent from him, apart from him, that they were his to control but not quite own. With that feeling came a passing chill of something like fear. After those years of what-if questions blooming weed-like in his head—what if he hadn’t followed Staff Sergeant Lockwood down that trail; what if he hadn’t joined the Army; what if his mother hadn’t died; he’d peeled these questions back toward infinity—he’d more recently decided, perhaps just to keep those thorny weeds at bay, that the what-ifs didn’t matter because the arc of his life was fixed: It was what it was.
Until today, when it wasn’t. The movement of his legs—he lifted one now, examined it in the frizzled DirecTV glow—seemed to sweep clean his future but more importantly negate his past. What did post-traumatic mean when the trauma no longer applied? In that dark room he felt he had neither a sense of the past nor of the future—only the mystifying, fluid present. When his hand touched his heightened leg it was as though for the first time and perhaps also for the last. What he’d thought, what he’d felt, what he’d loved, what he’d hated, what he’d done and had done to him, what he’d lost and had taken from him: All this felt erased by that touch. In equal measures these thoughts exhilarated and terrified him and to expel them he sucked down what remained of the warm can of beer and tried focusing on the television screen. Staff Sergeant Lockwood, he remembered, used to make fun of him for this kind of starry-headed thinking, used to accuse him of spending too much time sniffing the poppy fields. What would Lockwood say—what could he say, having more adversely survived the same blast—about what’d happened today? But this was another thought he expelled.
Sometime after two a.m. Cameron wheeled himself to his room but stopped his chair several feet from the bed. He raised himself from the chair and hobbled those last few feet, his legs as spent as if those feet had been uphill miles. He didn’t pray that first night, for himself or for anyone else, because as his head weighted the pillow his eyelids fell instantly shut. The next thing he recalls is the queer spectacle of his bedding all tangled at the foot of his bed in the late-morning light, after almost half a decade of waking to the sight of undisturbed bedding at the bottom half. He’d kicked in his sleep. He’d kicked ass in his sleep. “Tanya!” he hollered out. “Tanya!” He could hear the clomps of her feet as she came rushing toward his room, too stricken with jubilance to register the terror in those clomps. “Tanya, check this shit out!”
four
By the time the Sun Herald’s Jesse Castanedo arrived at the Harris house, early the next evening, 790 comments hung beneath Tanya’s post, with 561 people having shared the photograph with various other Facebook friends or groups. Excepting the first sixty or seventy people who left comments, most of whom Tanya knew (or knew of, as friends of friends), these later commenters were almost all strangers—many of them bearing names that Tanya found not just unfamiliar but unpronounceable.
Despite the wide scree of nationalities, races, and languages represented, these later messages tended to be uniform in their sentiments. (A significant chunk were the result of Tanya’s former high-school classmate Heath Quave, a youth minister, sharing the photo and his explanation for it with an evangelical Facebook prayer group.) Cameron’s recovery was God’s doing, they said, and stood as bedrock proof not of God’s existence—this was mostly a given—but of his grace, his magnificence, his mercy, his sustained attention to the modern world. Some of the commenters begged for miracles of their own, as though to piggyback on what they saw as
Cameron’s consecrated fortune. Others addressed Cameron himself, unaware of or indifferent to the oblique intermediaries. Many typed variants of hallelujah, while more than a hundred others registered a simple “Amen.” Taken together, they exude a kind of tent-revival fervor:
Loney Renzko GOD is GOOD all the time, all the time GOD is GOOD!!!!!
August 24 at 4:03am • Like
Mysongwi Haokip I dnt worry or afraid of anythn in dis world cozs God’s with me, like hs was wid dis man, and i thank God for guidn’ me and gvn’ me my life til nw today .praise the Lord Amem.
August 24 at 4:12am • Like
Mark Donetto That’s so cool as always and for ever and ever for hour only number one and only god and jesus chirst from the bloos of the savior from heaven
August 24 at 4:17am • Like
Eva Paranhos Leuch I pray for a miracle like this for my father’s recovery for his illness who is confined in the hospital for the past three weeks and I am still hoping for the Lord’s healing power. Lord this I ask to please grant me this prayer petition.
