Years before, in my youth, a friend asked me a question that I’ve never been able to shake. It was on Okinawa when we were lieutenants, full of ourselves, confident and feral. We were all so strong, and we knew nothing could kill us. At most of the parties on-island, I was among the quietest and most aloof. Others would be drinking and dancing, shouting nicknames at each other. I would be off in a corner, dabbling in unauthorized ideas with a friend who’d gone to Penn State. One night at the Kadena officers club, a classmate whom I hadn’t seen in years appeared beside me.
At Texas A&M, Jon had been a model cadet and was my perfect foil: a leader where I had always been a misfit. He and I had both been on the freshman drill team, a unit that began every practice with everyone doing a thousand sit-ups in sets of a hundred beneath an upperclassmen’s dorm window. At the end of fall semester, I quit the team and Jon had gone on and distinguished himself, eventually being invited back as a coach his sophomore year. Our senior year, he had commanded the honor guard for the governor, a position that came with privileges and a stipend. He was one of a pack of young men who held all the top billets in the Corps of Cadets, guys who ran around campus from activity to activity, already fully vested in life at nineteen. Fated to run the world, or at least a sizeable chunk of it, his luck had changed at Quantico.
During a live-fire exercise in the woods, there had been some confusion, and another lieutenant had shot him by accident between the shoulder blades. The bullet, on its journey through his body, a journey that I think of sometimes as a kind of odyssey, had taken a nasty turn, ricocheting off his collar bone, zigzagging through his neck, eventually exiting his cheek, leaving a long, brutal scar across his face. I hadn’t seen him in years and assumed that after the accident he’d left the Corps.
Needless to say, Jon had changed. At A&M, he’d been top of the heap, and he knew it. Cocky and with a hint of cruelty that is often the mark of the professional military man, he had never been a close friend. The man before me now seemed softened, chastened. After catching up for a few minutes, he asked me in a quiet voice, “Why are you here?”
“Here, what do you mean here? Like Kadena?”
“The Marine Corps.”
I gave him a look of disbelief and made some evasive reply, but the question chilled me. He knew the truth. He knew that on a certain level the Corps was just a pose for me, that I was watching the drama of it from a distance, not letting it touch me. That it wasn’t fully real to me yet, that it was play.
He had spoken to me as a seer, a man who had crossed a certain kind of threshold. When I think of him, I imagine him looking back over his shoulder from a distance, wondering when the rest of us will catch up. Among my college classmates, he had been dealt the worst hand by far. What had happened was wrong and grotesquely unfair, but it had happened just the same. And yet through some alchemy, Jon had been made better, more thoughtful, more perceptive. The bullet—his bullet—had taken things away, but it had given him things, too.
Epilogue: Counterfactuals
I am often asked if I regret going to Iraq or if I regret going into the Marine Corps. And it’s odd, because I can without too much effort imagine alternative universes for practically every historical scenario in the world—a world where the United States never enters World War I, a world where Saddam has the WMDs, a world where the battle of Fallujah never happens—but I have never been able to build a counterfactual world where I do not go into the Corps, a world where I don’t get the letters USMC tattooed across my back, a world where I don’t get on a plane and go to Iraq. I can even imagine a world where Erica doesn’t disappear to Vegas and we stay together and get married, but I cannot see the me who doesn’t go in, who doesn’t go over and get blown up and almost shot down.
I’m a writer. I have studied the mechanics of fiction at the graduate level, learned how to create and nurture alternate worlds in my own head. But there’s no alternate nonwar world of me.
In short, there’s no counterfactual of me.
It’s somehow too much to ask, to make a life without a war in the middle of it. It’s a little bit like what Freud said about trying to imagine your own death: it’s beyond my ken. It’s like a death in that it’s the absolute unknown, it opens a window to the world and lets every possibility in. It’s too much. When I start to think about it, my brain just goes to static, like a radio turned to a dead station. In every inner universe I make, I do go in, I do go over.
