The Ticking Is the Bomb

by Nick Flynn

  The documentary filmmaker Errol Morris wrote a piece for the New York Times a year or so later about Mr. Qaissi (Morris refers to him throughout as “Clawman,” the [demeaning] nickname given him by the MPs at Abu Ghraib):

  The photograph of the Hooded Man has created its own iconography and its own narrative. Like the unknown soldier, there is something mysterious about an unknown victim. Who is the Hooded Man? The Times picture of Clawman provides not just an identification of the Hooded Man. It provides the solution to a mystery. (A who-is-under-it, rather than a who-dunnit?) The Times piece assumes that we know what happened to the Hooded Man—the nature of the abuses he suffered—but if Clawman isn’t the Hooded Man, whose account are we listening to?

  As it turned out, the Times had issued a retraction a week after the photograph had appeared—the man on the box was not Mr. Qaissi after all, but a man named Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh. When pressed, Mr. Qaissi claimed to have been subjected to the same treatment, to have been photographed in that same position, but acknowledged that it was possible that it was not him in the iconic photograph. Morris continued:

  The identity of the figure under the hood is actually known. His real name is Faleh, his nickname is Gilligan, but what is his story? What happened to him at Abu Ghraib?

  Yes, the story of what happened to Mr. Faleh is vital for us to understand what happened at Abu Ghraib, but Mr. Faleh will not be heard from—he vanished after being released from Abu Ghraib, so we may never know his side of the story, beyond a limited testimony he gave for the Taguba Report. Morris continued:

  Clawman was playing to an expected narrative of abuse. The story had been widely circulated. The wires, the threat of electrocution had become well known. But herein lies the circularity. We see the picture of the Hooded Man. We imagine the abuse. Quotes from Clawman in the accompanying text confirm our worst suspicions about what happened at Abu Ghraib. Our beliefs about the picture are confirmed—except that we know nothing more than when we started. We have learned nothing.

  Morris wrote this essay while working on his film Standard Operating Procedure, an examination of the Abu Ghraib photographs. Morris has described his project as having a “narrow focus,” intentionally limited to those portrayed in the photographs. I appreciate the need to impose limits on oneself—the world is vast, impossible to contain in one jar. Morris continues:

  Another theory is that Clawman’s story was not a hoax, that he believed it to be true and is innocent of conscious manipulation or misrepresentation. In this version, Clawman, like Gilligan, was put on a box with wires. And since he was hooded, he could have thought that he was the Hooded Man.

  Morris dismisses this possibility offhand, yet it doesn’t seem so far-fetched—Physicians for Human Rights examined Mr. Qaissi in Amman, Jordan, in 2006, and corroborate his claims that he was subjected to electroshock and beatings. And no one denies that he was at Abu Ghraib at the time of the photographs—he is, in fact, depicted, unhooded—in several other photographs. Also, at least five photographs of hooded men on boxes came out of Abu Ghraib, and some of these are clearly of different men. One even appears to be missing two fingers from his left hand, as does Mr. Qaissi. But Morris’s “narrow focus” seems to limit him to versions given by Americans, which gives credence to one of the MPs depicted in several photographs, Sabrina Harman (of the thumbs-up-over-a-corpse fame), who may or may not be telling self-serving (or CIA-debriefed and-approved) versions of the events of those strange nights.

  Sabrina Harman, an M.P. (who took several pictures of both Clawman and Gilligan), says: “No. Gilligan was on the box, not Clawman.” Clawman was her prisoner, and according to her, he was not put on a box, nor attached to wires. She also said, “Clawman was heavy-set. Gilligan was short and slight. If Clawman had been put on a box, he would have crushed it.”

  One problem with this assertion is that Harman spent a total of eleven days on tier 1A, so it would be impossible for her to say whether Mr. Qaissi was ever put on a box, let alone whether a box was ever found that could have held his weight. It is possible she didn’t see him placed on a box in those eleven days, but she cannot say he was never placed on a box. Nor can she say that he is not one of the other hooded men balanced on a box in the other photographs.

