To Be a Friend Is Fatal

by Kirk W. Johnson

  A couple days after the bombing of Samarra, Fox News ran a photograph of the destroyed Golden Dome with the caption “Upside to Civil War?” The subsequent caption: “All-out civil war in Iraq: could it be a good thing?” Later that year, the network’s Stuart Varney spelled out the thinking more clearly: “Let me put out something positive about Iraq, if I may, for a second. Look, we took the fight to the enemy. We divided the enemy. The enemy is now fighting itself. America’s interest is surely being well preserved and well protected. We are, in fact, in a way, winning and preserving our interests here, are we not?”

  The Democrats also saw an opportunity to capitalize on the violence scorching through Iraq. A six-point plan was unveiled by the party, the first of which was entitled Real Security: Protecting America and Restoring Our Leadership in the World, which would “require the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own country.” They employed the same condescending language as the neoconservatives I knew back in Baghdad. “We did our part; it’s up to the Iraqis now to step up,” as if the civil war rending the country had nothing to do with us but, rather, resulted from a deficiency in the Iraqi character.

  Several months after Samarra, with millions displaced, a controversy erupted when Brian Williams at NBC Nightly News declared a civil war under way in Iraq. Katie Couric of CBS Evening News could not bring herself to agree. The Bush administration’s spokesman at the White House, Tony Snow, laughed at Williams’s assertion. It was not a civil war, he claimed, because the “different forces” were not unified: “You have not yet had a situation where you have two clearly defined and opposing groups vying not only for power but for territory.” When pressed on the question at a later briefing on December 5, 2006, he continued:

  I spent a lot of time thinking about this last week, and I’m not sure you get any two people to agree . . . if you have as your definition of a civil war as something that involves the entire landmass—north, south, east, and west—doesn’t apply. But some people think that the sectarian violence you’ve seen—centered largely around Baghdad, and you also have some terrorist activity in Anbar, a considerable amount—they think that is civil war. So it depends on which metrics you use for doing it. And frankly, I gave up on trying, because there are any number of people who have different measurements.

  It was just another refugee problem, invisible to most Americans and journalists. Unlike other humanitarian crises, Iraqis who fled to Syria and Jordan in 2006 didn’t gather in tent communities or cluster in recognizable refugee camps. They crammed into cheap apartments in overcrowded neighborhoods and waited for the civil war to pass or for the international community to act.

  But Yaghdan stayed, unwilling to leave his country and the home in which he was raised, confident in his ability to always keep a step ahead of the militants who hunted America’s Iraqis.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  Photo © Carolyn Hutchinson and Derek E. Johnson

  12-29-05

  9.

  The Insurgent of West Chicago

  He who conquers a city is as nothing compared to he who conquers his own nature.

  —David Mamet

  It was pointless trying to sleep. I slip out of the hooch into the sprawling mess of Camp Fallujah. I walk in uncertain flip-flop steps over fields of smooth rocks meant to bury the powdery sand, which always found its way up with the faintest encouragement. I pick my way along the catwalk flanking the Cummins generator that churns an end-of-the-world grinding noise, using a small xenon flashlight to avoid waist-high coils of concertina wire. Was there ever a real threat of infiltration?

  “Camp used to house some real tough mudders,” the marines said. “Saddam kept ’em on the outskirts of Fallujah to intimidate the city, keep it in line.”

  Now it houses American marines, there to do the same. In clusters of brutalist one-story structures with blacked-out windows operate intelligence fusion centers and logistics teams and endless other functions of HQ. What little rain spatters onto their slopeless roofs steams off. On I wander, over fields of gravel, past an egg-shaped pond with water so dark that three feet looks like a dozen. A single swan glides ghostly across its oil-slick surface. The generator is far behind now; all I can hear is the ship-ship of my sandals. I pass through the camp’s checkpoint and trudge past the boneyard and its acres of broken-down and half-exploded cars and trucks. The sun is peeking up over the dead fields as I approach the city.

