Chapter Twelve

Battle Scars

 

If you a soldier, it don’t matter whether you fighting in your own hood or in the Middle East. A soldier’s a soldier wherever he’s at.

—Flex

 

Mike Clary, a Triangle resident, marine, and Iraq War vet who served three tours, can’t sleep more than a few hours without being awakened by gunplay or nightmares. Tonight, a cacophony of shots and screams along Linden Avenue mingle with the roar in his mind of insurgent mortar fire and exploding roadside bombs in Fallujah. He wakes in a cold sweat, screaming into his dark, empty bedroom. It seems neither war—the one he fought in the desert, nor the one being waged outside his door—will let him be.

He checks the clock and sees it’s two a.m. Too late to call his wife, Diane, he knows, but he dials her number anyway, hoping she’ll answer and talk him through this latest flashback. Even as her line rings, Clary feels as if he’s back with his doomed convoy: the shrapnel again piercing his neck, back, buttocks, and legs; the flames again engulfing his body in a shroud of agonizing heat. Memories of the IED attack sweep over him two or three time a day, each episode as vivid as the ambush itself in Fallujah. He’d refused to see a mental health professional for two years after his return, despite Diane’s constant pleas and willingness to see him through his recovery. Month after month, he resisted her efforts, discarding psychiatry as “a scam” while failing to acknowledge the extent of his illness.

“Whatever’s going on in my head will take care of itself,” he’d say.

Some nights he’d wake up howling in pain beside his wife, feeling again the fire that had consumed the entire back of his body and forced him to undergo more than ten surgeries at the US military hospital in Ramstein, Germany. Diane would hold him when he awakened, whispering that it would all be all right, that he was safe at home. He’d often shove her away, believing she was attacking rather than comforting him.

“Tell your doctors at the VA you have PTSD,” she ordered him one day, a little over a year after his return. “Otherwise I’m leaving. Today.”

“I don’t need anyone messing with my head,” he said. “If you don’t like it, do what you got to do.”

And just like that, she was gone.

Eight months later, Clary’s ready to admit he was wrong. He’s ready to accept the support and care Diane offered him so often, which he rejected, sometimes violently. He’s seeing a VA psychiatrist twice weekly—treatment mandated by a judge following a recent arrest for public intoxication. The doctor has helped him to understand that post-traumatic stress disorder is nothing to be ashamed of. Many of the men he served with also suffer from it.

He wants to tell all this to Diane, if only she’d pick up.

“I’m getting help,” he says on her answering machine for the hundredth time. “Please call me. I need you.”

But he doesn’t really believe she’ll come back. Not after what he’d done to her, bloodying her lip several times when she’d awakened him in the middle of his nightmares. Other times, when she’d tried to embrace him during his flashbacks, he’d thrown her to the ground. She might have forgiven all of those things, too, if he’d been willing to move out of the Triangle. He’d grown up in his parents’ house there and never left, believing the neighborhood would one day gentrify—that the house would eventually double or triple in value. He’d hoped to pass the property along to their children, if they ever had any, as an asset.

But in the two years they’d been married before he shipped off to Iraq for the first time, the violence surrounding their home had only intensified.

“It’s like it’s not even America,” Diane wrote him in an e-mail while he was overseas. “In the Triangle, it’s like a Third World country.”

When Clary came home, Diane saw how gunplay in the neighborhood affected him. She begged him to move to another community. If he wouldn’t see a psychiatrist, she said, giving them a change of scenery was the least he could do.

“I’m not moving,” Clary said each time she brought it up. “These fucking gangbangers are the ones who should be moving. Not us.”

Now, his combat flashback receding, Clary hears voices in the street. He looks through a slit in the blinds of his bedroom window to see what the gangsters are up to. They’re drinking bottled beer in the middle of the block, smoking blunts in plain sight as though they’re kings, the Triangle their kingdom. Clary, knowing he won’t be able to sleep amid the noise, puts on a T-shirt, shorts, and slippers before heading for the front door.

