The Evil Hours

by David J. Morris

  Perhaps such flashback experiences are the root of the human belief in ghosts and the supernatural, our faith in revenants that return to torment us, to demand answers to questions that remain unresolved in the mind of the survivor. Such ghosts have a way of forcing their way in. They break in. They insist. They intrude, in the language of the DSM. “Memories gone wild,” one Marine veteran told me, describing his memories of the Iraqi girl he killed. In the worst cases, such memories can intrude so often and with such power that the entire life story of the survivor becomes warped over time, the autobiographical memories overshadowed. This can even affect memories that precede the event.

  Traumatic time doesn’t just destroy the flow of the present into the future, it corrodes everything that came before.

  In 2010, Sonali Deraniyagala, writing about the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami that killed her family, felt compelled to rethink her entire past in light of the subsequent horror. “In the past six years I’ve recoiled from remembering my childhood. I felt foolish about my youthful contentment, was niggled by a notion that even as an unsuspecting child I must have been marked, doomed.” Notice the language. Marked. Doomed. As if a scheme had been worked out in advance, a plan made, targets selected. Not the work of an anonymous force, but an alien intelligence.

  A suggestible person, a writer, in the wake of terror can begin to see their imagination hijacked by The Event until, in time, everything flows from it and to it; the world itself, the past, the future are all an expression, an extension of what happened, what continues to happen, what has always happened. Like a virus, trauma writes itself into the world, hijacking the cells of memory in order to replicate.

  Have you ever been blown up before, sir?

  The day I was asked that question, I worried about what it might mean. Further, I knew that I needed to be worried. I knew that a question like that was not a question without consequences. To ask it was, in some sense, to defy the will of the war, to defy its absolute control of your existence, its total ownership of your every moment. To ask it was to assert a kind of independence from the workings of fate, an independence that said one could exist apart from the mysteries of the war, that one had control, and that one needn’t worry about one’s luck. A luck that was seemingly determined by what you said about IEDs and when and where they actually went off.

  I knew this, in part, because I had written in my journal a nearly identical line about apophenia in 2004. That year, those early groping months of the war after the statues had fallen and before Abu Ghraib, when the war still held a certain novelty even back home, I had been at a remote Marine outpost on the Syrian border. On patrol one day, I’d heard a master sergeant mutter that something felt off, that it felt like the convoy we were riding in was going to get hit.

  “Today just doesn’t feel right,” he said after talking with some other Marines on the radio. This, it seemed to me later, was not mysticism. This was a guy, an unusually talented soldier as it happened, who had, over his months in-country (he was on his second deployment at this point), gotten so close to the war that he knew things without knowing how he knew them.

  When an IED went off ahead of us later that day, he was unsurprised.

  Patterns where there shouldn’t be patterns.

  This was, of course, an atypical episode, what might be described as a case of positive apophenia. A case where one Marine’s unconscious pattern making turned out to be correct. Had he been wrong, had there been no IED, I almost certainly wouldn’t have remembered it. But this event, coming when it did in the early months of what turned out to be a very long war, months which in retrospect came to seem like a primer in Iraq for me, drove me to take the master sergeant’s behavior that afternoon as an object lesson in survival: sometimes you have to attend to the invisible in a way that might seem crazy at first. Stay long enough in the war and you begin to grow antennae for the invisible, the unspoken, for the sometimes weak, staticky signal of intuition, the signal that says I don’t feel safe here. Why is that?

  By 2007, at the height of the surge, the existence of such antennae would, in fact, be recognized by the Pentagon and enshrined in FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency (a manual coauthored by General Petraeus), which encouraged commanders to pay attention to the “atmospherics” of a given area of operations. But what happens to these antennae when you come home, when you don’t need them anymore? How does one adapt to the “atmospherics” of San Diego? For many veterans and civilian first responders, these antennae can become a problem; an armature that was lifesaving in one context can become destructive in another.

