War and the City

1.

In March 2007, on the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I put on my desert camo top and took the train in to Bryant Park. I was painfully self-conscious: everyone was staring at me, I knew it, at my combat patch, my black T-shirt reading iraq veterans against the war.

I came up out of the subway station almost shaking from nerves. It was a beautiful, cold New York spring morning—the sky was blue, the light on the skyscrapers full and golden. I had come to walk with the Iraq Veterans Against the War, the IVAW, at the head of a protest march; I planned to put my four years on the line as a testimony for peace.

I’d gotten out of the Army almost a year before. I was finishing my BA at the New School in New York, taking the L train in every day from Brooklyn for classes in experimental fiction and continental philosophy, and working as a dog runner on the Upper West Side. Life was good, I was doing just what I wanted, but something was wrong. Every morning I’d go into the city, anxiety prickling my neck, feeling helpless, edgy, and weird. I’d come home and drink, restlessly sleep, then get up and do it again.

New York addled me: I struggled against the streets’ sensory assault, the adrenaline surge so close to what it felt like driving through Baghdad. I got into arguments with strangers, walked into traffic, muttered obscenities through clenched teeth. I wanted to punch people who stopped on the stairs in the subway. I missed my rifle.

I seethed with scorn at the hedonistic excesses around me. Walking home through Williamsburg in Brooklyn offered such an astounding parade of self-absorbed, prolonged adolescence and fatuous faddishness, I found myself driven insensible with contempt. One night a gaggle of hipsters playing kickball in McCarren Park provoked me to a burst of vitriol on how kickball was a grade-school kids’ game, how hipster culture fetishized immaturity, and how their vapid, petty lives were being dissipated in bankrupt idiocy—from wearing mantyhose and Members Only jackets to spending their lame, wastrel days planning nothing more serious than pretentious and quirkily-themed dinner parties.

“Chill out. They’re just having fun,” my girlfriend said, and she was right. But I had a point, too. These weren’t kids—they were adults, citizens, in their twenties and thirties. They were older than the men I’d ridden with on patrol in al-Dora.

Fiala, for example, a ruddy-cheeked nineteen, one of our SAW (squad automatic weapon) gunners. He was a goofy, chubby Minnesotan, who before joining the army had never left his hometown. He liked The Simpsons and Friends, and it was his job to ride in the roof of the Humvee with a machine gun and provide cover fire, especially watching for snipers, IEDs, and those guys who liked to drop grenades on us from overpasses. He was just a kid and he risked his life for what? Kickball?

The shift from war to peace, which was supposed to have been so difficult, had been easy compared to the shift from military to civilian. When I’d come back from Iraq, I was still a soldier. The combat patch I wore marked me as tested, experienced, someone who’d been there. When I was transferred to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for the last eighteen months of my service, I took what I’d learned in Iraq and put it to work training young soldiers how to run traffic control points, search prisoners, and clear rooms.

Now I read Spinoza and Lautréamont. Now I flew into rages for no reason. My combat patch didn’t mark me because I didn’t wear it, and if I did, no one knew what it meant. Every day was like a dream where you show up to school and don’t know anybody, don’t know the teacher, don’t even know your own friends.

And I couldn’t get past it because the army still clung to me, ingrained in the way I held my hands and how I walked, in my very words, in the story of how I got here. At every party, every dinner, every new room demanding introductions, I’d inevitably have to explain how I’d moved to New York after getting out of the army, I’d been in Iraq, and yeah, it was pretty intense. Then I’d watch them shift their eyes, as if searching for something appropriately respectful to say, and I’d hate them for it. I’d have to hear how they couldn’t imagine, or they wanted to thank me, or they wanted to know why I joined. Every time it came up, I had to relive the whole question of why we were in Iraq and what it all meant.

The prior four years of my life hung over my days like the eerie and unshakable tingle of a half-remembered dream—“my time in the army”—and the sense of chronic disconnection was getting to me. I walked between two worlds: the New York around me and the army in my head.

So I called up the IVAW. I was against the war, sure: who wasn’t, by this point? Iraq was a mess and everyone knew it. But I wasn’t looking just to speak out, to testify and proclaim—I was looking for other vets, some kind of relation, some way to fit the army back into my life.