But let’s call this what it is: a failure of imagination on my part.
I know I am not normal in this way. I know some people who can’t stop their brains from tackling all the possibilities, who are terrorized by their counterfactuals, guys who after one bad episode or another see their insides turned into tape loops, tape loops with questions on them. Questions like What if? What if? What if? What if? or, worse yet, Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I? playing over and over in their heads. In between the questions, there are worlds. Worlds where they aren’t so afraid. Worlds where they aren’t so tired and falling asleep during security halts that they take the longer, more tedious, safer way back to their patrol base. Worlds where their best friend lives. Where he walks past the IED buried in the side of an irrigation ditch. A world where he goes back to the barracks at San Mateo, where he gets out of the Corps, takes a job at a coffee shop in Tucson, goes to Pima Community College on the G.I. Bill, eventually gets into U of A down the road. Or a world where the IED hits another guy in the patrol. Or where they take a long security halt at the turnaround point, take a breather, and everybody lives because they’re not so wasted.
Everyone does this. We all build counterfactuals out of our lives, even when we don’t realize it. What if I didn’t have that last drink? What if I’d taken that job in Baltimore? It is possibility that kills us in the end, sheer chance, a kind of optimism that tells us that anything is possible. Life doesn’t work this way, but we wish it did. We wish that life could be lived with the benefit of hindsight, with wisdom coming when it should. We wish we could go back and marry the right girl. We wish we could go back and take that test again.
I would not go through another war again. Yet I know that another one is coming. Another war is coming, and no one can do anything about it. In every world my mind makes, a war comes. Even now, it is making itself ready. Thinking about this, I recall what Heraclitus said:
Justice in our minds is strife
We cannot help but see
War makes us as we are.
War has made me as I am.
And there’s a kind of beauty in that, or at least a kind of order, something that helps me make sense of the world.
To me, asking Do you regret going to Iraq? or Do you regret going into the Corps? is almost like asking Do you believe in God? It’s a really big question, a question that many people can answer with ease but one that tells you a lot about that person, how they see the world, how they see the role that fate plays in human life. But when I think about it, what I usually say is this: I believe in nature. I believe in brokenness. I believe in wholeness. I believe in whatever it is that connects the one to the other. I believe in it in the way that a geologist believes in the mutability of hills, of waterfalls, of beaches. It just is. I went in and went over because the situation seemed to demand it. It was a similar attitude that some playwrights in ancient Greece took, a kind of tragic realism, of staring into the abyss of terror and suffering as a way of affirming life. To fully appreciate the joys of this world, one must understand how temporary they are, how fragile human existence is.
“Beneath those stars,” Melville wrote, “is a universe of gliding monsters.”
On the way back from my first trip to Iraq, I was chatting on the tarmac of an airfield near Fallujah with an old Marine buddy I’d chanced into. He’d left the infantry and become a helicopter pilot, and it was like he was a different person now. He was a guy who knew how to do all that incredible stuff up in the air, miracles really. I was trying
to imagine him in the cockpit when we got the word that some “angels” were arriving and for everyone to get in line. I stood beside my friend while he saluted. Then I learned what they meant by “angels.”
Two aluminum coffins with American flags stretched over them were being hoisted into the back of a C-130 by a forklift.
“Angels” were corpses.
A few minutes later, when we were about to load up on the plane, the crew chief stopped me and said, “Sir, I’m gonna need to get your camera from you.” He was the first of three guys to tell me that photographs weren’t allowed on the flight, including a major who, when we were halfway to Kuwait, unstrapped and walked the length of the plane to deliver the news.
I can see now that this tarmac was a kind of dividing line, a demarcation between one world and the next. On one side of the line, real people got blown up and shot in the face. Real people got mortared in the shitter and drowned in filthy canal water inside overturned Humvees. On the other side of the line, people referred to the dead as “angels” and made sure that no one took photos of them. Here was where the language changed. Here was where certain facts became unspeakable. Here, then, was where a certain kind of alchemy began, an alchemy that changed the facts of life and death, the horror of daily life in Iraq, into a kind of Sunday-school story.