  Back in California, I didn’t immediately see the problems that could arise from having developed such antennae. Mostly what I felt was anger. Anger at the apathy and smallness of mind that had allowed the war to happen, anger at the same apathy and smallness of mind that allowed most Americans to act as if the war had never happened. But there were other, less intelligible concerns. For reasons that became clear once I thought about them, driving in alleys and on dirt roads became problematic. In theory, driving on virtually any paved road was permeated with bad associations for someone who’d been blown up in Iraq, but for reasons that remain unclear to me, driving on most surface streets, even driving in Tijuana, only rarely activated my antennae.

  Driving down the alley behind my apartment one morning, late for an appointment at the VA, I looked ahead and saw a flatbed work truck blocking my path. Without thinking, I stopped my truck, got out, and rushed toward the flatbed truck, yelling for the owner of the truck, whoever they were, to move it.

  “This is not a fucking parking lot, you piece of shit!” I remember yelling.

  Not for a second did I think that I was back in Iraq. Not for a second did I think that I was about to be ambushed, that there was an IED buried in the dirt of the alley. This was my neighborhood, North Park, San Diego, a neighborhood I had lived in for years after I had left the Corps the decade before. Three blocks away was a house that a friend of mine, a former drill instructor, had owned for years. Three blocks beyond that was Claire de Lune’s, the coffee shop where my friend Mitch had worked to pay his way through San Diego State. I knew by instinct how far away I was from the 805 freeway, could judge the traffic on it by sound, could tell the time of day simply based on the behavior of drivers on the nearby surface streets. In 2011, for my birthday, Erica had in fact blindfolded me and, according to a prearranged plan with a group of friends, driven me to my best friend’s house in nearby University Heights for the beginning of what would prove to be a two-day party. When I began calling out the street names as we drove by them, she got angry.

  “Damn it, Dave! You’re ruining the fucking surprise!”

  This was terra cognita, in other words, a place that as much as anywhere else on the planet I would consider home, and yet when I saw that truck, part of me was somewhere else.

  Mercifully, the owner of the truck, a handyman who resembled Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, appeared and quickly moved it onto the street, clearing the alley. I was free. My face was hot, the blood suddenly loud in my ears.

  After the same truck blocked the alley a week later, I was able to piece it together. Explaining it to a graduate student who was briefly my therapist at the VA hospital in La Jolla, it struck me. It was an ambush. The truck blocking my way, the dirt piling up at the verges, the heat coming off the concrete, the smell of old garbage, the diesel smell of the truck; these various stimuli had put a part of my brain back in Iraq. There had been no particular moment of transport, no feeling that I was leaving my body, no bad flash, no patter of radio traffic in my ears, no explosion, no sound of Reaper’s voice. Just a blocked alley, the truck seeming momentarily to be in color while everything else was in black and white.

  Scan our six o’clock.

  We’re gonna pivot and let the Bradley—

  My brain was making patterns, in other words, where there shouldn’t be patterns. Or more accurately, one part of my brain, the amygdala, that was governe
d by one principle, the danger principle, was making what at one time were the right patterns, but my body was now in another time. This was not an ambush. This was not an attempt to channelize an American patrol by blocking the escape route. This was not a key element of the enemy’s scheme of maneuver. This was an inconveniently parked work truck in San Diego.

  This was, I would see later, yet more evidence for the idea that “PTSD is a disease of time.”

  This situation was not, needless to say, governed by a rational process on my part. I was not thinking it through, lucidly deciding that I was in an ambush and responding accordingly. This was, I would learn, what amounted to a contest between two different parts of my brain, the old part and the new part—the amygdala and the neocortex—a contest between what I was feeling and what I was seeing. Laurence Gonzales, describing this sort of contest in Surviving Survival, wrote that “the brain can seem at times like a confounding bureaucracy with different departments arguing with one another. The amygdala is not in the Rational Department.”

