The Evil Hours Read online

  This change of identity also creates a dilemma for the society to which the survivor returns. As every military spouse can attest, the soldier who returns from war is different than the one who left, and it is perhaps this sense of a combatant’s differentness that led the Israelites to impose a strict weeklong period of exile on warriors returning from battle, as described in the book of Numbers. (“Anyone who has killed someone or touched someone who was killed must stay outside the camp seven days.”) Interestingly, in the cases of returning warriors and survivors of near-death experiences found in history, it is the survivor who is most often expected to do the work of the ritual cleansing. Having been “stained” by death or rape, the survivor is looked on as being out of place.

  This deep sense of separation from the normal world, this sense of, in the words of World War I veteran Charles Edward Carrington, “possessing a great secret which can never be communicated,” leads to the awkward conversations and misunderstandings that survivors often report when they return home. It is, as so many veterans have noted, as if they no longer speak the language of their countrymen. This language barrier, this inability on the part of the untraumatized to understand the existence of a place like No Man’s Land, further alienates the survivor. It is this language barrier that makes it possible for an otherwise thoughtful person to openly question whether a rape victim might have secretly wanted to be violated, might have in some way “been asking for it.” It is this language barrier that makes an unbloodied suburbanite ask a veteran whether or not he’d killed anyone in Iraq.

  To Leed, this liminal person, having journeyed to the boundaries of society and back, having seen it at its most extreme, has been granted a unique moral perspective. Examples of veterans, and of survivors of genocide and rape, who have become great critics of society abound. Indeed, as we shall see, the core group that fought to have war trauma officially recognized by psychiatry was a group of Vietnam veterans who, having taken part in war atrocities, felt compelled to make them known to the world. In Leed’s view, “As a man who had lived for years in No-Man’s-Land, he knew the nation and its pathologies from an exterior perspective.”

  Though he wrote No Man’s Land in the late seventies, Leed mentions Vietnam but once, quoting Chaim Shatan on how basic training is really about psychological restructuring, an argument that certainly rings true for me. Often my dreams about Iraq get mixed up with Texas A&M, where I enrolled in ROTC, first donned a uniform, first learned the Marine Corps hymn, and first chanted Kill, Kill, Blood Makes the Grass Grow! In that way, my dreams don’t really belong to me, they belong to that No Man’s Land that remains forever beyond my control, untamed, on the furthest margins of what might be called the self. They refuse my will, they touch and turn my past, they bend it into new and unforeseen shapes.

  One of the strangest things about war is that you never dream about it when you’re in it. Instead, you dream about holidays in the tropics, vast dinners with friends, the way your dad’s Impala looked in the sunshine, old lovers. It’s almost as if your mind knows the score, knows that you aren’t ready yet, and so it serves up these terrific entertainments, even as the war seeps into the bloodstream, the veins and capillaries, the synapses. Later, sometimes much later, is when the dreams come, good and bad. Sometimes they feel like intel briefs, updates from the unconscious telling you what’s up outside the wire, what really happened. It’s like the old story told by Michael Herr about the bullet that almost killed him. The bullet came so close that he never even heard it, so close that it took ten years before the sound finally reached him. That’s how it goes sometimes. Everything is fine until it isn’t. Shit happens, but you’re cool. Years later, in a Greyhound station in Green River, Utah, the fear finds you and changes everything.

  Sometimes I think that’s what happened to me in the movie theater that day. Before the movie, I’d had a good idea how close I’d come to dying in Iraq, all the close calls, the pizza box IEDs I’d run over that didn’t go off, the booby traps I’d stepped around. But, really, I didn’t know, or I should say that part of me knew, but I didn’t know that it knew. The movie explosion was a reminder, an all too realistic one, almost like a dispatch from that part deep inside of me that had recorded it all: here is what it would’ve looked like. Enjoy.

  One war-reporter friend of mine, who spent a year in Mosul with the National Guard before getting out and moving to Egypt to study Arabic, has one dream where he’s helping insurgents bury IEDs under the streets of Baghdad. When I asked him about it, he seemed to think that it had something to do with divided loyalties, about not always feeling like a “true” American, whatever the fuck that is, as if a conversation was happening between two very different chapters of his life, which is how I think life and war and loss work: your youth happens and you spend the rest of your life trying to figure out what it means.

  It’s a truism among psychologists that trauma messes with your sense of time, that it breaks your internal clock in some way. But to describe it as simply destroying your sense of time doesn’t quite do it justice. Post trauma, there are probably as many experiences of time as there are survivors. I’m frustrated by the fact that I have essentially lost years to my obsession with the war. To say that I am “haunted” by it doesn’t sound right to my ears, though in a certain sense it’s probably true. Something I say to friends a lot is that it still feels like 2004, the year I first went to Iraq, the year that the biggest lies about the war began to unravel, the year of Fallujah One and Fallujah Two, the year of Abu Ghraib, the year that Bush was reelected, the year my relationship with America changed forever, the year that was so full it seemed to drain the entire decade. The year, as well, that I watched Marines from my old regiment being sent to die in the streets of Fallujah because of an incompetence and duplicity that make me so angry I can scarcely begin to describe them. There comes a point in every man’s life when he sees that the magician’s hat is empty, that the government and the church are run by fools, and that virtue is far rarer than he’d been led to believe. It was my misfortune to see this at a comparatively young age and in an unusually dramatic fashion, one that was not easily forgotten. To forget what had happened and who was to blame seemed like an affront to memory itself. Time stopped that year, and looking back, I can see that I wasn’t really growing older so much as I was taking on a new version of time, a new way of being in the world.

