Love, Zac

by Reid Forgrave

  There was one aspect of college life that gave Zac great pleasure. At the end of his senior year of high school, he filled out paperwork to join the Iowa Army National Guard. He’d always wanted to be in the army, from when he played soldier with friends as a little kid, to when he watched military movies like Platoon or The Deer Hunter as an older kid, to when he blasted off fireworks and mortars and dynamite in the woods as a near-adult kid. For Zac, the military was like football: a test of being a real man, something that meant he could both indulge and tame his wilder instincts, and ultimately a place that would give him the discipline to make something of himself.

  He loved the military. For the next five years, he spent one weekend a month playing soldier on drill weekends and two weeks a year in full-time training. In physical training, Zac was Rambo. “He was a jaw-dropper,” said Sgt. Ryan Miller, who was in the same unit as Zac. “It was, ‘How in the world can he do this?’ He was one of the best soldiers we had.” This was no particular surprise to his family members, who knew of Zac’s fitness obsessions; after all, he once finished in first place in a national CrossFit competition. When his unit ran, Zac would whip all the other soldiers. His timed two-mile runs came in under twelve minutes. A perfect score for the two-minute push-up test was considered sixty-eight push-ups; Zac would routinely get in the nineties. He’d get 100 percent in the sit-up test. When the entire company of a hundred or so soldiers did their official physical training test, Miller finished in second place with a score of 280 points. Zac finished in first, beating Miller by sixty-some points. In 2013, Zac was chosen from the company to represent it at a state-level competition for the First Battalion, 133rd Infantry Regiment. The competition tested physical training, shooting skills, and military knowledge. Zac won the competition and was named soldier of the year for the entire Iowa National Guard.

  Zac had always wanted to be an “Army badass,” so he joined the Iowa Army National Guard.

  Superiors pointed to him as a model soldier. He twice won the Commanders Coin of Excellence, and he earned his airborne wings. “He was a truly bright young man who chose to be in the infantry because he wanted to do what the infantry does,” said Father Jacob Greiner, the chaplain for Zac’s battalion. “He thought he could do the most good by being one of the guys who kicked down doors. With Zac everything was a challenge. He saw a challenge and wanted to beat that. Everyone who knew Zac Easter said he was one of the best.” He was respected so much that he was named his company’s guidon bearer, meaning that in formations he had carried the flag that represented the unit. That was a big honor. First Lt. Chase Wells, Zac’s platoon leader, regarded him as someone a football coach would call a good locker room guy: Someone who was smiling and laughing, confident but never a jerk, smart enough to do things higher than his rank but committed to being part of his team.

  After Zac participated in the US Army Air Assault School—a ten-day course designed to prepare soldiers for things like rappelling out of transportation and assault helicopters on insertion or evacuation missions—commanders approached him about becoming part of the 75th Ranger Regiment, an elite airborne light infantry unit in the army. Zac was stunned, and thrilled. It was a dream, to become a US Army Ranger, among the biggest badasses in a military filled with badasses: His vision of the ideal man. They gave him a packet and sent him home to think about the possibility. When Zac told his father, Myles was immediately worried. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would mean certain danger for someone like an Army Ranger. The father who’d sent his son into harm’s way on the football field, a place where that harm used to seem pretty innocuous, was terrified of sending his son into harm’s way on the battlefield. When the military told Zac there was a backlog for Ranger school, his dad was relieved. Zac was put in a holding pattern for this Army Ranger dream. His parents urged him to enroll in more college classes while he waited.

  On the surface, Zac looked like the perfect candidate to become an army badass. Below the surface, though, he was coming apart. His military buddies saw hints of it from time to time. Miller and Zac did basic training together. They were fast friends, battle buddies, each other’s first partners as soldiers in training. One of the drills they did in training had to do with land navigation. Commanders gave them a protractor and told them it was their most important navigation tool. Again and again, the commanders drilled it into their brains: “DO NOT lose this protractor.” Zac lost his immediately. He had no idea where it went. The commanders were furious.