Somebody’s got to give some straight talk to these knuckleheads, he thinks.

He’s been thinking about this moment for a long time—the moment when he might make a stand against these kids, while also helping them see the wastes they’re making of their lives. He wishes someone had done the same thing for him when he was a kid in Hempstead, snatching purses and boosting cars. His hand on the doorknob, Clary stops for a moment, considering whether he should grab the Smith & Wesson pistol in his nightstand drawer. He decides against it, figuring that whatever else he does with the rest of his life, killing won’t be a part of it. Not after what he’d seen and done in Iraq.

He takes a deep breath, puffs out his chest, and steps outside.

“Y’all need to keep it down out here,” Clary tells the Crips standing in the street. “People are trying to sleep. Just take the volume down a notch or two, please.”

The Crips—Tyrek, Tony, Flex, Rock, and Savant—take stock of the slipper-clad, light-skinned black man, then bust out laughing. They’re partying tonight to observe the six-month anniversary of Little James’s death. No way this fool’s going to keep them from a good time.

“Is this mulatto nigga serious?” Tony says. “Yo, go back inside your house, old man, before you get hurt.”

Clary doesn’t budge. He’s stared down al-Qaeda fighters ten times as tough as these idiots. They’re the ones who should be inside at this hour.

“You deaf?” Tony says. “I said get the fuck in your house.”

“Son, I’ve got to ask you to show some respect,” Clary says, knowing there’s no turning back now. “Not just for me, but for the families on this block with children who are trying to sleep. It’s hard to rest with all the noise y’all are making out here. It’s a school night. Just be mindful of that.”

Tony smiles, nods his head as if in sympathy. He sucks down the rest of his beer and, without warning, fires the bottle at Clary’s head. The marine doesn’t see it coming in time. He takes the full force of it on his mouth, hears a tooth chip, feels the glass shatter and slice his bottom lip. But the pain doesn’t alarm him. Not in the least. He’s felt plenty worse.

“We ain’t playing with you, nigga,” Tony says. “I told you go back inside or you was going to get hurt. You see what you done brought on yourself?”

Clary spits out a blood-soaked piece of tooth, looking the boys directly in their eyes. In his bloodstained shirt, veins popping out of his neck and forehead, he’s a scary sight. At least, that’s what he hopes, given that he’s left his pistol inside.

“You trying to be Rambo or some shit?” Tyrek says. “ ’Cause you in a dangerous situation right here.”

“I did three tours in Iraq while you were out here playing gangster,” Clary says. “Fuck you know about dangerous?”

Clary had meant to keep his cool when he came out here. He’d told himself he’d be the bigger man, the adult, no matter how badly the gangsters goaded him. He’d show them he wasn’t afraid; in doing so, he’d gain their respect and make a connection. Then he’d give them some straight talk, explain that there are better ways to live than dealing drugs and shooting each other. But now he has lost his temper, and with it, any chance he might have had at relating to these kids.

“Oh, nigga’s a war veteran,” Tyrek says mockingly. “Went chasing after Saddam and shit.”

“Look, I ain’t looking for a fight,” Clary says, the adrenaline leaving him now. “I didn’t mean you no disrespect. I just wanted to level with—”

Before Clary can finish his sentence, Tyrek lands a haymaker on his right eye. The blow knocks him to the pavement, his head smashing into the street with a sickening thud. Tyrek shakes his hand, which is already beginning to swell, and steps over the knocked-out marine. He bends down and gives Clary’s cheek a little slap, wanting to make sure he’s not dead. Killing an enemy gangster with his bare fist would be a triumph for the Crips leader, but cutting down a noncombatant this way—a war veteran, no less—would draw all kinds of heat from the cops. After another few slaps, each one harder than the next, Clary moves his head a little. Tyrek exhales, relieved to know he won’t have another homicide probe to worry about.

The Crips, in a gesture they’d never make to a true foe, call for an ambulance before sauntering off.

“Yeah, keep leveling,” Tyrek mumbles, sucking on his bruised knuckles.