As I walked past the cameras and Vietnam-era peace activists that spring morning in 2007, I saw a tall man with a shaved head and a black goatee, wearing an IVAW sweatshirt. This was José, head of IVAW’s New York chapter. We’d spoken on the phone and still I didn’t know what to think of him: a self-described “war resister,” he’d never actually been to Iraq or Afghanistan. When his time had come, after several years in the National Guard, he’d applied for conscientious-objector status and refused to deploy.

We shook hands and he thanked me for coming. He introduced me to his second-in-command, a girl named Jen in a green camo BDU top. She, too, was a “war resister.” She, too, had never been to the desert. Zero for two now. I was beginning to worry, but José said he expected more vets soon. He told me how excited he was about all the press and how Tim Robbins was going to speak with us.

The news crews set up their cameras, and more people showed up to march. Not one of them was an Iraq War vet; none had come for the IVAW. I kept looking for a flash of desert camo, a combat patch, something familiar, someone I could look in the eye and ask where they’d been and share a moment with, remembering.

Tim Robbins arrived and the circus began. I was still the only Iraq War vet there. When it was the IVAW’s turn at the podium, José spoke, then Tim Robbins, and finally Jen got up and launched into a rambling jeremiad on the evils of patriarchy, our collective guilt for Native American genocide, the inhumanity of eating meat, the need to ban nuclear weapons, the dangers posed by global warming, Bush’s Supreme Court–led coup, and our need to pay reparations for our crimes against humanity. As Jen wound down with a quotation from Mumia Abu-Jamal, José asked me if I had anything to say. I shook my head.

Still, I marched with them. We walked up Park Avenue and down Lexington to the United Nations, where people had set up tables at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. It was a nice walk on a beautiful day, and by the time we got to the end, I was sick of it, sick of the sanctimonious do-gooders cheering on the sidelines and their empty slogans, sick of how many different issues were piggy-backing on my war, from legalizing marijuana to freeing Tibet, and sick of talking to Jen and José, who had no right to call themselves “Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans.” A German reporter stuck a camera in my face and asked me how I felt about the war. I shouted back that it was a disaster, nobody knew what they were talking about, and nobody cared.

I took the subway home from the march and threw my IVAW shirt in a drawer with my desert camo, disappointed and disgusted. Since then, the impulse to protest has passed. My confused rage has hushed to a quiet disaffection, and my bitterness mellowed and cooled.

2.

The last time I’d been to a protest had been in January 2002, a few months before I joined the army. George W. Bush had come to Oregon to give a speech, and a sizable crowd of malcontents had trooped out in the icy rain to the desolate strip malls of north Portland, where Bush was talking, with the intent of shouting him down.

We were stymied from the start. The first problem was that our “free speech zone” was nowhere near the auditorium where Bush was speaking—you could almost see it over there, a half mile or so away, well past the police and fences. The second problem was that the police had us well in hand. We were cold, wet, and disorganized; they had horses, riot gear, and a plan. They kept us cordoned in a small rectangle near an intersection, and our docility in being herded was as notable as our agitation in chanting “Democracy!”

A self-described “Anarchist Marching Band” livened things up with trombone and drum, various platitudes were shouted, and we all admired our own dedication and bravery in speaking truth to power on such a gray and dismal day. The protest ended darkly, with the police encircling some of the rowdier protesters and forcing them back with horses. Black-armored men waded into the clutch swinging truncheons, pacifying the malcontents, zip-tying them and throwing them into the back of a van.

It had been a grim winter. After the attacks of September 11, I’d returned to Oregon from Moab, Utah, in part to try to make things work with an ex-girlfriend. They didn’t. I couldn’t find a job in Portland, she and I argued almost constantly, and as my meager savings from Moab dwindled, I left town and moved into my mom’s basement down the valley in Salem.

I was twenty-five years old, with no college degree and no real prospects. My only significant job skills were short-order cooking and grassroots organizing, neither of which I wanted to put to use. What’s more, that August in Moab I’d had a bike accident that left me with a scarred lip, a broken front tooth, and a bill for several hundred dollars. I couldn’t afford any dentistry, so I walked around snaggletoothed. Then one night in Portland, I dropped my glasses, somehow chipping the lenses, and I couldn’t afford to fix them, either. Then the computer I’d brought back from Utah died.

