—
I dream that I am in Ciudad Juárez with Manuel and Beto. We are driving at night through a street filled with people, and we park our car along the side of the road to join the crowds. We walk through the city with the people of Juárez, celebrating with them in the open air. I dance with girls in the street, kissing and spinning them in the light. I can sense that there is an unease among the crowd, and every so often Beto leans toward me to point out certain people connected to the cartel, certain vehicles to keep an eye on, certain places to avoid. In the early dawn the crowds thin out and we begin making our way back to our parked vehicle. As we walk along the sidewalk, Manuel gestures behind us. In the distance men can be seen making their way down the road, killing and kidnapping everyone who remains on the streets. They’re coming this way, Manuel tells us. We hurry toward the car and I think to myself that we should have known better than to come here. We’ve all seen the bloody images, I think, why did we come? We reach the car. As we speed through the city, the streets begin to fill once more with people. The city’s residents are starting their morning, carrying flowers with them as they walk in all directions. How do they live with the fear, I wonder to myself, how do they survive?
—
Historian Timothy Snyder has spent much of his career examining the terror waged against the people of Eastern Europe between 1930 and 1945 in the borderlands between World War II–era Germany and the Soviet Union. His book Bloodlands chronicles the twin genocides perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin in modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and western Russia—campaigns of ethnically and politically motivated mass killing and starvation writ large.
Snyder implores his readers to view the staggering number of deaths—fourteen million—as fourteen million times one. “Each record of death,” he writes, “suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life. We must be able not only to reckon the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual.” Snyder explains that “to join in a large number after death is to be dissolved into a stream of anonymity. To be enlisted posthumously into competing national memories, bolstered by the numbers of which your life has become a part, is to sacrifice individuality. It is to be abandoned by history.”
Snyder ends his book with a plea to academics and fellow historians, to all those who grapple with death on a grand scale. “It is for us as scholars,” he urges, “to seek these numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people.”
—
Hayward came to my office in the late morning while I was reading through the day’s news on my computer. Are you busy? he asked. No, I said, looking up from the computer screen. He stared at my face. Jesus, he said, you look like shit. Thanks, I replied. I haven’t been sleeping, that’s all. Well, he said, let’s go grab some lunch.
After ordering Hayward took his hat off and placed it on the table. There was a shooting at your old station, he told me, did you hear? No, I said. What happened? An agent shot and killed a Guatemalan down near the line. Damn, I said. They say it was a good shot, Hayward continued, self-defense, cut-and-dried. What was the agent’s name? I asked. Lopez, he said. Do you know him? I thought back to my days at the station. I don’t remember a Lopez. Well shit, Hayward replied, I was going to see if you knew how he was doing. He sat back in his seat and gazed out the window. I know how hard it can be on a man after he kills someone, he said after some time. Have the other guys told you about me? I blinked at him in confusion. What do you mean? I asked. I shot a kid once, Hayward said. Back when I was a cop in Virginia. I thought maybe you’d heard. People talk, you know. He held his hat between his hands, bending and shaping the brim.
When the call came out on the radio, Hayward told me, he was on his way back to the station after working a double shift. There was a plainclothes detective just a few blocks away, engaged in a pursuit with a stolen vehicle. Hayward responded with lights and sirens and blocked the vehicle’s escape route down a side street. When the car stopped to make a U-turn, the plainclothes detective jumped out of his vehicle and attempted to remove the driver from the stolen car. As he pulled the door open, the driver took his arm and held on to him as he made the turn. Hayward saw that the detective was hanging from the car and being dragged across the pavement as the car accelerated, so he aimed and fired two shots, hitting the driver right in the head. I didn’t know where the bullet hit, he said, but I saw the driver go limp and watched the car come to a stop. He was just a kid, seventeen years old. There was a passenger too, a nineteen-year-old, unharmed.
Hayward stared at his hat, an old and quiet pain spreading across his face the likes of which I hoped I would never be made to carry. Hell, Hayward finally said, I was barely in my twenties.