  The city wakes, and I hide behind the gnarled remains of a detonated sedan on Route Ethan, weaponless and American. A bowel-shuddering dread seeps in as I watch the darkened blood of a butchered lamb trickling along a nearby sidewalk, dusted with Anbari sand. I want to crawl into the car to hide, but it has been mangled beyond any degree of car-ness: there are no doors, no roof, no tires, only a thornbush of splintered and blackened steel and melted upholstery. I want to crawl under the car, but it grows from the pavement—there is no under. Nearby, a black blossom of char blooms in the middle of the road where the car exploded. The sun is climbing, an executioner’s blade overhead, dropping hours of light before I can try to escape under cover of night back to Camp Fallujah.

  An errant soccer ball rolls up, stopping at my feet. A Falluji kid races over, his laugh turning into a gasp as he spots me, and then an excited yell. Shoulders and heads appear, forming an ever-tightening clutch around me, their talk turning to shouts and hands grabbing for me. Fuck. No. No!

  * * *

  The No! lurches me awake into West Chicago. The nightmare waits for me just on the other side of sleep, waiting to replay when I can no longer keep my body awake. There is a wretched pain emanating somewhere from my face, so eclipsing in its fullness that it takes some time to identify the source: I have thrashed my fiberglassed arms against the mob of my nightmare, clocking my broken jaw and severed lips in the process. More blood flows into my mouth and onto my tongue, and I am now irreversibly awake, as another night of potential sleep and recovery slinks from the room. I have wounds to tend, drugs to take. Once back in bed, I turn on the television and stare at infomercials until sunrise and the stirring of my parents downstairs.

  * * *

  In the beginning, despite it all, there was hope. I wanted to go back to Fallujah. I wasn’t supposed to be home yet and did not call my friends to let them know I was back. There was no point getting comfortable: I would heal up in a few weeks, I figured, and be back in Iraq to finish my work.

  But I was a wreck. My legs, the last piece of me to hit concrete, were somehow spared, although several of my toes had split open at the tips like small lobster claws. I had to hoist my feet high to ensure I’d clear each step on the stairs, since my big toes were wrapped comically in a tennis-ball-sized mass of gauze. With my casted arms and railroad tracks of stitches across my face, I lurched through the house like a medicated Frankenstein.

  It hurt to move. At the slightest movement, an ache would scramble through my arteries up to my head and pause in a menacing stance. If I kept going, it would twist and squeeze different parts of my brain without hesitation. I learned my place, that I could not best it, that I would listen to it, which meant that I did everything with great deliberation and delay. I wondered if this was what I had to look forward to if I ever grew old, which seemed unlikely considering my condition, when a good morning meant I hadn’t sleepwalked out of bed.

  During the first morning, I ambled down to the basement computer and wrote two emails. The first was to the First Marine Expeditionary Force to tell them that I would be unable to make it to the briefing in Camp Pendleton. Using my index fingers, I typed slowly and did not use any more words than absolutely necessary.

  I wrote the second email to management at USAID in Baghdad. I didn’t go into much detail about the accident, because I didn’t know much. I said I’d need approximately eight weeks before I could get my casts cut off and return to my projects, and apologized for any complications that might be caused by my absence.

  I wanted to write a che
cklist of the things that would need to happen before I could return to Iraq, but I couldn’t hold a pen: the distance between my thumb, index finger, and middle finger had been set in fiberglass. No amount of contortions could make them touch, much less grip a pen.

  In the basement, I found a roll of duct tape and climbed the twenty-two steps back up to my room like a mountain path, stopping to gather my breath and relieve the pressure in my brain.

  I sat down at my desk and placed the duct tape next to a pen. I leaned over and scooped up a sock from the floor, and wrapped it clumsily around the shaft of the pen. It took ten agonizing minutes to free a corner of the tape without the use of opposable thumbs. Sweat beaded and trickled with a sting into my wounds, and I barked, “Goddamn it, does it have to be so hot in here?!” After great effort, I managed to tear off a foot-long piece of tape. Bit by bit, I crudely taped the sock to the pen, its point emerging from the now-thick grip. I lowered my right hand over the sock-pen, wedged it into the space between my thumb and index fingers, and lifted the pen in my hand with a faint smile. I looked at the clock. Thirty minutes had elapsed. My head was thumping, but I had regained the capacity to write.