Later, Clary’s in a bed at Nassau University Medical Center, an intravenous painkiller drip beside him. He eyes the medical equipment in the room, recalling from his days in Germany what each gadget tracks, how each works its magic on a broken body.

“Feels like old times,” he says.

Diagnosed with a concussion, Clary’s released the next day. He catches a taxi home and, as he exits the cab, sees Devon LaFleur barking out orders to some hustlers up the street near MLK. The kid sure has changed, Clary thinks. He remembers seeing Devon around the neighborhood, a hardworking, well-behaved teen, kind and respectful in all of their interactions. He’d seemed to effortlessly navigate the dual elements of the neighborhood—the hustlers and the industrious strivers—without fully giving himself over to either. Now, the kid’s wearing a Boston Red Sox cap emblazoned with the trademark B—a favorite among Bloods members—and appears to be delegating responsibilities to a corner drug crew.

“Hey, D-Bo, what’s the good word, my man?” Clary says, crossing the street to greet Devon. The rest of the Bloods glare at the interloper, but Devon offers him a big smile.

“Mr. Clary, welcome home, sir.”

Still got his manners, Clary thinks, despite the fact he’s running with these fools. Devon flashes a “timeout” signal to his crew and shakes Clary’s hand.

“Surprised to see you out here, son. Your mother know about this?”

Devon looks back at the hustlers, tells them he’ll be right back. He leads Clary up the block so the boys can’t hear their conversation.

“Yeah, she knows. She don’t like it none.”

“Psshh. I don’t imagine she does. How’d you get involved with these knuckleheads?”

Under the streetlights, Clary gets his first up-close look at Devon’s face. He seems to have aged a decade since their last talk three years earlier, with blue bags and bruises beneath his eyes, patches of gray hairs crawling up his sideburns. The Triangle has done a number on him, Clary thinks.

Clary doesn’t look too good himself, with a fresh stitch in his lip and a bandage wrapped around his swollen head. Devon had heard about the beatdown, but spares Clary the embarrassment of mentioning it.

“I’m just putting in work,” Devon says. “Nothing more than that.”

“Boy, don’t give me that ‘It’s just a job’ routine,” says Clary, angry that such a good kid—in his mind, the smartest one in the neighborhood—is out here slinging vials. “Those Crips liable to come shoot up this corner anytime.”

“I know,” Devon says. “But I’m just trying to make a little something for myself. I ain’t involved in any of this other stuff.”

“By other stuff, you mean boys getting their domes blown off?” Clary says.

“Yo, D-Bo, Steed calling for you,” one of the Bloods interrupts. “He says you need to get with him at PL5 right now.”

5 Park Lake apartments

“Aight, tell him I’ll be right there,” Devon says.

“Steed Wallace,” says Clary. “You done got yourself involved with some nasty characters, son.”

“I got to go,” Devon says, giving Clary a parting handshake before starting toward Park Lake. “See you around.”

“Yo, D-Bo,” Clary says. “Remember to keep your head up.”

“I will.”

Walking back to his house, Clary notices a few Crips watching him from a stoop on Linden Avenue. Tony’s there. So is Tyrek, pressing a bag full of ice cubes against his fist. Unbeknownst to Clary, they’re in the middle of formulating a final assault on the Bloods—an attack they hope will decisively end the Triangle conflict.

Clary returns their gaze and nods, as if to say “No hard feelings.” Tyrek, after a few moments, nods back.

“Nigga’s got balls,” Tony says.

“Got to respect a player who get right back up,” says Tyrek.

“Yeah, but we should still cap his ass if he pull that Rambo shit again.”

“Shit. That goes without saying.”

On the other side of the Triangle, Ice is chewing on his fingernails between long sips of Hennessy, thinking about Doc’s murder. He knows Tyrek’s people are moving against his crew, targeting Bloods’ relatives, pushing them closer to defeat as September draws to a close. And he’s unsure how to respond.

