War Flower

by Brooke King

  Neurosis Therapy

  My son told me a joke once.

  Why did the RPG cross the road?

  To hit the Humvee on the other side.

  It was a harmless joke by my son. When pressed hard enough about where he’d heard it, he said he made it up, but why did it enrage me? Then make me sad? I realized he was right, that there was a truth to the punch line, a joke that could have easily come from my mouth or that of another soldier during deployment. I would’ve probably laughed at it, shaken my head, and passed it on, telling the next soldier I knew would laugh too. So why did it affect me so much now that I was out? Was it because I know now how a joke parodies reality? Surely it couldn’t be that. The joke was as true today as it would’ve been almost a decade ago in Iraq. So why did it bother me? Had the war changed me that much? It must have been because the joke is no longer funny.

  The Professor

  It was winter. I was at Lake Tahoe in my second MFA residency. The snow was falling down outside the window of my dorm room, but I was asleep. The quiet tribulation of each snowflake clinging to the glass because of heat radiating from inside seared the impact with warmth on its surface, liquefying its insides, forcing it down the windowpane in droplets of cascading water.

  Across the campus, a girl was screaming in pain or ecstasy, no one knew, but she was screaming all the same. Her screams woke one of my professors from her sleep, made her bolt upright in bed, and the first thing she thought of was whether or not the screams were mine. She contemplated trying to find me as she listened to the screams intensifying. Soon she worked up the nerve to get out of her warm bed, slip her tennis shoes on, and roam the second- and third-floor hallways in her bathrobe, listening for the room where the screams were resonating. She did this thinking of me, remembering that I was a veteran, that I had PTSD, and that I had nightmares; my poetry had told her this much. Soon the screams subsided, the urge to look for me dying with them. She went back to her room frazzled, wondering still if she should go see if I was okay, if she could be of any comfort to me, but I was fast asleep. The dreams had been kept at bay that night. The next morning she came up to me at breakfast, asked if I was okay, and I looked at her, puzzled. She gripped me on the shoulder and, holding firmly, she recounted the previous night, told me about the screaming, how she thought it was me, and how frantic she was about whether or not she should come find me. I smiled at her as I drowned honey in a cup of Earl Grey and told her that I was okay, but it was a lie. I was not okay, and I knew very well that the girl screaming could’ve been me and might be me that very night.

  Walking with the Dead

  In Galway, Ireland, the day of my MFA graduation, I stood in a graveyard looking at a bronze plaque. It read as follows:

  This Plaque . . . erected in memory of more than 300 sailors of the Spanish Armada who, having been washed ashore in 1588, were arrested by the English Authorities, brought to Galway and executed. The people of Galway who took pity on their plight laid them to rest in this graveyard.

  Ar dheis Dé go raibh a n-anamacha

  Que descansen en paz

  For a long while I stared at the marker in Forthill Graveyard. I walked the unstable paved path of stepping stones that grass, roots, and flowers had overgrown; the years had taken away from the beauty of the stones that constituted the path. I looked for the sailors. Walked every inch trying to find them, but after an hour of searching without result, I left. For a while I wandered the streets of Galway looking for them. Past the Hall of the Red Earl. Past the King’s Head Pub. Past endless side streets and through crowds of people meandering, carrying shopping bags filled with souvenirs. I wandered alone looking for them, the souls of those who were lost. I wandered into Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop, skimmed the pages of countless war books looking for them. I ran my fingers over lines, words, pictures. I sat in a heap on the carpeted floor, creasing the pages of Joyce and Yeats. I searched in the bargain books, gently used paperbacks, and ceiling-high stacks. I ran into friends I now call family who asked what I was searching for, but when I replied the souls of the dead, only one of my friends, a vet as well as a poet, replied back as he left the bookstore that the souls of the dead are inside of us, not in books. Though I knew he was right, I told him that I needed proof. He handed me a book of poetry, 100 Years of War. I told him that this was not the proof I needed. He smiled, told me to read it, to see what shakes loose. I bought the book, wandered out of the bookstore, bought a bottle of Jameson, and sat on a bench waiting for the sun to go down.

  The words spilled over in my hands and fell down the pages in splashes of black that wrapped the thin paper with swaying forms of loss, pain, and suffering. I followed the lines until they stopped the pages from turning. In my drunkenness, I had found my answer. The dead were buried there in the cemetery. I had been walking along their path of eternal sleep.

  The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

  They buried us without shroud or coffin

  And in August . . . the barley grew up out of our grave.

