War Flower

by Brooke King

  I thought of driving over the overpass near my house, down the highway to school, or to the park with the kids, looking at every pile of trash and debris on the side of the road, every culvert pipe and crack in the road, every person walking by on the path, uneven ground, roadkill, the heaviness in my chest when I was in traffic and I could not find an alternate route out of the cluster fuck that was rush-hour traffic.

  “Recurrent distressing dreams of the event. Acting or feeling as if the traumatic event were recurring (includes a sense of reliving the experience, illusions, hallucinations, and dissociative flashback episodes, including those that occur upon awakening or when intoxicated).”

  I thought about how many times I had awakened every night for the past four years wondering why it was that I couldn’t dream of anything else but Iraq. I thought about how James was ashamed to take me to parties because he knew I would drink to forget that I was surrounded by people, then be too drunk, and begin thinking about Iraq, begin crying or get angry, and then eventually, he knew, I would lose my shit completely. I thought about how he regretted taking me because of the apologies he had to make for me, my inability to function because of my hangover in the morning, and the fact that his wife was crazy. I lowered my head onto the desk, pressing my forehead up against the laminated wood surface.

  My shrink stopped talking.

  I looked up, but when my eyes meet hers, the pain in my chest came and I could not control the tear that fell down my cheek.

  She grabbed the tissue box, pushed it toward me, and continued to read.

  “Intense psychological distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event. Physiological reactivity on exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event.”

  I thought about the times I had been riding my bike in the hills and come across roadkill—the bloated body of the animal swollen at the stomach, waiting to be poked open by buzzards, picked apart, and devoured until there is nothing left but bones. I thought about how many times the body cavity was opened, the smell of death lingering in the air, how many times I had to hold my breath, try not to look at the body, close my eyes to avoid thinking about body bags, the smell of souring blood, and the pieces of soldiers that used to spatter the roadways instead.

  The tears were uncontrollable and fell with more persistence. I could not silence the sobbing that came when she began to read my life on the pages as though she had been there with me each time the memories, dreams, and triggers smashed the locker open, spilling the hurt onto my head and down my body.

  “Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness (not present before the trauma). Efforts to avoid thoughts, feelings, or conversations associated with the trauma. Efforts to avoid activities, places, or people that arouse recollections of the trauma. Inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma.”

  I thought about the missed July Fourths, concerts, bars, lazy beach days, and movie theaters. I thought about how many conversations I stopped from happening, how I pushed away everyone who wanted to talk to me. And now, I could not stop the tears or the pain in my chest, and it was then that I raised my head from my the desk and looked at my shrink, as if I was silently begging her to stop, but she continued.

  “Persistent symptoms of increased arousal (not present before the trauma).”

  I buried my head back down, pressing it against my knees.

  “Difficulty falling or staying asleep. Irritability or outbursts of anger. Difficulty concentrating. Hypervigilance. Exaggerated startle response.”

  I could not take it anymore.

  “Stop.”

  She closes the book gently and looks at me.

  I was a pile of flesh with a leaky faucet. My fingers were searching through my hair for a comforting place to rest, but the pent-up memories, and feelings, and years of forgetting stretch past them, pulling each fingertip off my head, forcing me to look up.

  I looked at her.

  She half smiled.

  I pulled a bunch of tissues out of the box and wiped away the snot and tears that were drawing streaks of translucent phlegm down my face.

  “I think I have PTSD.”

  She nodded.

  “Your brain’s broken, but the good news is, your brain can heal and so can you.”

  “So you can fix me?”

  “PTSD is a disorder, not a disease.”

  I threw a handful of tissues in the trash can and pulled a few more from the box, holding them in my hand, scrunching them into a ball.

  “So how are you going to fix me, Doc?”

  “I’m going to elect that you go through CPT.”

  All this shit was new to me, so I was confused at the terminology already, and soon I looked at her as though I was a blind man in a strip joint with an outstretched hand waiting to be led, instead of being shown the way.