  The question I would have asked Harman was whether she was aware that this torture technique—a man forced to stand on a box, wired and hooded—has (as noted earlier) a name: The Vietnam, created by the CIA during Brazil’s dirty war in the 1970s, which makes the likelihood that it was an isolated instance that just happened to be captured on film that much less credible. More credible is the possibility that, like Palestinian hangings, hoodings, nakedness, waterboarding and beatings, it was simply one of the approved “enhanced techniques” floating through those halls. Techniques authorized by the president, brought in by CIA ghosts and private contractors, implemented by soldiers who had come untethered. Morris, it seems, did not ask this question, focused as he was only on those (Americans) depicted in the photographs. His essay continues:

  One human rights worker suggested that it made no difference whether Clawman was really the Hooded Man—that his testimony was no less valid. I do not agree. Now we are talking about reality—not about photographs. Clawman was a prisoner at Abu Ghraib. He was most likely subjected to abuse, but whatever his account might be, it’s not the account of the man in the picture. That man is Gilligan—not Clawman.

  Morris seems to be suggesting that Mr. Qaissi appropriated someone else’s (Faleh’s) pain, cobbling together a narrative of abuse which may or may not be somewhat fictive. It is, of course, vital to get the stories right—something happened the night that Mr. Faleh was photographed on the box, but this in no way cancels out what happened on other nights, to other detainees. Unfortunately, if Morris (or his collaborator, Philip Gourevitch) spent much time tracking down these stories from the Iraqis themselves, they ended up on the cutting room floor. What we are left with are the voices of the MPs, who, either unfortunately or by choice, became torturers. Those on the wrong end of the leash, as it were, remain silent.

  Morris, for his part, risks being known as the man who views Abu Ghraib as primarily a problem with getting the captions right, rather than a moral catastrophe.

  twelve

  electra

  (2008) Labor came on gradually, five days after the due date. By then I’d almost convinced myself the wait could just go on and on. It started just after midnight, and we took a cab to the hospital the next afternoon. We were in the hospital for a total of seven hours, a hospital on the Upper East Side, where it was hard to find a nurse who’d been present for a natural childbirth, which Inez was hoping to attempt. Twenty hours into it she asked to be prepped for an epidural—the pain was mind-bending, too much, but by then it was too late. Inez breathed and moved through it, and the baby came just after midnight, twenty-four hours after labor began.

  Outside there was snow on the ground.

  In the days between the due date and the birth, I’d been reading Anne Carson’s translation of Electra. In her introduction Carson breaks down the subtle nuances of Electra’s screams. During the last two hours of labor, when I’d wander into the hallway for another cup of water, or just to catch my breath, the other nurses seemed huddled at their station, wide-eyed, listening to Inez’s screams coming from our room at the end of the hall. All the other rooms on that floor, where many other children were being born, were in a drug-induced silence.

  self-portrait as an infant in my father’s arms

  Unuttered, but always present, was the fear that Inez would die in childbirth—don’t women sometimes die in childbirth? Unuttered was the fear that the baby would be a miscarriage, or else not survive her first hours, her first days. Unuttered was the image I carried of myself after this disaster—wandering the face of the earth, unrecognized, barefoot, alone.

  I have in my hand a photograph of my father sitting in a chair—I am the infant in his arms. We both look into the c
amera, or at least at whoever it is that is taking the photograph—my mother, I imagine, since I found it with her things. The look on his face is heavy, as if I were a burden, as if he were burdened, though perhaps I am simply reading into it, knowing that he will be gone in a few months—impossible not to read into it. How old am I? He was gone by the time I was six months old, or we were gone, my mother taking me, us, away. Choose a version, choose a victim. The look on his face is a tunnel, leading out—no one would call it happy.

  And now I have a picture of me with my daughter in my arms, in almost the same pose, all these years later. Now I am older than my mother made it to, older than my father before he walked into that bank with his forged check, smiling into the camera. I have her in my arms, and I am smiling so broadly that I barely recognize myself.

