Ryan Smithson (21 page)

A sharp silhouette appears in the bedroom in front of the doorway. It’s slender looking and appears to have long straight hair. It’s undoubtedly female. She walks toward my side of the bed.

The cold sweat reappears on my forehead.

She gets closer. I can’t see her face, for the light is behind her. But I can tell she’s looking me directly in the eyes, or directly to my soul.

I am paralyzed. In front of me stands what must be the reason behind these awful night terrors, and she’s getting closer. My heart is pounding and my whole body is numb and tingly.

She’s right next to me when she bends down. She walks, or floats maybe, down to me.

My eyes open. Or maybe they were open the whole time.

And, as if by magic, my heart slows down, and my cold sweat dries. I breathe normally. I’m no longer dizzy or tingly.

Whatever or whoever the silhouette was, it changes me, it heals me. I am perfectly calm. I lie in disbelief, but I no longer fear going back to sleep.

I have not had a night terror since.

T
he hardest part of a combat tour is not the combat. It’s not the year or more away from home and family. It’s not sleeping in Humvees or eating MREs. It’s not the desert sun that makes everything too hot to touch. It’s not the fear and wild atrocity you experience. You get used to all that. Bombs are just bombs. Blood is just blood.

The hardest part of a combat tour, I’ve discovered, is coming home.

Not in the literal sense, of course. The bounce and squeal of our airplane tires on an American runway are the sweetest sounds these ears have ever heard. That part of coming home is easy. But dealing with the many thousands
of emotions that ensue after a year in Iraq is difficult.

We act tough in PTSD briefings, but we really need them. Upon returning, the way I deal with my war stories, my silhouettes, is with silence.

I don’t talk to anyone about the tour. Not Mom. Not Heather. Not even my own father. He wants to know things. He wants to know how close his son was to death. Not morbidly, not with a sick fascination. He sees me as a man. He wants to talk to me like one.

He tosses me a beer, and we sit in the back room of his garage. The poker table is on our right. There’s a dart board on the wall and a foosball table that sits quietly, waiting for some playtime. There are pictures of the Adirondacks and various camping and sporting equipment.

It smells like pine and musk in this place. All man, all the time. This is somewhere I should be comfortable sharing my experiences, talking like a man. We stand by the black mini fridge and crack open our beers. I am silent, far away. My dad wants to talk.

“I’m glad you’re home, son,” he says, trying to sound like he’s not choking on tears.

“Me too, Dad,” I say, taking a sip of beer. “Me too.”

More silence.

“I missed you so much, Ryan.”

He puts his arm around me. I put mine around him and we stand holding each other. We both want to cry, but
neither of us wants to be the first to do it. Foolish pride, I guess. That’s what you get with fathers and sons.

“If you ever need to talk about anything, Ryan, you know I’m always here,” he says.

“Yeah, I know, Dad,” I say. “Thanks.”

But I don’t want to talk. My father knows that. He doesn’t want to pry too hard. So we take another sip and head inside.

Mom is with Heather. We all stand in the kitchen. The same kitchen where my mother made most of my childhood dinners. In high school I’d yell at her, tell her I had to cut weight for wrestling. Or I’d tell her “No thanks” and go out with my friends. She’d put my portion in the fridge for leftovers. Then she’d watch me shut the door behind myself.

“Ready for dinner, honey?” she asks me when Dad and I walk in.

“Yeah, Mom,” I say. “Smells great.”

And she smiles.

Mom and Dad: the only two people on the planet who have forgiven me and supported me in everything I’ve done. They’ve dealt with bad report cards and a noisy drum set in my bedroom. They’ve gone to every wrestling match they could. They’ve seen me off at hotels and airports when the army takes me away from them.

After realizing my freedom in basic training and seeing
the starving children in Iraq, I have learned to become so grateful for their influence and support in my life. It’s been a long road, one full of mistakes and regret, but I am so thankful that they never gave up, that when I blew off the dinner Mom made, she’d understand, she’d still smile. She’d still say, “I love you.”

“Ryan, were you ever in combat?” Mom asks me at the dinner table. This is something she’s asked before, over the phone while I was still in Iraq. I give her the same answer I did then.