  “Cognitive processing therapy. We are going to have you relive, in your mind, the traumatic events again from your deployment and see if we can’t reprogram your brain to process them differently.”

  “Sounds painful.”

  “The pain is part of the healing process, but I know you can do it.”

  “This is going to fucking suck, isn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  She handed me my first assignment.

  “I want you to write down every trigger you’ve ever had. Then, I want you to start writing the traumatic event down. Take your time. Don’t try to do it all in one day. You’re a writer, so I know you know how to take your time writing a story. Think of this as a story. Let the words come when they can. Don’t force it out. Then, next week, we’ll sit down and you can read me what you wrote.”

  “I have to do this on my own.”

  “Yes. It’s your version of the events as you see them. Try to focus on the most traumatic one first.”

  “So the Stryker?”

  “Yes. That would be a good one to start with.”

  I grabbed the worksheet packet and stood up to leave, but I stopped at the door before she stood up and came to the door to walk me out to the waiting room.

  “So, I’m not crazy?”

  “No, not crazy—just human.”

  Treatment

  In my dreams the war looked like blurred faces, burned piles of trash and debris, and body bags laid out longer than I stood tall, but the glint of the mirrors still reflected the sun into my eyes the same, making the war a sum total of things felt rather than instances remembered years later. And while sitting in the waiting room of the VA PTSD clinic a week later, I looked nervously at the door that kept opening and shutting, the disheveled veterans who sat waiting too, all of them much older and grayer than I, their war much longer fought than the one I was fighting, but I stared at the door instead, waiting for my psychologist to produce herself, call my name, and usher me back to a room that was cold and bare except for a desk, a few chairs, and her diplomas masquerading as confidence hanging on the walls. But as every veteran was called, shuffled in, and produced back out the door more unevenly keeled than before, I began to realize that war, at its simplest, was a machine without feeling, that it was the people involved who gave it meaning, who brought hope and fear together like the frayed split ends of a paintbrush smoothed clean when dipped gently and rolled into a glob of saffron red acrylic paint.

  I watched a Korean War vet in his motorized wheelchair roll past me, one of his tires half inflated, his legs frail, no muscle definition left, the skin around his eyes drooping, covering the look of unchanged disenchantment for his forgotten war, and I looked down at my worksheet. The letters on the page spelled out my fears in paragraph form, with comma splices, run-ons, and fragmented sentences smeared with ink from the countless times I touched the words and sentences, wondering if that was exactly how the body rested in the cab of the truck, if the teeth protruding from the mouth of the driver were slightly covered
with his lips or if his upper lip was burned away, leaving only his teeth exposed, as though he were locked in a deathly scream. I read the words over again, wondering if I had gotten every detail right, if I had completed the assignment correctly. I did not write about the sound the blood made when it sloshed in the body bag. Or the taste of my half-eaten breakfast coming back up as I vomited next to the burned Stryker. Or the way the texture of torn flesh feels like a raw chicken breast with its wing still attached. The way it slimmed in your hand and slipped if you didn’t sink your nails into the tougher part of the muscle. Or the way shrapnel rips through face tissue and skull as though it were shredding cheese off a new block, the pieces falling from it with more ease with every downward force. I did not write any of this. I read my worksheet out loud, my psychologist sitting there listening. When I was finished reading, I passed the worksheet to her on the desk. She picked it up and, without looking, ripped it into pieces and threw it into the trash. She opened her desk drawer, pulled out another worksheet, and pushed it across the desk.

  “Now that you’ve written down what happened, write what really happened, but this time, don’t treat it like it’s something you have to regurgitate to someone in the army. What do you call those?”

  “After action reports.”

  “Yes. Write this one as though you are trying to tell someone in your family what really happened that day, how you felt, what you saw, how it makes you feel now to think of it.”

  “I have to do this all over again?”

  She nods her head.

  “Fuck that. You know how hard it was to write that in the first place? I’m not doing it again.”

  “Do you want to heal or do you want to keep living the way you have been?”

  I grabbed the worksheet off the desk. “Is that it?”

  “Yep.”

