Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Jesse showed up first, then Ryan and Craig Fazenbaker and his wife. None of them seemed overly concerned. They’d all been there recently, needing a little time alone to catch their footing. Ryan told her he’d talked to Tom for ten minutes the day before and he’d seemed fine. “He’s probably just going somewhere to cool off,” he said.

  “No,” Nina said. “I know him. This isn’t normal.”

  The Whorls use an iPhone application called Loopt that allows them to see the other’s location when they’re logged onto Facebook. In a dual-military household, with plenty of schedule changes and times when phones can’t be used, it’s an easy way for Nina to know that Tom is still out in Camp Lejeune’s vast training area at the rifle range, so she should wait on starting dinner. For two hours, she checked her phone every few minutes, but Loopt hadn’t updated, and still showed him at their house. She hoped he was a hundred miles away by now. Tom needed time, distance, and solitude when he was angry, so he usually would drive. After an argument in South Carolina, he drove to Florida. After another at Camp Lejeune, he drove to Virginia. He might drive for hours, but then he’d mellow, and she’d mellow, and they’d talk it through.

  At ten p.m., his location finally changed on her phone, and she knew that he had gone to kill himself.

  She left Jesse, Ryan, and Fazenbaker with her kids and sped toward the Jacksonville Mall, six miles away. There was the Pontiac, lights off, in front of the Ulta cosmetics store, which was Nina’s favorite, always their first stop on trips to the mall. And there was Tom, slumped against the window.

  “I found him!” she shouted to the 911 operator.

  She opened the door and Tom pitched forward, his shirt front covered in vomit. He moaned and mumbled, barely conscious. Nina screamed at him to stand up. She worked her arms under his arms, bloodied from knife slices on his wrists, and half dragged him to the Jeep as a police car raced toward her.

  He lay unconscious in the intensive care unit at Onslow Memorial Hospital, a breathing tube snaked down his throat because his body was too weak to breathe for itself. On the sixth day, he woke up, puzzled and disoriented. He tried to lift his arms, which had been restrained at his side.

  “Tom, do you know why you’re in here?” Nina asked him.

  He shook his head. She showed him his bandaged wrists and the understanding washed over him, and he cried. Later he told her he thought it had been one more terrible dream.

  Being home from Afghanistan hadn’t been easy for Nina, either, as she watched her husband fall apart and tried to keep the family upright. They had always been each other’s support—them against the world—but he’d retreated somewhere so dark that she couldn’t find the path to bring him home. To see him so distraught that he’d choose death broke her heart, but she flushed with anger, too. “It was the biggest betrayal,” she says. “It was selfish, and it was going to relieve his pain by giving me pain. I would have blamed myself for the rest of my life had I not found him.

  “I just want to shake him and make it go away, make it stop and have my old husband back,” she says. “I have to learn to love him this way. If he’d gotten his leg blown off, I’d learn to love him that way. I have to realize that he’s not going to be like he was.”

  The Marine Corps celebrated Tom as a hero for the moment that weighed on him most heavily.

  On a cool January morning, nearly eight hundred men of Second Battalion, Eighth Marines gathered beside their redbrick headquarters at Camp Lejeune, arranged by company, in perfect rows. Tom stood before them, at the position of attention: back rigid, chest out, arms at his sides with his fingers curled against his palms. He’d been promoted to staff sergeant three months earlier, and he wore on his collar the metal rank insignia he had taken from Jimmy’s uniform that day in the compound.

  His battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Harrill, who still had debris in his face from the blast that killed Jimmy, walked up to him in sharp, measured steps, stood nearly toe to toe, and pinned a red-white-and-blue ribbon to the left chest pocket of Tom’s uniform. From the ribbon dangled a Bronze Star, over his heart. A Marine read from the citation for the Bronze Star with Valor over the loudspeaker: “His leadership directly led to the defeat of the insurgency in the vast majority of his battle space. By his extraordinary guidance, zealous initiative, and total dedication to duty, Sergeant Whorl reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps.”