Down in my mom’s basement, I unpacked all the boxes I’d left there years ago—my books, mementos, and old clothes—and tried to make myself believe that coming home to this clammy, dank cave was some kind of moving forward, or at least coming back around on a higher plane, as if in a gyre.

I could at least get some writing done, I thought, and sat down at my little desk in front of the electric typewriter that replaced my computer. I rolled in a sheet of blank paper. The rain outside falling from leaden skies onto the gray streets washed over the typewriter’s hum with a desolating patter.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan. The Patriot Act. Anthrax letters. While I sat in my mom’s grimy basement, rode the bus with the elderly, destitute, and lame, and applied for jobs at Wal-Mart and Target, while the rain dropped from the black branches of winter-dead trees, pooled in oily puddles, and flowed down the gutter to drain into the flotsam-choked eddies of the Willamette River, History had returned to the world with a vengeance. A new millennium had been born in fire, the American Empire was striking back, and I watched it all from where I’d fallen in my hole. This wasn’t how things were supposed to be happening.

I’d dropped out of the University of Puget Sound seven years before, after my freshman year, to find my fate in the world, make my way on my own terms, and most of all, become a writer. The act was one of pure hubris. I can blame the many hours I spent that year underlining and annotating Nietzsche, I can blame James Joyce and his “silence, cunning, and exile,” I can blame a girlfriend for dumping me, my parents for not being able to afford my tuition, and Samuel Jackson’s Jules in Pulp Fiction for inspiring me to “walk the earth, like Kane in Kung-Fu,” but the real blame lies with my wild arrogance in deciding to remake myself in words.

I spurned the safe path through college and decided I’d do things the hard way: I would spend the next year working and writing, reading and studying on my own, with my own syllabus, teaching myself style and technique. Then the following summer, I planned to hitchhike across the country to New Orleans, where I’d get a job and live the writing life.

I had a great dream that once I got out into the world, I’d find myself a circle of like-minded souls who’d refused to take the offered paths and insisted on going their own way, a brilliant literary-artistic collocation such as was found in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s. I knew they were out there somewhere. All I had to do was find them, and once I did, I’d not only find the tribe to which I belonged, but I’d also find my fate, my connection to the greater world, my place in history. I’d join not just with other people but somehow with the Zeitgeist, and through it all I’d transform myself from the fat, nerdy, timid, white-trash loser I was into something stronger, more beautiful, and more profound.

Dropping out to become a writer was also in some sense political. It was a rejection not just of who I was and where I came from, but also of who I felt I was supposed to be and the choices I saw offered. A life spent earning a wage to waste on useless consumer goods and empty diversions seemed sterile and bleak. Becoming a writer was a choice for self-determination in the most radical sense, and literature seemed deeply connected to the ideals of freedom and democracy I’d imbibed wholesale growing up in the last decades of the Cold War. As I read Orwell, Whitman, Twain, Havel, Mailer, and Solzhenitsyn, the connection between writing and freedom seemed ever stronger and ever more true.

At first, things went more or less according to plan: I moved in with a friend in Salem, got a job, and started typing. The following spring, I said goodbye to the girl I’d been seeing, packed up the novel I’d written, and walked down Highway 99 with my thumb out. By the time I got to New Orleans, though, late in August, I was so lonely, stressed out, heartbroken, and busted, I only lasted a couple weeks. I had my mom wire money for a bus ticket home and, with my tail between my legs, slunk back to Oregon.

Several other misadventures followed over the next few years, including a torrid affair with a German woman ten years my senior who flew me to stay with her in Hamburg; two summers spent on the pow-wow circuit with a traveling hot-dog stand; a variety of low-down, no-account jobs; a failed attempt to go back to school at Southern Oregon University; a year spent working as a grassroots canvasser and activist with the Fund for Public Interest Research; a car trip through Mexico; the WTO protests in Seattle; a Rainbow Gathering; supporting a tree-sit; and a brief stint as a phone psychic. Through it all I kept writing, often badly, logging hundreds of thousands of words and hundreds of hours of revision.