  Those first few moments, holding our newborn in that hospital room, I thought about my father, which surprised me. My father never made it to the hospital for either my brother’s birth or mine, claiming car trouble both times (though he ran a car dealership). I’d never thought much about it, but as I held our newborn in my arms I felt sad for him, having chosen vodka (or did vodka choose him?) over this simple moment.

  We didn’t name her for three days, not until we were about to leave the hospital, until it was made clear to us that if we simple wrote BABY GIRL FLYNN on the birth certificate, as a placeholder, then this name would haunt her for the rest of her life. When she was thirty-five, a letter might come in the mail from some obscure bureaucracy, addressed to BABY GIRL FLYNN.

  So we named her Maeve Lulu, after the Queen of the Fairies.

  And now some weeks have passed, some sleepless weeks, and I am less certain about that photograph of me in my father’s arms. Maybe he is simply tired, bone-tired. Maybe he’s been up all night, trying to soothe me back to sleep, and what I see in his face is not unhappiness, only exhaustion. If you took a photograph of me one of these sleepless nights, pacing the apartment and singing All you need is love softly to Lulu, desperate for us both to return to the land of sleep, you might say that I don’t look especially thrilled at this miracle I am holding in my arms. But you would be wrong. And so, maybe I’ve been wrong, all these years, about my father.

  thirteen

  the uses of enchantment (flying monkeys)

  The scariest moment in The Wizard of Oz is, still, when the flying monkeys fill the sky, sent out by the Wicked Witch to hunt down Dorothy and her pals. It still surprises me, every time, how terrifying they are, the way they move, the way they hover over the earth, how they land running, folding their wings up onto their backs. The thing I always forget about the monkeys is that they’re under some sort of spell, and that when Dorothy accidentally tosses water on the Witch, the spell is broken. Every year it surprises me—as the Witch is melting, while she still has a voice, it’s as if anything can happen. At any moment the monkeys can turn on Dorothy, tear her apart, like they did to the Strawman. Once the Witch is silent, one monkey hobbles over and sniffs the puddle that remains of her—every year I brace myself, in case it turns out different. But every year a guard steps forward and states, simply, You killed her, and the spell is broken.

  Sometimes the story we tell about ourselves can be a type of spell. Sometimes it’s about a love that never should have ended, sometimes it’s about a family fortune squandered, and sometimes it’s about a war we shouldn’t have lost but did. Sometimes it’s an echo of a story from our childhoods, a fairy tale, a story of what could have been saved, what could have been salvaged, if we’d just held on a little longer. A story of not giving up, as they say in A. A., before the miracle comes. Or the story I carry, unuttered—If my mother had just made it to Monday, bewildered but alive…. The structure of these types of stories fit into what is known as “redemption narratives”—I once was lost, but now I’m found. It’s Aristotle’s Poetics, it’s Jesus coming out of the desert, and now it’s reenacted, over and over, on daytime television. By now it’s nearly hardwired into us, but is it possible that this same narrative structure is now being used, by some, as a justification for the use of torture? The idea being that if we push the prisoner a little more, if we don’t give up when it becomes unpleasant, if we can ignore the screams, the disfigurement, the voice in our heads, then the answer will come, the answer that will save the world. And if the tortured dies in your hands, without giving the answer, will this mean you were wrong, or merely that the techniques must be refined? Or if the answer he gives is worthless, if it is a lie, will that mean we must push a little further, hold on a little longer? Force his head under water? Make his eyes electric? Does it mean that the doctors must be brought in, the feeding tubes inserted, the body kept alive? And if we continue to cling to this way of telling our stories, this fairy tale, long after we’ve found our way out of the woods, at what point can we then be said to be under the effect of some spell, some enchantment?

  the fruit of my deeds

  Thich Nhat Hanh gave a dharma talk about a Vietnam vet, an ex-soldier who came to him, unable to sleep. After seeing a buddy killed, this soldier had put rat poison in some sandwiches and left them outside and watched as some children ate them—and since that day what he did has been slowly tearing him apart. You have only two choices, Thich Nhat Hanh told the soldier—continue destroying yourself, or find a way to help five other children. These are your only choices.

