AS KURT VONNEGUT wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, “And so it goes.” The ritual is the same every morning: head downstairs, push the button on the coffee maker, let the dogs out, turn on the radio to get the news, head back to the kitchen for my meds. I keep the bottles lined up on top of the microwave. Off come the tops, one by one, and out come the pills: the oblong white one; the white ovoid; the yellow and white capsule; the round white disk; the little pink one—a sip of water, and down the hatch.
This new cocktail of drugs seems to be working better than the last. My psychiatrist is even making noises about reducing some of the dosages. I’ve been on some of these for seven years now, so it’s about time. All the ones I’ve tried that failed are arranged on my desk upstairs. You can tell which insurance plan I was on by the pharmacy labels. The cheapies from the VA stand out as well: brown bottle, yellow top = VA. They didn’t seem to help much, so the bottles are still pretty full.
I’m getting better, but I’m not safe at home yet. The monsters are still out there. I’ve shaken, and cried, and embarrassed my wife and myself because I’ve been simply terrified of some unknown something coming over the hill. I’ve been too scared to go out to a movie. I had to leave Dodger Stadium on a beautiful afternoon because I couldn’t control the shaking and fear that enveloped me like a parachute collapsing on a jumper.
The crying and fear and shaking are still here. They are closer to the skin than blood to a razor. I’ve stopped counting how many times I’ve poured too much alcohol into myself and forgotten to take my prescribed medication—the stuff that says on the label, “Do Not Drink Alcohol While Taking This Medication.”
It’s a process, everyone says. I haven’t felt the urge to pick up that pistol and drive alone out into the desert again. But I suppose I’ll always worry about something coming out of the shadows and pulling me back there.
I started writing what would become this book while I was still in Kosovo. I remember sitting down with my laptop at a little table in my room in Pristina after the bombing campaign and typing the words, Yellow. Their skin was yellow. They had dirt under their fingernails and their feet were dirty. I remember that night specifically. It was the first time I let my guard down about how messed up I was, because of what I had been a part of, and had witnessed first-hand.
One of my colleagues, our team’s financial management officer, came by my room to ask me something, and sat down to have a drink. He had joined the team after the bombing campaign, and somehow we got onto what things had been like on the team in the early days of the war. I told him about that day in Senik. He left embarrassed half an hour later because I was crying and unable to get control of myself. It was the last time I let myself go like that publicly, because I knew that if I did, word would get out that I was broken, and I would be sent home.
That was in 1999, and I was already screwed up then. When I gave this manuscript to my publisher in the fall of 2013, I was still trying to get better. In the interim I wrote nearly every day: sometimes a crisp, dry piece for work; sometimes a messy, stream-of-consciousness freakout; sometimes a revision.
In Afghanistan, in 2002, and despite how messed up I was, I started working on the chapter about Podujevo. What I wrote then as a post-script to that story is as much a meditation on memory as a snapshot of that place and time. It fits better here than at the end of that chapter:
I didn’t solve the mysteries. Maybe someone has in the years since. The war crimes tribunal continues to indict both Serbs and Albanians for war crimes and crimes against humanity. As I write this, it is over four years later. I have moved from Kosovo to Rwanda, to Washington, and now to Afghanistan. I started writing this piece in Afghanistan after I awoke in the middle of the night with an image of the body in the second house in my head. I don’t often dream of Kosovo, so I took the dream as a sign that it was time to start writing again.
I finished the first draft a few days later on the same day I received an email from one of my colleagues, a young Kosovar who had been my translator for months during the war, who was enrolled in college in the U.S.
“Our friend Fatmir was indicted by the tribunal,” he wrote. Fatmir had nothing to do with the killing of those people in Podujevo, but it makes me feel that perhaps some of the crimes of Kosovo will be solved.