Eventually I landed in Moab, where I got another job cooking breakfast and settled in for the long haul. I thought I’d stay and write, become a desert hermit, and leave the world to its troubles. After the compromises of grassroots fund raising and the disappointments of the WTO protest, I was done with eco-warriors, tree huggers, and anarchists; I wanted nothing at all to do anymore with the politics of our fallen world.

Then one morning I woke to find that several men had flown planes into the World Trade Center towers. I didn’t see it; I didn’t have a TV. My ex-girlfriend had called me and told me to turn on the radio.

Within a few months, I was in my mom’s basement, listening to the rain fall. After everything, I was right back where I’d started but even worse off, and just as far from the Left Bank as I’d ever been. Moreover, I could see, if I kept on like this, there was a good chance I’d wind up slipping into drunken, self-loathing decrepitude, eventually writing bleak, dark-hearted stories about Great American Failures, if I managed to keep writing at all. This wasn’t how things were supposed to be happening.

3.

People always want to know why I joined the army. They meet me now and see my bookish demeanor, my sensitive green eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, and can’t seem to fathom why a thoughtful, seemingly intelligent young man might want to put himself in harm’s way in the service of American power when we’re engaged in dirty, uncertain, and morally dubious wars.

The obvious answers are easy: adventure, excitement, travel, challenge. It was also a way to pull myself out of poverty. In 2002 I was back at my mom’s house after years of trying to get away, an unemployed, desperate, snaggletoothed college dropout, stuck in a dead end. I’d had enough washing dishes, mopping floors, and scraping by, and the army offered money for college, full medical and dental, a regular check, and combat pay.

I also joined because I wanted to see. I wanted to see, first, if the American empire, out where it was happening, was as bad as all the Chomskyites said. I assumed it would be, but after several years of disappointment with the left followed by the frightening shock of 9/11, I was unwilling to take anti-imperialist polemic at face value. Furthermore, I was swayed if not convinced by liberal hawks like Christopher Hitchens and George Packer, who argued that in the “war on terror” there was something real at stake in terms of international peace, the spread of democracy, and the idea of a better world. Islamic fundamentalism seemed a real danger, and I thought maybe our open society, for all its deep flaws, was worth defending by force of arms. I wanted to see for myself what it felt like out there doing what Orwell called “the dirty work of empire.”

I also wanted to see war. I wanted the material. All my life, from GI Joe to Apocalypse Now to Sartre, I’d been told that war was an experience beyond all others. It might destroy you, it might cripple you, but in it you’d confront yourself and the world in all its bedrock authenticity—there was no way around the physicality, seriousness, and death at the heart of war. It was inescapably true, in all its horrors, profoundly meaningful, in all its risks, and ultimately redeeming, in its test of character. I wanted to know what it felt like to get shot at; I wanted to know what it felt like to kill.

I wanted disillusionment and wisdom. I wanted the equanimity and poise of Conrad’s Marlow sitting on a ship deck in the London dusk, telling the story of his boat trip up the Congo. I wanted to write with the confidence and authority of Hemingway, to be able to say how “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages.”

I wanted the concrete names of villages. I wanted the shuddering opening to unknown vistas of the soul, truth in sudden flashes, something transformative and maybe crippling that would give me, like Edmund Wilson’s Philoctetes, power in my very wound. I wanted to cut through the buzzing anomie of our feckless consumer society and see through to the realm of the real, even if it meant suffering from it the rest of my life. I wanted to cross over from innocence to experience, like all those heroes of literature, and come back with a novel.

Finally, I went to be a man. My dad was a sailor, and both grandpas, too, one uncle, a Navy helicopter pilot, and another did time in the National Guard. I’d been fascinated by all things military since I was seven or eight, and had collected patches, manuals, gear, and paraphernalia like I was stocking a tiny militia.

One night when I was ten or eleven, I ran away from home. I waited till midnight, then put on full camo fatigues and a web belt, packed my canteen, poncho, Swiss Army knife, and lensatic compass, smeared my cheeks with Army-issue olive-drab face paint, and rode my bike out to my grandma’s house in the country, where I planned to live in the woods like Rambo or Patrick Swayze in Red Dawn.

