The Evil Hours

by David J. Morris

  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 experie
nces 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.

  My eyes adjusting, I looked through the window and saw that the homes to our left were still burning, the smoke migrating over the blacktop. It occurred to me that someone ought to be shooting at us from behind the wall of smoke. This thought began to irritate me. We were off the script, somehow. This was supposed to be an ambush, so why wasn’t the enemy playing its part and finishing us off? With all of our attention focused inward, on the bomb that had just gone off, we were in perfect position, practically begging to be annihilated. As if by magic, just then a line of muzzle flashes began winking at us through the smoke almost whimsically, like carnival sparklers. I sat there for a moment, bracing for the bullets’ impact. My ass welded to the seat, I was trying to believe in what was happening: any moment now and it would be over. The agony of the end, it seemed to go on forever. There was a moment of regret, clouds of dust billowing from the houses.

  Blinking, suddenly I felt different, as if a long moment had passed in my head. I looked over at the houses, and I realized that no one was shooting at us. We were safe and yet all was profane, all was going and coming at the same instant.

  And just like that, I got pissed. Here I was, trapped in a Humvee full of buffoons who were practically begging to be murdered by a bunch of half-assed insurgents. Was there ever a bigger ship of fools?

  “Why the fuck isn’t someone busting down doors, looking for the trigger man? Where the fuck is the Bradley? Why hasn’t someone launched the QRF?” I yelled at no one in particular, using the military term for the rescue squad that every unit kept on standby in case of attack.

  Vollmer turned his head around. “Everyone okay?” he yelled. He didn’t seem to have heard a word I’d said.

  I patted down my legs, first doing a quick once-over, then squeezing near my groin, my armpits, and my neck for the arteries. Remembering the dick-shot soldier in Dora, I double-checked my crotch, just to be sure. All clear. I got my gear in order and found the door handle with my hand, just as a reference point. I looked over at Reaper, somehow making out his eyes burning red through the haze. He was cursing violently. “Two months left in this bitch and then this!” And so on.

  “Everybody stays in the vehicle! Nobody gets out!” Vollmer yelled at no one in particular. Then he was yelling up at the gunner, craning his neck up into the turret, asking him if he could see where the smoke was coming from. The gunner didn’t say anything.

  As John le Carré observed, somewhere in every bomb explosion there is a miracle. For some, it is the tiniest of details that saves a life: the shrapnel that penetrates a guy’s helmet only to exit the other side, leaving him unscathed. With every IED that went off, there were a dozen stories, some dark and some redeeming and transcendent, but all of them flew in the face of human reason. The year before, I’d interviewed a navy corpsman who told me about a Marine who’d been killed in Fallujah the same hour that his son was born back in the States. Our miracles were more common. The first was the twelve inches that saved Reaper, sending the force of the blast through the trunk of the Humvee instead of through his ass. The second miracle was that somehow everyone in the Humvee was deafened by the explosion except me, even though it had gone off less than three feet from where I sat.

  At some point, I can’t remember when, someone from the Bradley ran up to our Humvee and doused the flames with a fire extinguisher. A second later, he wrenched open the door and yelled, “You morons, there was a shitload of machinegun ammo in the back that was on fire.” Before the soldier could get another word out, Vollmer hollered at him to get back in the Bradley before someone took a potshot at him.

  This seemed to wake Vollmer up, and he yelled at the driver to put it in drive and take us back to the patrol base. The driver did as he was ordered, though Vollmer had to yell at him twice to be heard. It was then that we discovered our next problem: the IED had destroyed our right rear wheel, and when the driver floored it, nothing happened except the grinding of the wheel rim inside the remnants of the tire. It took forever, but somehow the driver, alternating between forward and reverse, was able to extract our Humvee from the blast crater and aim us toward home, toward our patrol base, which shone in my mind now like a holy city.

  Somehow we got back safely, somehow the Humvee held together, somehow no one else decided to light us up, somehow we managed to not hit another IED on the way. My memories of the drive back are erratic, like snapshots in a lost photo album. There were checkpoints manned by Iraqi soldiers that we ignored, local traffic moving blindly through the streets oblivious to our presence, the ruined rim of the Humvee grinding on the pavement.

  One memory remains clear, however. I could feel Reaper’s eyes on me, and when I glanced over at him, he let me have it.

  “What the fuck are you doing here anyway?” he yelled. “I don’t fucking get it. They must be paying you some serious bread to be here.” He turned his head away but not before I got a look at his eyes, which blazed with a sort of fury. It was like the IED had soured things between us, and whatever connection that had existed had been destroyed in the blast. There was an unmistakable tone of disgust in his words. He began again. “You’re a reporter, man! You could be anywhere, and of all the places in the world, you chose this one. I have to be here. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but none of us wants to be here in this bullshit. You think I’m here because I love America? Dude, I joined the army ’cause I’m poor. I joined the army ’cause I had nowhere else to go.”

  I started to answer him but gave u
p. What could I say? The blast had shaken me enough that I could barely think straight, let alone argue coherently, and what really was the point in trying to argue with a Humvee full of deaf soldiers? And besides, he had a point, and even though it wouldn’t sink in for years, I didn’t have any words for him. Turning away, I looked out the window and watched the hot city stutter past. Reaper had been wounded three times before and had handled it with equanimity, or so I had been told by his buddies, but there was something about my presence in Saydia, on this particular patrol, that seemed to have pushed him over the edge, as if the IED had shaken loose some secret doubts within him, as if he couldn’t fathom what sort of person had so little use for his life that he would voluntarily go to a place like Baghdad in the middle of a war.

  Later, I would realize that Reaper had been on to something, that this was exactly what it was all about, this and several other things. I was here to cover the war, it was understood, but why was it understood? The war had granted Reaper a certain measure of early wisdom, this much I had seen prior to the explosion. Now, shaken by this fourth near-death, he had aimed some of this wisdom back at me, and it hurt, though it took a long time to understand why. Maybe he wouldn’t have said anything under normal circumstances, maybe he shouldn’t have. The IED had stolen so many things, including his restraint. Or perhaps this was a gift, really, the gift of candor, the bomb’s final miracle.

  When, after what seemed like hours, we made it back inside the wire, I looked up and saw the sign again. EVERYDAY IS DAY ONE. I looked away as quickly as I could. One part of the war was over, another just beginning.

  Thirty minutes later, I was back at FOB Falcon, in an air-conditioned surgical clinic, having my head examined. A week after that, I was back in California.