The Things They Cannot Say (24 page)

While we lived through the dive, our jobs are now in jeopardy. Only through profuse apologies do we both avoid getting fired, and we will both be in the penalty box for several weeks. The gravity of our recklessness is compounded the next day, when another diver dies at Karpata, a victim not of deep diving but a reported pulmonary embolism. This diver found death but, unlike us, wasn't looking for it. Because I pushed to make the dive, I begin to feel guilty about the fallout for Schoonhoven. It's true he's a big boy and able to make his own decisions, but he probably doesn't need the added temptation of reckless endeavors dangled in front of him daily by someone who is supposed to be listening to his stories, not egging him on to new ones. However, he does not hold it against me. Despite our foolishness, we now have a bond that goes beyond our shared war zone experiences. Together we experienced the danger but also the solitude and peace of the deep. There is, we know, a bond of loyalty to each other in that as well.

A few days before I leave Bonaire to return to the United States and begin my fellowship at Harvard, I ask Schoonhoven why he agreed to share his stories with me for my book. He looks down, gathers his thoughts and sighs.

“I want a job where I can make okay money, enough to support my family and my [future] kids,” he says to me. “If there is a book with my memories in it, then I don't have to hold them in my head; at least that's what I hope.”

Postscript

After the birth of their first child, a daughter named Robyn, Sebastiaan and Carolien Schoonhoven returned to the Netherlands. A year and a half later they had their second child, a son named Finn.

The photograph of the author's wife he carried in his helmet during his last reporting trip to Afghanistan

Epilogue: Deus Ex Machina

And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

—Tim O'Brien,
The Things They Carried

I
n my initial reporting and writing of this book, I was troubled that the stories featured here might collectively represent an indictment against hope. I'm glad to know now that I was wrong. War both gives and takes from those most intimately involved in it. It wrests from them delusions of innocence and reveals, as we've explored, a shadow self capable not only of taking life but sometimes of finding fulfillment in the process. This undoubtedly creates confusion for both soldiers and the societies they fight for, as the seduction of violence challenges self-perceptions and even our beliefs about our own humanity. Additionally, living in the midst of death, witnessing the killing of comrades and friends, suffering physical and psychological injuries, compounds this disequilibrium for warriors in the aftermath of battle. So how, then, does one go forward in a world marked by pain and loss, and steeped in the moral inconsistency that those capable of the greatest violence win?

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
General Hospital
on TV. Despite his strict discipline, she became close to her adopted father, learning to love sports as he did, especially his hometown football and baseball teams, the Patriots and the Red Sox. She became a successful advertising executive, married her college sweetheart and had a daughter, but divorced just two years after her birth. I admired her strength and tenacity and was enthralled by the oversized personality that fit inside the travel-sized woman. When my relationship with my girlfriend ended shortly before I left Los Angeles for my fellowship at Harvard, I tried to reconnect with Anita but ran out of time. And so began what should've been a year of enlightenment, meeting accomplished fellow journalists and immersing myself in the myriad of offerings at America's preeminent institution of higher learning, but instead I traveled down what I consider the long, dark corridor of my life.

I
f 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.

This is the image that I've tried to forget: I'm on my knees and I'm pleading for my life. As I was taught in a hostile-environment course for journalists, which I was compelled to take by my employer long after I started covering wars for a living, I'm trying to make eye contact with one of my captors. I'm trying to make him see me as a fellow human being rather than an animal, a threat, an impediment or even leverage. My hands are clasped one on top of the other and I pump them in front of me as if I might be agitating a bottle of champagne after winning the Tour de France or Indy 500—but this, I hope instead, he will recognize as the international symbol of someone begging for his life. In case he still doesn't understand, in perhaps an ill-advised gesture, I draw one hand across my throat like a blade and at the same time say in English, “No. No.”

Sitting in my therapist's office six years later, I wondered why I had shut out so completely this specific detail of the memory. Was I ashamed of what I had done? Was I afraid to remember what it felt like to be completely powerless and without any control? Or was it, as my therapist asked me to consider, a correlation of two images too disturbing for me to hold together in my mind: the image of myself pleading with my captors for my life compared with the image of Taleb Salem Nidal inside that Fallujah mosque pleading with me to save his? While I got out of my predicament alive, thanks to the negotiations of Tofiq Abdol, my Kurdish interpreter, Nidal was not fortunate enough to have someone like that to champion his cause.

C
onsidering his career choice, Mark Sadoff was aptly and whimsically named. He had treated everyone from husbands and wives trying to comprehend their loveless relationships to Central American victims of torture. He had been studying an emerging form of therapy known as EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (the same therapy used in Michael Ayala's case). With EMDR the therapist attempts to re-create the rapid eye movement of sleep by having the patient follow the therapist's finger moving back and forth in front of his eyes like a metronome. At the same time the therapist prompts the patient to talk about the incident affecting them, trying to change its negative orbit into something more positive. In my situation, Dr. Sadoff asked me if I purposely wanted Taleb Salem Nidal to die or if my actions were accidental, rather than intentional. If I could have prevented his death, if I knew what would've happened to him when I left the room, would I have acted differently? Of course I would have stayed, I said, I would have taken him out of the mosque to somewhere he might be safe, rather than leaving him alone. It was Dr. Sadoff's effort to get my guilt-addled brain to understand that Taleb Salem Nidal hadn't registered as a victim to me, as someone who needed saving. The person I was trying to save, by exposing the crime, was the one who had already been killed on videotape in front of me. He helped me to understand that it was a mistake, not malice. My intentions were good, I just hadn't thought the situation through clearly, which was understandable considering what I had just witnessed. Through our discussions he also helped me to see that difficult but ultimately critical connection between my capture outside Tikrit and the murder of Taleb Salem Nidal. With no interpreter, no Tofiq, as I had had during my capture, to translate for him, Nidal would die because I did not understand, as I should have, that I needed to walk him out of that mosque under my protection. I didn't save anyone, as I did in my dream; I let the plane sink to the bottom of the Potomac. I did nothing. But I had to find a way to forgive myself, or in a misguided search for equal justice, I would end up killing myself in exchange.