  Episodes like mine in the alley behind my house are essentially an altered form of perception, and because they are typically fleeting in nature, they elude scientific observation. Reminiscent experiences like this, especially when they are chronic and delusional, can be difficult to distinguish from full-blown psychosis. For this reason, cases of chronic PTSD are frequently misdiagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. So powerful, so transporting, are these intrusive memories and flashbacks that Dewleen Baker, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied PTSD for decades, refers to them as “affective seizures,” though she is quick to point out that they are not actually seizures in the neurological sense. PET scans done on patients in controlled settings have shown that the most active part of the brain during an induced flashback is the amygdala, the bundle of cells that serves as our guard dog, warning us of approaching danger, a finding that would indicate that while flashbacks can represent a number of past experiences, the overwhelming theme seems to be one of fear for one’s safety. Interestingly, these neuroimaging studies also show that one area that is conspicuously inactive is a region of the brain known as Broca’s area, one of the brain’s speech centers, which may help explain why flashbacks remain so mysterious, so beyond the powers of language.

  Such hauntings or “reexperiencing” of symptoms, as such events are sometimes called by psychiatrists, play a major role in PTSD and exist along a continuum from recurrent images, thoughts, and dreams about a traumatic event to persistent misperceptions, hallucinations, full-blown dissociative flashbacks, and in the rarest of cases permanent psychosis. (One famous case of such a psychosis is that of Ivor Gurney, the World War I poet, who was wounded and gassed in 1917 and died in a mental hospital twenty years later convinced that the war was still going on.) These sorts of alterations in consciousness can also be caused by overwhelming guilt for a crime or perceived sin that the conscience cannot tolerate, as in the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Like death itself, death’s “ghosts” have a million ways of making themselves known. Some recurrent images and thoughts are responses to specific environmental stimuli, such as the sudden appearance of women dressed in traditional Islamic clothing in the United States for veterans who served in Iraq or the fear felt by rape victims who find themselves alone in a dark alley. In each case, environmental stimuli associated with the traumatic event, even the most trivial and spurious stimuli, like the smell of diesel fuel, can become triggers.

  Flashbacks, as they are experienced by survivors of trauma, tend to be dominated by the visual sense, but they are often triggered by smells. One woman, who had been molested as a child and then assaulted as a teenager, wrote that “for both events smell will bring back strong flashbacks.” She continued, saying,

  I had my first flashback of being assaulted as a child when a man sat next to me on a bus. Once I smelled [his] sweat and body odor, I was not on that bus anymore. I was in my neighbor’s garage and I remembered everything. The bus driver had to ask me to get off the bus when we arrived at our destination. I lost all sense of time and place.

  Nearly all survivors report that certain traumatic memories communicate an uncanny feeling of timelessness, as if, as Tim O’Brien described in his novel In the Lake of the Woods, “the unities of time and space had unraveled.” Joe Simpson, a British mountaineer who survived a catastrophic fall while climbing in the Peruvian Andes in 1985, returned to the site of the original accident to film a reenactment of it, only to find himself hallucinating that he had never left the mountain and was still crawling his way back to base camp. Writing about it in an epilogue to his bestselling book Touching the Void, Simpson said,

  I felt as if I was about to be attacked from behind at any moment. The feelings became most powerful when I was on the moraines or the glacier and the familiar cirque of mountain ridges dominated my every view. It was a memory that had been seared into my consciousness. Seeing it again all these years later was the trigger that brought back my worst memories and associations. This was the place where I had known I was going to die. Those ridge lines should have been the last thing I would ever see. It was not cathartic. It was terrifying . . .

  For me memories came rushing back with such a clarity and startling vividness that I became convinced at times that the last seventeen years had not passed by and I was back in the terrible reality of 1985 trying to crawl my way down the mountain.