He takes a call from his aunt Cheryl, an ordained minister in Atlanta and Ice’s only real connection to his pre-dealing life. Cheryl hadn’t given up on him, even after it became clear he’d chosen to make a career out of being a criminal. She’s long encouraged Ice to move to Atlanta for a fresh start, and she tries again now, sensing Francine’s rape and overdose is connected to her brother’s drug business.

“Come live with us,” Cheryl says. “It’ll be a new beginning for you. I get the feeling you’re up to your neck in it out there.”

Atlanta gives all kinds of breaks to small business owners, she tells him. Why doesn’t he start a little accounting firm out here? She and her husband have money they can loan him to get it up and running—not that he needs it, with all those corners he’s running. Maybe he could rent some office space downtown in Atlanta’s commercial district, get involved with the chamber of commerce. He’d always been such a smart kid, such a savvy businessman.

“I know you can do big things, Michael,” Cheryl says.

“I am doing big things,” says Ice.

“But not in the way you ought to be.”

Ice remembers sitting on Cheryl’s lap as a child, laughing as she sang nursery rhymes and bounced him on her knee. His mother was already dabbling with the pipe then, and his father, the leader of a Bloods set in Washington Heights, had been shot to death three months after his birth. Cheryl—unlike her sister, Ice’s mother—had made good and escaped Hempstead. She’d married one of Atlanta’s most successful black businessmen. Together, they owned a string of popular stores in the city and its suburbs and would fly Ice and his mother into Georgia for weeklong visits when Ice was a small child.

“I’m a businessman, Auntie,” Ice says. “Same as your man.”

“My man is not selling drugs,” says Cheryl. “There’s a big difference.”

“Not that big,” Ice says. “Business is business.”

“You’re dealing the stuff that got your sister killed,” Cheryl says. “Don’t tell me that’s even close to a legitimate business, boy.”

“My people don’t sell no heroin.”

“Right, they just serve up those rocks, because they’re harmless. They never hurt a soul. Least of all, your mother.”

Ice is silent on that point. He hasn’t seen his mother in two years, having cut her off after she continued to blow all the money he gave her on crack. She’d been on and off the pipe since Ice’s father died but picked it up full-time when Ice started making real money with the Bloods. At first, she used the cash he gave her for rent and groceries to buy rock from Ice’s own corner dealers. When he found out, he stuck Big Mac on the offending dealers and told his mom he was finished with her. Now, she gets her drugs from the Crips.

“That woman got nothing to do with me,” Ice says. “She’s been cut off a long time now.”

“Your mother might be lost to us, I know,” Cheryl says. “And Francine’s gone. But I’m not giving up on you, Michael. I can’t lose you, too.”

“I ain’t lost,” Ice says. “I’m doing good, Auntie. I work for myself . . . don’t answer to any fools the way I had to at my other jobs. I got people on my payroll with families, with kids, and they get taken care of behind what we do out here. You may not like it, but it’s work. It’s business.”

“Business, huh?” Cheryl says. “Well, I call it what it is—a racket. A racket that turns folks into junkies and gets them killed. People in your own family, Michael. Your own sister got raped—she died over some gang nonsense you’re mixed up with. Can’t you see that?”

“Yeah, I see that,” he says. “I see that she was weak, that she couldn’t handle the game. Can’t say I fault her on that. The game be rough.”

“You sound like a fool,” Cheryl says. “You can make something of your life, something real. But you got to do it soon, before the game catches up with you.”

Ice wonders how hard it would be to take her advice—to pack a bag, hand the reins of the set to Steed, and get on a plane to Atlanta. He knows Tyrek has him on the ropes here, knows the constant threat of assassination has warped his mind in some irreversible way. If only he could get away from it all, maybe go back for his master’s degree in finance, maybe read all those books he still hasn’t gotten around to. But it’s just a pipe dream, he knows. The war is still waiting outside his door.

“The game’s going to catch up, regardless; that’s the game,” Ice says. “Love you, Auntie.”