  The biggest reason Zac wasn’t quite the soldier his superiors thought he could become was because of something he kept secret. When he filled out his military medical forms, he lied about his history of concussions in football. But the concussions would continue to come. Zac wrote: “I still felt all the post concussion symptoms during basic [training, at Fort Benning] and I remember having an m-4 [a type of military assault rifle] fall on my head one time when I was sleeping because my buddy accidently knocked it over. I finished the last two weeks of basic with pounding headaches and was scared to say anything because I was scared of being recycled. With in a few weeks of getting home I got reended at a stop light by the catholic church. I was at a dead stop trying to turn and my car was totaled by a girl who hit me going like 45 mph so she says. I was instantly dazed and confused with ofcoarse a head pounding headache. The paramedics came and said I most likely had a concussion and that I should go to the hospital. Ofcouse the tough guy zac lied and told him I was fine and that im pretty sure I didn’t have a concussion. I ended up going home that night.”

  Another time, at the beginning of a training session, the soldiers got in formations. Commanders called out their names, and they were supposed to hop out of formation when their name was called. “Easter!” a commander shouted. No answer. “Easter!” No one moved. “EASTER!” “Moving!” Zac finally replied, and he jumped out of the formation. At the time, these seemed like momentary lapses in Zac’s upward trajectory. In retrospect, they seem more like clues that he was crumbling.

  “I used the army to mask what I was really dealing with inside,” Zac wrote, “and fed my family with all types of things about how I was going to do ROTC and go special forces when really I knew I couldn’t think enough to be in ROTC and I knew that I wasn’t mentally tough enough anymore for special forces. My family looked up to me so much for my military decision that I just couldn’t tell them about how I felt.”

  So much of his energy he now devoted to making sure nobody could tell what was really going on with him. “Anything I’ve portrayed to anyone in the past 6 years has been a lie to conceal my secret struggle,” Zac wrote. “I wish back then I knew why I was how I was and that the concussions changed me, but how was I to know when no one knew what they knew know about the repercussions of using your head as a weapon back then. I always lied to the doctors so none of them mentioned that I might eventually have a shit ton of problems.”

  Life after high school turned into a roller coaster of diminishing returns. The highs were never as high as Zac wanted, and the lows became ever-deepening troughs. There was one high, though—one happy, healthy, authentic high—that would stick with Zac for the rest of his life. It started on December 31, 2010, New Year’s Eve. Zac was home from winter break after his first semester of college. One of Myles II’s friends was having a party at his parents’ house, which was out in the country, surrounded by cornfields. Zac decided to go. There was beer pong. Music blared. Zac was drunk. No, Zac was hammered.

  Walking down a hallway, red Solo cup in hand, he saw an old friend: Alison Epperson, tall, buxom, and beautiful, a whip-smart cheerleader with a sharp wit. They’d always hit it off in high school as a yin and a yang: Zac as the good-ole-boy conservative who loved guns, football, and the military, and Ali as a feisty young woman who didn’t shy away from political arguments as a liberal in this rural sea of Republicans. She was a tomboy, a lifelong fan of the Baltimore Orioles, a spitfire with striking red lips and a flirtatious smile. She loved to party
, but she was more responsible about it than Zac, perhaps the lingering effect of her best friend in middle school being killed by a drunk driver. Ali was a year behind Zac in school, and the two had been friends for a couple of years. She used to skip her fourth-period music class to hang with Zac and his friend Jake in the hallways. From the start, there was a spark between the two, even if they ignored it at first. They would go to Subway and get breakfast sandwiches, then they would eat them on the senior bench.

  On this New Year’s Eve, exactly twenty-eight years from the night when Zac’s mother and father shared their first kiss, Ali wobbled up to Zac in the hallway. She had a Monster Energy drink laced with vodka in hand. It was her eighteenth birthday, and she was tying one on. She and Zac talked and laughed. Slyly, they brushed arms. For a moment, they were alone in a corner of the house, and Zac grabbed Ali’s hand and tugged her toward the door. One of Myles II’s friends gave them a knowing look as they walked into the winter air.

