Until Tuesday (8 page)

When my tour was up, I didn’t ask to stay. I had volunteered twice for extended duty, once in Al-Waleed and once in south Baghdad. This time, I was ready to leave. I had been, for as long as I could remember, just hanging on, trying to make it through the day without a breakdown, sort of like the American operations in Iraq. By the time I touched ground in Colorado in February 2006, I was burnt toast. That’s the image that always comes to mind when I think of myself then: a blackened, smoking hunk of bread, still jammed between the heated wires.

Four months later, in June 2006, Colonel McMaster completed his command with the Third Armored Cavalry. As his adjutant, it was my honor to sprint across a field at his change-of-command ceremony. I hadn’t run for more than a year because of my injuries, but I figured one short run couldn’t hurt. Fortunately, there was a rehearsal the day before. I sprinted one hundred yards before stepping in a sprinkler hole, slamming my head to the ground (another concussion), and ripping the patellar tendon from my right knee. My kneecap was floating six inches up my thigh as they loaded me into a truck, wincing in pain. We were heading to Evans Army Hospital at fifty miles an hour when a fire extinguisher exploded and started whipping around the truck, spraying foam in all directions. The driver swerved violently, shouting “I can’t see!”

“Pull over! Pull over!”

“I can’t see to pull over!”

“Do it anyway!” I yelled.

When we finally careened to the side of the road, the two soldiers tumbled out, coughing and puking, leaving me lying in the back yelling, “Get me out! Get me out! I can’t breathe in here.” By the time I found the door handle and threw myself onto the street, my lungs were burning and my skin and uniform were toxic-white. I could taste the fire retardant in my mouth, and believe me, it was worse than Tuesday’s toothpaste. And more relentless. The more I tried to spit it out, the more it clung to my throat, choking me. It would have been funny, really, if it hadn’t been my life.

CHAPTER 7

HARD DECISIONS

The most hateful grief of all human griefs is this, to have
knowledge of the truth but no power over the event.

—H
ERODOTUS
,
T
HE
H
ISTORIES

The reality of war wounds is that they’re worse when
you’re out of the combat zone. That’s why so many psychologically scarred service members end up back for second and third tours, telling people they “couldn’t adjust” to civilian life. That’s probably why I volunteered to spend extra months embedded with Iraqi troops in south Baghdad, the point of the Triangle of Death. I had almost been killed by traitorous Iraqi allies, and yet I put myself back in Iraqi hands, in one of the most dangerous sections of Baghdad, partly out of responsibility and guilt but mostly to quiet my mind. I ignored my physical injuries, engaging in combat clearing operations and raids despite debilitating pain. I needed the adrenaline rush, the distraction of action, more than I needed personal security.

The worst thing you can experience is time to think, and that’s exactly what I had during the two months I was bedridden while recovering from patellar tendon surgery. My body was a mess. My knee was immobilized. My fractured vertebrae had, in two years without treatment, developed “wedge deformities” that threw off my alignment and rubbed nerves, causing numbness, soreness, and shooting pain. Headaches from my multiple concussions developed suddenly and lasted for days. Sometimes I was afraid to move. Even opening my eyes in a lighted room could bring on stabbing pains.

My mind was worse. Flashbacks, black thoughts, bad dreams. I woke up almost every night in a sweat, convinced I was back on the ground at Al-Waleed, awaiting the assassin’s knife. During the day, without duties to distract me, I dwelled on the war. I walked step-by-step through battlefields and relived my anniversaries: my first combat, my first dead body, my first kill the day I escaped death, and all the other dates that never leave a soldier’s mind. Eventually, I started researching. I was unable to turn away from the war, so I started reading everything I could about the war planning and objectives, from soulless Department of Defense (DOD) documents to combat reports to soldiers’ blogs from the battlefield. I was driving myself crazy, but there was no way I could stop. The search for answers was keeping me sane.

After my two-month recovery, the Army sent me to Fort Benning as the executive officer of B Company, First Battalion, Eleventh Infantry. It was a recovery assignment, because it was clear by then to everyone that I was in bad shape, but like everything else in the Army, B Company was undermanned and the operations tempo too high. My job was to help train 650 newly commissioned officers for combat tours, but there were too few instructors to properly train that many leaders. I was hurting, most notably with a serious limp, and I needed to take care of myself, but it would have been irresponsible not to kill myself for those men and women bound for war, even though I no longer believed in the U.S. Army.