“Do you really want to know?” I ask.

It’s my way of telling her yes. It’s a way I know won’t provoke any more questioning. I gave her this response when I was in Iraq because I didn’t think she really needed to hear all the gory details of war, not while I was still stuck in it. She worried enough about me. She didn’t need details to scare her even more. I was looking out for her, just like she’d done for me for so many years.

Now, though, I don’t have that excuse, and she knows it.

“It’s okay now,” she says. “You’re home.”

“Until my next tour,” I say.

This statement shoots straight up her spine and into her tear ducts. She sees that combat, though something that is currently far away, is still a close part of my reality. I’m still in the army. And she sees that I don’t want to talk about it. My father already knows this. He washes down
some pork with a sip of beer.

“Yeah,” says Mom. “That’s true.”

My parents want me to open up, but being the understanding people that they are, they refuse to step any further into my minefield. I’m not sure if it’s fear of what they might find, if I’ll end up exploding. They look into my eyes and they see dark secrets. They know there are parts of me that may never come out.

My father remembers talking to his grandfather about World War II. Gramps rarely talked about it, but when they sat in the VFW among other vets and a few beers deep, he opened up. My father loved when Gramps talked about the war. Even though the stories were thirty years old and even though it seemed to bother him sometimes to tell them, the stories were entertaining and exciting.

My father looks at me now with that same degree of hope. The hope that I’ll loosen up and share with him what I’ve seen and what I’ve learned. Not the blood and guts; he can get that on the evening news. Dad wants to know the lessons I learned from such a unique, worldly encounter. He wants to know what I was thinking about in my bunk at night. He wants to know if I remembered the first time he took me skiing.

“Is that what you thought about, Ryan?”
he wants to ask.

He wants to know what it feels like to attach ammunition to my chest and roll out of a gate in a cheaply armored truck.
“
Weren’t you scared?”
He wants to understand the life of a soldier. “
Is it the same as when Gramps was in the navy?”

He steps through my minefield with these questions. Each a possible trigger. He doesn’t want to ask pointed, direct questions. But he wants to know.

And I wish I had the strength to answer.

Little do I know, literature is what will set me free.

See, I’ve always seen books as an escape. I read almost every night in Iraq, because every night I tried to get away. I would lay my military flashlight across my chest. The flashlight’s red glow illuminated the pages. Up and down the light went, rising and falling with my breath.

It would turn the white pages into a shade of dark pink. The letters would become golden brown shadows, and the words formed by the these letters would resemble something alive and moving.

Every book was alive as I read it, lying in my sleeping bag. I wasn’t in the godforsaken Middle East fighting a war. I was in my own country: a country of the mind.

I wasn’t a soldier, a GI Joe Schmo. I was the words on paper.

The smell of a book is the best part of reading, because it makes the escape tangible. Each has a different aroma, and the smell always seems to reflect the story.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
by Jules Verne smells like cold metal and sea salt. A faint aroma of old cigarette smoke and playing cards
rises from the pages of
Hearts in Atlantis
by Stephen King. And even in the blazing hot sun, I could smell the pure white chill of the Arctic as I turned the pages of
Deception Point
by Dan Brown.

Each book provided an escape. Each in its own way reminded me that there was much more to life that I had yet to experience. Each gave me hope and faith that I would experience more in my life.

High school defines literature with terminology: metaphors, similes, imagery.

But experience defines literature as more than words on paper. Not just escape, but more important, words that have the power to heal.

I am in my second semester of college before I even think about writing down my experiences. For a whole year I’ve avoided talking about the year I spent at war. And this means I’ve hidden from writing about it.

In English Composition II my professor gives us an essay assignment. It’s a creative writing piece in which we have to describe a time when we saw something destroyed. I sit in my seat looking over the handout she gave us. It’s printed on yellow paper.

“Minimum three pages,” it says. “Double spaced, Times New Roman, 12-pt. font.”

I read and reread the last line.

“…saw something destroyed.”

The phrase sticks out at me like a knife. Like the barrel of a hand-me-down Kalashnikov from the Cold War. Like Haji trying to kill me with it.

Something destroyed. That’s exactly what happened in Iraq. The bombs and blood and guts, sure. But more than that. It was
my
destruction.