  —Seamus Heaney, Requiem for the Croppies

  The next morning, I walked the streets with my head hung low. I knew where the dead loomed, where the ghosts of the past cast their shadows on the living, but as I passed High Street Gallery, Gordon Harris’s Battling Demons stared out from the shop’s window. The two warriors stood apart, clashing against metal, their swords and shields giving their due attention to the irrevocable calling toward victory. Blood dripped the metal clean of peace; the two men had brought their lives to the battlefield, breathing the odds of failure with every strike of the blade against their opponent. And as I looked on, the pane of glass separating our bout in history, I still understood the need to thrash the metal, wield it through the air, and bring it down upon the earth. I remembered the need to pit the dirt in tiny shells and break open the flesh like the strokes of bright vermilion red splattering outward from uneven stippling over the canvas, the brush swiveling upward, leaving the painting with bristle indentations carved out in the pigment and etched in the lines where the red hues splayed on the metal met the dark desert brown dirt. The war had done its work on the living, claiming the motions of fear in a single swipe of the sword.

  And I remember now—the ghosts of the sailors wandered the streets of Galway, some gathering down by the King’s Head Pub, some dangling their legs over the seawall near the Spanish Arch, others laid supine in Eyre Square on the grass staring up at the sky, waiting for the stars to appear and break open the mystery of celestial navigation and the route home to Spain, where their loved ones lay fixed in white marble in orchards that bear nothing but bones.

  I stood there outside of High Street Gallery, staring at the painting in the window that, in different light, reflected the bloody scene as abstract beauty. And while the three hundred dead wandered around me looking for peace, I wondered if people would pause momentarily on any given day to remember that year after year, the bones of the dead sink deeper into the earth, drifting farther away from the land of the living—breaking under the weight of soil until the marrow is stretched thin and turned into mineral and rock, burying itself back into the dirt, where all manner of life begins and ends.

  FUBAR

  It had been five years, seven months, twenty-two days, and some odd hours since I had been at war. And the one thing I can recall with certainty was that my war was different than Vietnam or Desert Storm or, hell, even World War II. Every war was different, and yet, they were all the same. Just different places, faces, and enemies. We fought them all for different reasons. But for the Iraq vets, it was hard for us to pinpoint what it was we were fighting for, so we started to question why we were fighting. For some of us, we never stopped to question why we walked with the rifle; we just carried until we realized that we had walked with it for so many years that when the war was over for us, we didn’t know how to walk without it. For some of us, including myself, we still carry the rifle as we walk because for us, we are still in the d
esert, waiting for the sun to rise, for the darkness to end. We are still in that good forsaken desert because we are still waiting to come home. And whenever I told someone I was a veteran of the Iraq War, they always responded with the same question: What do you think about the war? Usually my response was that I didn’t have a readily available opinion and that the topic was best left undiscussed. Exercising my right to be silent on the subject usually raised eyebrows, but I did have a response to that question and it wasn’t one most of the general public liked to hear. War was a machine that kills without rhyme or reason, that has no feeling toward you either way, that stole from us the very best and the very worst of who we were with no particular plan for who might be next. It took away all that we were, all that we were not, all that we might’ve become, and at the end of the day, they stacked us neatly next to one another because among the dead there were no survivors, only the remnants of who we used to be and would never be again.

  The Fallout

  We don’t play hide and seek.

  We don’t scare Mommy.

  We don’t play war.

  We don’t talk in the car when Mommy’s driving.

  We don’t shout in the living room because the ceilings echo.

  We don’t pretend to have a gun in our hand.

  We don’t pretend like we’re dying when we play fight.

  We leave Mommy alone when she’s upset.

  We make sure, when we go out to eat, that Mommy gets to sit in the corner.

  We don’t talk about dying or killing anyone.

  We don’t point at amputees when Mommy has to take us to the VA.

  We don’t touch the knives in Mommy’s purse.

  We don’t talk about people being crazy.

  We respect the dead on Memorial Day.

  We say Roger that and know the signal for mount up and rally point.

  We use them often.

  We don’t pretend to be a normal family because this is our normal.

  Ghosts (#3)

  Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if I had conversed with the Iraqi girl I saw in the market years ago, the one standing there with her mother next to one of our trucks and waiting to get water and supplies. I imagine it would be the way a camel spider stares down its prey before injecting venom. Silent. Unmoved. I sometimes imagine that she is not dead and has grown up like I have, getting married, raising kids, kissing them every night before she goes to lie down next to her husband like I do now, and thinking of how much the war has taken from her.

  And sometimes, at night, early morning, o-dark-thirty, I look out the back sliding glass door at the outside world and imagine where she would be now, somewhere off in the desert in a small village, far from the city, but not yet on the outskirts of a town, nowhere near a checkpoint or weapons, somewhere in Iraq where the war cannot reach her now. She is looking out of her window, staring out at the stars, the vast desert, the oblivion beyond the horizon where she knows the war is still fighting against peace, where the new age technology of a first world country is giving the war a shot of adrenaline that has been begging for years to be used. She contemplates what the dunes would look like if they were scattered with bodies like the marketplace had been eight years ago, when she lost her father and mother instead of dying herself.

