The Ticking Is the Bomb

by Nick Flynn

  The trip back to Vietnam had been difficult for Travis. He’d only been on an airplane twice in his life—once when he was seventeen and enlisted in the Marines, and again three weeks before this moment. His first days back in-country he couldn’t even look a Vietnamese person in the eye, especially anyone in authority, for they all wore the uniforms of the Vietcong. Even the “mama-sans,” he couldn’t look at them. He told the director a day before we left America that he was planning to bring a small sidearm with him, for “protection.” A gun? she asked, incredulous. She called me and asked if I thought he was serious. As far as I know, I said. She called him back—Travis, you can’t bring a gun with you to Vietnam.

  Fuck it, he said. I’ll buy one over there.

  So Travis and I spent the first few days in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) searching the markets for a gun, or even a big knife, but in the end he settled for a bag of marijuana and a massage.

  Outside the My Lai museum building is an open field, with small plaques marking the sites of what happened—a spot where some huts stood, a well where a baby was thrown down, the ditch the women and children were herded into. A woman, maybe in her forties, was seated on the grass, her legs folded under her, weeding the lawn very slowly, one stalk at a time. Travis watched her for a while. From a distance I watched Travis watching her. It was as if she was meditating on each blade, considering whether to uproot it (And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves). I found out later the translator whispered into Travis’s ear that the woman had been a child at the time of the massacre, and had survived by hiding beneath the body of her dead mother. Travis nodded, asked if he could speak with her. The translator went to the woman, knelt down, spoke some words, looked back at Travis, gestured for him to come. I watched Travis walk up, say something for the translator to translate. I watched him kneel down before this woman, still seated on the grass, take her hand, kiss it, ask her to forgive him, to forgive America.

  istanbul redux

  (2007) This is where we pour the words into a jar, as if they were water. As if a jar of water was the same as a river. This is where we try to make a coherent narrative out of chaos. As Amir looks at the photographs of himself, the photographs of what happened three years ago now, he says, I do not believe it was me that was there. On the table before him is the wrist tag he was issued, the number he was given, the letters CI after the number, the code which signifies that he was picked up by the CIA. He taps the tiny photograph of himself on the wrist tag—in the photo he has a beard, and his cheeks are gaunt—Don’t you see, he says, this man in the photograph, and look at me now. He smiles. I notice that his arm is trembling slightly by his side.

  On our last day in Istanbul, during the last interview, I keep spacing out. Bahir was a soldier in Saddam’s army, and he does not smile. His story is less seamless, more fragmented than the others, and I find myself wondering if I believe him. It seems he can’t remember much. He looks away as he answers, he starts and stops, he stutters. As I will myself to listen, to pay attention, I realize that it’s me—it is the last day and I am so full up with stories of torture and this man before me seems like he hasn’t made it out alright. He seems damaged, more damaged than the others, and as I listen, as I pull myself back from wherever it is I go, I realize that his story is one of the hardest. I was hooded for six months, Bahir says, they never took off the hood. And I was shackled to the bars for hours every day. And I was naked, the whole time I was naked. I don’t remember anyone’s face, he says, because I didn’t see anyone’s face. Listening to him, I notice that I am sweating, I feel like I will faint. His story often just ends, he cannot continue, he needs a cigarette, he needs to stand and walk around, get some air. We take a break with him, we take many breaks with him. During one break I open the binders of photographs, to a picture of a smiley face magic-markered onto a detainee’s nipple. I walk into the hallway and weep.

  When we come back from the break the artist asks the translator to tell Bahir how handsome he is, what a pleasure it is to be able to paint him. Bahir listens as this word, “handsome,” is translated, smiles slightly—his first smile—then murmurs Shokran.

  One sometimes needs to be told that one is still beautiful.

  After everyone leaves Istanbul, I stay on for another week, to visit the Blue Mosque, the Roman aqueducts, a hammam. To write up my notes. In the mosque I read about the use of fetish objects in ancient Islam:

  Creating a bridge between spiritual and material opposites of daily life, the “Mevlevi” philosophy alters the nature of a simple, ordinary object. A mystical symbol engraved on a “mutekka” (cushion or rest for neck) or a piece of calligraphy embroidered on a mailbag gives spirit to the simple material of the object; each item used in daily life evolves into a living being, illuminated by this spirit.