  I called for my mom, who hurried up the stairs, and explained that I needed a sock taped around a knife, fork, and spoon.

  Later that afternoon, I wandered to the kitchen with my modified silverware and a faint appetite. I knocked a tinfoil-sealed container of Mott’s applesauce from the fridge onto the floor and sat down with my legs crossed before it. The act of peeling off the foil was impossible, so I fitted the sock-knife into my cast, hovered it over the applesauce, and slammed it down, hoping to puncture the foil enough to snake a straw through. But the foil was too strong, and the knife popped out of my cast and onto the floor. Shadow, my cat, walked by and stared for a moment before sauntering over to the open can of tuna my mom had left out for her.

  I refitted the sock-knife and tried again. Again. Again. The sweat stung. I figured out how to use my feet to hold the applesauce in place, rested the knife’s point directly on the foil with my right hand, and this time bashed the blade through the foil using the cast on my left arm. A quarter of the applesauce slopped onto my feet and the floor. I gingerly pursed my torn lips around a straw and guided it past the foil to feed myself. A couple weeks earlier, I was coordinating tens of millions of dollars of aid. People called me sir.

  * * *

  I made a checklist:

  Stop infection

  Casts off

  Unwire jaw

  Root canals

  Stitches out

  Braces

  Insurance reimbursement

  Beneath it all, I wrote “Medical clearance,” knowing that I would need a new clearance before being permitted back into Iraq. In every conversation with my doctors, I pressured them to give me best-case scenarios and the most aggressive course of treatment, hoping to be back on a plane to Fallujah in less than two months.

  In my childhood bedroom on a dead-end street in West Chicago, I created a war room. I locked myself in and mapped out my return. The floor was soon littered with checklists, timelines, alternative timelines, secondary to-do lists, all with boxes to be checked, printouts of articles, pill bottles, briefing materials for the canceled marines lecture. CNN looped endlessly on mute.

  The first week passed, and my bosses hadn’t responded to my email. Surely it had been sequestered as spam. I emptied my backpack onto the bed and found the matchbox-sized device that periodically received a several-digit code from a satellite, allowing me to log into USAID’s email system to resend the message through my government account.

  I woke each morning with a gnawing need to check in on the news, to log into email, in search of some connection with Iraq. I called my colleagues who had returned before me to rant about the lack or quality of media coverage and to trade news about who was being investigated for corruption, which projects were unraveling, who was going to Afghanistan next, who got what plum posting where, who was resigning from the agency in frustration over Iraq. I wrote to the few Iraqis in Fallujah whose email addresses I still had and apologized for my delay in returning.

  Early on, friends relayed hurtful gossip pushed by marines and others in USAID and the State Department who barely knew me: the most widely spread version had me drunk and partying out a window. One marine general announced in a staff meeting that I had decided to simply quit so I could stay in the United States, which angered me more than the other explanations for my absence.

  * * *

  Friends who found out about my accident asked me just what, exactly, had happened in the Dominican Republic. I pecked out the number of a neuropsychiatrist friend who worked with veterans at the VA hospital in New York. He listened to my account of what had happened and interrupted: “Kirk, you had a dissociative fugue state.” I perked up, remembering the months I’d spent as a fourteen-year-old learning Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on the organ. The act of pedaling a bass line while playing on two tiers of keys was such a leap for my adolescent mind that I had to master the hands so that I could play without looking, focusing my eyes instead on the pedals below my feet and dangling tie. I stared at my casts while he continued.

