The Evil Hours Read online

  For all its pathos and drama, World War I represents something of a lost opportunity for the cause of trauma. The war took an unspeakable toll on soldiers’ minds, and for a time, the world sat up and noticed. In Britain alone, there were twenty shell-shock hospitals and numerous “Homes for Recovery” by the end of the war. Shell shock was the first instance of a trauma-caused mental disorder being acknowledged, and while the term itself became confusing, it offered a chance of recognition, of adding to the store of knowledge about post-traumatic stress.

  Oddly, no veterans movement ever coalesced in Great Britain. Prominent veterans of the war, such as Harold Macmillan and Clement Attlee, were known to reminisce about the war “at the drop of a hat,” but they did so as individuals, never as members of any kind of movement. Some have argued that the issue broke down as a matter of class. The most high-profile sufferers of shell shock were anything but inclined to make a political cause out of it. Sassoon is again useful as an exemplar: always somewhat aloof, he wrote extensively about the war, but the idea of agitating for what amounted to a psychiatric issue was simply not in the cards. After the war, Rivers returned to his academic work at Cambridge; his research on physical immobility and trauma was scarcely read.

  Across the Atlantic, the American Legion, established in 1919 by veterans who had fought in France, became a powerful voice for the treatment of returned soldiers, though like the Grand Army of the Republic, the dominant post–Civil War veterans organization, the Legion focused on pensions and the funding of local veterans hospitals rather than on a mental health agenda. The political meaning of the veteran experience was a dominant motif in the interwar politics of Germany, France, and Italy (Mussolini used veteran support when he took power in 1922), but the trauma narrative itself was politicized in a way that rarely served the psychological needs of the individual veteran.

  The one exception to this vast amnesia was an American who never saw the war firsthand, Abraham Kardiner. A sometimes obsessive man, Kardiner’s long medical education culminated with a personal analysis by Freud himself in Vienna. In 1922, he began work at No. 81 Veterans’ Bureau Hospital in the Bronx. Over a four-year period, he saw over a thousand war-related neuroses. He later described the experience as “the most instructive and the most dramatic” of his entire career, but also very disturbing. There was nothing in the medical literature to explain the “tortures and discomforts” he was attempting to treat.

  In 1939, as war was again breaking out across Europe, he began work on a comprehensive theoretical study, The Traumatic Neuroses of War, in which he noted the episodic amnesia that dominated the field, saying, “The subject of neurotic disturbances consequent upon war has, in the past 25 years, been submitted to a good deal of capriciousness in public interest and psychiatric whims. The public does not sustain its interest, which was very great after World War I, and neither does psychiatry. . . . In part, this is due to the declining status of the veteran after a war.”

  The book would be almost completely ignored for over thirty years. Kardiner’s message was one that no one wanted to hear: for war-damaged men, unless active, systematic treatment was undertaken, the prospects for recovery were slim. In the 1970s, as American medicine confronted an epidemic of mental disorders among Vietnam veterans, Kardiner’s work was the only resource psychiatrists could turn to. His predictions about the capricious public interest in war neurosis proved all too accurate.

  4

  THE HAUNTED MIND

  IN TREATING SHELL-SHOCKED soldiers, doctors during World War I were at first inclined to address the ailment strictly as a physiological phenomenon, as if the concussive force of the shell had damaged something in the body of the sufferer. While people suffering post-traumatic symptoms may experience their distress as forms of somatic dysfunction, they are just as often experienced as paranormal, uncanny phenomena or compulsive returns to the past. Survivors look back and see messages written into the world. Warnings, omens, sermons in the form of premonitions. Clues. Survivors look back and remember the unanswered email, the curious out-of-the-blue remark from a stranger, the way the traffic aligned the moment before impact, putting five red cars together in the same lane. The unused plane ticket, the trees whose leaves were out of season, the freakish weather, the odd journal entry. What is it to be a person who notices such things, to become a detective of one’s own life? What is it about terror that makes us into creatures so lacking in normal faith that we begin looking for a deeper order in the world, drifting into a kind of gnostic wonder? What happens at the moment of horror that makes us so lonely that we begin to see the world as haunted, to keep such details as company? Does terror in its total mystery awaken some need for pattern making, some more ancient way of understanding the world?