  The temperature was about to dip into the single digits: “Cold as shit, so cold,” Ali recalled. They stopped by a car and shared their first kiss. “Oh, wow,” Zac said. “This is a long time coming.” They crept into an old wooden hay barn. The space was dark. Against a bale of hay, they kissed, and kissed some more. Their clothes fell to the floor. Goosebumps rose all over both of them. They rolled to the dusty ground, and they made love. “For me, from that moment on, it was always Zac—my heart was always Zac’s,” Ali said. They put their clothes back on and they laughed. Then, they crept back into the party, both drunkenly thinking they’d pulled off something sneaky, something that no one else would ever know about.

  On New Year’s Eve 2010, Zac and Ali shared their first kiss.

  But it turned out that everybody already knew. Of course everybody knew: Their clothes were covered with straw.

  “I wanted to prove to myself that I’m not actually stupid and that I’m still the old Zac Easter who can push through anything,” Zac wrote. He was writing about his early twenties, a time in his life when he dropped out of Kirkwood Community College, moved back in with his parents, and enrolled at a community college nearby. “I started off living at home for a year and a half and hardly talked to anyone. I felt so insecure with my self-image and I often never could get myself to ever talk to anyone in classes [at Des Moines Area Community College] or even talk in a class in general. I think this is when I first started panic/anxiety attacks. It seemed like anyone I tried to talk to someone other than my family I would start to panic, start sweating, get a [blushy] face, and have an insanely high heart rate. Speech classes were the worst. 10 minutes before I even got up to speak I would be soaked in sweat just sitting there . . . I worked hours on end for good grades but often didn’t speak to anyone in my classes and my anxiety stopped me from even raising my hand. Speech class was the worst. I remember feeling so embarrassed and blushy faced trying to fumble through a speech.”

  After spending his freshman year at Kirkwood, Zac had returned to his childhood bedroom. He often felt like a failure, but he’d will himself to rally back to those roller-coaster peaks. He signed up for classes at the second community college with a vague idea of eventually going to business school. He got down on himself for feeling dumb in his classes, read a Tony Robbins self-help book for motivation, then got pumped up and scribbled down all his life goals. He got a job as a server at a Red Robin burger joint near the giant mall in Des Moines’s western suburbs to prove to himself that he could be good when communicating with people. But he experienced terrifying struggles just talking with customers. He forgot their orders, he got annoyed by their demands, and he quit the job. He lost all motivation to become an Army Ranger because he presumed he was too mentally weak—and he drank by himself and got depressed. He read Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in How People Change. And while he was still taking classes, he also worked for his dad, who had found himself a good gig at a mortgage company in Indianola. Then, Zac quit that job. Up, then down. Down, then up. He couldn’t find a steady trajectory.

  He moved to the family’s farmhouse near the timber to establish independence from his parents. One lonely night, depressed, he even loaded up the .22-caliber rifle before again talking himself out of suicide. He worked out on an insane schedule: a six-mile run every morning and an intense CrossFit session every night because working out was the only thing that could help his head feel right. He struggled with sleep and became addicted to sleeping pills. After getting an associate’s degree from community college, he transferred to the same four-year university in Des Moines his older brother had graduated from, Grand View University, determined to do right. He didn’t make friends in classes, partly because he was too anxious, partly because he told himself he was there to get a college degree, not just to mess around like he had in Iowa City. He worked his tail off for classes and held down various jobs as he moved toward graduation. He needed to prove to himself he could make it.

  No question, Zac had weathered ups and downs since high school. But, his parents thought, he was finally on track. From the outside looking in, his life seemed mostly good. That was by design. Zac’s whole persona—the concussions, the military, the tough-it-out Easter mentality—had made him skilled at masking his feelings.

  But a mother knows. And as Zac progressed through college, Brenda could sense things weren’t right with her middle son. After Zac moved out of his parents’ house and to the farmhouse, Brenda knew there was one surefire way she could bring Zac (and his brothers) back home: food. Every Sunday, she’d fix a big lunch for the family. Some weeks, it was roast beef, mashed potatoes, and vegetables. Other weeks, it was steaks with potato casserole and green beans. She’d make triple batches and send the boys home with plenty of food to get them through the week.