  The award references two days specifically: the running gunfight in Cocheran Village, in which they mortally wounded a Taliban fighter and recovered a cache of IED components, and the day Jimmy died. “His mental agility and ability to remain focused in a chaotic environment enabled him to rapidly coordinate a medical evacuation while simultaneously directing his squad into a security cordon. With disregard for his own safety, he repeatedly entered the blast site to treat a mortally wounded Marine and remain with him during his final moments.”

  Tom’s father drove down from Maryland for the ceremony, and afterwards he took a picture of Tom, with the medal pinned to his chest. In the picture Tom is smiling, a rarity in the months since he’d come home. Yes, the medal reminded him—shouted to him—that Jimmy and Ian were dead, but it also made him proud of what the Third Platoon Marines, the living and the dead, had accomplished in northern Marjah.

  In the weeks since he’d tried to kill himself, he had slowly started reframing the story of his time in Afghanistan, a messy, stumbling exploration that had begun as he lay in the hospital bed, wrists still bandaged, and his doctors asked if he’d like to speak with mental health.

  His psychologist at Camp Lejeune hadn’t been in combat, which Tom counted as an immediate mark against him, but he didn’t say he knew how Tom was feeling, and that made up for plenty, because Tom was certain that almost no one could know that. The psychiatrist did tell him this: Yes, you lost two men. But you brought home forty-six, the result of thousands of good decisions. Of everything anyone had told him, the condolences and absolutions, the tough-love talks and the tips for coping, this made the most sense. “It’s a small thing, but for me, that’s what I needed to tell myself,” he says. “Every time I think of the two I lost, I think of the forty-six I brought home, who have babies now, who have gotten married, who are doing great things with their lives.”

  That helped assuage the guilt, although Tom reached another conclusion, too: he may have brought home forty-six, but he couldn’t stand losing another. He was done. “I can’t do it anymore,” he told the psychologist. “I can’t lead eighteen- and nineteen-year-old guys into combat and not bring back one or two. I can’t perform the job. I can’t watch these kids get fucked up in the worst ways. I’m tapped out. And it’s a hard thing to admit.”

  In June, Tom spent a month in Texas at an inpatient clinic for post-traumatic stress, where he learned how to better cope with the guilt and the sadness and how to pull himself back when he started obsessing over details, like the smell of Jimmy’s last breaths or the gurgle of blood in Ian’s throat.

  Before he left for Texas, he told the Marines Corps he was finished, after thirteen years of service. He wanted a medical retirement. Upon his return, he moved to Camp Lejeune’s Wounded Warrior Battalion, a unit full of men with shot-off faces, missing legs, and rattled brains, where the whole mission is getting better. He sometimes had three appointments a day, with neurologists, psychiatrists and psychologists, chiropractors for a back wrecked by too many years as a grunt, and counselors who helped him plan for life after the military. He worked out five times a week, with elective sports like surfing and kayaking twice a week, and he spent more time with his family.

  For the first time in his Marine career, Tom didn’t feel responsible for everyone else, and that was okay.

  With Lee riding his bicycle outside on a warm Camp Lejeune evening, Andrew busy on the couch with a monster-truck video game, and Nina in the kitchen with Gia on her hip, Tom opens the closet door in his bedroom and drops to his knees. He
slides out a scarred wooden toolbox, two feet wide, with three drawers and a hinged lid, passed down from his great-grandfather. He lifts the lid and his eyes flit across the contents, a story of origins and evolution, told through accumulated treasures and fierce heartache.