I was so frightened by the time I got there, I woke up my grandparents and slept on their couch. I was turned over in the morning to my father, the one whose fury I’d been fleeing.

I was a sensitive kid. I loved to read, loved my mom, and cried at the slightest provocation. My dad made sure I knew this was unacceptable. His parenting style was taken straight out of boot camp, and he seemed to think that if shame failed to motivate me, fear would work in its place. The more he’d yell, the more I’d cry, the more I’d infuriate him, the more he’d threaten, the more I’d whimper and break. “You wanna cry,” he’d shout down at me, “I’ll give you something to cry about.”

My dad was a large, red-bearded, red-faced bald man with thick, hairy arms and a bulging gut. He was a bully and, like most bullies, a coward and a liar—rough, uneducated, manipulative. For most of my childhood, he worked a succession of low-wage jobs, at a gas station, a porn shop, and a cannery, among others, but he eventually got certified as a marine electrician, which is what he’d done in the navy. He had a good job for a few years at the shipyard in Portland before he got laid off. He was not only massive and quick to anger, but also charming, mercurial, and funny. Even as I feared him I looked up to him, to his sheer physical bulk, his legendary years sailing the mythic Orient, his seething power and fickle affection.

My mom insisted, with a fervor all the more dubious for its force and repetition, that I had been wanted and planned, yet simple calculations put my conception some months before her senior year of high school; my dad at the time had been twenty-five. I wondered whose plan I could possibly have been.

It doesn’t take much to make a child feel unwanted. I was well aware, and early, that my arrival had cut short the glory days of youth my father enjoyed and my mother never really had. My father’s resentment at having to provide for a child he no doubt saw as a mistake was exacerbated by the death of his namesake, my younger brother Baby Dan, who died within a year of his birth, and my own failure to live up to Dad’s militant standards of masculine behavior. I often felt he’d prefer I simply didn’t exist.

He prided himself on never hitting me. He didn’t have to. He bullied me with words, taught me to fight with them, taught me how they rend and destroy. One day when I was sixteen, he threatened me, like he always did when I pushed too far, but this time I dared him to follow through. I got in his face and shouted, “Hit me, then, if you’re gonna talk about it so much.” His fist spasmed and his eye twitched, then something happened: he seemed to shrink, diminishing in the half-light, like a gently collapsing red balloon. I turned my back on him that day, and for a long time after on what I thought it meant to be a man.

I read French poetry, I did theater, I went in drag for Halloween, I fooled around with other guys, I grew my hair long and channeled my anger into poetry, activism, and protests. For a while I thought I was an atheist anarchist nihilist revolutionary, then a secret, starry-eyed Emersonian ascetic, then a rabble-rousing martyr for redwoods and butterflies. Anything but that kind of blue-collar man my father was or the kind I thought society said I should be—violence-cheering, sports-watching, self-satisfied, anti-intellectual, domineering.

I paired a sensitive, feminine side with a deep insecurity about my masculinity, an unstable self opening into a gut-wrenching fear pounded in by my dad that I was never good or strong or tough enough, and no matter what I did or how I struggled to find my own way, I still always felt like I was treading water over a bottomless sea, a feeling of emptiness of meaning and will I was sure would end only with my self-destruction. By 2002, after years of struggling to remake myself somehow like James Joyce or Nietzsche, I had nothing to show but hands empty with failure. In my mom’s basement, I faced a choice.

“Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,” Dr. Johnson said, and when I decided to join the army in that grim February after 9/11, that’s what I told my friends, the one who’d been a PETA activist and the one who’d marched with me against the President. They thought I was being flip, but my seemingly offhand remark held a truth deeper than I could have then admitted.

4.

I stumbled out of the cattle car and onto the drill pad, wobbling and sweating under two duffel bags and a backpack, while drill sergeants’ smokeybear hats circled like killer UFOs, shadowing bulging eyes and red faces screaming, “You better move, private!”

