His good intentions don’t take into account that the barrier is there in the first place to prevent cars from taking the curve too fast and hurtling into the river. By one o’clock he is trying to pull me out of the brambles on the side of the hill. He goes down with me, and together we slip farther toward the river. Red Bull and vodka has intensified the earth’s gravitational pull to the extent that this slight incline overlooking the river might as well be a sheer rock face. I come close to gaining a foothold and then tumble farther down. I can hear the water. I can hear my own laughter. In the faint streetlight coming from the top of the hill I can see that the branches and thorns in the brush have cut my hands.
We claw our way back up to the top, away from the river. Back on the sidewalk, we can’t stop laughing at each other. My khakis have been torn to ribbons; my right leg is bleeding through what’s left of them. In a marble-mouthed haze, Kamauf asks me if I have my cell phone on me. He says we should call somebody. I manage to say yes, unless I lost it, unable to recall why I hadn’t thought about that sooner.
It is time to radio the QRF.
I thought maybe the homecoming would go smoother the second time around. I made it a point to see Nikki when she was in town around Christmas. It was nearly a year to the day since I’d walked out of her apartment. We talked briefly over lunch at a restaurant. She said she was happy. After that I never spoke to her again.
I never drank around my family during the day, but the short temper and the mood swings did enough damage. One night after I couldn’t find something of mine that my poor mom had unwittingly moved, I blew my top. When I calmed down fifteen minutes later, I realized just how stupid I looked and sounded. It made me laugh. I was becoming a stereotype. Johnny had come marching home just like the rest of the infantry.
Hanging out at home with Mom and Dad, trying to function just after the war, I could tell, just wasn’t going to work out. It was after I yelled at my parents for touching my shit that I decided to leave. I’d had enough of my family, my hometown, all the superficial news stories about the war, and the plethora of “support the troops” stickers on cars. I was tired of everyone’s shallow patriotism. Everyone around me had an opinion about what we should do to “the Iraqis” and the “terrorists,” but nine out of ten of them couldn’t tell the difference between the two. I was surrounded by supporters of the government—often those closest to me—who had no knowledge of history or insurgencies; no sense of real patriotism. In my mind, flags and stickers did not count as patriotism. To them it was a fight to defend freedom and that was all there was to it. We love freedom; they hate freedom. We must defend liberty. From the safety of their cozy bedrooms, watching other people deal with REAL PROBLEMS on the TV from ten thousand miles away, that was the attitude. There was no depth of reflection, no critical thinking. There was no respect for the true nature of a bloody life-and-death clash of human cultures and ideologies. There was no empathy for Iraqi families. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd called this kind of mentality “the bravery of being out of range,” and he wrote a song about it.
I just felt like I didn’t belong there anymore. America had somehow become Amrika, as the Iraqis say. I was on the outside looking in, and I needed space.
So I took the money and ran—using the cash I’d saved during the two wars. In army-speak I “beat feet.” I “popped smoke.” Less than ninety days after setting foot back on American soil, I caught a military hop headed for Europe. I figured that would be far enough away. All I carried was a single backpack with clothes, some photographs, a camera, and my passport. There were no plans for returning home. The first lesson I’d learned on returning from a guerilla war was this: Get your fucking head on straight before you speak to anyone.
11
The Mediterranean
Winter 2004
On the Spanish island of Mallorca, an explosion tore through the cold night air. We had been drinking up on the roof of the place I’d been staying. I was with two other lone travelers. One was American and the other a French Canadian. Sitting in lawn chairs that overlooked Palma harbor, we had been staring at all the twinkling lights on the hundreds of yachts down below. For three days I had told neither of them that I’d been in the American army.
It was earsplitting and close. I was out of my chair and moving for cover before the echo had stopped reverberating. As I moved in a low crouch, I turned and looked back at the two guys. They hadn’t moved and looked like seated statues. The Canadian had a Heineken halfway to his lips, where it was now paused. They were staring at me.