I can easily recall much of what happened while I was in Kosovo. My memory is also well supported by my notes and by emails I had written home. Most of what happened on that wet morning is clear, and I assume it will remain a part of me forever. But I have a very unfocused memory of the bedroom where the last body lay (and even later, at home, I found that some of my notes from that room are useless scribbles). I can summon a memory of the floor being wet and littered with broken red tiles. I remember the figure 4 formed by the victim’s legs. When I try, I can bring up flashbulb images of the walls and of a large bed, beside which lay the body. But I am, in fact, not confident of those memories. The first house and the outbuilding: yes, those memories are clear and I am certain of them. I remember the last house. I remember walking to it. But I wonder if I am imagining more.
I didn’t cry during my first year in Kosovo. I often think about the not crying and wonder if I should have—or more properly, if I needed to. I have cried since. I don’t know if I cry for the dead or just because I didn’t then. In Kosovo, I mostly just looked and listened. I took notes and walked away. That day, Mimi and I and our guide got into our truck and drove back to Podujevo and had coffee. Our guide talked about the politics of the city and I took notes so I could write a second report about that when we returned to our office that evening.
I remember putting my arm lightly around Mimi’s shoulders as we left the compound and asking her if she was all right. She confidently said she was. I guessed that if she was all right, then I was supposed to be all right, too. So I was; I was all right. I said I was all right, and I was all right, for a short while at least.
Mimi was eighteen at the time. She was fearless. I tried to be, but I wasn’t. I remember her because I want to. I want to remember her courage and her loyalty. She had been with me in Senik, too. I want to remember her being all right.
But as much as I want to remember Mimi, I want to forget some things we did and saw together—some of the awful memories. I know it is important that society have and keep a memory of these things. It’s important to remember who was killed. Not just that some people died, but who was killed and when and how and why they were killed—especially if we never learn by whom. We have a collective memory of the horrors of wars. We all recognize words like Srebrenica and Auschwitz as code words for horror. But they are code for collective memories of collective horrors. We don’t necessarily remember the specific individual horrors of war even though we remember the Hiroshimas. We must have a memory of the smells and the sight of the bodies and the look on that girl’s face as she fought her anguish. Someone has to remember these things. It’s important that we, our society, have these personal memories. But sometimes I wish they weren’t mine.
But they are mine, and they stay with me, and they keep coming back. Not every day, but often enough that I want them to stop. Most times when they come, I can clench my teeth and turn the music in my headphones up loud and make myself think of something else. I can usually walk away from them as easily as I do from a project on my laptop. But sometimes I cannot walk far enough to get these filthy pictures out of my head. When I can’t, my hands shake. I lay my head in them and rub my eyes and run my hands across the top of my thinning hair. I shudder in a warm room. My stomach twists and knots in a visceral reaction.
I write in hope that by writing down these memories I can give them away like a penitent in a confessional. Maybe if I can confess my memories to someone I can be absolved of them. Maybe if I can give the memories away or at least share them, they won’t be so awful. Maybe they’ll only be bad. Bad would be ok. Bad would be all right. But I haven’t yet been able to give them away. They stay with me in a cruel validation of the aphorism that no good deed goes unpunished. So if I’m stuck with them, I guess the best I can hope for is that they only come back when I want them to—only when I need them. I will need them someday. I’ll need them when someone says these things don’t or didn’t happen. I’ll know they did and they do. So, for now, when the pictures come back to me uninvited, I take a deep breath and I try to be All Right.
Each week, in the graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins, I would bring some short piece of writing about my experience in Kosovo or Darfur to class and my fellow students would critique it in workshop. I know several of them found the writing disturbing: all stream of consciousness, profanity-laced, filled with violent images and descriptions of my collapse. But one classmate suggested I craft an essay about one aspect of my story for a magazine she edited. It would run in July, a traditional time for non-military themed magazines to place patriotic or other military themed articles. We had about nine months and used all of it.