—
In their ongoing attempts to understand the roots of human violence, scientists have identified a genetic deficiency that predisposes certain men to acts of hostility. In 1978, in the southeastern Dutch city of Nijmegen, a woman approached medical experts at the Radboud University Medical Center, concerned about a history of violence in her family, which included her brothers, her son, and generations of her male forebears. These men raped and abused their sisters, they chased down their employers in rage, they committed arson, they got in fights, they leveled threats against family members, friends, coworkers, and strangers. In 1962 the woman’s peaceable grand-uncle, a teacher at an institution for the learning disabled, traced the violence in his family as far back as 1870, identifying nine male family members and ancestors with a history of such behavior. For over a decade, geneticists at the University of Nijmegen conducted research on the woman and her family.
In 1993, after fifteen years of investigation, researchers identified a deficiency in a gene that produces an enzyme called monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA, a key regulator of impulse control. Individuals with low levels of MAOA, it seemed, were predisposed to violence, and researchers came to refer to them as carriers of a “warrior gene.” Since the occurrence of this deficiency is tied to a defect in the X chromosome, men—possessing only one X chromosome, while women possess two—are more prone to the defect, although women may carry it and pass it on to their sons. Subsequent studies revealed that about one-third of the world’s male population carry the warrior gene, the expression of which can be triggered by childhood exposure to trauma.
Dr. James Fallon, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, upon discovering that several of his ancestors had a grisly history of murder, submitted himself to brain scans and genetic analysis. His genetic results and brain activity patterns matched those thought by scientists to be associated with aggression and violence. Fallon attributed his failure to succumb to a “charmed” upbringing. “If you have the high-risk form of the gene and you were abused early on in life,” he explained in an interview, “your chances of a life of crime are much higher. If you have the high-risk gene but you weren’t abused, then there really wasn’t much risk. So just a gene by itself, the variant doesn’t really dramatically affect behavior, but under certain environmental conditions there is a big difference.”
Dr. Fallon does not specify the environmental conditions that might lead to the activation of the warrior gene, nor does he suggest whether large-scale trauma, enacted over decades across an entire society, might trigger the ceaseless perpetuation of violence. He does not indicate how long our subconscious can absorb terror and fear—how long we can live in proximity to aggression and cruelty—before slipping into madness.
—
I agreed to take care of Beto’s dog while he was deployed for several days on an intelligence mission out of town. Before he left I told him that I planned to hike in the Franklin Mountains over the weekend. Can your dog handle a steep climb and a few hours of walking? I asked. Probably not, Beto said.
In the morning, before leaving for the hike, I fed Beto’s dog and left him in the gated backyard. As I drove through
El Paso to the McKelligon Canyon trailhead on the east side of the mountains, I noticed a heavy spring wind blowing across the city. The wind tore at my shirt as I climbed up the canyon, the dust obscuring the views to the east. An hour later, at the top of a peak, I looked out to see the entire region covered by a massive cloud of gray-brown dust. On a clear day I would have been able to see the West Texas plains and the deserts of New Mexico, I would have been able to look south across the city of Juárez and the surrounding countryside of Chihuahua, but with the blowing dust I couldn’t even see to the base of the mountains. I made my way back down the canyon spitting dirt and shielding my eyes.
I returned home to find the gate to the backyard slung open and Beto’s dog missing. In the fading dust-filtered light of the evening, I drove frantically through the surrounding neighborhood searching for the dog, unable to see more than a hundred yards in front of me. Through the brown haze I saw a woman walking down the street with a hooded sweatshirt pulled tight around her face. I rolled down the window and shouted to her over the wind. The dog catcher came through here maybe fifteen minutes ago, she told me. I drove back to Beto’s house to find an impoundment notice from El Paso Animal Services on the door. I raced across town to the shelter, cursing myself aloud.