  Thich Nhat Hanh always has a contingent of Vietnam vets at his retreats, at least at the ones he holds in America. As the years pass, more and more are from our subsequent wars. I first met some of these vets nearly twenty years ago, and the time I spent with them convinced me to track down Travis, my stepfather, whom I hadn’t heard from in years. Travis had served in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970 as a combat Marine—my mother got together with him soon after he got back stateside. They stayed together for four or five tumultuous years, and then they split up.

  The years Travis lived with us I never called him my stepfather. He was more of a wild older brother, just a guy who was around for a few years, who taught me how to bang a nail, how to build an addition without pulling a permit, how to “borrow” a stranger’s boat to go fishing—then he was gone. When I found him, all those years later, in upstate Vermont, I wanted to ask him two questions: how did he meet my mother, and how did he find out she had died? I’d brought a video camera to film his answers, telling him, telling myself, that I was making a documentary film—the home movie we never had. Later, I would seek out my mother’s other boyfriends, ask them the same two questions. What surprised me about Travis was that he felt responsible for her death in some way. He thought she’d used his gun, which I don’t even think is true—my mother had her own gun.

  (1999) Four years after Travis and I reconnected, a filmmaker tracked me down (she’d seen my home movie), and asked if Travis and I would be interested in flying to Vietnam to be part of her documentary film—three combat veterans and three of their children, the vets returning to the scene, their children along to bear witness. The conceit of her film was to examine if war trauma was passed on through generations.

  Travis turned fifty on a train from Ho Chi Minh City to Na Trang.

  Three weeks into it we spent a day filming a single stretch of road outside Da Nang, where Travis had been stationed. Each night, Travis told us, this dirt road was destroyed by “the gooks,” and during the day the Americans would hire the locals to rebuild it. Travis knew, everyone knew, that it was likely that the same ones who destroyed it then rebuilt it the next day. This went on for months. It was, for Travis, as if Sisyphus had to hire someone else to push his rock, thereby denying himself even that pleasure. The day we were filming, Travis spent a long time trying to find the spot he’d spent so many days on thirty years earlier, the exact stretch of road that had been blown up so many times. He spoke with the other vets, pointed to the line of mountains in the distance, tried to line up a photograph of his younger self, standing on that road, with the line of mountains today. While Travis
was being interviewed I stood under an umbrella, trying to protect myself from the merciless sun, watching farmers work the rice paddies on either side of the road. Each shoot of rice, once it reached a certain height, had to be transplanted by hand—the bent-over farmers were doing that this day. Travis needed to stand upon the same piece of road he’d stood upon so many years earlier. Maybe we’d bombed the line of mountain beyond recognition, José offered—it happens. Travis finally had to accept that it wasn’t exactly as he remembered. As we drove back to Da Nang we passed small mounds of rice piled along the edge of the road, drying in the sun. Some of the rice got caught up in our tailwind as we passed, rose up in the air, then settled back down to earth.

  That night, over dinner, the director announced that the next morning we were to visit the site of the My Lai massacre. It was the first we’d heard of it. The other two vets were not happy about this, and threatened to leave the film if they were forced to go. No one will be forced to do anything, the director insisted. The other vets said they’d spent their lives living down My Lai, being called baby-killers by strangers, and this was not why they’d agreed to be part of the film. Travis looked at them. This is what we all did, he said. This is what they meant when they ordered us to clear a village—these guys just got caught. Travis asked me what I thought. I told him I thought we should go, but that it was up to him.

  The next morning the bus pulled up in front of the site of the massacre, which is now a museum, a sacred site. Travis and I walked in together, the camerawoman walking backward in front of us. The other vets and their children remained on the bus. The museum is a small building with framed photographs on the walls, most of the photographs from the New York Times or other American newspapers. I remembered seeing a lot of the same photographs when they were first in the Boston Globe. At some point Travis told the camerawoman to shut off the camera, that he didn’t want to be filmed. Then he walked slowly away from us, talking softly to the translator.