What became of that world on the other side of the line? What became of that way of being, that way of feeling, that time, that history? What became of the Marines whom I sang the theme from Aladdin with on the way to the ambush site in Saqliwiyah? What became of the sergeant from 1/1 who cursed me in the hotel? What became of Reaper, the philosopher of Saydia? What became of the soldiers who jinxed me? Called out my fate like it was a common fact?
America didn’t look the same when I came back to it that first time. The houses were closed to me now, shuttered, the people foreign. I had only been gone three months, but it felt like years had passed. A silence came over my life, one I didn’t know how to break.
Later, after I was back from the war for a few years, I read a poem Siegfried Sassoon wrote called “Fight to a Finish.” Toward the end of the poem, Sassoon imagines leading a bayonet charge into a crowd of smug, patriotic civilians after a victory parade in London. The poem ends with an assault on Parliament, payback for a stupid war. It is a fantastical poem, written in a tone that seems intended to shock, but I wasn’t surprised when I read it. I didn’t serve in a war like Sassoon, but I recognized the anger, the feelings beneath it, feelings so potent that you never spoke of them, even to friends. Even to lovers. Even to yourself most of the time.
Sometimes when I get depressed or worried that my memories of the war are slipping, I get into my truck and make the trek up to La Jolla, that beautiful place that hovers over the dark Pacific like a hallucination, that place with the hills covered in what looks like mohair. I drive up past the Mormon temple, past the organic market and the pharmacy school, and I park, and I walk through the sliding doors of the VA and take the elevator up to Same-Day Psychiatric on Two North.
When I get there, I just sit and listen for a while, taking in the waiting room while they call out the names of those who are next. I spent hours waiting here for my name to be called. I used to hate waiting here, but now I don’t mind it so much, and I know my name won’t be called, at least not today. To my right is a man pouring his life into a cell phone, telling a friend that he’s so sorry, that he needs him to go into his bedroom and throw away all the coke in his backpack because he’s so sorry, but he can’t be trusted anymore. To my left is a man whose leg is going up and down like a jackhammer. Everywhere are the faces, each like a page from a book that never ends. Looking out over the room, which was full yesterday and will be full tomorrow, I sit thinking as the names of the chosen float through the air, and I wonder which one of them was in Danang, which one of them was in Fallujah, which one of them was in some godawful place in Afghanistan that I’ve never even heard of, which one has a heroin habit that will kill them, a wife who is going to leave them, which one has lost more than they ever knew they had, has paid more for their dreams than I ever paid for mine, and to all of them I say it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Mike, Kay, and Bev. Thank you to Ryan and Lisa Sims, Joe Garza, Michelle Latiolais, Ron Carlson, Geoffrey Wolf, Elliott Woods, Ted Genoways, Ramona Ausubel, Ismet Prcic, Nathan Phelps, Mitchel Zafer, Steve House, Steve Schall, Alex Gilvarry, Joel Kiker, Elizabeth Wyatt, Christine Eubank, Beverly Prange, Jesse Weiner, Margaux Wexberg-Sanchez, Rey Leal, Annessa Stagner, Jo Dery, Matt Sumell, Ryan Ridge, Jon Wiener, Tom Ricks, Ghislaine Boulanger, Gerald Nicosia, Marc Walker, Mike Bryant, Maggie Shipstead, Jen Percy, Derek Keller, Dewleen Baker, Leila Mansouri, Dan Morris, and Angie Wolf.
Thank you to Seth Fishman and Andy Kifer at the The Gernert Company. Thank you to Eamon Dolan and Ben Hyman and everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Thank you to Bryan Russell.