August 24 at 4:34am • Like
Muhaluleh Esau Johnny Look upon his miracles and be sore afraid. Surely his salvation is near those who fear him,that his glory may dwell in us ,”may God bless you all”
August 24 at 4:37am • Like
Chianne Hudnall Please man in the picture pray for me and my two sons John and Grant for healing of diabetes Please .In the name of Jesus
August 24 at 4:59am • Like
RaeJean Spinks The Lord has lifted this wounded Warrior into his bosom and made right what was wrong! See God’s power! He’s in control of everything. Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30 NLT)
August 24 at 5:03am • Like
Debbie Barnett Rees Amen!!…please say a prayer for my sweet husband Mike who also served in Afghanistan….he is havin medical issues & he needs Gods healin….. God is the ultimate healer….God has got this!!!….TIA…God blees all!
August 24 at 5:18am • Like
Jhazzmine Ejaz I love you jesus.
August 24 at 5:21am • Like
Snježana VrlićIvčin Just like this miracle.. dads scans to be clean tomorrow.. Toddler not to have more seizures and for myself bec i am paranoid because of that
August 24 at 5:33am • Like
Nishe Massagli I need a big miracle to all my issues god knows them so with more prayers he can work in my miracle too god bless you all I’m the name if Jesus Christ
Amen
August 24 at 5:39am • Like
Yankle Wazzyboy Rumbidzai Sir pls I want u to pray for a lady who has bein attack by nitmare n things of d world.she is in a church yard rit now,bt she did lot of thins to herself in d luv of money n fashion thins.I want u to also pray for my mom to except dis lady back who has bein posess by demon spirit as her daughter dan refusing her back in d hme.i need job, travel experience n a gud luv 1 who will luv me for who i m nt bein I don’t v wealth.
August 24 at 5:47am • Like
Willy Nzepop j’ai confiance en mon dieu et je sais qu’il mettra tout en oeuvre pour ma réussite sur cette terre
August 24 at 5:50am • Like
Hal Baker Booyah in Jesus name Let everything that has breath Praise the Lord
August 24 at 5:57am • Like
Shirley Coffman pleasepraythat god help me get strogerwith the strok i had in jun i I amtierd of fighting alone
August 24 at 6:02am • Like
Cameron did read some of these, at Tanya’s urging, though fewer and fewer after the first hundred, and hardly any after about the five hundredth comment. The later ones were often repetitive, hammers striking a nail already pounded deep into wood—and, reading them, Cameron sometimes felt himself to be the nail, stricken with sudden force and meant to hold something larger together. Still, they exerted a not-insignificant force on him. The unanimity in their messages—that Cameron’s recovery was an incontestable act of God, an authentic miracle in its purest Coca-Cola sense—cast doubt upon his own doubts. “When you don’t really understand something,” he says, “and there’s eight or nine hundred people claiming they do, it’s hard to ignore that.”
Cameron’s notion of what’d happened to him in the Biz-E-Bee parking lot was a void, and over the course of the twenty-four hours that followed people came rushing in to fill that void. They did this digitally, of course, but also in person, with a parade of friends and acquaintances dropping by the house the next day. They came to congratulate Cameron, to embrace him, to toast his recuperation, to deliver him gifts of beer and flowers and fried chicken and pecan pie and seven-layer dip and a new-in-the-box football, and, most of all, to watch him showboat across the back lawn (on crutches that Tanya had arranged for him to borrow). At the sight of this they wagged their heads, slapped their open mouths, applauded, knelt down and prayed, and sometimes wept.