“Wow, man. You okay?” he asked. His French accent sounded to me vaguely like Ammar’s Arabic one.
A car backfire, magnified by crisp, clear night air and tall buildings set closely together, does not necessarily register as “car backfire” to skittish ears. As I thought about how to explain my reaction, I realized that I didn’t even jump like that when I was in theater. Two wars, and I don’t think I ever jumped like that. I guessed that it had something to do with not being around any other soldiers, being halfway buzzed, and not clutching a weapon.
I spent the rest of the night killing a twelve-pack under the stars, telling war stories.
Over sangria in Barcelona I told a psychology grad student what the moment is like right before you die. When I did that, I felt like I was using my real voice for the first time in a while. It felt fresh. When I spoke of the war, it didn’t have that flat tone anymore.
When she finally asked me how I was doing, I paused, trying to figure out how to answer her. I’d gotten the same question from a lot of people back home. Usually they would start by asking me what the war was like. Then they’d ask how it affected me. And then, as if to make themselves more comfortable, they’d always say with a laugh, “But you’re okay now, right?”
Every time I’d hear something like that, I’d hear Ving Rhames’ character in Pulp Fiction when Bruce Willis asks him if he’s okay. This, of course, is after the disconcerting rape scene with the red ball gags and the gimp. Rhames’ character, Marsellus Wallace, responds, “Naw, man. I’m pretty fuckin’ far from okay.”
To Lisa, the curious junior psychoanalyst I’d known for three days, I responded, “I’ll be fine.”
In a train car, on the way to Rome, I stayed awake all night talking war and international affairs with an Australian accountant. I’d been traveling with him and an American girl for two weeks and he hadn’t really probed about the war or what I thought about it.
As the train clacked along the tracks, we played cards, and I told him about how, in the beginning, a reasoning, moral person could have wanted to do the things I’d done, and see the things I’d seen. Crossing the Italian frontier, I told him about the Iraqi people I’d met like Ammar, Mohamed, and Waseem. I tried to convey to him how awkward it was at times for the Iraqis to work with the Americans. And I recounted how Hameed had threatened to make the RPG gunner eat his own guts. After that I glanced over at the sleeping girl next to us. She looked peaceful. I dealt the stack of cards and continued on. I tried to explain to him Collins’ seemingly unquenchable lust for battle—and how even that had seemed to wane, or soften, toward the end. I told him about Croom and what a great guy he was. And I explained to him how Croom had once told me he’d lost his faith in God on 9/11. A few hands later I turned the deck over and said, “Your turn to shuffle, dude.”
In Rome I met a sergeant with a group of American soldiers who were partying away their leave from the American base at Vicenza. Their closely cropped hair had given them away. Over the din of a noisy bar, we talked about Iraq. He’d been in Kirkuk around the same time I was there, and we talked about how shitty things were getting in northern Iraq. We tried to come up with some names of people we knew in common, but couldn’t think of any.
Talking to him, I’d never felt more awkward—there with my longish hair, backpacking around a continent with no responsibility—talking to those who were preparing to go back to war. I felt out of place again, like som
e hirsute hippie.
I wanted to feel in place again, to be comfortable somewhere. I think that’s why a part of me was trying to get back to the Middle East—to the Arab world—to the only place I really knew how to be. I knew how things worked there and I knew where I stood there.
I took another train to the Italian port of Brindisi, this time alone. I was being pulled southeast by what was becoming a sort of tractor beam. Along the route through the Campanian countryside I talked to no one. I just let my mind drift. I thought back on how I’d done. I was twenty-five years old and I’d been a combatant in two wars already. I thought about how, as a kid, it was something I’d always envisioned—wanted, needed. But somehow it hadn’t turned out the way I thought it would. I never thought that battle was something that could drive a spike into my psyche the way it had.