  I’ve come to believe that the function of torture in our society is not about getting information, in spite of what we might want to believe. It is merely about power. It tells the world that there is now no limit to what we will do when we feel threatened. That it is ineffective in gathering information, that it is actually counterproductive in making us any safer, has been clearly documented, it’s been known for years. That the box has been opened, and that the use of torture continues, now legally, suggests that it has become, for us, a mystical symbol, no less based on superstition than carving a crescent into a stick. Money, information, these words you are reading—all of this will seem quaint in five hundred years, if we have that long. What they will say when they look back on this time is that torture continued from the death of Christ for over two thousand years—a strange, primitive reenactment. They will see that at first we confused it with passion, which devolved into the Inquisition, and then transformed into what we now call “information.” They will see that a handful of maniacs living in caves were able to take down the greatest empire on earth, they will wonder how that could be. All we can tell them is that these maniacs understood our fear, that they transformed into it as we tried to hold on, asking, over and over, our meaningless question.

  travis redux

  (2007) I spend a day driving route 100 north, the entire length of Vermont, to see Travis—a few years without a face-to-face have slipped past again. I made the trip to ask him about torture, I told myself, but now, sitting across from him, it seems enough to simply catch up. Sue was with a guy for a while, Travis tells me—he’d been in Iraq, came back with a short fuse. Sue is his daughter. It must be hard, I say. If they were there for a reason it might be different, Travis mutters. Twelve years ago, when we first reconnected, we’d talked about the first invasion of Iraq, about how he went off the rails—breaking into his estranged wife’s apartment, standing at the kitchen stove, burning her clothes item by item on the open flame, until he noticed the blue lights swirling outside. He kicked out a window, crawled on his belly to his truck, outran the cops for a hundred miles. The next morning, once he’d sobered up, a cop knocked on his door—they all knew him—so he turned himself in. The judge went easy, sentenced him to group therapy for vets with post-traumatic stress at the V.A.

  A few years later, when we went to Vietnam together, it seemed he’d righted himself—no new stories of run-ins with the law, a jewel-like cabin in the woods he was building for his new girlfriend, his house a little less chaotic. We went to lunch with his kids.

  And now, eight years later and three years into another war, I ask him how he’s faring. He goes to bed early these days, he tells me, wakes up at three or four, watches the news for an hour or two, then goes to breakfast at Flo’s. The other workers—carpenters and plumbers, electricians and mechanics—push some tables together, talk about the war. Did you know that in Camp Lejune (a Marine Corps base in North Carolina), five out of seven wells were contaminated, and the government knew, for five years, and still let the army wives and children drink from them? I shake my head, but I’m not surprised. The Walter Reed Army Medical Center is in the news these days, paint peeling from the c
eilings, roaches in the food, soldiers with head injuries wandering from building to building like an army of zombies, looking for help. We talk about how soup kitchens are set up on bases now, run by church groups, how the rate of suicide among military personnel is the highest it’s ever been. Travis is remarkably well informed—The corporations are getting all the money, he says, just like always. When the war started he went off the rails again, got another DUI, lost his license for eighteen months, got caught driving on a suspended, and ended up spending ten days in lockup, just as the bombs were falling on Baghdad. I bring up Abu Ghraib. Seems like things got out of control on the night shift, he says. I tell him about the memos from the White House, about Charles Graner getting high marks for the work he was doing, about how the photos were cropped so that we couldn’t see the CIA spooks and the private contractors just outside of the frames. He shakes his head, but it doesn’t surprise him. We look so bad now, he says. Invading Iraq was like opening Pandora’s box, now no one knows how to stuff everything back in. We talk about our trip to Vietnam, about My Lai. I tell him that the moment he kissed that survivor’s hand and asked her forgiveness was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever witnessed—utterly transformative. I tell him that the same guy who released the My Lai photographs released the Abu Ghraib photographs. Travis shakes his head.

  Here for a purpose, he mutters.

  Memorabilia from our trip to Vietnam hangs on his walls—a woodblock print of a water buffalo, a straw hat.

  Inez is pregnant, I tell him.