So I sit down to write a three-page paper about one of my missions in Iraq. My fingers move across the keyboard in the community college library faster than I’ve ever seen them do before. The story just pours out of me. No effort at all, like the story was just waiting to be told.

Pausing for a breath, I scroll back through what I just wrote. It’s over twelve pages long. And I feel like I could write two hundred more.

Over the next week or so I edit and re-edit the essay. Leaving just the meat of the story, I finally cut it down to eight pages. But still, something’s not quite right. I read it over again, trying to find what’s missing.

Then it hits me. I need a theme. I need to show what was really destroyed. Not just the bombs. Not just the death. I need to show what was destroyed within me.

I realize that it’s the innocence of my childhood that was really lost over there in the vile, churning stomach of Iraq. And it’s the soldiers with whom I lost it who really understand.

So I weave a nursery rhyme into the essay. I modify the nursery rhyme so it fits with the theme of war, the theme of Iraq. And I call the piece “The Town That Achmed Built.”

My professor reads our first drafts and makes comments.

“Ryan,” she says to the class typing away in the computer lab. “Your turn.”

I get up from my computer and go to her desk.

“Is eight pages too long?” I ask.

“No, it’s fine,” she says, taking the essay. “Have a seat.”

She begins reading the piece. I see her back straighten when she reads the phrase, “dismembered people.”

When she’s done reading, she places the paper on her desk and says, “Ryan, this is amazing.”

“Thank you,” I say. She doesn’t even know it, but she’s the first person to read it.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” she says, “are you seeking any sort of therapy?”

I shake my head. Then I point to the essay.

“That’s my therapy,” I say.

She smiles.

“At the end of the semester I have the students take turns reading one of their essays,” she says. “Would you mind reading this?”

“I don’t know,” I say, butterflies suddenly flying around inside my stomach.

“Think about it,” she says.

That night I give the essay to Heather. She reads it, tears up, and says thank you.

“It means a lot to me, Ryan,” she says. “That you shared that with me.”

I nod, and she hugs me.

“Well,” I say. “Sharing stories is the point of having them.”

At the end of the semester, when my turn comes around, I read “The Town That Achmed Built” to a class full of college kids. Before the first paragraph is over I’m sniffling and talking through tears.

I take a deep breath and look to my professor. She nods her head, urging me to continue.

While I read, I can’t look up from the page. I have to stop every few paragraphs and wipe tears or take a controlled breath. It’s not so much that the story is too sad. It’s just that reading it in front of people is overwhelming. And there’s this tremendous weight like my heart is being squeezed by my lungs. Think of a boa constrictor stuck in your chest.

But I notice with every page the weight lifts a little. Think of a boa constrictor letting go, wriggling away to find an easier meal.

Ever wonder if there are little cancer cells just growing
and multiplying inside of you? Ever wonder if you’re stronger than they are?

That’s what reading this story is like.

I look up and the circle of college kids is staring at me, jaws hanging open. None of them even knew I was in the army before today. All at once, in their eyes, there’s understanding. Respect. Faith. One of them raises his hand.

“I just want to say,” he starts, “that you gave me a whole different perspective on what’s going on over there.”

And I look to my professor. She nods her head and smiles at me. With her eyes she says, “
I told you it was a good idea to read it out loud.
”

As class dismisses, people stop to shake my hand. They thank me. These college students are actually grateful for what I did.

It’s funny, but all I did besides sit in a dump truck during the ambush was write a story about it. It’s funny, but the story is what matters. The story is what changes, at least for a moment, the way these people feel. And what an empowering sensation it is to share it.

After the semester ends, with my professor’s encouragement, I begin writing about all the experiences I’ve had as a soldier. She helps me edit the pieces, send them to small journals for publication, and eventually, to organize them into a book.

Each piece I write I give to Heather. Then to my parents.
Slowly I feel comfortable talking about Iraq. And slowly, the more I talk about it, the more I realize that it’s the words that save me.

They are only words, words we use every day. But they are the words of a heart, the silhouettes of a generation. They are
my
silhouettes. In between these words, there’s the resilient silence of humanity. This is
my
silence.