Over a few weeks, I pulled together about a thousand words detailing my collapse and the bureaucratic framework surrounding it. For the first time, I admitted openly my flirtation with suicide. I even joked about it a little. I wrote about the contradictions inherent in the military medical system: that doctors have divided loyalties, owing privilege to patient conversations, but at the same time owing equal responsibility to the service to protect interests and security and operational effectiveness. I wrote about service members’ anxiety over asking for help because they fear ridicule, loss of position and potential for promotion, or being charged with cowardice—and yes, that has actually happened. But, mostly I wrote about my own collapse.
Putting the words onto the page was hard enough, but sending those words out for publication was terrifying. It meant publicly admitting what I had tried to hide for so many years: that my mind was broken. To hell with it, I thought. I’ve lost my career, my twenty-year marriage fell apart, I’ve moved on to a new life. Let’s air the laundry of the old and start anew; maybe I can help someone else in doing so.
So I did. I laid it out in the same language I had used in all those reports: crisp, dry accounts of the moral failures of an individual, but also of the government. Then I waited. With every piece of professional writing there is editing and some back and forth with the editor. This is especially true for a peer-reviewed health policy journal. I was fascinated by the idea that these editors were trying to find peers to review my essay. How many others were there with a story like mine? Few, I supposed. But in time and after several rounds of editing, the journal hit the stands. I was out.
The Washington Post and NPR had first dibs on interviews and a review of the essay itself. The Post was kind, complimentary even. Reading an excerpt from the essay into a microphone at the NPR studios was a struggle. Keeping the emotion out of my voice—not breaking down into tears—took a few takes. Afterwards, I rode the train home, shaking and struggling not to collapse into a ball of goo on the floor.
The reaction of my friends and colleagues was most surprising, particularly that of the colleagues from Darfur where I had nearly taken my life. “I never knew,” was the phrase I heard most often. ‘How could you not have?’ was what ran through my mind in response. Surprisingly, none of my friends or colleagues from Afghanistan ever commented on the piece. Maybe it’s because they aren’t NPR listeners or don’t read health policy journals and just don’t know. Maybe it’s because they’re embarrassed that one of their own had broken so easily.
Once that story was out, I kept writing. I published mostly policy commentary for TIME, Foreign Policy, and The American Interest. But I was also writing this book. I published essays that became the chapters “Yellow” and “The French Lieutenant’s iPod” in literary reviews.
I wrote what I remembered. I wrote because it helped me control the memories. I wrote because it helped me understand.
This book is what I remember. It is what I found in those metaphorical boxes I had stuffed under the bed—the things that came out once those boxes were rattled in Afghanistan.
It’s what I found in my notebooks from Kosovo, from Central Africa, from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Darfur that I had stuffed in a plastic bin in the back of a closet. I wrote mostly from memory, picking out moments from each major deployment that stuck with me or haunted my dreams. But I used notebooks from my deployments to confirm details. Scribbled inside are the names and places and times and dates and numbers I needed to remember for my reporting from the field.
I read the notebooks as if I were a researcher filling gaps in an oral history. I wrote what I remembered, and then pored over the journals to confirm or refute what I remembered and had written in the first draft. Sometimes I had remembered that an event took place in one village, when in fact it had occurred some place else. I had forgotten the names of some villages, of some people. I used the notebooks to correct those gaps. I also emailed friends and colleagues with specific questions. Most were helpful, while some ignored the questions.
Digging through the notebooks and asking colleagues what they remembered was part of the revision process. Revising an essay or chapter is one thing, but I can’t edit what’s in my head. There really is nothing like Alexander Pope’s line, “the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.” There is no forgetting, no changing the past. Not yet, anyway.
Besides, I don’t want to forget. I want to remember, but I want to be in control of the memories, which is something I have been unable to do for years. I’m still living in my own private Idaho in some ways because I don’t yet have full control over my mind. I have a sign in my office about either controlling the story or allowing the story to control you that might as easily be applied to one’s memory as story. Some days the fight ends in a draw, but I feel as though I’m winning more and more often. Writing is the most effective tool I’ve found to help get the memories under control.