  Get ready, he smiles.

  standard operating procedure

  What surprised me the most about meeting the ex-detainees in Istanbul wasn’t their descriptions of the torments that had been inflicted on them—after all, I’d seen all the documentaries, read all the transcripts. What surprised me was that before I met them I had somehow created an image in my mind of what an ex-detainee from Abu Ghraib would be like—I pictured someone angry, damaged, maybe tipping toward fundamentalism. And yet each of these men was completely unique, completely human. Each seemed to have taken in what happened in a completely different way, and it still surprises me that this surprised me. What surprises me is that I forgot that each would be fully human, fully complex.

  (2008) Reading over my notes from those days in Istanbul, I decide not to write what happened, not in detail, the night Amir was dragged on a leash. The information of what happened that night is readily available, and besides, we have the photographs. You might be horrified by the photographs, or you might be deeply saddened. Or you might think that what happened was justified, you might think that it was only a few bad apples, but very few would say that it looked like the MPs were simply trying to help the man on the end of the leash. This is what I imagined, but when I saw Errol Morris’s film, and then when I read Philip Gourevitch’s companion book—both titled Standard Operating Procedure—I was no longer so sure. I paid special attention to the parts which purported to tell the story of what happened the night of Amir on the leash. In the book, in the MP’s version, Amir was a wild man—“he kept saying he hated Americans and he wanted us to die.” At one point, in their version, Amir is on the floor of an isolation cell, “…wounds on his side or his back, and he was laying in feces and urine,” and he needs to be moved, but he would not, or could not, budge. Graner claims that he wanted to clean up the cell before the next prisoner arrived. He also claims that he was concerned with how to move Amir without hurting him, so he asked a medic. The medic suggested he place a tie-down strap around Amir’s torso, then use it to lift him. But this strap slipped down (up?) around Amir’s neck as England held it. Graner thought it looked amusing, so he snapped some pictures. The MPs (and the medic) agree that the photograph looks bad, but they insist that they were merely trying to help Amir (“…he didn’t get hurt…,” “…my concern was whatever it took to keep him from getting hurt…”). Graner and England were with Amir for maybe fifteen minutes that night, they say, just enough time to move him safely.

  As I read this account I felt something between amusement and outrage. At first I assumed that Gourevitch was merely giving Graner and England enough rope to hang themselves, as it were, but this didn’t turn out to be the case. In the end, Gourevitch takes the MPs’ version of events of that night at their word, concluding:

  With Gus [Amir] and the tie-down strap…when we find out the story, the pictures of him with England remain shocking—only now the shock lies in the fact that the pictures look worse, more deliberately deviant and abusive, than the reality they depict.

  When we find out the story—despite Gourevitch’s claims, and despite whatever other insights we might glean from his book (of which there are many), we don’t know “the story” of the night Amir was dragged on that leash from Standard Operating Procedure. What we are offered is merely an endorsement of the version of the events of that night as told by his torturers. Amir, the man on the wrong end of the leash, is forced to remain silent. Amir’s version of that night is anything but “anodyne.” As documented by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), Amir describes being leashed and dragged, from cell to cell, floor to floor, for hours. In one cell he is pushed, face-first, Graner’s boot on his head, into that floor soaked with urine and excrement; in another cell he is sodomized with a broomstick; and in the final room Graner kicks his testicles, as England steps on his hand, breaking his finger. At this point Amir passes out and is dragged back to his cell. Whether you chose to believe Amir is another issue, but it seems one should at least give as much ink to him as is given to his tormentors. In Istanbul, as Amir told us of that night, he held up his broken finger to each of us, and we each bent in closer to examine it. Nearly four years later and the damage was no longer visible (the body hurries to heal itself) but the doctors have their x-rays, and the Red Cross has their records, and the PHR has corroborated everything. As Amir finished his story that day in Istanbul, he touched the photograph—This is what happened that night, he said, there were other incidences, other nights.

  eclipse

  Last night was a lunar eclipse, I held Lulu up to the window to see it. I told her about the sun, about the earth, about the moon, about the eclipse. I said, You are the sun, I am the moon, I circle around you, and sometimes a shadow falls across your face, sometimes a darkness rises up inside us, but it isn’t real, we cannot believe it is real. I held her head like a sun, and we moved around the room, singing, Little darlin, it’s been a long cold lonely winter, until she stopped crying and fell asleep.