I always thought it would have been easier. The soul-crushing phenomenon of fear before combat had been unexpected. It had left me more afraid of dying than ever. The idea terrifies me now. It keeps me awake at night. Before the wars, the thought of not being alive had warranted no more than a detached shrug. Now I could see that it would always be in the forefront of my mind—that it would be evident in everything I did. The closeness—that proximity—to death, or just the possibility of it, day in and day out seemed to have invaded my soul like a creeping disease. As the train clipped through southern Italy, I stared out the window.
From Brindisi I took an eight-hour ferry ride to Greece. Halfway across the Adriatic, I started dozing. There were Greeks sitting, lounging, and talking around me. I allowed their language to put me to sleep. They were discussing something funny because they kept laughing while I lay there with my eyes closed and my book on my chest. After a while, though, it seemed like their conversation turned serious. It was a slight change in voice tone that I noticed. They began speaking in Arabic:
The Baghdad taxi driver won’t stop yammering at me. I see he wants help for the people in his car. He is quivering anxiously, pacing and pointing for me to inspect his cargo. I see that the trunk of his taxi is half open. I walk over to it and look inside. The first thing I notice is all the blood. Looking up at me is an Iraqi man wearing shorts and a t-shirt. His eyes are as big as plates and he looks terrified. He has been shot but I can’t tell how many times. His face is pale and his teeth are chattering. He is lying in a pool of his own blood.
“What about the other guy?” I say, gently setting the trunk lid back down. “Let’s see the other guy.”
Croom walks over and grabs the rear door handle. He opens it and looks in.
“Ohhh shit!” he says, taking a step back.
I walk around from the trunk and look inside. Blood, pink flesh, chips of bone, matted hair, lolling, vacant eyes, the muffled groan of—
I jerked and woke up, looking around and trying to get my bearings. The Greeks were still talking and hadn’t seemed to notice. If they did, they hadn’t cared.
I reached down to the ground and picked up my book where it had fallen. I put it back in my bag and then stood up. I stretched my back and walked out onto the deck of the ship. The wind was blowing and it was cool out. I stood with my hands on the railing, listening to the water lapping against the side of the ship. Across the water to the east was the Albanian coastline, with its soaring, snow-dusted mountains. As the setting sun reflected off the snow, it reminded me of the Hindu Kush. They looked just like the massive peaks ringing the Shomali plain in Afghanistan.
I stood there gazing out at them, wondering if I was always going to think that way. A part of me hoped that maybe one day they would just be mountains again.
There is an old trick that shady Athenians play on tourists. I’d read about it in a tourist book in Rome. It goes something like this: A native strikes up a friendly conversation with a lone tourist. After the tourist becomes comfortable with the Athenian, the Greek says he knows a great bar nearby with cheap drinks. He says there will probably be girls there and then he offers to take the tourist. Unbeknownst to the tourist, everyone in the bar is typically in on the ruse. The Greek buys the first round and gets the conversation going. Suddenly two beautiful women appear and begin conversing with the tourist. They start pouring it on—to the point that the tourist thinks he might have a chance with one or both of them. The tourist starts buying more drinks, becoming more inebriated with each one. Once he’s ready to leave, the bartender hands him the check. The tourist sees three of them at this point, but he looks at the amount on the one in the middle. It’s exorbitant—several hundred euros. The tourist at first argues. When he gets nowhere, he turns to the door. Only now, three very large men are blocking his way out. The bartender wants his money. The tourist looks for the guy who brought him there in the first place, but suddenly, the guy is nowhere to be seen.
I counted myself as being one of the fortunate ones for having heard of the scam before first wandering the maze of Athenian streets. Because I was on the lookout for it, I didn’t let the prospect stop me from talking to the people I met.
One cloudy afternoon I was walking along a downtown street when a guy in drag walked past me going the other way. I did a double take just to make sure. A plump older gentleman wearing a dark coat and a Burberry scarf was walking just behind me and saw the same thing. After he/she had passed, I made eye contact with the older man and he said something to me in Greek—a joke by the expression on his face. I smiled politely and said, “Sorry, I don’t speak Greek.”
His eyes brightened. “Oh,” he said, “you speak English. You American?” As he spoke, I noticed his wavy salt and pepper hair was just beginning to bald in the back.