  What is it that makes us want to believe that a traumatic event has a life of its own? That it is searching for a place in time to express itself, to make itself known to the world?

  The day before I hit an IED in Baghdad, I went out on a patrol with some soldiers who couldn’t believe that I had never been blown up before. A month before that, while waiting for a helicopter to Dora in a cooling hut next to the flight line at Camp Fallujah, I had what I believed at the time to be an intimation of death. It came in the form of a man whom I recognized even though we’d never met.

  He was waiting, like me, for a helicopter out of Anbar, beginning the endless journey home or, like so many other citizens of the war—contractors, retired shooters, wanderers, and mercenaries—making their way from one assignment to another, hitting the line of bases strung along the Euphrates like old frontier towns. I was on my way to the latest in a series of embeds and filled with a fatigue that seemed to stretch back into childhood, making me feel that I might spend the rest of my life trying to get on the other side of it. It was the sort of fatigue that went beyond simply making you feel exhausted and took on an aggressive character, actually causing you to question certain fundamental principles in your life.

  I’d been living hand to mouth with the infantry for months, and opening my eyes after a nap inside the cooling hut, my heart froze. There I was, stretched out a few feet away on the filthy plywood floor, eerily still, head resting on a backpack, immersed in a book whose title I couldn’t make out. The floor seemed to turn to liquid beneath me. It was impossible: my double in brown-canvas utility trousers.

  He had the same build as me. We both possessed an unmistakable college boy look, a wholesome angularity that almost seemed designed to anger first sergeants. Like me, he was a dandy with a taste for the old world adventurer. He wore tastefully scuffed Italian mountaineering boots, displaying his (our) weakness for needlessly technical gear in a war that required no such extravagances. It was as if I were seeing myself for the first time. Nevertheless, it is a man’s books that tell the inner story, and if it wasn’t for the book he held, I might have been temporarily fascinated and then fallen back to sleep. Once my eyes adjusted to the light of the hut and I made out the book’s title, I went from being intrigued to a sort of fearful wonderment: he was reading the very book that rested inside my identical Canadian-made rucksack: an out-of-print Black Dog & Leventhal copy of T. E. Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert (the précis of his magnificent Seven Pillars of Wisdom), available only through certain rare-book dealers in Great Britain. It was the only copy I’d ever seen apart from the one I owned. Seeing the book, I felt ill. The idea came to me that he, whoever he was, wasn’t an accident, that he had been inserted here for some purpose.

  The fear grew, clenching and unclenching itself like a fist inside my ribs. I knew that in certain mythologies the appearance of a double was viewed as a warning, a premonition of coming death. If this were true, then it was possible that a version of him had been following me throughout Iraq, lurking in my peripheral vision, waiting for the right moment to present himself. I saw him watching from inside a hovel in Karma, through the parting of a window curtain, through a half-cracked doorway, through the dark of a peephole, almo
st as if he were not just a warning but an actor in the drama of my demise. Was it possible that I’d seen him before but hadn’t recognized him? Was this how it worked? Did a man take on a heightened perceptive power the closer he moved toward death? Was this why so many men were overtaken by a feeling of calm when they passed, as if the end were something like a learning process, an acknowledgment of a lost memory? Why was I being allowed to see him now?