No, that’s not right. I believed in the Army. I loved the Army more than ever, and I respected and cared about the men and women who fought for it. But I didn’t believe in the men running the Army or the civilians running the war effort. These junior officers were being sent to an undermanned and badly planned war; the least I could do was try my best to prepare them.

I was angry. Looking back, that emotion probably defined that year of my life. PTSD is a dwelling disorder; it makes a person psychologically incapable of moving beyond the traumas of his or her past. The mess hall, the uniforms, the training exercises: they all triggered memories of my worst moments in Iraq. When I wasn’t distracted by work, I was lost in the past, trying to shift through the details and figure out where I had gone wrong. Betrayal and anger were my watchwords, feelings that never really left me, even in my best moments. But I also wheeled through cycles of outrage, frustration, helplessness, sadness at the loss of friends, guilt, shame, grief at the loss of my life’s work, and an ever-present bone-deep loneliness that seemed to entomb me like a ceremonial cloth.

Alienated and haunted, I moved thirty miles away from my fellow soldiers to a trailer surrounded by a seven-foot-high barbed-wire-topped fence (it was already in place; the landlady had trouble with her convict ex-boyfriend). I was trying to wall myself off from the world, I suppose, but the present was already lost, and even in Salem, Alabama, the memories of Iraq came to bury me, triggered by everything from the smell of my dinner to a bird flying across the sun to the knife I kept always at my side.

I didn’t run from the memories. Instead, I delved deep, continuing the research I’d started in Colorado, spending twelve hours a day training officers and eight hours a night studying government documents, a beer in my hand or a bottle of Bacardi on the desk beside me. Slowly, page after page, I turned my anger into righteous indignation, and then a call to arms to fight for justice and truth. I had been a warrior for sixteen years; this was a survival instinct. With a cause I believed in, a hidden part of me realized, I would never give in to hopelessness and despair. So I read thousands of pages of State Department and DOD reports, crunched thousands of numbers, and wrote out my thoughts, night after night, trying to figure out why the war I experienced in Iraq was so different than the one portrayed in the media—and so different than the victory we might have achieved.

In January 2007, two days after George Bush announced the surge, a twenty-page condensed version of my assessment of what I had seen in Iraq ran in the
New York Times
as an op-ed entitled “Losing Iraq, One Truckload at a Time.” The essay focused on two things—tolerance of corruption within the American and Iraqi armies and lack of accountability by high-ranking officials—and caused quite a stir in the military hierarchy. I heard from dozens of active-duty officers who supported my conclusions, including several high-ranking officers I had served with. A faculty member at West Point suggested I apply for a professorship. I was invited to the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank “unofficially” developing the strategy for implementing Bush’s surge, where I participated in serious discussions with scholars and strategists like retired generals John Keene and David Barno and Gen. William Caldwell, currently in charge of the NATO training mission in Afghanistan.

Most of my superior officers at Fort Benning were less supportive, however, and as my articles kept appearing in places like the
Washington Times
, the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
, and the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, they expressed a strong interest in seeing me muzzled . . . or gone. And so that summer, by mutual consent, the American military and I officially ended our relationship. My honorable discharge date was September 11, 2007, six years after the terrorist attacks, seventeen years after I joined the Army at seventeen, and only a few days after Tuesday was released from his own period of exile at a prison in upstate New York. Even on my worst days, I can’t help but smile at that parallel in our lives.

By then, I had accepted a position at the New York Office of Emergency Management. Within a month, I moved straight from a small trailer outside Salem, Alabama, to a small apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a bustling immigrant neighborhood far from the yuppie enclaves to the north. I had no furniture; I had no more clothes than would fit in a small closet and a rucksack; I sat on the floor to use my laptop and slept on the carpet with only one blanket for warmth, much as I had slept in my sleeping bag at Al-Waleed. I looked into the closet days before I was to start my new job, saw the two new suits hanging from their wooden hangers, and knew it wasn’t going to work.

It wasn’t the responsibility. I knew planning. I knew implementation in life-or-death situations. At Fort Benning, I had been responsible for hundreds of people and millions of dollars of equipment, and my evaluations had praised my “extraordinary performance” and suggested a promotion to major. I was a leader; I would rise to the occasion in an emergency. That was when I thrived.