At times I thought of trashing this project. Putting all the files under the physical bed, or in the real attic, and moving on. I have at times seen this book as my confession of weakness and cowardice. Not the cowardice where one turns and runs in the face of a determined enemy onslaught. That kind is understandable, to me anyway. No, mine is moral cowardice: failing to take action to protect the survivors in Senik; fighting harder to get into Racak; being complacent about injustice and hatred, about humiliation and dishonor, about murder and rape. It has seemed to me at times that it was the mere memory of ten years of failure, of weakness, of all the dead I did not save, that broke my mind. Were I more religious, I would call these sins of ommission rather than sins of commission.
Through it all, the sane part of me wondered why would I want to expose my weakness, my failures. The crazy part urged me on at night, whispering: “Keep writing.”
I think a lot about what I did in these wars and what more I might have done. Maybe I did all I could, all that I was capable of doing. Maybe not.
Could I have stopped the killing of over a hundred thousand Hutus in Zaire in 1996? No.
Could I have convinced the United States government to intervene politically or militarily to do so? No.
In point of fact, I tried and failed. Standing on the roof of an Entebbe airport building, fuming and cursing the general and his bosses all the way up the chain to President Clinton, I should have learned to keep my role and my place in perspective. But I didn’t. For whatever reason, that failure seemed very personal to me. I believed I had failed the refugees through my fecklessness, my inability to convince a major general to deploy his troops into a sovereign nation in the grip of a civil war that would become what many now refer to as Africa’s World War.
I wanted to be the man. I wanted to be the guy who found a hundred thousand people that the satellites and surveillance aircraft couldn’t. Maybe I was. My partner and I put that video in front of the general. But I was greedy. I also wanted my nation to fly to their rescue, to wrap the American eagle’s wing around them as protection, to ride to the rescue like the cavalry. They didn’t. “It’s the UN’s problem now,” the general said.
Could I have stopped the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo? No.
Could I have prevented the killing of forty-five innocent Kosovars at Racak? Maybe.
There was a myth among my colleagues at the Department of State that I was the first observer into Racak, that I had discovered the bodies. I heard someone repeat this even as recently as June 2009. I usually tried to correct the record, but that time I let it go. I didn’t feel up to going into the story. To do so would be to have to explain how I felt about not trying harder to get into the village on the first day. It would have meant admitting that I didn’t do everything I could have. It would have meant admitting that I am in some way culpable for those deaths.
It’s hard to explain why I feel this way. When I think about Racak, I try to accept that I could not have stopped the killing. I now realize that my boss in Belgrade was right. I know these things intellectually. But it is hard to understand them emotionally. It’s hard to understand why these things happen. I know how they happen. I know intellectually how societies are motivated to pit one ethnic group against another. I know how people’s minds can be manipulated to dehumanize an entire group of people. I’ve seen enough of these things that I can explain the steps involved in a coldly rational way. But I can’t explain what in human nature allows a group of men to take another group of men away from their families and their warm houses up to a frozen hilltop and shoot them dead.
It’s hard to explain evil.
Richard Holbrooke’s book on the former Yugoslavia is titled To Stop a War. Holbrooke was a larger-than-life figure. He was twice an ambassador—to Germany and at the United Nations—and twice an Assistant Secretary of State—for Asia and Europe. I served as Holbrooke’s driver a few times in Kosovo. He was there to stop a war. I was a junior officer on my second assignment in the Foreign Service. I was there to pretty much do what I was told. Is it folly to think I could have done much more than I did? Even looking back I think not. I suppose in the end it’s a question of scale.
Could I have stopped the genocide in Darfur? Of course not. But I did help keep one village from being destroyed. I may have saved some lives there, so I guess I got better at this work as I went along. I was certainly less fearful of taking some sort of action in Darfur than I had been in Kosovo or Zaire. If I were to judge myself on the ability to stop a war or an act of genocide, I would fail. But if I were to judge myself on finding a way to keep one village from being destroyed, I might pass, or at least fail better.