  Since 2004, I have learned to trust people less. I have learned to trust America less. I worry that life is completely random, without center or cause, and that the world could blow up at any time. I drive slower, eat out less, drink more. I walk carefully over broken asphalt. I avoid crowds. I don’t go to action movies. Sometimes, when someone is following me on the sidewalk, I stop and let them pass. Sometimes, maybe when I hear an old song, I find myself missing the old America, the one that existed before 9/11. Sometimes I find myself missing the nineties, me in my twenties, fresh out of the Corps and loose in the world for the first time.

  Elise, my friend who was raped, said something similar. Thinking back on her wandering years, years when she’d forgotten how to trust people, when she’d chopped off all her hair so she could pretend to be someone else, she said something you hear a lot of trauma survivors say. She said, “I want those years back.” Now, I can’t say I feel exactly that way, in part because rape and war are two very different things to go through, and war is more than just terror. War is also thrilling and revelatory. War is an adventure. War is history in fast forward. But I want something equally impossible. I want a different world. A better, less venal world, one where stupid wars aren’t started and then forgotten about when they lose their entertainment value, and sometimes I play a game with myself that historians like to play; it’s called creating a counterfactual, a what-if realm where the Germans won World War II, Lee Harvey Oswald’s shots missed JFK, or the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Gore instead of Bush. You change just one thing and imagine the different world that would result.


  And so I build a world where three Blackwater contractors don’t get lazy and decide to take a shortcut through downtown Fallujah in March 2004 and get ambushed and killed and burned and strung up from the pedestrian bridge over the Euphrates west of the city. A world where their charred bodies aren’t filmed, don’t make the evening news back home, and don’t cause the president to order the Marines into Fallujah to punish its citizens, against the advice of commanders on the scene. A world where we don’t invade Iraq, a world without a 9/11, without a Gulf War, without an Islamic Revolution in Iran, without Allen Dulles in charge of the CIA in 1953, and so on.

  It’s fun to see how far you can take it, to see how they look, these alternate worlds. And it teaches you some things, too. It teaches you that the world depends, has always depended, on the smallest details, every single last one of them needing to happen the way they do so that the world ends up the way it does, to make us the way we are. Accidents. Statistics moving through space.

  But in the end, it’s still just a game, a dressed-up kind of nostalgia, and really it’s a dodge, a way to not think about what’s really bothering me, and sometimes I have to rely on my involuntary memories, memories I forgot I had, my dreams, my nightmares, to remind me.

  Which they always do. Almost every night I’ll have a dream about a thing that happened over there, a thing I’d forgotten about, something hilarious or cruel or wonderful a grunt said; the cigarette I shared with a wounded soldier from the 10th Mountain as we watched my first shamal come in, turning the sky blood red; the Aladdin songs I sang with a bunch of Marines in a seven-ton on the way to reinforce a platoon that had been wiped out near Saqliwiyah. Usually when it happens, I wake up smiling and excited because I know that I have the rest of the day, the rest of my life, to think about it, to figure out what it means. And then I thank God that I survived.

  5

  MODERN TRAUMA

  I. The Good War?

  WITHIN THE HISTORY of psychological trauma, the era that remains most shrouded in myth and misapprehension is World War II and its aftermath. In the popular imagination, the war, which lasted from 1939 to 1945 and ended the lives of an estimated sixty million people, is still somehow remembered as “The Good War,” and the veterans who fought in it are generally regarded as having returned home, put their uniforms in the closet, and simply gotten on with their lives. For the United States, the war came on the heels of the Great Depression, and the soldiers who fought the Nazis and the Japanese came from a culture that had little patience for people who dwelled on their personal problems. Karl Shapiro, the poet laureate who served in the Pacific theater, described the group of young writers who’d fought, saying, “We all came out of the same army and joined the same generation of silence.” Included in this generation of silence was J. D. Salinger, who in one of his early stories wrote that “I believe, as I’ve never believed in anything else before, that it’s the moral duty of all men who have fought and will fight in this war to keep our mouths shut, once it’s over, never again to mention it in any way.”

  In America, stories of veterans who came home and kept their mouths shut are commonplace. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley describes how his father, who famously helped raise the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima, avoided discussing his role in the battle, instructing his children to wave off reporters and curiosity seekers with a cover story that featured him on a fishing trip to Canada. It was only after the senior Bradley died that his son, while arranging his father’s effects, discovered a trove of old letters that revealed how much the war had tormented his father.