Ice hangs up the phone. He pours himself another Hennessy and stares out the window, watching one of his corner crews work the evening rush. Most wear bulletproof vests under their shirts now, always on alert for a Crips drive-by.

“Soldiers,” Ice says, admiring their commitment.

The action of the drug corner once seemed hypnotic to Ice, even soothing. He’d long found comfort in the rhythms of the market; in watching his dealers make hand-to-hand sales with ease and fluidity; in surveying the flow of cars stopping to score. He’d recognized an almost meditative quality in those rituals.

But lately, it all seems ominous to him, the rhythms of the corner foreboding rather than comforting. Ice doesn’t know when the change began, or why, but it’s intensifying every day. Now, as an old Honda Civic pulls up to the corner, he again experiences that crawling sense of dread, growing stronger as a Bloods tout scrambles over to take the driver’s order. Ice studies the wheelman’s face and thinks he recognizes him as a Crips associate, a crazy, buck-toothed fool named Marvin who’d shot Ice in the leg seven years earlier, giving him his limp.

Just then a boom—a shotgun blast, Ice thinks—is heard in the street below. A cloud of smoke appears near the beat-up Civic. Ice drops to the carpet, gets on his belly, and covers his head. An ambush, he thinks. Marvin probably took out Ice’s tout with that first shot and is on his way upstairs. Ice knows he should go grab one of the guns he has hidden throughout the apartment, but he’s paralyzed by fear—a crippling anxiety that sets his hands trembling and makes him certain he’s about to die. Marvin will burst in any second now and blow his head off, he’s sure.

Ice hears more shots fired in the stairwell, followed by screaming in the hallway just outside his apartment. The smell of gunpowder fills his nostrils. He hears banging on the door, the sound of boot heels kicking it again and again, followed by the crack of splintering wood. It’s almost the end, Ice thinks, beginning to pray. He’ll be with Francine soon, with Mac, Lamar, and Doc.

Five minutes later, there’s nothing but silence. Ice risks a peek at the door. Still locked and chained. No one has kicked it in. He steadies his hands, takes a few deep breaths, and steals a quick look out the window. The street’s empty except for a Bloods tout. The old Civic is gone, no trace of it but for a bit of smoke and the smell of oil. It was just a car backfiring. Not a shotgun blast.

He looks farther up the block and sees a guy peering under the hood of the broken-down, smoking car. He’s fifty-something with graying hair. Just a middle-aged pipehead, slightly buck-toothed. Marvin’s daddy, maybe, but definitely not Marvin. What the fuck is wrong with me? Ice thinks.

He has been having these episodes for weeks now—bouts of intense fear set off by a loud noise, familiar face, or something else that calls to mind one of the violent acts he’d witnessed or participated in over the years. He wonders if it’s the same thing that marine over in the Triangle’s been dealing with since coming home from Iraq. Everybody says the war made him crazy, that he wakes up neighbors with his screaming in the middle of the night. PTSD, they call it. Ice has never been overseas, but he’s seen plenty of death, plenty of boys getting blown apart. He wonders if someone can get PTSD from gangbanging. If they can, he thinks, just about every soldier out here must have it.

“There ain’t no VA for gangsters, though,” he says.

His self-diagnosis may be spot-on. Americans who suffer traumatic injuries like gunshot wounds develop PTSD about as frequently as war veterans like Clary, studies have found. Just like their counterparts in the armed forces, nonveteran trauma victims can experience lifelike nightmares, paranoia, flashbacks, explosive anger, and withdrawal from their families and friends. But efforts to recognize and treat PTSD outside the military are in their infancy. In high-crime, impoverished, mostly black neighborhoods like the Triangle, hardly any efforts are made at all.

The young men wounded by gunfire and stabbings here and in scores of gang-plagued communities throughout America aren’t getting treatment for PTSD, research shows. In fact, they’re not even close to being diagnosed, since few have access to affordable mental health care, and according to many gang members, the stigma associated with anxiety, depression, and other psychiatric issues in their social circles remains strong.