When I’d rolled across the tracks to basic training, panting in the stuffy stink of fifty other recruits tense with fear and excitement, I felt an odd dissociation different from anything I’d felt before. In one way, I couldn’t believe it was me—the hippie, the weirdo, the poet, the anarchist—here to learn the craft of making war. In another, deeper way, it was like I was coming home.

I did basic and advanced individual training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where I learned to operate the targeting computer that would be the focus of my military occupational specialty. I was a 13P, which is a combat arms MOS, but one of the nerdier ones. It would be my job to sit in a tracked vehicle behind the lines and send down targeting data to the giant multiple-launch-rocket-systems launchers, which would then fire long-range rockets armed with air-dispersed antipersonnel bomblets deep into enemy territory.

I’d gotten station-of-choice in my contract, so after AIT I headed for Germany, where I was assigned to the First Armored Division (“Old Ironsides”). Soon after arriving, I was made the battery commander’s driver and unit armorer. I found myself suddenly responsible for half a million dollars of weapons and electronics I had no idea how to take care of. I knew how to maintain an M16 and vaguely remembered taking apart a SAW once in basic, but I was completely boggled by the Mk 19 automatic grenade launcher, the M2 .50 caliber machine gun, and all our night-vision goggles, coding machines, and GPS devices. As if the weapons weren’t confusing enough, I also had to keep track of what got issued to whom and puzzle out the arcane Army bureaucracy involved in trying to get anything fixed. The previous armorer had given me two days of training before he split back to the States; my first-line supervisor, the unit supply sergeant who should have been my mentor, spoke a kind of English incomprehensible to non-Spanish speakers and spent most of his time cruising internet dating sites.

Over that fall and winter, I was so busy, overwhelmed by new responsibilities, frantically trying to learn the ropes, and taking two college classes on top of it all, that I hardly had any energy left to worry about the impending war with Iraq. When we were told for sure we’d be going, though, the formerly distracted curiosity with which we’d faced the future turned in an instant to an ominously solemn sense of fate.

We deployed to Kuwait in May 2003, then drove from there to Baghdad. Since the fighting war was over and our MLRS rockets all but useless, we were tasked to “needs of the Army.” We worked a variety of missions: picking up old Iraqi mortar and artillery rounds, running IED patrols, and assisting cordon-and-search operations, among others. I was transferred from the arms room, which, since we all carried our weapons with us anyway, was merely storage, and spent my tour driving a Humvee.

To be honest, those brutal, maddening days in Baghdad in the summer of 2003, when I thought every morning I was going to die, were some of the sweetest and purest of my life. Each moment gleamed with transcendent splendor. I knew it was pure danger, just adrenaline and focus, and that over time my body and mind would lose the ability to cope with the stress. I knew that, as with any drug, I would develop a certain tolerance. Yet none of that changed the fact that I drove through the city with sparkly eyes, alive to the trees’ shadows cutting the street, the aching, tender curve of a baker’s Arabic neon sign, the lugubrious sweep of the gray-green Tigris, the manic systemic flow of traffic like waves, the ebb and pulse of foreign bodies.

Nor was I merely passive to the glory—I was action, movement, life itself. I could feel the shudder in the wheel at 50 mph through bumper-to-bumper rush, just my fingers on the column and my foot tapping lightly gas-to-brake as I swung two tons of steel around a truck piled twenty feet high with bricks, brushing between it and a van full of Iraqis, all of them gaping, maybe an inch on either side. Sweet like sex, the gut-grinning crunch of ramming a civilian car, angels singing as I sped through jammed intersections without stopping, God’s own righteousness when I picked up my rifle to take a man in my sights.

Everything miserable and beautiful at once.

On the road, in the mix of it, I was pure motion. I did not wonder who I was or what I had to do or think about tomorrow. My fate was held in hidden hands and my horizon limited to the rising and setting sun. I saw we had to die and it was foolish to deny it. I saw our lives were merely preparation for the emptiness to come. I saw how all was vanity, how nothing mattered except forthrightness of purpose and motion. I saw how ridiculous we animals were to think ourselves so civilized, to think our words and thoughts mattered, when really we were nothing more than complicated meat, counting-beasts puzzling ourselves with specious enigmas. I saw we were nothing but guts and eyeballs, and the closer we lived in our skin, the more beautiful we became. I saw that the true glory of existence was in being free from existence itself, free from attachment, free from loss. I saw that only in the purity of fearless, thoughtless action were we truly alive.

