The Evil Hours Read online

  Virtually every survivor of trauma, whether or not they experience diagnosable post-traumatic stress, returns to the regular world and quickly recognizes that things are not as they were. People behave differently. There is an element of strangeness, a sense, often uncommunicated, of being marked by a kind of scarlet letter, even if one has not violated any moral code. In fact, in these situations, one’s degree of innocence or complicity in events can seem almost beside the point, as if one’s luck or simple fate is what is at stake. Often this change of perception is expressed in physical, spatial terms, as if the scope of what has transpired is so vast that it serves to alter one’s material position in the world. One British World War I veteran described his postwar existence as one lived in “a mental internment camp.” Alice Sebold, in her bestselling memoir Lucky, which describes the aftermath of her violent rape at age nineteen, looked out at the faces of her college classmates less than an hour after she had been raped and saw that she “was now on the other side of something they could not understand. I didn’t understand it myself.”

  This palpable sense of not belonging, of being “on the other side of something” after trauma, has in fact been widely noted. Anthropologists who study tribal societies describe this state as one of “liminality,” which comes from the Latin word for “threshold.” Arnold van Gennep coined the term in his 1908 Rites of Passage, a book that draws on his studies of the tribes of southwestern Africa. The liminal state, as observed by van Gennep, was thought to be “dangerous” and “precarious” because of its social ambiguity and the conflicting, paradoxical demands it placed on both the individual and society. In tribal society, liminal states, such as adolescence, were punctuated by ceremonies designed to “accompany a passage from one situation to another or from one cosmic or social world to another.” Weddings, graduations, bar mitzvahs, and quinceañeras are all examples of van Gennepian rites of passage, which end dramatically and decisively with the person’s new status made clear to the community. Yet as Victor Turner, an influential anthropologist, pointed out, the modern world has no such “rites of incorporation” to mark the transition from the underworld of trauma to the everyday world, saying, “The liminal persona, in this case the returning veteran, is not alive, not dead, but somehow both and neither.”

  It wasn’t until the summer of 2009, some two years after Saydia, that I got the first hint that I was “on the other side of something.” I was in a theater watching an action movie with my girlfriend when a black curtain fell over my head. The world disappeared for a few minutes. Looking around, I noticed that I was pacing the lobby of the theater, my head on a swivel, looking at people’s hands to make sure they weren’t carrying. My mind had gone dark, but my body was back in Iraq.

  I managed to slip back into the theater and sit back down next to my girlfriend. I looked around to see if it had happened to anyone else, but they were all engrossed in the movie.

  “What happened?” I asked Erica, who seemed as confused as I was.

  “There was an explosion in the movie. You got up and ran out of the theater.”

  Soon after, I began to have dreams with explosions in them. Sometimes they were about Saydia. Sometimes innocent items exploded more or less at random—an apple, a garbage can, a box of Chinese takeout. Over time, I began to see that Saydia was beginning to infiltrate the present, albeit in a slightly disguised form, as with the exploding garbage can, which I understood to be related to the loud garbage truck that jolted me awake every Thursday morning. My dreams about Saydia were frightening, but I sometimes saw them as a kind of debriefing, a way of examining different versions of the past, and as meditations on what had happened, or might have happened, in the street that afternoon in Saydia. Sometimes the gunner was decapitated by the blast. Sometimes a machinegun opened up from the neighborhood and wasted us all. Frequently, a member of my old Marine platoon was in the Humvee next to me, watching, shaking his head in disgust, or providing a sort of color commentary on the action.

  The dreams usually ended the same way. Something would explode, unleashing a tidal wave of blackness that obliterated everything, and I would wake up with my heart racing. I was dead. This was what the blackness meant. The movie explosion had gone off, just as it had in Saydia, and it had given me a glimpse of my own death. But before things could go any further, my brain would shut everything down, like an overloaded electrical grid; everything would go dark, and then I would wake up. It was just as Freud had noted nearly a century before: one’s own death is unimaginable.