Recent studies show that about 8 percent of all Americans suffer from PTSD at some point, but that number is significantly higher—as much as 30 to 42 percent, by some estimates—in communities where gang violence is prevalent. In one study, researchers at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital found that 42 percent of 307 shooting, stabbing, and other trauma victims surveyed in 2011 exhibited symptoms of PTSD.

In a separate, Atlanta-based study, researchers interviewed more than 8,000 inner-city residents and found roughly two-thirds of them had been violently attacked. About half of them said they personally knew someone who’d become a murder victim. And at least a third of them experienced symptoms consistent with PTSD at some point in their lives—a “conservative estimate,” the project’s lead investigator, Dr. Kerry Ressler, told ProPublica.

“The rates of PTSD we see are as high, or higher than, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam veterans,” Ressler said. “We have a whole population who is traumatized.”

In the Triangle and other New York communities plagued by Crips and Bloods violence, that trauma is painfully obvious. A survey of ninety-seven people wounded by gunfire during the past fifteen years in Hempstead, Uniondale, Freeport, Roosevelt, and Queens found that about 60 percent of them showed signs of PTSD.6 Sixty-five of them self-identify as Crips, Bloods, or their affiliates. Among them: Ice, Steed, Tyrek, Tony, and Flex, all of whom were wounded by gunfire at some point. The fact that none received an official diagnosis or treatment for PTSD—and continued to perpetrate violence against others after being wounded—is probably not coincidental, research indicates.

6 Data is drawn from the author’s survey of gunshot victims on Long Island.

“Neglect of civilian PTSD as a public health concern may be compromising public safety” because some untreated sufferers tend to commit violent acts, Ressler and his research team found.

Clary, unlike the gangsters he shares a neighborhood with, suffered his emotional trauma while serving his country. He was nearly killed by an IED, saw a friend’s head blown off by a sniper, and watched as the limbs of several marines were shredded by roadside bombs. He’d also killed an insurgent at close range, he said, “something that ensured I’d never kill again, because of the weight it put on me.”

As a result of the carnage he’s witnessed, Clary finds himself constantly bracing for possible attack, living every moment in a hypervigilant state. He’d brought those behaviors home from Iraq, and the gang violence in the streets only exacerbated them, his doctors said.

“I’m always expecting something horrible to happen,” he says.

Clary and Hempstead Crips and Bloods speak in remarkably similar terms about their symptoms, even though most gang members have never set foot outside the state of New York, much less fought overseas.

“Ever since the times I got shot and shot at, I don’t see like I used to,” says Tyrek, who has survived several gunshot wounds. “Afterward, I saw everything like a hawk, man, like every detail mattered because my life depended on me not missing nothing. And the same went for my hearing. I heard, like, every little thing, because you’ve got to listen for footsteps coming up behind you, for Bloods who be creeping. It’s like I had some kind of antennae that went way up and been there ever since. I don’t know what you call that, medically. I call that staying alive. I mean, if my body and my brain telling me I’m in danger, even if there ain’t no danger at that time, I don’t see that as a bad thing. Because at some point, the danger’s going to be real. And I need to be ready for it, or I’m dead.”

In Flex’s opinion, there’s no difference between being at war in an overseas combat zone and fighting Bloods in his hometown. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise, he says, that PTSD symptoms experienced by many veterans after they return home are the same ones plaguing some gangsters.

“If you a soldier, it don’t matter whether you fighting in your own hood or in the Middle East,” Flex says. “A soldier’s a soldier wherever he’s at. All that shit about mental illnesses or whatever? That’s bullshit, yo. Ain’t no illness. Ain’t nothing you can do to fix those kinds of thoughts. It’s just soldiering. You live with it, or you get out the game. Always going to be that way, whatever a doctor says about it.”

The only Triangle or MLK resident to receive an official diagnosis of PTSD other than Clary is Donna Crawford, who lost two sons—and more recently, her nephew Lamar—to gang shootings.

“These scars on the mind are real,” she says. “And they last forever.”