I said, “Yes.”
“Oh, that’s great,” he continued with a Greek accent. “My son lives in San Antonio. What part of the States you from?”
I told him I was from Louisiana but that I was moving to Texas when I got home. We walked and talked for a while during which time he told me his son was a doctor. He was dressed nicer than anyone around and I thought that might have explained it. He asked me if I’d eaten and I said no. “In that case,” he said, “there’s a sidewalk café just down the block. You wanna get a bite to eat?”
I was hungry so I said okay.
The downtown streets were packed, leaving us to thread our way through the moving crowd. He stopped for a moment outside a door to a building. The sign was in Greek. The rotund man looked up at me and said, “I’m going to run in here and grab a drink before we go. You can wait right here.” Then he paused, appearing to think about it. “Or,” he said, “you can come in and grab one too. It’ll just take a second.”
I wasn’t sure what kind of a drink he meant, whether he wanted bottled water, a Gatorade, or a shot of ouzo, but I didn’t object.
He opened the door, revealing a flight of stairs leading down. I followed him and when we reached the door at the bottom, he opened it and allowed me to proceed in first. Starting to feel a small prickle of uncertainty, I scanned the interior. As I did, I heard the man close the door behind me.
Mother. Fucker. To my right was the bar. Behind it stood a smiling, fiftyish looking female bartender. Sitting at the bar was the twentyish looking blond decoy—also smiling intently at me. I probably should have run right then, pushing through the man, and making my way back up the stairs, but I didn’t. I figured that I’d play it cool and see if I could play stupid enough to get my wallet and myself out of this in one piece.
The fat man walked me over to the bar. “You want some ouzo,” he asked. “I think we should have some before lunch.”
Assuming bottled water and Gatorade were both out of the question, I declined politely.
The bartender then looked across at me, smiling. “Oh come, young man! Here let me pour you a glass of our good stuff. You just have to try it . . . and if you don’t like, you don’t drink anymore!” She started pouring a bottle of ouzo over a tall glass filled with ice. Then she poured two more—one for the man and one for the girl.
After she
handed them to us, the fat man raised his and said, “Yamas!”—Greek for cheers. I raised the glass near my lips, but didn’t sip any—if nothing else I wasn’t going to allow them to charge me for drinking. They didn’t seem to notice.
The fat man then exclaimed that the three of us—meaning himself, the girl, and me—should go take a seat in one of the red vinyl-covered booths in the corner of the otherwise empty bar. I turned to him and said, “Hey, what about lunch? You said we were gonna go to a sidewalk café for lunch.”
“Oh come on, we won’t take long here . . . just a couple of drinks.” Now it was a “couple” of drinks. As if to entice me further, he continued, “And I have a cell phone with me I use to call my son. You can use it to call home if you’d like.”
Holding the glass of ouzo, I just gave him an icy glare. As we walked to the booth I took the time to assess the situation. At the moment I only saw the man and the two women. But I had no way of knowing who else could have been in the back. I also had to assume someone had gone behind us and locked the door. I was angrier with myself than at the three visible con artists. I couldn’t believe I’d been snared. I had to give it to the fat man though—I sure as hell hadn’t been on the lookout for old men wearing Burberry scarves.
In such a compromised position, I’d never wanted more than to be in the U.S. Army. As a backpacker I was ashamed at having been tricked, but as a soldier I felt somehow dishonored for having been confused for a “regular” tourist.
As we sat down, the bartender asked if she could take my coat. “No thanks,” I said. “We won’t be staying here too long.” She just smiled and nodded. I pulled in next to the fat man behind a table. Then the girl sat next to me. Rusty! Rusty! Rusty! I realized that I’d allowed them to pin me in.
The girl started making small talk with me—really small talk, because her English was horrible. I noticed that she wasn’t even that attractive for bait. The fat man pulled out his phone and said he was going to adjust it so I could call home.
The War I Always Wanted Page 19