In 1998, just before I had deployed to Kosovo, I met a man in Montreal who helped me grasp how important one small action can be. At the time, I was a consul working in the non-immigrant visa section of the American Consulate in Montréal. He appeared at the window applying for a visitor’s visa to the U.S.
“What is the purpose of your travel to the United States?” I asked the man, only cursorily looking up to confirm that the face at the window matched the face in the passport picture.
“I have an interview at the United Nations,” he said. “A job interview,” he quickly added, handing me a letter from the United Nations inviting him to a job interview in two weeks. It looked official.
“Do you have any family here with you in Canada?” I asked.
“Yes, my wife and six children are here,” he said.
Well, that’s something, I remember thinking.
“Do they like it here?”
“Yes, but they would rather be somewhere warm.”
Somewhere like Florida, perhaps, I thought.
“When was the last time you were in the C.A.R.?”
“Oh, it has been five years. I’ve been here since I began my studies,” he said.
I had been there the year before, in 1996, when the army of the Central African Republic had mutinied after too many months of not being paid. The American ambassador had ordered all non-essential Americans out of the country and I had flown in on a Marine aircraft to help run the evacuation. In about ten days the expatriate population of the small country had dropped by ninety percent as the French and American militaries conducted what the military calls an NEO: a Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation.
“I was there in May, last year,” I said.
“Oh, that was a very dangerous time,” he said. Vincent was his name. “My children were there then.”
“So what were your kids doing in Bangui during the mutiny?”
“Oh, well, you see, until then they were living there. It is so much cheaper for them to go to school there. Plus, it is very cold here,” he replied.
“Did they have any problems during the fighting?”
“Yes, sadly, our house was looted and they had to be evacuated,” he looked a little wistful.
Suddenly, it dawned on me. Those kids I loaded in the aircraft and evacuated to Canada, they were Vincent’s kids.
“How many kids do you have,” I asked glancing at his application, “and how old are they?”
“Six.” He pulled a picture of them out of his wallet showing them all sitting around a Christmas tree.
I told my colleague in the booth I would be back in a second. I slipped out the door and pulled Vincent over to a bench in the waiting room.
“I evacuated your kids out of Bangui.”
He was as shocked as I was. He told me how the Canadian ambassador had called him from Yaoundé and let him and their mother speak to all of the kids. They’d arrived in Montreal a couple of weeks later and, aside from the cold, had adjusted well.
Vincent got his visa. He went to New York and got his job as an agricultural economist with the United Nations. A few weeks later, he brought the kids by the consulate. The kids looked great and had no idea who I was, although the older kids remembered an American at the airport. At least they said they did.
I’ve lost track of Vincent now, but I hope he and his family are all some place safe and warm.
They say time heals all wounds. I know it’s even beyond cliché to say that, and I don’t really believe it. If it were true, the Hatfields and McCoys wouldn’t still be feuding in West Virginia. Or Darfurians would only need the ridah, the calming. There would be no diyah, no restitution for a crime. One would simply let time wash the memories like a bloody bandage, fading the stains from crimson to pink to white.
For me, time has passed and some memories have faded. Some of the images have changed. I can’t remember the grieving father’s face from Senik. I can’t remember details of the woman who wanted me to evacuate her son. I wonder if, having smothered so much for so long of what I’d felt then—confusion, fear, revulsion, anger—I can no longer remember those faces because I have subconsciously suppressed the images. Or maybe those images, those people, have become spectral, symbols representing events and actions that are, in my mind, larger than life.
If so, then those memories are like actors in a morality play, one seen clearly but remembered only in fits and starts. They inhabit a dusky netherworld of fear and ambiguity. They exist to remind me of my fears and my failures. And they remain the central characters in these acts of war.