Thank you to Field Test Film Corps, Bob Sims, Edward Woods, Lisa Kenney, Bridgid MacSeoin, Leon Higley, Jacob Snyder, Jessica Halpin, Kees Marijs, Mary Jane Nealon, Patrick Austin, Matthew Philip Wee, Seth Tucker, Jill Britton, James Lemke, Evan McGee, Joshua Lewis, Matthew Desautel, Cheryl J. Taylor, Lorene Delany-Ullman, Patrick Coleman, Rob Kunzler, Brittni Waldow, Cindy Boyer, Mary Duran, Caroline Davies, Gunveen Kaur, Jane Satterfield, and Michael Pavlichek.
Thank you to the National Endowment for the Arts, to the MacDowell Colony, to the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, to the staff at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, to the staff of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, and to the U.S. Navy Seabee Museum in Port Hueneme, California.
Notes
While much of this book is based on my own life experience and firsthand reporting, I also relied on the hard work of a number of other researchers and writers. In these notes, I have tried not only to identify my sources but also to briefly explain how I arrived at certain conclusions. Research is a detective story. What follows is the trail of clues, some found in the library and in archives, some found on the internet, and others at conferences and lectures I attended. The story of PTSD is one with a poor signal-to-noise ratio—there are a lot of people saying a lot of things about it, many of them contradictory. Writing this book has taught me to be a better critical listener as well as a better critical thinker. I have also learned the value of peer-reviewed science, as well as the value of reaching out to thinkers who have been banished to the intellectual wilderness by the popular trends of the day. I have also come to appreciate anew the empirical value of poetry and fiction, the forms of inquiry that originally informed and inspired this book.
I also wish to honor the writers upon whose shoulders I stand. Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992) remains a foundational text and provides a superlative overview of the field of trauma studies from a psychiatric standpoint. Alice Sebold’s Lucky is a one-of-a-kind book: powerful and well written. It helped me immeasurably. Gerald Nicosia’s Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement (New York: Three Rivers, 2001) is an excellent history of the movement to have PTSD recognized in the 1970s. Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam (New York: Scribner, 1994) and Odysseus in America (New York: Scribner, 2002) both give a sense of how trauma was conceptualized in the ancient world and how Greek mythology can illuminate our understanding of trauma today. Ben Shephard’s A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) is an excellent survey, though it occasionally suffers from a curious ethnocentrism. Shephard’s treatment of the world wars is superb. His treatment of the American experience in Vietnam is less than superb. Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) is an enduring masterpiece and captures the cataclysm of World War I and how that conflict continues to influence our world today. An overlooked work of scholarship is Eric Leed’s No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge Un
iversity Press, 1979). Leed’s discussion of liminality and war neuroses is illuminating and informed much of my thinking. Laurence Gonzales’s Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013) thoughtfully examines the science behind trauma and resilience. From an organizational standpoint, I gleaned much from Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (to which I owe the literary conceit of a clinical “biography”) and Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Finally, I am indebted to William Gibson for teaching me about the concept of apophenia, which I first discovered in his novel Pattern Recognition.
Prologue: The Warning
[>] Apophenia: finding patterns: Sophie Fyfe of University College London, in her article “Apophenia, Theory of Mind and Schizotypy: Perceiving Meaning and Intentionality in Randomness” (Cortex 44, Nov-Dec 2008: 1316–1325), defines apophenia as “the perception of connections or meaning in unrelated events.” As William Gibson explained in a 2003 article in The Telegraph, “It’s probably projection, but I’m inclined to think that everyone experiences it, to some extent . . . It seems to me that it is the thing we do which distinguishes us from other species. We seem to be so evolved to do it that we’re prone to seeing faces in clouds. I bet birds don’t see birds in clouds, right?”
[>] a prominent psychoanalyst: The psychoanalyst I spoke to was Robert Stolorow of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles.
Introduction
[>] a handful of disgruntled Vietnam veterans: The best resource for those interested in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War “rap” groups is Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement by Gerald Nicosia. Nicosia collected six hundred oral histories from VVAW members, the transcripts of which are stored at the Dolphe Briscoe Center for American History in Austin, Texas. The importance of Nicosia’s contribution to the history of PTSD is hard to overestimate.
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