The feeling passed. As the year wore on, I saw futures extending beyond the brilliance of those strange and dangerous days. I began to want to live again, finish school, write more, get married, maybe have kids. I wanted something more than the blur of the moment and the pseudo-truths of adrenaline and terror. I grew attached again to existence.

After the chaotic summer and fall of 2003, Baghdad seemed to calm. In early 2004, we ran patrols in the al-Dora neighborhood on the south side and I thought perhaps the door had opened to peace and stability. There were fewer bombings, ambushes, and attacks; the streets seemed quieter, the people less fearful and surly. My unit prepared to redeploy to Germany, and I looked back over my time in Iraq with a sense of relief and achievement. In simply making it through, in riding out the fear I felt every time we’d crossed the wire, in taking on a kind of hardness, and in learning to push myself past my limits, I’d proven whatever it was I’d needed to prove.

I have a picture of myself standing by my Humvee on an overpass in Baghdad, taken one afternoon when we’d set up an ad hoc traffic control point. I’ve got my M-16 and grenade launcher hanging across my body armor, and I’m standing looking into the distance like some dauntless conqueror, some Cortés, Ozymandias, or Alexander. My helmet’s slightly too small for my head, and my fatigue pants are too big and baggy, giving me a clownish, dumpy, sort of pinhead look. I make a ridiculous soldier.

Yet I did my job. I moved when I was called upon. I stood fast when I was needed to stand fast. I felt I’d accomplished what I’d come for—my dad, after all, had gotten no closer to Vietnam than two nights spent on a destroyer tender in Da Nang harbor.

Unfortunately, we weren’t done. Just before we were to leave, in the spring of 2004, Iraq erupted again into violence. Sunni fighters took Fallujah, captured four mercenaries, killed them, set their bodies on fire, and hung them from a bridge, while closer to home Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army took to the streets of Baghdad with RPGs and rifles. I was on the truck to go to the airport to fly back to Germany when we were told to download our gear. We had new orders, extending us in-country indefinitely.

The last few months in Baghdad, we mostly drove convoy security between the Baghdad airport and Karbala. I was bitter and angry; I felt I’d done my part, and I wanted to go home before I got killed. I was sick of Iraq, the army, my rifle, my boots, and the tension in every mission somewhere between boredom and terror.

After some weeks, I finally made it back to Germany, passed the sergeant’s promotion board, and was transferred to Fort Sill. Through pure luck, I dodged another deployment and spent the rest of my time in the army training privates, going to sergeants’ school, taking college courses, studying for the GRE, and applying to universities. I also began a novel about my war, typing away in the dark hours before first formation.

In April 2006, I threw my desert boots in a dumpster and took a flight to Berlin, leaving the war behind—or so I thought. The truth was, I’d just begun learning how to carry it with me.

5.

It’s been a long four years, writing, thinking, reading, trying to understand the connection between thought and deed, who I was and who I became and why we use certain words for things. I’ve struggled with the ideas of innocence and experience, trauma and revelation, fiction and truth. I’m still not sure how to remember my war. I’m unsure about a lot of things.

My gravest doubt, to echo the soldier and philosopher J. Glenn Gray, is whether I’ve learned anything from my war at all. In the end, my adrenaline-drenched days driving through Baghdad, my moments of terror and hell-bent fury, and my chilling scrapes with death were just more mere human existence, a dazzled bath of glandular chemicals, nothing sublime.

I got my war stories, but I didn’t find any authentic bedrock I could stand on and say, “This is real.” I found no soldier’s faith, no concrete names of villages. How we understand and account for violence, death, and destruction seems just as contingent and convention-ridden as any other aspect of human culture, and the notion that there’s another “really real reality” somehow reachable beyond the physical, mental, and cultural constructs shaping our being in the world seems wholly naive. We find in war what we want to, what we expect, what we’ve been trained to see.