  She stood, walked to the door, opened it, and ushered me back out to the waiting room, but before I walked away, she told me, “Remember, this time with feeling.”

  I mumbled under my breath, “Fuck your feeling bullshit.”

  Months passed, CPT was almost finished, and I felt as though I might have made some sort of progress. I started to write down what happened in Iraq, formed words together into what looked like poems, and shared them with some of my professors at Saint Leo University. They gave me encouraging words, told me to keep writing, that after graduation I should look into going to a master’s program for creative writing, but I did not feel confident in the words or my remembering of Iraq, so I began to write it all down, so I did not forget, so that I remembered, so that a part of me, however small and insignificant, could learn to live again.

  Survivor’s Guilt

  I didn’t know his name or even where he was from, but I watched the young Iraqi boy topple over the two-story building and hit the ground in front of my Humvee. Maybe I shot him. Maybe I didn’t. Either way, I was there, and because I was there, because he had tried to kill me, I didn’t care that he died, just that he was dead and I was not. Now I see my noncompliance with mourning, caring, or even remorse for his death as my admission of guilt. I didn’t kill him. I didn’t shoot, but I was there and that was proof enough of my guilt. I was present the moment he plummeted from the top of the building, and that was enough to imprint his death in my head, enough to make me remember him, even now.

  So I wear a black bracelet on my right wrist that reads “Don’t Fuck Up” in big bold capital letters. I look at it every time I think about Iraq. It reminds me that the war was boredom punctuated by violence and that, at any given moment, fucking up could lead to my death. I look at it now, and though I am no longer in a war zone, the bracelet still gleams the same meaning.

  Mementos

  At my desk I was flipping through pictures of Camp Liberty on Google, trying to find maps, locations, and areas where I was once stationed, when I came across a picture of a woman standing next to a burned-out Humvee. At first I did not recognize the area or even the route where the Humvee was hit. I clicked on the photo. On the right side of the computer screen the caption bar reads, “2006 IED attack. Three dead.” I saved the photo. Opening it up in Photoshop, I enlarged it. Then I saw it. The pixilated face of the woman standing there was me. My memory came back. I looked at the photo and remembered.

  The next day, I Facebook messaged my battle buddy Anderson, asked her if she had any photos of me in Iraq, or maybe just of Iraq. She sent me a reply.

  “If you go to Facebook, I put a bunch up of our deployment. You’re there.”

  I went to her page, looked through the photos, and found more than what I was looking for; I found the fifteen-year-old boy, my old gun truck, the base, friends, places that I thought I had left behind, and as easily as it was for me to open the webpage, I clicked on the X in the top right-hand corner of my computer screen.

  I went back to Google. I searched through the photos again, looking for what Camp Liberty looks like now, and it was then that I found an aerial photo of the base. I stared at the photo, trying to visualize where the DFAC used to be, where my hooch was, the front gate, the clearing barrels, Mortuary Affairs, everything, but it was gone. The trees had disappeared; the place looked like a concrete wasteland, stripped of everything but the hooches that lined the camp like gravestones, marking where refugees now lived in deplorable conditions.

  And in a sense I was looking on at a body postmortem with the lividity fixed and rigor mortis setting in, the limbs now stiff and crooked, unmovable. In a way it was unsettling and pleasing at the same time. The world making use of what was left behind, and yet the decomposition still forced a cringe when looked at too long. Years from now, when the violence of Iraq settles down, I may be able to venture back to this spot where my life once circled around in busy successions of simple tasks carried out day after day with no end in sight. For now, the camp looked as though it was in its final stages of death, the earth ready to bury the concrete blockades, buildings, and barbed wire under its heavy soil, to have this place forgotten, a picture placed on the internet that soldiers go to when they have lost the ability to recall where it was that the war took place, or maybe it will be in a textbook under the all-encompassing title “Iraq War” and perhaps then there will be a paragraph that accompanies it and speaks of the camp and how it was one of the major footholds in Baghdad during the war.