  Over the phone, he read from the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association: “Travel may range from brief trips over relatively short periods of time (i.e., hours or days) to complex, usually unobtrusive wandering over long time periods (e.g., weeks or months), with some individuals reportedly crossing numerous national borders and traveling thousands of miles.” A fugue state is characterized by autopilot behavior, which is only sometimes tame. People have emerged from a fugue state to find themselves behind the wheel of their car or in a mall with shopping bags under their arms, with no recollection of how they got there. Incidence of the disorder increases during periods of war.

  I hung up, shuffled over to the computer, and typed “fugue” into an online dictionary, and the page blinked back two resulting words. I wedged the sock-pen into position over a notebook and wrote in nervous, oversized letters that filled the page, “Fugue: Flight, Departure.”

  I had never heard of the disorder before, but each example I found online came as a revelation. I felt as though my accident had trapped me within a kind of John Grisham novel, only a much more pathetic version. There was no pelican brief, no assassinated justices; just some kid who sleepwalked out a window while on vacation from Fallujah. But each sentence seemed as though it were written for my eyes only, as though I had just deciphered some conspiracy in plain sight, the plot to pilot me to my death while I slept.

  The essential feature of dissociative fugue is sudden, unexpected travel . . . with inability to recall some or all of one’s past. . . . Fugues are usually precipitated by a stressful episode, and upon recovery there may be amnesia for the original stressor. . . . Once the individual returns to the prefugue state, there may be no memory for the events that occurred during the fugue. . . .

  Sometimes dissociative fugue cannot be diagnosed until people abruptly return to their prefugue identity and are distressed to find themselves in unfamiliar circumstances.

  I took the words, symptoms, examples, and spread them like plaster over the rupture that had torn open on December 29.

  * * *

  At the end of the second week, I still hadn’t heard anything from my bosses. I was growing angry. Didn’t the near-death of a senior staff member warrant at least a brief phone call? I didn’t know what was happening with my position and wanted to report on my progress, lest they think of giving the Fallujah job to someone else.

  I wasn’t making much progress, though. The yellow pus of infection colonized healthy flesh as it wept drowsily from the sutures on my chin and forehead. A beard was emerging, and I had the terror-filled realization that I’d need to shave to effectively fight the infection. Once I could no longer push it off, I duct-taped a sock around my razor blade. Each downwa
rd stroke tugged at the stitches, and a sickly stream emerged in response. I spent an hour shaving what felt like one whisker at a time until the tear and infection site were mostly cleared. My legs, exhausted, carried me back into bed, where I stared at the silent television screen and tried to sleep.

  As I tried to avoid fixating on my bosses’ silence, I began to doubt my eight-week estimate. The successful completion of once quotidian demands—feeding, washing, shaving—triggered a wave of euphoria that quickly broke apart into a frightful awareness of how battered I was. I turned my full attention to the maintenance of my body: teeth, bones, face, antibodies, stomach. I was in the cockpit of a heavily strafed bomber, my engine sputtering and coughing, lines leaking, windshield cracked and whistling. My only priority was to hold altitude. In the quiet of my room, I would whimper, and then curse myself for the self-pity: Oh, you big baby. Least you can walk. Lot of people never wake up. So you have a little dark spell here. Tough shit. But my high-minded attempts at paying respect to the dead and worse off sputtered quickly. The churn of self-pity grew stronger by the day, threatening to overpower my hope for a speedy return to Fallujah.

  * * *

  My parents, in the thirty-seventh year of their marriage, were struggling with each other like any couple approaching four decades and the imminence and uncertainty of retirement. They had masked any sign of this whenever I’d call from Iraq, but now I was home, and it was unavoidable. And while a trauma in a family brings everyone closer, it also rubs the plates in the tectonic history against one another, resurrecting old tensions and unwanted recollections. I bickered with my dad like an adolescent. That I relied on them to shuttle me to and from surgeries didn’t help. I felt guilty for being back in their space at a time when they could have used privacy, and embarrassed that I was home when I was needed elsewhere. I pushed them away, going to great lengths to take care of myself, ruffling my casts into garbage bags so that I could stand under the shower, contorting myself elaborately into my clothes, bashing knifes through tinfoil to eat.