  For months after the movie, my unconscious debriefed me like this. It didn’t happen every night, but it occurred often enough that sleep became an ordeal, something to be worked up to, like an athletic contest. It got so that preparing for bed was like getting ready for a night patrol. I would set my alarm, put up the blackout curtains, close and lock every door and window in the house, recheck them, and ensure that all the paths in the house were clear and all the shades were drawn. After all that, I would take my sleep medicine, usually a mix of prescription and nonprescription pills, depending on my mood, and then put my earplugs in and my blinders on and pray that my mind would behave itself for the next eight hours. Part of me got a black pleasure from it, as it made me feel that it was somehow an honor to be haunted, as if the war had touched me so deeply that it had granted me access to the darkest chambers of the mind. Part of me was ashamed of the dreams, of the realization that I was trapped inside a cliché: the veteran so obsessed with his own past that even his unconscious made love to it every night.

  There were other hints that I was on the far side of something. These usually came in times of uncertainty or stress, such as when I received three ludicrously expensive parking tickets in a single week, when I got the cold sweats during a bumpy airplane ride over Cape Cod, or when I saw the fear on Erica’s face whenever I got angry, which was often.

  For several years after the war, Erica and I lived in a kind of postwar bliss, happily trapped in the time-capsule of our love. We had met before my final trip to Iraq, and I was immediately taken by her beauty, her wide-ranging mind, her joie de vivre, and her exquisite wit, which made her seem at times like a dame from a hard-boiled detective novel. From day one, we shared a bond that seemed immune to the normal laws of life and career. Coming home to her, my life seemed to make a certain kind of sense, as if the world had kept its promise. When she picked me up at LAX in 2007, I saw her standing behind a gate in baggage claim, blushing hotly, angry at me for the ordeal I’d put her through. Finally, she relented, greeting me with her trademark “Hey, bub!” and kissing me wildly.

  Women have always played a pivotal role in the drama of homecoming from war. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’s ten-year journey back from the Trojan War doesn’t end when he sets foot in his hometown of Ithaca, but rather when he is finally reunited with his wife, Penelope. Men, left to their own devices, turn into emotional nihilists: wild, cruel, and death-obsessed. Looking back on those heady days after I returned from Iraq, I can see that the drama of my reunion with Erica was an elemental experience on par with the war itself, a struggle to reconcile the two halves of myself—the dark with the light, the hard with the soft, the very masculine stoicism that war demands with a woman’s sensitivity. I’d always admired her tough exterior, but Erica’s presence somehow had a softening effect on me in the months after I returned, almost as if her sarcastic demeanor allowed me to lower my guard. I couldn’t relate to others after what I’d been through, but Erica had been in it with me from the very beginning. She had seen me preparing my gear for my long months in the field before I left. She had read my strained emails from Fallujah, listened to me on the phone from Baghdad as I tried to reconcile what I was seeing every day with what the media was reporting. It was as if I didn’t need to tell her what I’d been through. She already understood, somehow. We had survived the war. Whatever followed would be child’s play, surely.

  Then, in 2010, right before the holidays, Erica disappeared.
Her car was gone and there was no answer when I called her cell phone. Two weeks later, on Christmas Eve, she phoned from Las Vegas to tell me it was over. She was tired of my secrecy, she would explain later. “You go off into this other place, and it’s like I can’t reach you.” Oddly, this turn of events, while certainly disappointing, was not overly shocking to me, and even when it finally sank in that Erica would not be returning and that our pantomime of connubial bliss was over, I didn’t cry. Tears had become something beyond my ability. In these sorts of situations, I did exactly as I had been trained: I went numb and waited for the time to pass. When I explained Erica’s departure to my friends, their jaws hit the floor. She just disappeared? Like poof? For two weeks? Not even a note?