  Then, as if he’d felt my gaze, he stood up, collected his gear, and stepped out of the hut. Without thinking, I rose from the plywood floor and hurried after him, out into the assembled crowd of Marines, contractors, and weary straphangers, hundreds of them on their way in and out of theater, piling off trucks and Humvees, carrying with them the body heat of the vast war and their own small reveries and agonies, the unspeakable melancholy of all their gear stacked into long moraines that stretched along the edge of the landing zone. Almost at once, I experienced a strange elation, the kind of thrill that seizes every chase. I ran toward him, taking brisk, overstated strides, but he was already weaving himself into the knots of men crowding the gravel field between the hut and a wall of seven-ton trucks. For a moment, I felt free, tethered to him, enmeshed in mysterious adventure. I could feel the fatigue draining, the lava in my limbs burning away in the pursuit. I saw him slip behind a tall SAW gunner, catching a final glimpse of the exquisitely weathered backpack dancing on his frame, his impeccable gait, the bulk of Lawrence still in his hand, middle finger marking his place. Then he was gone.

  Looking back, I found myself thinking that he was a vision of myself already returned, a doppelganger in the Norse tradition who arrives before his twin departs. But I saw him before Dora, before The Question, before I met Reaper, before the IED in Saydia. Did I know something without knowing how I knew it? If he was here for me, what message was he carrying? Was he just the embodiment of how I really saw myself: a vagabond beholden to no one, a grown boy who’d read his Lawrence with a little too much enthusiasm, a guy who’d taken it all a little too seriously and found himself rootless, wandering through a war that seemed to grow more meaningless by the month?

  Sometimes I think that he came from the same fund of superstition I had been drawing on ever since I started going to Iraq, a fund that had been augmented by all the books I’d read and movies I’d seen where soldiers carried lucky charms, stuffed animals, and rabbit feet. All those previously mundane objects made holy by the war. I’ll wonder if those talismans and alternative beliefs about life are what drew me to the Marine Corps in the first place. A knowledge of them gives you a great sense of power that stays with you long after you get out and makes you think you’ve mastered something about life itself.

  And in that way, maybe the other me was just a messenger sent to show me who I was or dreamed myself to be, a dispatch rider bearing the same questions that Reaper would pose in extremis a month later. What was I doing in Iraq? Who was I now? Who was the war making me into? What exactly was I trying to prove to myself, to the world, by being over here when I didn’t have to be? Why did I keep coming back, putting myself in more kinds of danger than I could understand, trying to write about a war that people back home had only the dimmest interest in, people that increasingly seemed to me to live their entire lives like fish in an aquarium, insulated, glassed off from the real world? Was there some other force at work, some invisible magnet that kept drawing me back? Some sense that there was an honor, a distinction, to be found in mortal danger?

  Modern science tends to look on such episodes as, among other things, examples of apophenia, events meaningful only in retrospect, or as the product of an altered state of consciousness, like the doppelgangers that mountaineers often report seeing at high altitude. An omen, properly understood, is like the foreshock of a major earthquake. A foreshock only becomes a foreshock in the wake of the temblor that follows it, as seismologists begin creating a model of what happened. In the absence of an earthquake, what might be described as a foreshock is instead simply called a tremor, one of the dozen-odd minor seismic events that happen across Southern California on any given day. Or so the thinking goes.

  And yet there is something to these uncanny events, these mental foreshocks and aftershocks. If, as Freud argued, dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, then perhaps there is practical meaning to be found in these visitations, even if they are only mirrors made by the self. Stories, self-fulfilling prophecies, hallucinations. Flashbacks. It is tempting to look at such phenomena as negative symptoms, as deficits of perception, but keeping in mind how common hallucinations are in all cultures, perhaps—once we acknowledge their surreality—we can use them as tools, as lenses into the mind of the survivor, rather than seeing them only as evidence of pathology. Perhaps, as Laurence Gonzales wrote in his book on disaster and resilience, Surviving Survival, there is a useful neurological correlate at work, a negotiation that happens during such hauntings between the lower, older parts of the brain and the neocortex. Perhaps there is something of value to be found in this conversation, this call and response between instinct and imagination.

  The year after she was raped in a tunnel in Syracuse, Alice Sebold felt “sharp, stabbing pains” in her abdomen at 8:56 p.m. while at a poetry reading the week before Thanksgiving, which was the same time, as the Syracuse Police Department later reported, that one of her friends was being raped in Sebold’s apartment.