  Brenda and Zac had always been close. When he was living at home, they’d do errands together. When Brenda was cooking on these Sundays, he’d sit in the kitchen and chat with her. As Zac roller-coastered through his postadolescence, Brenda noticed his life subtly but consistently taking on a darker tinge.

  “He’d come home, and you could see he was troubled but didn’t want to talk about it,” Brenda later recalled to me. “Even to this day, my mother, the minute she sees me, she can tell if I’m sick, if I’m off. Mothers just can sense things about their kids. And I could see it in his eyes. I’d ask him, ‘What’s going on? What’s new?’ He was always quiet about it. But I saw distance in his eyes.”

  College was nearly over. Somehow, against all odds, Zac was about to get his degree. His older brother helped him get a job working alongside him at a full-service financial firm in Des Moines’s suburbs. Working with Myles II, Zac thought, was at least supposed to be exciting, and it would maybe give him a bit of that brothers-in-arms feeling he used to have on the football field. The two decided they were going to get rich, and quick. At the beginning of each workday, the brothers would pound on their chests like Matthew McConaughey’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street: “Let’s go to WORK!” At the end of the days, his brother would ask Zac if he’d made any sales. Usually, the answer was no. Zac spoke about going to business school, about investing in the stock market, about becoming a millionaire and purchasing a really nice car to replace Old Red, his 2008 cherry-red Mazda3.

  The Easter boys, (from left) Levi, Zac, Myles II.

  It was all a ruse. In truth, Zac was coming apart. Yeah, he was working out, but part of that was to mask an addiction to fast food that he often couldn’t control. Forget succeeding at work; most days, it was a struggle even to show up. Part of his job was to make cold calls to potential clients, trying to sell them insurance. But his memory was failing him, and often his language was, too. So Zac had to write a two-page script that he would follow, word for word, during sales calls. His colleagues noticed. They thought it was weird he couldn’t just wing it for a standard phone call. Even with the script, he sometimes couldn’t make it through a call. He’d be talking, a
nd then all of a sudden, no words would come. Just frozen. Zac called these moments brain tremors. It felt like when a muscle in your leg cramps up—but for Zac, the cramping muscle was the brain. Sometimes, he’d have a brain tremor when he was driving, and he would have to pull over until his mind calmed down. A tremor would last up to five seconds, brief but intense pains in his head that rendered him motionless. He wondered what was going on: Maybe a brain tumor?

  “I’m still not sure what to do about work,” Zac wrote in his journal. “Right now I feel unmotivated towards it and I would like to get my shit figured out. It’s also depressing knowing I have memory issues and language issues when I work in sales. All my hard work probably won’t pay off . . . I didn’t have any fast food binges today but I thought about it when I woke up. I feel like my body temp might be a little off because I’m sweating all the time. Jake invited me to go out to Buffalo Wild Wings with some friends. Just thinking about it gave me extreme anxiety and I felt very avoidant right away. When is this going to stop? 24 years old and I feel like I need to be hidden. I used the excuse I’m not feeling well. I was doing some research on TBI’s [traumatic brain injuries] and found something about impulsive sexual behavior. Explains why all I want to do is jerk off.”

  Zac obsessed over his failures at work. With Tony Robbins’s books at his side—one was titled Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical & Financial Destiny!—Zac scrawled action plans for his success in one of his journals. “I have so much potential,” Zac wrote. “If get better at cold calling and get better w/ people, I will have total self confidence and nothing will stop me. Change mentality first. Action determines results.” It’s as if Zac was acting as his own therapist, his own life coach. “I just know I’ll be rich and I will do it. I can overcome my fear. Practicing certainty in the mind is the most powerful thing.” On one side of a sheet of paper, he scribbled empowering beliefs. (“I always outwork ppl.” “I have a sexy body.” “I am an athlete.” “I will be a CEO.”) On the other side, he scribbled disempowering beliefs. (“I’m chubby.” “I’m socially awkward.”) “Stop using words that disempower you and use words that empower you!” Zac wrote. “I have come far as fuck in life, and I don’t even realize it.”