  As Simpson later explained to me, this hallucinatory episode triggered by his return to the Andes caused him to suffer from PTSD, whereas the original trauma did not, an unusual instance of being retraumatized by environmental stimuli. (Though psychologists think that one traumatic event can “soften up” a person for a subsequent trauma.) Interestingly, before this episode, Simpson had “always been a little sceptical about the very idea of post-traumatic stress disorder. It seems that everyone gets it nowadays and I was suspicious that it had become a catchall to provide exculpation from the past and a convenient way of suing for compensation.” Needless to say, Simpson, who considers himself something of an “enlightened stoic,” is no longer skeptical about PTSD.

  While intrusive symptoms are most often visual, people with PTSD may experience auditory hallucinations as well. One study of 115 combat veterans with PTSD published in Traumatology found that fully 65 percent of those studied reported hearing voices, often the voices of dead comrades. Some veterans in this study reported hearing “command voices,” which the veterans felt compelled to obey. Douglas Bremner, a researcher at Emory University, makes the point that post-traumatic hallucinations, while easily confused with traditional psychotic hallucinations, are quite different, saying, “Auditory hallucinations in PTSD are related to the traumatic event, and often consist of a buddy talking to a patient, voices crying out in pain, or actual traumatic memories. Psychotic auditory hallucinations, on the other hand, commonly consist of an unrecognized foreign voice with specific types of content, such as making disparaging comments about the individual.”

  Once, after interviewing an Iraq veteran on the phone for several hours, I heard the maghrib, the Muslim evening call to prayer, from my front porch in San Diego, even though there were no mosques in my neighborhood. My strongest associations with the maghrib pertain to Fallujah, a town known to some Iraqis as the “city of mosques,” and from Marine patrol bases within the city, you would hear the calls to prayer broadcast over loudspeakers throughout the day. (“God is great/I bear witness that there is no God except the one God.”) That many Marines were convinced that the mosques were insurgent sanctuaries that used their PA systems to coordinate attacks seemed almost irrelevant: hearing the maghrib never failed to send a chill up my spine. Spooky is just a word in your mouth until you have heard the sunset call to prayer in a half-rubbled city surrounded by Al Qaeda fighters.

  The veteran and I had been talking about Diyala province, a mixed sect region east of Baghdad. The consensus among Marine officers was that the Sunni insurgents who had be
en driven out of Anbar in 2006 had largely relocated to Diyala, and I had been halfheartedly planning a reporting trip there before finally ending up in Dora. Somehow Diyala had come to represent a missed opportunity in my mind, a challenge unmet, and as we spoke I felt a certain disappointment in myself, along with a number of other complicated feelings about the war. Shortly after hanging up, I stepped out of my apartment to take a walk. When I returned, I heard a distant PA system turn on, followed by the strains of the maghrib. This went on for nearly a minute, continuing even after I went inside my apartment and shut the door.

  Hearing the maghrib, sung in the distinctive Iraqi style, while in San Diego reminded me that, like many veterans, I have a number of disturbing, unresolved memories lurking in the depths that can be reactivated under certain conditions. Interestingly, the maghrib is not associated with any particular traumatic event for me but rather with the string of weeks I spent in Fallujah, beginning in May 2004. It is common within the clinical literature on trauma to focus on superlatives—on the singular moments of greatest terror and helplessness, such as the instant the IED went off or the moment the building collapsed during the earthquake—as if the process of traumatization must be reduced to a single point in time in order to be understood. In this vein, clinical descriptions of traumatic hallucinations are nearly always told as corresponding to a moment of maximum horror, a point of near-death. During my worst times post-Iraq, times when I felt the most alienated and angry at the world, it felt like my body was back in Dora and Ramadi, places where I lived on the knife-edge of fear for weeks at a time. It was, in short, a cumulative feeling of stress and fear that came back to me, not unresolved memories relating to a specific close call. Arabic music has always been evocative for me, and I wonder if hearing the maghrib in San Diego when I did wasn’t a misperception that related to a broader stretch of time in Iraq, when I felt lost inside the war, like a fugitive from a regular, grounded life back in the States.