Dear Little Jo,
I told Mark about the party, about beating on Dowell like that. When I said I barely knew what I was doing, that I barely saw who I was hitting, I thought Mark would be really shocked. I thought he’d think I was mentally unbalanced or something. I mean I’ve been worried about that quite a lot actually.
But Mark told me it happened all the time in Afghanistan. In a firefight someone would fire his weapon and later not remember doing it. They’d have to file reports after any conflict, and they often couldn’t agree at all what had happened, or in what order.
He said once this guy in his unit named Ostend got his thigh grazed by a bullet. He went down but then popped back up and kept running like nothing had happened. And when they got to safety, Ostend was bleeding all over the floor and didn’t even notice. He was swaying from the blood loss, Mark said. Mark and another guy had to pin him down and bind up his leg for him, and it was like the leg wasn’t even attached to the rest of his body: Ostend kept looking down saying, “What the hell are you guys doing to my leg?” As though his brain couldn’t hold on to the knowledge that he’d been hit. He just kept blocking it out and blocking it out, like it didn’t exist.
Mark said all this has something to do with trauma. The flow of information gets interrupted somehow in your brain.
“Did it ever happen to you?” I asked him.
“Not over there,” he said, “but when I arrived home at the airport, I didn’t recognize Mom.”
I laughed, until I realized he was serious. “What do you mean you didn’t recognize her?”
“Sylvan and Mom came to meet me at the airport,” Mark said. “A flight attendant was wheeling me across the tarmac, and Mom came running at me, running in for a hug. I sort of hugged her back out of politeness. I was thinking, ‘Wow, some weird lady is getting all emotional about a veteran coming home.’ Then she stepped back, and I looked her straight in the face, and I still didn’t recognize her. She could have been anybody.
“‘It’s Mom,’ Sylvan told me. ‘Your mother, Irena.’
“‘Hi, Irena,’ I said to her, as if she was my sister, or something, not my mother.”
“Did it hurt her feelings?” I asked.
“I think it scared the crap out of her,” Mark said. “It’s funny now, but it wasn’t funny at the time. It scared the crap out of me too, to tell you the truth, when I realized later what I’d done.”
Sincerely,
AK