  Before she came, if I tried to vis-u-al-ize her, I’d always end up back on that rollercoaster, in a broken-down car climbing a rickety hill, this tiny baby at the apex. As I’d reach her, as I’d take her in my arms, the car would begin its inevitable descent, then drop into freefall. Part of my fear, if unarticulated, was that as we fell I wouldn’t be able to hold on to her, that she would fly out of my grip—I couldn’t imagine that she could simply fall with me, safe in my arms.

  fourteen

  wrong ocean

  (2008) I wake up early, carry Lulu from the bed to the living room, let Inez sleep in. Lulu smiles at the daylight, at the shadows crossing the brick wall outside the kitchen window. She seems happy that the sun came back. It’s so simple. At dusk she looks in terror out the windows, seemingly confused by the darkness, by where everything goes. In this she is like me—I smile in the morning, and as the day progresses I get more and more confused, by everything coming at me. Overstimulated, they call us. Sundowners. At sundown she cries, simple as that. Nothing you can do that isn’t done, I sing to her, swaying slowly around the kitchen with her in my arms—nothing you can sing that isn’t sung.

  The book I read after my mother died, the how-to-deal-with-trauma book, had failed to say when change could resume, when one could go on. So, year after year, I lived on the boat. Year after year I rowed my body out, scanned the shoreline, waited. Ten years—why did it take so long to get my feet back on the ground, why did it take so lo
ng to lose my sea legs? The boat was built the same year my mother was born (1939, the same year The Wizard of Oz was released, the same year Freud died), and therefore contained something of her, or so it seemed. We’d scattered her ashes in the Atlantic—living on the boat was as close to her as I could get. You could say I felt held by the water, you could say I was, like Dorothy, only trying to find my way back home. It worked, for a while, to dissolve into something larger than myself, until by the end not even the ocean was big enough to contain it.

  giddy-up

  (2008) My grandfather, my mother’s father, calls in the Irish girl who takes care of him by ringing a small brass bell, which is shaped like a crane. I am visiting him a few weeks before Lulu is born. He holds the bell by its beak as he shakes it. If I let myself imagine what I would like to have to remember him by, all I can imagine is this bell, this crane. Framed on the wall behind his head is a silhouette, I remember my mother making it during a blackout, my brother aiming a flashlight at my head, my mother tracing my profile with a pencil onto the black paper tacked to the wall. I remember her taking it down, then cutting it out. The Irish girl comes in, smiles, leans over the bed, asks, And what can I do for you now, her blond pigtails nearly brushing his face, but already he has closed his eyes again. As a girl my mother wore her hair in pigtails, I have pictures, I’ve seen the painting of her beside the horse. I even remember her in pigtails, sometimes, when she was my mother. Strange, but in my grandfather’s room, in his whole house, there are no photographs of her. It’s not that it’s a house without photographs—walls, bookcases, tabletops, all sit thick with cousins, uncles, strangers—photographs are everywhere. But none of my mother, and as for my brother and I, only this one silhouette—it’s as if our branch had been erased, and was now merely a shadow. Grandpa and I never talk about my mother, not really, but I interviewed him once about her, when I made the documentary, the home movie, about her ex-boyfriends. I wanted to ask him one of the questions I’d asked each of them—How did you find out she’d died? Grandpa wore a suit for the interview, sat upright behind his desk, but seconds into it he began crying—I’d never seen him cry before. I didn’t know how to help her, he said. Ten years later, ten more years of not uttering her name, and I’ve been sitting with him when I can, since he broke his hip. Sometimes he talks to me about the universe, sometimes about his fever dreams, and sometimes I transcribe what he says in a small notebook. Both of us know that this bed is his deathbed—he will die two days after Lulu’s born, he will never hold her. The Irish girl and I are with him now. He opens his eyes, tells us his dream—I was walking down a mountain road, and a man approached me in a carriage, drawn by four horses. The carriage stopped beside me, opened the door, but I said I’d rather walk. He smiles, then he closes his eyes. The Irish girl winks at me, leans over him, asks again what she can do for him. He opens his eyes, takes a pigtail in each of his hands—Giddy-up, he says.