What’s troubling, though, is that I’ve continued to want to believe, however tenuously, that I’ve had some sort of revelatory and existential encounter with “truth.” I must have learned something profound, some steely-hearted Hobbesian revelation about the “way things really are,” some peek into the heart of darkness, or at least something important about myself—right? Maybe, I tell myself, I just haven’t figured it out yet. And how do I explain my disappointment in having to wonder whether or not I’ve had a revelation?

Equally troubling, I’ve found the moral authority imputed to me as a veteran gratifying and am reluctant to give it up, even though it depends on this very idea of an encounter with truth I don’t wholly believe in. I like how it sets me apart, how people assume I know something they don’t, how my war has made me special. Over time, I’ve gotten used to dropping Iraq into conversation like bait, and while this is certainly an improvement over the nervous, angry silence I lived in before, if I’d seen then the way I use it now, I would have been appalled at my easy cynicism.

Just a few years ago, I wanted to shout in people’s faces. Now I walk down Sixth Avenue carrying my dirty little war like a card I hand over for credit. It doesn’t buy anything on its own, but it does change the calculus: the Post Office gives veterans ten free points on their civil service exam; being a vet, having been to Iraq, gives me similar points in all kinds of ways, from publishing articles to sleeping with women. It might have even helped me get into graduate school.

And what’s wrong with that? It’s what I went for. I’d joined the army so I could write with authority not just about war but about history, love, life, meaning, and truth. George Orwell, Sam Fuller, Norman Mailer—these are the men I followed, men who went to battle in some sense already wanting to be writers. The tradition goes back to Hemingway at least—Hemingway the self-aggrandizing con artist who spent all of six weeks at the front, as a nurse, before getting himself blown up. He didn’t even carry a rifle. I was in Iraq for thirteen months and had a grenade launcher—why shouldn’t I own that moral authority? Or at least, if I think it’s a question, step up and put it on the line.

So here it is on the line.

I had an easy deployment. I didn’t kill anybody. I never even fired my weapon in combat. I mostly drove around Baghdad. I saw nasty things and met some nasty people. I got shot at. I twisted my ankle. Some of my fellow soldiers didn’t come back in one piece, and some didn’t come back at all. I remember the UN building’s wreckage after it got car-bombed, Humvees burning on Route Irish, the sound of incoming mortar rounds, blood, smoke, and fear.

I remember hating the Iraqis. Hadjis, we called them, and it took me a few years to train myself out of using the word. I remember learning to despise weakness, incompetence, and stupidity—not least because they could get me killed—and learning to enjoy feeling pain and inflicting it on others, not least because it could help me stay alive. I remember the posturing and machismo of military culture and how I was so frightened of being deemed not manly enough, not brave enough, not tough enough, that I hid my love for poetry, my checkered hippie past, and much else besides.

Coming back from Iraq on leave through Dallas–Fort Worth, I remember being disturbed by all the people thanking me for my service. I remember dusty bodies in Baghdad streets. I remember standing with pride when I got pinned sergeant. I remember the day I got out and left Fort Sill, feeling so light, free, and full of hope, yet stricken with an unexpected and deeply unwelcome sense of loss. I remember the faces of friends I’ll never see again.

Mostly I was lucky. I got everything I wanted: I got my college money; I got my teeth fixed; I saw the dirty work of empire up close, did it with my own two hands and learned its moral cost; I felt the ultimate exhilaration Winston Churchill spoke of, that of being shot at and missed; I saw the chaos of war and wrote a novel about it.

I proved to myself I was man enough, whatever that means. The last time I saw my dad was at my sister’s wedding in October 2006. He tried to talk to me and I cut him down. As if seeing him for the first time, I understood in a flash what kind of man he would have been in the service: a braggart, competent but lazy, noisy, untrustworthy, a moral coward. The roles we’d played in my childhood were now reversed: instead of me not meeting his standard of what a man was, now he failed to meet mine.

Since then, I’ve continued to struggle with what things mean, what a man is or what truth is, but with a difference. My struggle now is no longer merely in my soul but in the world. Rather than treading water in a metaphysical sea, my feet are planted on the simple, quotidian earth. With this body comes mortality, an end and eventual rot, but also the concreteness of human being, our animal life and breathing thoughts. [2010]