  Great-Grandfather Mason’s ivory-handled butcher knives from his days in the slaughterhouse. Grandfather Whorl’s belt buckle, with its raised image of the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, aboard which he’d served. A wooden checkerboard his grandfather Whorl had given his dad when he was a boy. Two musket balls from Gettysburg. A bag of sand, black and gravelly, that Tom collected on Iwo Jima in 2000. A ragged sliver of shrapnel Tom pulled from his own neck in 2009, and a black-and-white-checkered kaffiyeh scarf from that first deployment, given to him by an interpreter after Tom used his own to carry a Marine’s severed arm.

  He unpacks the box, fingers caressing these pieces of himself. The Velcro patch with Jimmy’s name, rank, and unit that he stripped from Jimmy’s uniform before they loaded him onto the medevac bird, and the dog tags Jimmy wore that day. His Bronze Star with Valor. A wad of Afghan money. The pirate flag that hung above Jimmy’s cot from the first day of the deployment to the last, and the American flag that hung over Tom’s cot.

  In time, he’ll drive up to Vermont and see Ian, out on the hillside in Danville Cemetery, with the White Mountains in the distance, and he’ll visit Jimmy in Arlington National Cemetery. He knows he won’t have any lasting peace until he does. But for now they meet here.

  He flips through his journal, reminded of dates and names already grown foggy, his words pulling him back to Afghanistan. He unfolds a laminated satellite map from Third Platoon’s sector and traces a finger across the patchwork of fields, crisscrossed with roads and canals and sprinkled with buildings, which appear as tiny squares. There’s Patrol Base Dakota. The road where Ian was blown up. The building where Jimmy stepped on the bomb.

  He sets aside the map and, with a reverence reserved for sacred artifacts, picks up the most cherished item, the picture of Ian, Jimmy, and Tom taken by Jesse an hour before Ian died, the picture that so disturbed Alison Malachowski when she first saw it because she feared Tom would be next, death moving down the line. Tom had figured the same, and the thought didn’t trouble him; he knew he would die in Afghanistan. After all the bombs, and the bullets that passed so close he could feel them slice through the air, he still can’t make sense of how he survived, or why.

  When his boys are older, maybe when they have children of their own, he’ll give them the box. “I’ll tell them I served honorably,” he says, “and the men I led served honorably.” His boys can sift through the treasures, feel the jagged splinter of shrapnel pulled from their father’s neck, run a fingertip over the raised lettering on Jimmy’s dog tags, unfurl the Jolly Roger that hung above Jimmy’s cot, still washed in the dust of Dakota. Their ears won’t ring from the rifle fire. They won’t smell the pungent bite of explosives hanging in the air, or hear Jimmy cry out for their father. And perhaps by then the sharpest edges will have dulled for Tom as well.

  Orion

  FINALIST—ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

  This anthology closes with an essay the National Magazine Award judges described as both “rich in suspense” and “cautiously optimistic.” The subject is nothing less than the fate of humanity. Charles C. Mann argues that although other species have been rewarded for their success with extinction, our plasticity—our ability not merely to adapt but to change for the better—may earn us survival. Mann is the author of 1491 and 1493, about the New World before and after Christopher Columbus. Mann’s work has been nominated for National Magazine Awards twice before. Founded in 1982, Orion describes its mission as hosting a conversation about “the relationship between human culture and the natural world.” Another Orion essay, Joe Wilkins’s scarifying “Out West,” was an award finalist in 2010.

  Charles C. Mann

  State of the Species

  The problem with environmentalists, Lynn Margulis used to say, is that they think conservation has something to do with biological reality. A researcher who specialized in cells and microorganisms, Margulis was one of the most important biologists in the last half century—she literally helped to reorder the tree of life, convincing her colleagues that it did not consist of two kingdoms (plants and animals), but five or even six (plants, animals, fungi, protists, and two types of bacteria).

  Until Margulis’s death last year, she lived in my town, and I would bump into her on the street from time to time. She knew I was interested in ecology, and she liked to needle me. Hey, Charles, she would call out, are you still all worked up about protecting endangered species?