And while God was invoked in these offline interactions as well, it was still, to Cameron, as shorthand for something that couldn’t otherwise be explained. He recalls conversations related to this back in Afghanistan, during philosophical “oxygen wasting” sessions with a couple of guys from his platoon: about the way the Afghans accepted everything that happened or was going to happen as God’s will, the whole Insha’Allah mindset, and how impossible it was for Cameron and his platoon mates to reconcile that credo with the physical world as they understood it, with the world you sank your boots into, bled on. They’d once had to inform a villager that most of his family—wife, daughter, three sons, two nephews—was dead, having been executed by Taliban gunmen during a raid on a civilian minibus. “It’s God’s will,” the man kept saying, according to their interpreter, eventually provoking a blast of outrage from a lieutenant: “If these motherfuckers would start understanding that shit like this is the Taliban’s will, and not God’s, we could start checking ourselves out of this shithole.”
Yet that villager’s mindset didn’t strike Cameron as all that different from the way the platoon’s born-agains—that same lieutenant among them—often ascribed their fates to “God’s plan.” Will versus plan: To Cameron the difference was like four quarters versus a dollar bill. A three-Stryker convoy goes rolling down a road in Paktika Province, with Cameron in the lead vehicle. An IED detonates beneath the Stryker in the rear. Two of the soldiers inside die almost instantly; the gunner survives, but with a crushed forehead and no eyes; and five more soldiers stagger from the wreckage bearing little more than cuts and bruises. One of the dead was the married father of twin daughters, and on his wrist was a bracelet he’d made by joining together his babies’ hospital identification tags; one of the survivors enjoyed hurling filled urination bottles at Afghan children pleading for water on the roadside. To Cameron it seemed capricious and cruel to suggest this event represented divine intent, that underlying all that carnage was some semblance of a moral order. God’s will or God’s plan: These phrases had seemed like stand-ins for “I don’t know,” verbal or mental disguises masking the possibility that nothing more than random chance dictated who died and who didn’t. Or as one of his platoon mates put it, quoting from the movie No Country for Old Men: “The point is there ain’t no point.”
Extending this line of thought into his Biloxi backyard, Cameron found himself wondering: If it’d been God’s will/plan for him to walk, then why had God paralyzed him in the first place? He knew what his old Sunday school teacher would answer: that his paralysis had been a test, like when God dispatched Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, atop Mount Moriah. But if it’d been a test, wouldn’t he have needed to pass it? Nothing Cameron had done since returning from Afghanistan seemed to qualify for a passing grade, unless he counted not killing himsel
f—but all that should’ve earned him was a participation trophy. It seemed an awfully low bar for a miracle.
These were thoughts Cameron kept to himself, however, as his visitors praised Jesus and asked him what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a miracle. A few pressed him for sensory details about the supernatural: Had he heard God’s voice, had he seen Jesus’s face? At one point the conversation shifted to Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent’s bestselling book Heaven Is for Real along with the movie adaptation that had been released that spring: Had Cameron read or seen it? (No.) Would he like to borrow the book? (Yeah, sure.) For Cameron, contradicting this level of certainty with doubt felt like a futile exercise, if not an insulting one. Nor did he feel capable of articulating his own vague and more secular reckoning of what type of miracle he’d experienced—the million-to-one play that his body had somehow cooked up, the nine laterals his nerve endings must’ve thrown to pull off this somatic victory. Because here came his fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Lacey, having rushed to Reconfort Avenue after seeing Cameron’s photo on her daughter’s Facebook page—launching herself into his arms, sobbing “thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus” until Tanya had to pry her off so that an unsteady Cameron could sit back down. Moments like these felt immune to nuance.
Not until the Sun Herald’s Jesse Castanedo put the question to him directly, however, did Cameron realize how much this crowd-sourced interpretation of his recovery had affected him—had in some ways overwhelmed him. “Do you think God performed a miracle yesterday?” asked the reporter. Until then, the questions had been about factual matters—what happened and when—and in Castanedo’s recording of the interview one hears Cameron responding with a crisp and obliging efficiency, addressing Castanedo as sir and chronicling the previous day’s events with military concision. Then arrives a very long pause after the question about God: twenty-three seconds of silence, before Castanedo gently repeats the question.
Anatomy of a Miracle Page 6