But the daily grind? I wasn’t in any condition for that. I limped; I used a cane; I experienced frequent bouts of vertigo that resulted in falls; I was in near constant pain. As I looked at those suits, I realized a job meant riding a subway during rush hour, walking into rooms full of people, and making small talk with the receptionist. The fact was, I hadn’t made small talk with anyone in a year. At Fort Benning, I had withdrawn, both physically and mentally, ignoring social obligations and invitations. In Brooklyn, I barely left my apartment. When I did, it was usually late at night, to buy necessities like packaged food. I wasn’t an alcoholic, but I drank every day to calm my anxiety and most of the night to put myself to sleep. There wasn’t any one thing I could point to—no recurring dreams or angry outbursts, no paranoid voices in my head. I just wasn’t myself. Some nights, it took me an hour to work up the courage to walk one block to the liquor store.

Turning down the position at Emergency Management was the right thing to do, but it was also the hardest. The night I paced my apartment before making the call was one of the most difficult of my life. I wanted the position. It paid well, it was interesting, and it was a great career opportunity. Turning it down felt like failure. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get another chance.

But when I made the call, I felt free. I felt more liberated, in fact, than I ever had in my life. For almost four years, I had ignored my problems. I had worked too hard, pushing myself too far, so that I wouldn’t have to deal with them. I had almost done that with Emergency Management, too. But I had stopped. I had been honest. I had summoned the courage to stop pretending and accept the reality of my life. Now, finally, I was going to get help.

My parents didn’t see it that way. Mamá shook her head, then walked out of the room. My papá got in my face—I had traveled to Washington by train to tell them, a harrowing journey in my agoraphobic state—and said, “You are not going to be one of those broken veterans.”

It wasn’t a threat. It was a statement of fact. My father thought I was doing this to myself, and he wasn’t going to allow it. He knew I was wounded in Iraq; my parents had received that horrible call from the Army in the middle of the night, telling them I was hurt. He didn’t realize those wounds were still with me, a poison in my life. He thought I was wallowing in misery, and if I was a real man I’d pull myself out of it. He thought my diagnosis with PTSD, which I received before my honorable discharge, was some kind of excuse.

I wanted to curse him right there, right to his face, but I wasn’t raised that way. And truth be told, I was too angry. It was, in many ways, the lowest moment of my life. The betrayal of the Army cut my heart; losing the respect of my papá ran a saber through my soul. It was the moment when anger took over and my memories of Iraq consumed me. I had been isolated from the world long before Alabama, but that night, for the first time, I felt terminally alone.

I spiraled downward, becoming anxious and paranoid. Without my family, there was nothing to keep me moored. I clung to my righteous indignation, but without my parents I lost hope. I scanned the computer nightly for war news, and I wrote frequently—sometimes obsessively—about my condition, but I essentially stopped going outside except to the liquor store, where I would buy a large bottle of rum and four liters of Diet Coke. I’d drink them to the bottom over the next few hours or days, then head back to the liquor store, numbed against the world. I skipped Thanksgiving, bottoming out alone in my apartment with Bacardi. There was no turkey, no mashed potatoes or stuffing, just a bottle of amber liquor quickly descending toward the bottom and a single lonely string of Christmas lights twinkling dimly in the dark.

Sometime early in the morning, blitzed on rum and sadness, I wrote an essay for NPR’s
This I Believe
. It talked about my feelings of abandonment, of betrayal, of being denied even basic medical assistance. It ended, “I hope I get help before it’s too late.”

I look at that essay now, and I don’t know what I meant. I wasn’t suicidal, that I know for sure. But I was, as I can see now, hurtling toward an end. Sometimes, as I lay on my bed after three days awake, having consumed too much alcohol for too long to be truly drunk, I thought,
Wouldn’t it be nice if I could fall asleep? And wouldn’t it be even better if I never woke up?

I trudged on, too indignant to give in. Despite my official diagnosis with multiple injuries, there was a delay in receiving disability benefits, and my meager savings from seventeen years in the Army were running out. Still, I took a car service (like a taxi, but I could call and ask for the same driver) several times a week to my only standing obligation: the Brooklyn Veterans Affairs Medical Center. It cost $11 one way versus $2 for the bus, something I couldn’t really afford, but I had to do it, because I couldn’t ride the bus. The faces, the smells, the enclosed space. I tried, but I couldn’t do it. I had to step off. I needed to be somewhat coherent, after all, when I reached the VA, because they were running me through the usual routine, making me fill out endless paperwork, making me wait for hours, making me see a different medical intern every visit who would walk in with a smile and say, “So what’s wrong with you today?”