  But then again, the war, this camp, it has a way of living on through the ages, as so many things do after they are forgotten. And like those that have been left and displaced through time, patience is their friend. The camp will wait through it all and be there again, if only for those who seek it out.

  I stared at a screen that flickers flocculent light onto my face while I sat in a dark room in front of my computer and reimagine a place that time had made me forget. The photo, meanwhile, through no admission of its own, had dismantled the memory of the camp and the luster it once held.

  Part 7

  Homeland

  Eyes Cast Down

  But maybe going home isn’t as difficult as I thought. Maybe it is that the home isn’t strong enough to hold back the war and everything that comes with it. Maybe it isn’t where home is that matters but that I have brought the war home with me.

  Iraq is in everything that I do, and it is this vast expanse of land that swirls up into a sandstorm and creeps into everything that I touch. Maybe this is what I must do—travel back to Iraq and leave for home again, except this time, leave Iraq, leave the war, leave PFC Brooke King behind and return home Brooke. Just Brooke.

  *

  At one point in my academic career, I tried to go to law school. I wanted to write, but I still felt a sense of civic duty. I still to this day do not know what possessed me to try my hand at the worst profession for a short-fused Iraq vet to dabble in, but I studied, took the LSAT, and got a decent passing score, one that would get me into a mid-tier law school with reasonable bar-passing rates, but sometime during the last semester of my undergrad I had a crisis. I didn’t know what
I wanted to do. It was mid-March, just before St. Patrick’s Day, and my mom was driving me, Courtney, Ashley, John, and my stepdad, Fred, through South Lake Tahoe. I looked out the window and noticed a college. I thought how cool it would have been to go to school there. I had always wanted to be a writer but knew that with two kids it might not ever be possible. I guess I did law school to make something of myself or prove that I could do something else of worth. It didn’t last. I found out that a poet I admired was opening up an MFA program, and I decided to go for it instead, to be a writer. I thought, What was the worst that could happen? I certainly couldn’t die or be in a position to be threatened with death. I applied, got accepted, and went to get my MFA in creative writing.

  My first residency in and I was doing fine. My PTSD was manageable, but my writing was attracting attention. No one had really seen a female vet try to write about Iraq, not in an MFA at least. Some said I was doing great. Others wondered why I was trying to write fiction when I should be writing nonfiction. Others let me be, let me write, and became drinking buddies, but something struck me. A professor kept asking me, bugging me, pushing me every time she asked it: Why was I writing fiction when clearly I had enough to write nonfiction? When I was attending the MFA, I bounced the question off my shoulders, avoiding it by simply saying I knew how to write nonfiction and that I wanted to learn something new, but the truth was that I was scared to write nonfiction. I hadn’t processed enough of my deployment to handle writing it all down and sharing it with anyone. I confided in the director of the program, a vet and mentor of sorts, and he seemed to give me sound advice. Write where your heart takes you, and when you find that place, live in it until there is another place that seems worth going to next. So I wrote fiction, but as I began to write the story of a young female soldier, I started to realize that the soldier wasn’t fictional; she was me, and the harder I tried to write away from myself, the closer I came to the truth until finally, when it came time to turn in my thesis and graduate, the story I had unfurled onto the page was almost completely true. But what was truth in the eyes of war? Was my somewhat semifictional account of a female soldier’s struggle so different from mine? Or was I simply applying my demons to the page until I had the courage to write about myself? None of it made sense and all of it confused me, but the point I am trying to make is that it was okay that I didn’t know at the time; I did later on and that was what made the story truthful and real even though it was nonfiction written in the guise of a novel. I had found out about my pain, unleashed it on the page, and realized for the first time in my life that it was okay to hurt while writing, that the best part of a story is when the writing leans into the pain on the page instead of leaning away. It didn’t matter if I was writing fiction or nonfiction; writing was helping me deal with the war, gain perspective about what had happened to me, and broaden my sense of the world around me and the people I was affecting. In a sense, I was molting my war skin and becoming something entirely different. I was leaving behind Private King and becoming Brooke with every story I committed to my MFA thesis.