  “We’ve got an exact time,” the female detective said. “She looked up at her digital clock. It was eight fifty-six p.m.”

  “When I felt sick,” I said.

  “What?” The female detective looked mystified.

  This event, we learn later, was part of a larger feeling about her postrape life. “My whole world was turning over; whatever else I’d had or known became eclipsed. There was no chance to escape, I realized; from now on this would be it. My life and the lives of those around me. Rape.” Not merely obsessed with it or defined by it, Sebold had been overtaken, eclipsed by her rape, as with a celestial body whose reflected light has been blocked by another body. Within the space of a year, Sebold had been raped and one of her best friends had been raped. It was as if her entire world had been raped.

  The literature of trauma contains a wealth of similar unsettling phenomena, and because trauma can tattoo the imagination and disrupt our normal powers of narrative, it can create episodes that seem supernatural in origin. Ambrose Bierce, the most important American writer to actually fight in the Civil War, wrote that he was haunted by “phantoms of that blood-stained period” and continued to see “visions of the dead and dying” for the rest of his life. Freud, a passionately secular man, discussed the tendency of World War I veterans to repetitively relive their traumas in their dreams, which he described as having a “daemonic character,” having first broached the subject of such repetitions in an essay titled “The Uncanny.” Seventy years later, Cathy Caruth, a writer with seemingly no reservations about the supernatural’s relationship to trauma, declared in Trauma: Explorations in Memory that “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.”

  Beliefs about trauma’s connection to the spiritual realms remain strong even today. Bear Creek Ranch, a Pentecostal Christian organization located in Portal, Georgia, and profiled in a 2013 book by journalist Jen Percy, offers exorcisms for 199 dollars, asserting that PTSD can be cured only through “deliverance.” The proprietors of this retreat claim to have conducted five thousand such exorcisms, including casting out the demons of army veteran Caleb Daniels, who lost eight of his buddies in a 2005 helicopter crash in Afghanistan. Daniels, who is no longer associated with the group, described being visited by a “destroyer demon,” intent upon punishing him for both “killing and living.” Consumed by survivor’s guilt, he began to hallucinate that his dead buddies had crowded into his bedroom. “Everywhere he went, he saw them, their burned bodies, watching him,” wrote Percy. Eventually, he was haunted by a demon he called “Destroyer,” a six-foot-five buffalo with h
orns. “It was a shadow. It was death. It was the gathered souls of all his dead friends.” According to Percy, the owners of the ranch believe that “people are in bondage to a pattern of sin. Trauma is the doorway through which demons can pass.”

  That such possessions occur is, on a certain level, unsurprising. Everyone carries with them arresting memories of particular events that come to define them, both positive and negative, events that can seem to enshadow everything that follows. Graduations, road trips, breakups, broken bones. Such are the raw materials of life, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We are our scars, it seems. Neuroscientists have long known that not all memories are created equal. James McGaugh, a pioneering memory researcher at the University of California, Irvine, recalls his grandson Tristan saying, as his mother pulled a T-shirt over his head, “Remember when I fell at Kirby’s house and cut my chin? I had this shirt on.” Tristan had fallen a year earlier. According to McGaugh, “Significant experiences create strong memories.”

  But the extraordinary flashback memories associated with PTSD are more than just strong memories, and psychologists think that flashbacks may be stored in the brain in a different “format” than normal autobiographical memories. According to Chris Brewin, a researcher at University College London who studied the memories of sixty-two civilian PTSD patients, there is a radical difference between autobiographical memories, which can be verbalized, and flashback memories, which remain beyond the reach of language and can flare up if there is any reference to the traumatic event or any sensory stimuli associated with the event. This “dual representation theory” posits that the most toxic memories remain sequestered even from other memories of the same traumatic event. That such uncontrollable memories of the dead and dying might, in the case of Bierce, have been construed as “phantoms” isn’t hard to imagine.