  Margulis was no apologist for unthinking destruction. Still, she couldn’t help regarding conservationists’ preoccupation with the fate of birds, mammals, and plants as evidence of their ignorance about the greatest source of evolutionary creativity: the microworld of bacteria, fungi, and protists. More than 90 percent of the living matter on earth consists of microorganisms and viruses, she liked to point out. Heck, the number of bacterial cells in our body is ten times more than the number of human cells!

  Bacteria and protists can do things undreamed of by clumsy mammals like us: form giant supercolonies, reproduce either asexually or by swapping genes with others, routinely incorporate DNA from entirely unrelated species, merge into symbiotic beings—the list is as endless as it is amazing. Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and even giving rise to the oxygen we breathe. Compared to this power and diversity, Margulis liked to tell me, pandas and polar bears were biological epiphenomena—interesting and fun, perhaps, but not actually significant.

  Does that apply to human beings, too? I once asked her, feeling like someone whining to Copernicus about why he couldn’t move the earth a little closer to the center of the universe. Aren’t we special at all?

  This was just chitchat on the street, so I didn’t write anything down. But as I recall it, she answered that Homo sapiens actually might be interesting—for a mammal, anyway. For one thing, she said, we’re unusually successful.

  Seeing my face brighten, she added: Of course, the fate of every successful species is to wipe itself out.

  Of Lice and Men

  Why and how did humankind become “unusually successful”? And what, to an evolutionary biologist, does “success” mean, if self-destruction is part of the definition? Does that self-destruction include the rest of the biosphere? What are human beings in the grand scheme of things anyway, and where are we headed? What is human nature, if there is such a thing, and how did we acquire it? What does that nature portend for our interactions with the environment? With 7 billion of us crowding the planet, it’s hard to imagine more vital questions.

  One way to begin answering them came to Mark Stoneking in 1999, when he received a notice from his son’s school warning of a potential lice outbreak in the classroom. Stoneking is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig, Germany. He didn’t know much about lice. As a biologist, it was natural for him to noodle around for information about them. The most common louse found on human bodies, he discovered, is Pediculus humanus. P. humanus has two subspecies: P. humanus capitis—head lice, which feed and live on the scalp—and P. humanus corporis—body lice, which feed on skin but live in clothing. In fact, Stoneking learned, body lice are so dependent on the protection of clothing that they cannot survive more than a few hours away from it.

  It occurred to him that the two louse subspecies could be used as an evolutionary probe. P. humanus capitis, the head louse, could be an ancient annoyance, because human beings have always had hair for it to infest. But P. humanus corporis, the body louse, must not be especially old, because its need for clothing meant that it could not have existed while humans went naked. Humankind’s great cover-up had created a new ecological niche, and some head lice had rushed to fill it. Evolution then worked its magic; a new subspecies, P. humanus corporis, aro
se. Stoneking couldn’t be sure that this scenario had taken place, though it seemed likely. But if his idea were correct, discovering when the body louse diverged from the head louse would provide a rough date for when people first invented and wore clothing.

  The subject was anything but frivolous: donning a garment is a complicated act. Clothing has practical uses—warming the body in cold places, shielding it from the sun in hot places—but it also transforms the appearance of the wearer, something that has proven to be of inescapable interest to Homo sapiens. Clothing is ornament and emblem; it separates human beings from their earlier, un-self-conscious state. (Animals run, swim, and fly without clothing, but only people can be naked.) The invention of clothing was a sign that a mental shift had occurred. The human world had become a realm of complex, symbolic artifacts.

  With two colleagues, Stoneking measured the difference between snippets of DNA in the two louse subspecies. Because DNA is thought to pick up small, random mutations at a roughly constant rate, scientists use the number of differences between two populations to tell how long ago they diverged from a common ancestor—the greater the number of differences, the longer the separation. In this case, the body louse had separated from the head louse about 70,000 years ago. Which meant, Stoneking hypothesized, that clothing also dated from about 70,000 years ago.