At the shelter I found Beto’s dog covered in blood and bite marks, cowering in the corner of the kennel. I felt, briefly, as if I were in a nightmare. He was in a fight, the officer explained. He’ll be fine, but he messed the other dog up pretty good. The officer gave me the address of a house a few blocks down the street and I drove straight there, leaving Beto’s dog curled in the passenger seat of my truck. Standing in front of the house, I wondered why I shouldn’t just turn around and leave, why I should hold myself responsible for a fight that wasn’t mine. At the door I was met by a disheveled woman. I was supposed to be watching the dog, I told her, losing my words. I placed a hand over my chest and clenched my jaw. The woman stood with her hand still gripping the doorknob. Is your dog all right? I finally asked. My husband took her to the animal clinic, she said, barely concealing her anger. Your fucking dog tore her throat open, right through the goddamned jugular. I lowered my gaze. She’s getting stitches, the woman said, we don’t know if she’ll make it. She stared at me with eyes wide and unblinking. I’m sorry, I told her. We stood with coldness between us until, finally, I turned to leave. I’ll come back for the vet bills, I told her, I promise.
That night, as dust blew across the desert, I kneeled in the backyard of Beto’s home, trembling as I washed blood from the face of an animal.
—
In his book What Have We Done, veteran war reporter David Wood examines the pervasiveness of “moral injury” among soldiers who have returned from the battlefronts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Long confused with PTSD, moral injury is a more subtle wound, characterized not by flashbacks or a startle complex but by “sorrow, remorse, grief, shame, bitterness, and moral confusion” that manifest not in physical reactions but in emotional responses as subtle as dreams and doubts. “In its most simple and profound sense,” writes Wood, “moral injury is a jagged disconnect from our understanding of who we are and what we and others ought to do and ought not to do.” As a soldier tells him, “Moral injury is a learned behavior, learning to accept the things you know are wrong.”
Wood describes how “most of us . . . have a firm and deeply personal understanding of life’s moral rules, of justice and injustice, right and wrong. That sense, our inner compass, is built on beliefs we begin to acquire as infants . . . But war, by its very nature, tends to suddenly and violently upend these remaining moral beliefs. Things don’t go well in war, whose very purpose demands death and destruction.” This upending is often a gradual process, one that is difficult to perceive. Likewise, moral injury is a wound that sets in slowly, something that occurs, as one Iraq veteran wrote, “when a person has time to reflect on a traumatic experience.”
When Wood writes of moral injury, he refers most often to traumas suffered in combat, by soldiers deployed in foreign war zones on the other side of the earth. But he also notes that one does not have to be in combat to suffer from moral injury. He reminds us that war is something that reaches far beyond the battlefield, something that leaches out into proximate geographies and relationships, seeping deep into the individual and societal unconscious. “To be in war,” Wood states, even in this broader sense, “is to be exposed to moral injury.”
—
Our team was deployed to work a mission in the deserts of my old station. Before we left El Paso, Hayward came to me to say he needed me at my best. You know the lay of the land. I want you out there helping Manuel to triangulate scout locations, matching up the intercepted communications with what you know from the ground, what you see on the maps. I want to know where they’re staging their loads and what they can see from their lookout points. There’s a shit ton of dope moving through here—let’s figure out where it’s headed.
I rode through long days with Manuel and Beto, gazing out the window at the blossoming landscape, bright with green creosote and yellow plumes of palo verde, with red-tipped ocotillos and endless orange wildflowers. As we listened to crackling voices on the scanners, I imagined that I might know where they were and I tried to hold in my mind their high-up views across the ephemeral lushness of the desert.
In the late afternoons we returned to the forward operating base where we had set up a trailer to serve as our mobile command center. One evening, a few hours before sundown, Hayward suggested that some of us take ATVs down the back roads to survey the approach to a nearby scout hill. You guys go, I told him, I’ll stay back and work on the shift report. Half an hour after leaving with Manuel and Beto, Hayward called me on my cell phone. We ran across a quitter, he said, can you transport her back to the base for us? Sure, I said. I asked if she was all right, if she had water. She’s fine, he assured me.