  It was a rotten deal, no doubt. Yet something in me knew that Erica had been capable of this sort of thing all along. That she would surface with a phone call from Vegas seemed somehow in character for her. I had always admired that hint of the femme fatale in her, so what right did I have to be surprised? I knew in some objective way that I had seen a lot of awful things happen to a lot of people, so when chance turned on me in the form of a capricious woman, it wasn’t entirely unexpected. This world was designed from the ground up to hurt us, to break us, all of us, into the tiniest little pieces. What made me think I was so special? Who was I to think that I should be spared? That was like going out into the rain and expecting to not get wet.

  There had been other reasons, other complications, to be sure. I was a working writer, a career choice that often came with an unspoken vow of poverty, which put a lot of pressure on our relationship. The writing, whatever else it did, took me to the same place that a lot of veterans ended up: the dark cave of my head, where the only sound was the echo of my own voice. It takes a long time, too long, to learn that the brain’s job is to hide the truth of trauma from you and that no amount of thinking, however penetrating and well informed, is going to help you locate it. Nobody ever said that nightmares tell the truth, or even a portion of the truth, though their allure is that we think they do.

  I can see now that Erica was simply unprepared for what was coming, the sheer weight of all my unprocessed dread. Not that I was prepared. Who could be? I’d been surrounded by death for so long that I’d forgotten how to live. Living, I was learning, was harder than just surviving. It reminded me of something I’d heard a Vietnam vet say: just because your body was safe didn’t mean that your mind was. I had been changed and expanded by the war, but it was an expansion that seemed to have put me out of balance with the world, with Erica. I hated her for leaving, but what could I do?

  Relationships, when they end, are not unlike car crashes. Hidden energies only hinted at in regular motion are violently released, demolishing the carefully constructed bodies we depend on every day. With Erica gone, everything became more difficult. I felt for the first time that I was alone in dealing with all the pain and uncertainty in my life. My nightmares and general disaffection with the world seemed to double. Occasionally, at sunset, I would hear the Muslim call to prayer, even though I lived dozens of miles from any mosque. As a journalist in Iraq, my greatest fear had always been that I would be kidnapped and tortured. In Erica’s absence, this healthy awareness of my surroundings blossomed into a consuming paranoia that I was being followed whenever I left my apartment.

  The morbidity of my imagination was astonishing: disaster and loss were my constant companions. The war had taught me some things about physics, and my mind transformed this knowledge into a series of visions: cars exploding on peaceful residential streets, IEDs welded to innocent light poles, helicopters losing power and crashing into suburban canyons. Sometimes it was willful, and, wondering what residues of the war remained, I would create my own daydreams of destruction. Surveying a bustling mall scene, I would call IEDs into existence, watching as a fireball erupted into the air, eviscerating the shoppers. Wherever I went, there seemed to be legions of amputees, reminders of wounded Marines I’d seen, limbs I’d almost lost. For reasons beyond my ken, when I looked at perfectly normal people, my mind would begin to subtract limbs from them. An arm resting on a hip became a mangled memento of an IED in Ramadi, of the machinegunner I’d seen lose a hand near Karma. Everything became a reminder of death’s omnipotence. It was as if my mind was insisting that the war be brought home and that true peace was an obscenity, an affront to life’s stark reality. And, always, there were the awful mornings when, suddenly awake, I would wonder where Erica was and why there always seemed to be a helicopter hovering over my apartment.

  There was a time when I believed that there was only a certain amount of suffering that a person should expect in life. Essential to this belief was the idea that a person returning from war was basically owed a measure of easy happiness from the world, a peace dividend if you will. As a former Marine who had been in and out of a war zone for years, I felt entitled to my own peace dividend. In the courtroom of my mind, I decided I had suffered enough. The end of my relationship with Erica shattered this illusion, and in the winter of 2010, after finding myself out of work and adrift for a number of months, I began searching for a new way to understand what I was going through, an explanation for why I seemed to have lost control of my memories, why I felt stuck in time, why I couldn’t sleep, why I was angry all the time.