But some memories of Senik—the sticky, sweet smell of blood and wounds, and the sounds of the picks and shovels attacking the rocky ground—have become a permanent part of my memory. The image of the women’s bodies on the trailer, the yellow pallor of their skin, the crimson of the blood staining the white bandages, the blue of the UN tarp, stubbornly clings to the rim of my memory. The weary disdain so evident on the old man’s face and the bright reds and oranges of the scarf covering what remained of that young woman’s head, these are mine for life.
I wonder sometimes if those people remember that an American diplomat had abandoned them? I suppose they remember that the Red Cross and the United Nations did not abandon them, and that UN and Red Cross workers came to take them to safety. Maybe the woman who pushed her child at me that day remembers. Maybe the old man, shot or wounded by shrapnel, remembers. If he survived, that is.
I wonder if they can forgive. Is it in them to forgive my ignorance and my cowardice? I wonder if it is in me to forgive myself. I haven’t yet.
As pieces of this book have been published, read and reviewed, readers, friends, editors, and commentators have taken note of my use of the word cowardice. “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” one said. “It’s more fearfulness than cowardice,” said another.
Lord Moran’s classic treatise on the psychological effects of war, The Anatomy of Courage, devotes an entire chapter to cowardice. Moran writes that the Army Act’s (the early 20th Century British version of the Uniform Code of Military Justice) definition of a coward is “someone who displays an unsoldier-like regard for his personal safety in the presence of the enemy by shamefully abandoning his post or laying down his arms.” This seems reasonable to me.
The Uniform Code of Military Justice explains that cowardice is “misbehavior motivated by fear,” and further that the offense of cowardice is, “Refusal or abandonment of a performance of duty before or in the presence of the enemy, as a result of fear…” When the Taliban fired rockets at our base in Afghanistan, I didn’t fall apart. I got up, grabbed my weapon, and went to where I had been instructed to be. When the thug in Recane held his pistol against my head, I didn’t piss my pants. I waited for an opportunity to act, and I did. When the lady tried to hand me her child, I told her I couldn’t take it because the rules of our mission wouldn’t allow it. I was afraid I would be sent home and our mission might lose its status if I had. I failed to act because of fear—but the only enemies present were my ignorance and anxiety; we weren’t at war.
So maybe my actions that day in Senik don’t meet the official definition of cowardice; it’s not cowardice to work within the rules of my mission. But it’s certainly not courageous to hide behind the skirts of diplomatic bureaucracy.
I’ve thought a lot about those guys with the pistols outside Recane. They were bullies. They wanted to feel big. I suspect they did. They scared a couple of diplomats and a Kosovar woman. And, even though the bombs didn’t fall until a few months later, they eventually did. I doubt that village was hit, because most of the bombs actually were aimed at Serbia proper rather than Kosovo. Maybe I should have felt big after the bombing campaign. But I didn’t. I felt we had failed in our mission to stop the violence. Realistically, I now know that it wasn’t possible. But that has taken me a while to understand.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were so big and my role was so small that it’s hard to even consider what more I might have done. I do wonder, though, had I been stronger, smarter, more competent, whether Habibullah and Dilawar might still be alive. I don’t know. I failed, the system failed, they died.
By the time I got to Darfur, I was pretty broken. At the end of my two tours there, I knew I was finished. I knew that day in Chad with the French lieutenant that I was done. I knew when that peacekeeper pulled the gendarme’s body up onto his knee so I could shoot a picture that, undoubtedly, I’d seen enough, probably too much. I wrote then that I sometimes felt like I was still in all those other places, in all those other wars. Or that maybe all those other places and all those others wars were still in me. I didn’t know then; I still don’t now.
What I do know is that the killing and dying go on. I probably have written five hundred thousand words about the root causes of the conflicts that I was involved in, citing historic grievances and ethnic rivalries manipulated by despotic leaders through the inequitable distribution of resources, and still they continue—only the venues change.
There will always be wars and there will always be dead guys. But someone else is out there now. Godspeed to them. I’ve done my share. I’m going home.