  In October 1945, my maternal grandfather returned from the Pacific, where he’d served as a Seabee, and never uttered a word about the war. For most of her life, my mother knew almost nothing about her father’s military service, never for instance knowing why he had a large puffy scar on his left hand, nor understanding why he never spoke of the war. This near-perfect state of ignorance reigned until 2011, when we requested his records from the military’s storage facility in St. Louis. While no shocking revelations emerged from his personnel file (he spent most of the war on a tiny atoll in the middle of the Pacific; the scar on his left hand was caused by an accident with a power saw), it nevertheless highlighted the degree to which my grandfather had lived as a stranger to his family, silent and unknown. A cipher. “He came from the Midwest,” my mother explained. “People just didn’t talk about their problems then. It was considered impolite.”

  The refusal of the average veteran to talk about the war was one thing, but the larger, enduring problem with the trauma of World War II, historically speaking, stems from how this silence was viewed by the culture. As psychiatrist Judith Herman explains in Trauma and Recovery, “As long as they could function on a minimum level, they were thought to have recovered. With the end of the war, the familiar process of amnesia set in once again. There was little medical or public interest in the psychological condition of returning soldiers.” Nearly sixty years after the Japanese surrendered, this idea that keeping your mouth shut helped you recover was still being promoted. In the November 8, 2004, issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell, in an article titled “Getting Over It,” examined the evolving attitudes toward trauma, utilizing Sloan Harris’s iconic novel about a veteran turned business executive, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. At the beginning of the article, Gladwell posed the following question: “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit put the war behind him. Why can’t we?”

  In fact, the evidence indicates that many World War II veterans were unable to put the war behind them. Millions of veterans were haunted by the war for the rest of their lives, returning to a culture that celebrated them in ceremony but preferred not to trouble itself with the messy details of their service. (The U.S. government encouraged this ignorance. In 1945, when the U.S. Army learned of John Huston’s plan to screen his war trauma documentary Let There Be Light for some friends at the Museum of Modern Art, it had the film seized and banned, claiming that it violated the privacy of the soldiers shown.) During the war itself, the incidence of psychological breakdown in the U.S. Army was three times that of World War I. Over half a million men were permanently evacuated from the fighting for psychiatric reasons, enough to man fifty combat divisions.

  At the end of the war, General Eisenhower ordered a commission to look into these “lost divisions.” The authors of the official report, titled Combat Exhaustion, concluded that

  there is no such thing as “getting used to combat” . . . Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure . . . psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare . . . Most men were ineffective after 180 or even 140 days. The general consensus was that a man reached his peak of effectiveness in the first 90 days of combat, that after that his efficiency began to fall off, and that he became steadily less valuable thereafter until he was completely useless . . . The number of men on duty after 200 to 240 days of combat was small and their value to their units negligible.

  Most of these casualties didn’t improve once they got back home, either. While the mental health of the Greatest Generation was almost completely ignored for thirty years, the few inquiries that were made showed a clear pattern of what today would be labeled “chronic post-traumatic stress.” One such study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1951, examined two hundred World War II veterans and found that 10 percent of them still suffered from “combat neurosis.” Subsequent studies into the traumatic experiences of World War II veterans in the eighties found some of the highest PTSD rates ever recorded. One study, which zeroed in on Pacific theater POWs, discovered that nearly forty years after the war, more than 85 percent of them suffered from PTSD. In a 1987 study, eight out of ten former Pacific POWs had a form of “psychiatric impairment,” more than one in four had PTSD, and nearly one in five were clinically depressed. As Matthew Friedman, the first executive director
of the VA’s National Center for PTSD, explained, “World War II occurred in a different generation and society didn’t acknowledge the psychological consequences of war in the forties any more than it did in the sixties . . . People [at the time] didn’t talk about what they called ‘traumatic neuroses,’ or combat stress . . . Yes, there were all kinds of dollars given to the VA, ‘hire a vet,’ the G.I. Bill, the ticker tape parades and all that. But when you get down to the nitty-gritty, in terms of the nation’s willingness to acknowledge the devastating consequences of World War II, that’s only happening retrospectively.” The postwar years were dominated by this paradox: Americans were, on the one hand, surpassingly proud and supportive of their veterans, but on the other, they took almost no interest in their inner problems. Part of this was just human nature. People simply wanted to move on, and if some vets were struggling, then that was their own problem, as it had been before the war and during the Depression.

  If anyone embodied this paradox, it was Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier to emerge from the war. Born into a large sharecropper family in Hunt County, Texas, Murphy was abandoned, along with his siblings, by his father during the Depression, forcing Murphy to hunt game to put food on the table. After he was rejected by the Marine Corps because of his age, his sister helped him falsify the enlistment papers for the army. A supremely talented soldier, he was awarded the Medal of Honor after killing fifty Germans during the Allied invasion of southern France and was later profiled in Life magazine. His battlefield prowess bordered on the mythic. One time, he’d heard that a group of officers was leaving on a reconnaissance patrol beyond friendly lines. Unbeknownst to them, Murphy trailed after the group. He said, years later, “I figured those gentlemen were going to run into trouble; so I tagged along, about twenty-five yards to their rear, to watch the stampede.” When the patrol found itself pinned down, Murphy charged the enemy position, killing five Germans and wounding another three.