  The concussive blast. The women and children, elderly, and herds of goats caught out in open land, the blast radius already certain of its killing capacity. She thinks of the shockwave, the debris, of what the dirt would look like when the blood soaked through it to make brown mud. And of the retaliation of men with vehicles bearing explosives that puncture the human barriers of crowded streets where families become separated and loved ones, shrapnel fodder.

  Maybe as she stands there like I do, she thinks of all of this too. Maybe she thinks of her family who still grieves the loss, or the countless other children the blast orphaned that day. Or maybe if she were alive, she would think of me and trick her mind into thinking that her inaction, her unspoken words, her inability to help that day were not the mind’s way of seeing itself as evil but rather the cyclical way that prey and predator need each other in order to survive the world bent on chaos and ruin.

  IED

  “I don’t know why I did it, but I told him.”

  I looked up at the veteran sitting next to me. He pointed to one of my poems, the acronym IED, improvised explosive device. He said it has a different meaning now. I was puzzled at what he meant, so I listened as he began to tell me his story.

  “I was sitting in my new counselor’s office, talking to him about an incident that happened to me over the weekend. I was at Home Depot standing in the lumber aisle when all of a sudden I couldn’t remember what I needed or why I was there. Frustrated, I punched the piece of sheet plywood in front of me. Like boom. Just punched it. I don’t why I did it, but I did. So, when I tell the story to my counselor, the guy types up something on a piece of paper, prints it out, and hands it to me. It was a new diagnosis. I had been there not even five minutes and this guy hears one story I told him and diagnoses me all over again with something new. So I get upset at the guy, tell him there is no way that he could’ve diagnosed me by hearing only one story I told him.”

  The vet turned and looked at me. “You know what he diagnosed me as having?”

  I shook my head.

  “Intermittent explosive disorder. IED. All that time in Iraq and I’ve been labeled the same thing that tried to kill me. Can you believe that shit?”

  I shook my head in disagreement, but the sad truth was that I could imagine being killed by an IED at war and at home.

  NUMB3RS

  “How many have you killed?”

  The old man asked me when I told him I was a .50 cal gunner. The other questions he had asked when I mentioned I was a vet while we waited for a nurse to call our names at the front desk of the doctor’s office no longer mattered, my answers forgotten. All the old man saw now was a killing machine that had a number, this quantifiable proof that I, not just the weapon I used, was capable of killing. Giving him the number would confirm it. And yet, to me, saying it aloud was an admission of guilt, a point of reference that someone could put their finger on and say, “See here, there is your proof. She’s not capable of compassion.” To me, the number was something that could be held against me or dangled over my head, as if anything that I happen to do later in life that’s questionable, that number can be pointed to and used as evidence of my inability to care about life. I’ve told people the number before, mostly vets, Nam vets. But all they saw after I told them was the number of kills, not the invisible number of times I did not pull the trigger, the number of times I spared a life rather than taking it. No one seems to care about that number, and so it is never seen, but it holds just as much weight. So much so that I made sure I would never forget it. I tattooed the proof on my back: a large cross with a skull and crossbones screaming, a bullet hole in the center of the forehead. I carry it there as if to say, “Here is your proof. Here is what you need to see. This is the measure of who I am.” It takes a lot of courage to pull the trigger, to take a life, but it takes even more courage to find a reason not to, to give life in a place where only death is created day in and day out. But there are other numbers as well. That’s all that war is—a quantity that is added to or subtracted from.

  Every day I was deployed in Iraq, I counted, measured, kept tallies and tabs on all sorts of things:

  The body bags in the back of the truck after my first mission—3

  The seconds that pass just before an incoming mortar round hits—4.1

  How many in the unit have been killed—5

  The number of times I wanted to call home but didn’t—9

  The months I waited until I saw my family again—10

  The total number of gauze pads that fit into a grenade pouch—17

  The pages I had left until I finished The Sun Also Rises—22

  The number of birthdays and holidays I missed—29
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br />   The number of bullets in an M4 magazine—30

  The number of hot meals I’d eaten at the DFAC—46

  How many times I woke up from a nightmare screaming—too many

  The number of tears shed over body bags filled with soldiers I didn’t know—not enough

  And yet none of these numbers made a difference to those at home, and the old man sitting next to me in the doctor’s waiting room couldn’t have cared less about any of them except the one—the number of people I’ve killed.