  Looking back on this post-Iraq, post-Erica period of my life, I’m reminded of Hemingway’s early short story “Soldier’s Home,” in which a World War I veteran, identified only as “Krebs,” ponders his predicament on the front porch of his father’s house. Over the course of the story, Krebs’s obsession with the simpler life turns from a vague expectation into something like a mantra. “He did not want any consequences. He did not want any consequences ever again. He wanted to live along without consequences. Besides he did not really need a girl. The army had taught him that.” I, too, wanted a simpler, easier life like Krebs, a man whose odd remove from the daily course of life was something I recognized in myself. Watching the world go by from the porch, he thinks, “He liked the girls that were walking along the other side of the street. He liked the look of them much better than the French or the German girls. But the world they were in was not the world that he was in.”

  Unexpectedly alone, unsure of the world I was in, I began, tentatively, even skeptically, to explore the idea of post-traumatic stress, first as a historical curiosity and then on more personal terms. Had I really been traumatized? I had paid almost nothing as these things went. Sure, I had nightmares and felt haunted by the past, but who didn’t? PTSD? Wasn’t that something homeless Vietnam vets had? I’d spent some time in Dora and Fallujah, been blown up and shot at a number of times, but I knew plenty of people who had seen far worse things than I had. However, as I would learn, one of the deceptive things about trauma is that it is usually pretty easy to find someone who has been through something even more awful than what you’ve been through and thus dismiss your own pain, needlessly prolonging the process. It’s easy to find people to place at the top of the pyramid of loss—Holocaust survivors, Bosnian refugees, African child soldiers—but what about all that space below them? Who goes there? Who decides? It reminded me of something a veteran of the battle of Khafji once said to me, a guy who’d lost eleven of his buddies to friendly fire. “It was bad, but it wasn’t like Stalingrad or anything.”

  As a Marine lieutenant, I had always been told in times of uncertainty to go to the library. Read. Get smart. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Look at the history. It’s likely that someone before you has faced the same challenges you face now. So I went to the largest library within a day’s drive of my house, in this case at the University of California, San Diego, and began methodically working my way through the stacks. What I found was surprising. PTSD may well be the Esperanto of psychiatry, but its research literature is remarkably chaotic. Taken at a distance, the world of trauma studies resembled an arcade at the state fair. Along one side was a series of stalls populated by psychiatrists, psychologists, and neu
roscientists, along the other were poets, memoirists, historians, and anthropologists. The barkers within each stall might call out to you, singing the virtues of their worldview, but there seemed to be little overlap between these various groups, let alone coherence. The result was a wash of statistics and anecdotes that offered no logical point of entry for the common observer.

  As I would learn, PTSD, as it is understood today, is a very heterogeneous disease, essentially a junk drawer of disconnected symptoms, which include a numbing of the emotions, hypervigilance (always being “amped up”), social isolation, and a variety of intrusive manifestations, such as nightmares and hallucinations. The field of trauma studies embodies this fragmentation, with each subspecies of researcher rarely poking their head out of their own little stall (to continue the state fair metaphor). This sort of “silo-ing” of expertise is common throughout academia, but with the problem of trauma it is unusually counterproductive, because as Jonathan Shay, a pioneering trauma theorist, likes to point out, “trauma impacts the whole critter,” by which he means it affects every aspect of a person’s life.

  In the months that followed, I would enter therapy at the VA, take part in three research studies, visit three historical archives, and interview scores of researchers from across the country, looking for an answer to one question: What is PTSD? The more I looked, the more I found that my initial impression held true. Mental health is an unusually demanding and at times confounding line of work, but I was astonished to learn that few clinicians were familiar with the literature of the Vietnam War from which PTSD emerged, nor did they possess an even rudimentary understanding of the global War on Terror. One leading VA researcher I spoke to didn’t seem to know where Fallujah was, nor, as I learned, had she ever read any of the work of Tim O’Brien. Similarly, many of the leading historians on the subject remained willfully ignorant, and in some cases openly dismissive, of the scientific research relating to post-traumatic stress. One British author of an influential history of military psychiatry went so far as to brush off the neuroscience behind modern trauma studies as “completely dubious.”