When I arrived I saw Hayward, Manuel, and Beto standing over a small woman sitting in the middle of the dirt road. Hayward walked over to me as Beto and Manuel continued speaking with the woman in Spanish. We checked her pockets, he said, this is all she had. He handed me a cell phone. Her group left her behind. Looks like she’s got a pretty bad limp—probably has some nasty blisters. Manuel and Beto walked the woman to the back of my patrol vehicle and helped her into the backseat. Vete con cuidado, señora, Manuel told her before shutting the door. I looked up at the sky and then at Hayward. You should get going, I told him, there’s not much daylight left. Whatever you say, boss, he said. Just don’t forget that report.
As I drove down the dirt road back toward the base, I looked at the woman in the rearview mirror through the mesh of the metal cage that separated us. I tried to think of something to say but found myself unable to speak. Is it all right if I roll down the windows? I finally asked. Lo que usted quiere, oficial. I rolled the windows down and turned to look at the woman. Me puedes tutear, I told her.
Cool air blew in from outside and I gazed beyond the road at the dust devils creeping across the warmly lit valley, a myriad of clay-colored cones whirling in the distance. For a short time, driving down the open road, I felt a strange and familiar sense of freedom, an old closeness with the desert. Perhaps there was something comforting, I thought, about being able look out across the landscape and see for myself the horrors laid upon it. I looked again through the mesh to the woman seated behind me. She stared out the open window, her hair whipping at her sun-wrinkled face. I wondered what she might have seen, what she might feel looking out at the desert, and I was certain it was no sense of freedom.
At the forward operating base I parked and helped the woman out of the vehicle. I offered her my arm as she limped up the walkway to a small holding area. Inside, she sat on a cold steel bench as I asked her a series of questions to fill out her voluntary return papers, the only semblance of conversation I was able to have with her. I’m forty-six years old, she told me. I was trying to
get to Phoenix to see my husband. My group crossed four days ago. They left me after the second day. I come from Guerrero.
After filling out the paperwork I asked the woman if I could see her feet. I’m an EMT, I told her, I can tell you how bad they are. She took her shoes off slowly, embarrassed at the smell. It’s all right, I said, I’ve smelled it before. As she removed her socks, the fabric, stiff with days of dried sweat, pulled at the skin of her soles. The balls and heels of her feet were covered with silver-dollar-sized blisters. I opened a medical kit and put on a pair of gloves. I touched her feet, turning them slowly in my hands. They’re okay, I assured her, I’ve seen worse. Most of your blisters are unbroken.
I cleaned her feet one at a time with a disinfectant wipe, swabbing the fluid from the edges of her broken blisters and smearing them with ointment. Slowly, I unraveled a roll of white gauze around each pallid foot, then covered them gently with an elastic wrap. As I looked up, I saw that the woman had been watching me with her head resting on her shoulder. Eres muy humanitario, oficial, she told me. I looked down at her feet and shook my head. No, I said, I’m not.
—
“The horrible thing is when you are dreaming,” the sicario tells his interviewers. “You have very realistic dreams. I would dream that I was running through the streets, jumping over cars. Oh, I would dream that I was out there and did not have my weapon and they were chasing me. And the dreams were so real that I would wake up and the gun was on the pillow and I would have my weapon in my hand and I would be aiming it.
“I was very violent,” the sicario explains. “The dreams are not things that could never happen, they are not fantastic dreams, but very realistic. The fear that I had that kept me from sleeping in my house with my family, the reason I would go someplace to sleep by myself . . . it was because the least little noise would cause you to react violently . . . One time my wife tried to help me when I was dreaming . . . She saw I was having a nightmare and tried to wake me up, but when she touched me—ARRRGGH—my reaction was to grab her by the throat . . . I was strangling her, I was strangling my own wife.” The sicario’s huge hands tremble as he makes a gesture of strangulation, his fingers stretched out and quivering.
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