The truth I’ve been able to discern from my interviews and personal experiences in war is the not-unfamiliar concept that it magnifies the duality of our nature—our capacity for good and propensity for evil—and has an unequaled power to unite and divide us, to fill us simultaneously with pride and shame. But the piece that we are only beginning to more fully embrace (out of necessity, with thousands of American troops returned or returning home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) is that that same sense of duality can destroy us if we do not honestly share its full and complete narrative. As difficult and perhaps unnatural as it may be, that sharing must include giving voice to the natural excitement and fellowship of war as well as communalizing its grief.
Of the stories told here, there is hope in all, some in the ability to bear well the terrible responsibilities of killing in war, as in the case of Staff Sergeant Mikeal Auton; some in the promising results of the ongoing recovery process, as with Lance Corporal James Sperry; and others simply in the courage and willingness to explain what can happen to you once you pull the trigger, as in the case of the late Corporal William Wold. We owe all these men a debt, not simply for their service, but for their willingness to help us understand just a little bit better. We must implore and help the others who follow to do the same.
Fortunately, there is a thread of hope in my own story that was the result of this very thing—being willing to do the work of sharing my own fractured narrative and reconstructing a new one grounded in hope and purpose, instead of ending in self-destruction. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it began almost comically, and with no other likely solution in sight, as my own personal deus ex machina, a god from a machine, the savior from the final act of a Greek tragedy, literally suspended from a series of ropes and pulleys.
Her name was Anita. We met in Joshua Tree National Park at a rock-climbing class in the summer of 2008. At only four foot eleven she had what most would consider an understandable fear of heights, yet as was her style, it was something she was ready to take on without hesitation, like the many other challenges she had already dispatched in her life. We had a natural banter, chatting and laughing. At one point during the class, she put her hands on her hips in a feigned sign of impatience, asking me why it was taking me twice as long as the others to tie the knot that I would use to “belay” her, or anchor her against a possible fall as she climbed. I looked at her as if she was crazy and told her that this was quite obviously the one knot she might want me to take the time to get right.
It felt very much like flirting and probably was, at least on my part, but we were both in other relationships. We became friends instead, meeting for dinner or drinks with our significant others in tow but focusing our conversations on each other. We talked at a frantic pace like two idiots bailing out a rowboat. Later, I invited her to hike Temescal Canyon with me and another friend. My girlfriend at the time chose not to go. Over the course of three hours, amid breathtaking vistas of the Pacific, Anita and I again spoke nonstop. There was more to this feisty Filipina, I learned, than just her sarcasm and expensive boots.
After an American sailor married her mother, she came to the U.S. at age thirteen and learned to speak English by watching
If there was anything that underscored the fact that I needed therapy to deal with the toxic blowback that became my life in the aftermath of my war experiences, it was this: during a holiday break from my fellowship, while doing coke with an old friend, we turned the razor we used to chop the lines onto our own bodies. I pulled it along my lower back, the blood immediately bleeding up from the fissure I had just created below and parallel to my waistline, where it would be hidden from all but those who knew me most intimately. My friend did the same. Then I took the razor again and this time sank it in above my right hip deeply enough to carve a long asterisk that, in time, raised into a permanent dark-pink keloid. I’m not sure what statement I was making, but it may have had something to do with the desperation of feeling like an asterisk to history.
Cutting didn’t become a regular practice for me. It was more of a novelty than a persistent desire, simply another chance to physically punish myself for letting a man die.
What was almost comically incomprehensible to me after the realization of what I had done in Fallujah was that my dreams before I began going to war with great frequency were mostly filled with the idea of saving people rather than letting them die. I remember a specific dream I had when I lived in Washington, DC, in which I dived into the frozen Potomac after a jet crashed in the river (likely spurred by the memory of an Air Florida plane crashing into the river in 1982 and the bystander who jumped into the icy water in an attempt to rescue someone; seventy-eight people died). In my dream I took a cable from a construction crane on the riverbank and wrapped it around my waist, swam to the plane, looped it around the fuselage and then used the crane to winch the plane and its passengers to safety back on shore… No big thing.
But when the actual opportunity to save someone was right in front of me, a man begging for his life, I couldn’t see it. I was shocked and confused by the killing I had just witnessed and videotaped. I couldn’t process the fact that the person in front of me might be the next victim. If there was any doubt that the shooting I captured on video was unjustified, it disappeared completely with Taleb Salem Nidal. Wounded and obviously unarmed, he was killed in a horrible and cowardly way, almost two dozen bullets stitching his back, likely as he saw the intent of his killers and tried in vain to crawl away. While I can never forgive myself for this, what I did realize was that I had been aggressively trying to kill myself, either in combat or through the attrition of alcohol, drugs and dangerous situations, in atonement.
If it accomplished anything, the cutting proved to me how far off the grid I had fallen. In its aftermath, I finally succumbed to therapy, but only because of a confluence of circumstances. A friend, despite being treated shoddily by me, helped find me a suitable therapist, and the therapist was willing to treat me for a fraction of his normal fee. But perhaps most importantly, I felt I had a reason to go. While still at Harvard I had made a trip back to Los Angeles for some interviews for this book. While there, I contacted Anita. We hiked Temescal Canyon again and then I made her dinner. On the plane back to Boston, I wrote her a five-page e-mail, explaining how from the very first day that I met her at Joshua Tree she had inspired me with her courage and willingness to face her greatest fears. Then I really piled it on like a lovesick schoolboy, using our climbing experience as the metaphor for how I would always be there to protect her from a fall. It took her three days to respond. I began to think I might’ve overshot a little. I wondered if I had not only lost the potential of a romantic relationship but killed the friendship as well. After some lengthy “negotiations” and a number of cross-country visits we began a relationship that resulted in our getting an apartment together in Los Angeles. But it would not be just the two of us. Anita’s ten-year-old daughter would also be living with us, as well as Anita’s sister (who was going through a messy divorce) and her six-year-old daughter. Overnight, I became a parent. The car wreck of post-traumatic stress and drug and alcohol abuse was no longer an option, nor would it be tolerated by Anita.
For two months, I embarked on a life I had never experienced before; each morning I woke up and made breakfast for the girls and then drove them to school. I helped them with their homework, played board games and card games with them, watched the Disney Channel and listened to them speak about the virtues of the Jonas Brothers and Justin Bieber. At night I would make them dinner and when Anita got home from work, we sat down at the table together as a family, one to which I was joined not by blood but by belief.
Of all that I had accomplished, my time in this family, I quickly realized, was an irreplaceable gift, the opportunity and motivation to be a better man. But the anger, guilt and self-destruction did not simply disappear with my new life and responsibilities. I had a difficult path ahead and many months before I could begin to let go of the past and fully embrace hope.
Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 and one year before the mosque shootings, I was briefly captured by Saddam’s Fedayeen militia along with a CNN colleague, our bodyguard and an interpreter outside Tikrit. It’s strange to me, because while I was scared shitless at the time, in the subsequent years I rarely thought about the capture and didn’t think it had contributed to my erratic postwar state of mind. But there was a place, I discovered through my eventual therapy, where it did intersect, a place I avoided, until I could no longer contain the toxic mess of my life.
