Denial (26 page)

He has chosen a table in the back of the coffee shop.

“Where did you grow up?” I ask.

“In Maine,” he tells me, close to where he lives now. “In Union.”

“How did you end up in Iraq?” I ask.

He tells me he wanted to be a chef. He applied and was accepted to Johnson and Wales, which I will later learn is considered the Harvard University of cooking schools.

“At that time, the army was running an experimental program called College First,” he says. “They paid us a hundred and fifty dollars a month, and promised to pay back our federal loans if we signed up with the army when we finished our degrees. Four years,” he says. “We had to join up for four years.”

“What if you didn't want to join when you finished your cooking degree?” I ask.

“We'd have to pay the stipend back,” he says. “Everything they gave us, plus interest.”

Erik's dream was to open his own restaurant in Camden. Camden is perhaps the fanciest resort town in Maine, popular with wealthy New Yorkers with refined palates. If you have a cooking degree and want to be a chef, Camden would be a good place to start out. But when Erik finished his degree, there were no cooking jobs to be had in Camden.

“The army told me they would pay off all my loans if I joined the service, and I didn't see a way to pay them back myself. They told me I'd be skydiving,” he said. “Jumping out of planes from ten thousand feet. All this cool stuff. But I never did any of that. They lied to me.”

He has some trouble telling the story in chronological order.

“I was injured by an IED [improvised explosive device] in Iraq,” he blurts out.

This is the first I have heard of any physical injury. Karl did not tell me that his daughter divorced the man who was his son-in-law. He did not tell me that Erik was injured.

“Right outside of Tikrit. Blew out my right eardrum. I had skin grafts. My arm was completely mangled,” he says.

Without my asking, he rolls up the sleeve on his right arm. Two large sections of his arm are red and raw, as if, in remaking Erik's arm, the surgeon had run out of human flesh and was forced to substitute a side of beef. Instinctively I pull away, and then quickly lean in, embarrassed by the cruelty of my animal reaction to his wound.

Now he points to his face. I note his blue eyes, long lashes. A sweet boy, I think to myself.

“All this is dirt and shrapnel still stuck in my face,” he says, pointing to flecks of gray and black metal embedded in his skin. Still, his eyes make the strongest impression. Vulnerable. Also angry. I don't know why it should occur to me, but maybe he's not angry enough.

“My right mandible—”

He starts again. “The whole side of my right jaw was completely shattered. They wired my mouth shut. They took skin grafts from my right thigh to use on my right arm and right elbow.”

In this recitation, body parts are jumbled together, as if the pain in his jaw were referred to his right elbow and arm. I do not
ask to see the thigh from which the flesh was removed, though now that I know what to expect, based on what I saw of his arm, I am curious.

“They tried to rebuild my right eardrum. I lost about half my hearing,” he says.

I try to listen as a doctor would, taking in the facts. But the look of pained innocence on this boy's face makes it hard to stay detached. I am irritated by a familiar feeling of wooziness, which I try to hold at bay.

“I need to warn you that I might ask you questions more than once,” I tell him. “I might forget what you said five minutes ago. I didn't go through anything like what you went through, but I've been told that I have some symptoms of PTSD. When I hear a story like this, I begin to lose track.”

I don't know why I feel the need to confess my difficulty maintaining control of my thought processes. I have not been asking many questions, so how would he know that I cannot follow? His story is coming out on its own, according to a logic I don't yet understand.

“That's okay,” he says, grinning cheerfully. “I can't remember what I told you three seconds ago!”

I recognize this grin, the gallows humor of a man whose psyche is still partly in the grip of the threat of death. It isn't yet clear how much of his psyche death is prepared to return.

“How did your parents feel about your joining the military?” I ask. “How did they feel when you got wounded?”

In this moment, I am furious with the parents of this beautiful boy. How could they have allowed their son to join the military? Did they not understand the risk? Did they not understand that this war is a kind of class warfare?

“They didn't want me to join, but what could they do? I couldn't afford to pay back my college loans. I was over twenty-one. When I was wounded, they were devastated,” he says.

He looks away, processing some private pain.

“When was this?” I ask, trying to impose a timeline on this narrative, if only to keep myself connected to historical time.

“This happened in April of '06. I had done my time. I was supposed to be free by then. Betsy and I were going to move to Canada. But then I got a notice: stop-loss.”

“What does that mean?” I ask, stalling for time.

“Stop-loss means that you have an extension of your contract. At the request of the U.S. Army.”

The word
request
throws me. “Does that mean you could say no?” I ask, although I already know the answer.

“You have no choice. You can go AWOL, but then they put you in jail.

“So Betsy and I find out, we're not moving to Canada,” he says. “I'm going back to Iraq.”

And when he comes back, I know now, he will discover that this wife he wanted to start a new life with was “bad.” Instead of starting life in a new place, he will return to his hometown, a changed man, a man he barely recognizes as himself.

Once again I try to tether us to time.

“What year did you finish your degree?” I ask.

“I finished college. I signed a contract that said four years of active duty. I did that in June of '02.”

I take note that he has to talk himself through time to discover the year, to get the sequence right.

“What happened after you signed the contract?” I ask.

“I went to basic training.”

“For how long?” I ask.

“Two months.”

“Then what?”

“Then I went to AIT.”

“What is that?” I ask.

“Advanced individual training. That takes two months, too.
Then I went to airborne school in Georgia. That's where they teach you to jump out of planes.”

“Did you like it?” I ask, knowing that skydiving was part of his dream, hoping for a moment of relief.

“No,” he says. “But I didn't mind it—”

“But you wanted to parachute,” I insist.

“You're crammed into a plane with a hundred other guys. You're connected to a line. You have your rucksack, that is fifty pounds. You have your gun. You're so loaded down, you waddle like a duck.”

In my minds eye I see a duck loaded down with a gun and a rucksack. He dreamed of soaring. He wanted to soar like a bird of prey, not waddle.

“Then you jump. You're only eight hundred feet off the ground. They had told me, you'll be at ten thousand feet, jumping out of planes. It's nothing like they told me it would be,” he says, bitterly again. But maybe not bitterly enough.

“How long did that take?” I ask.

I notice a slight frown on Erik's face. I cannot tell if he is annoyed at my insistence that he tell me this history in chronological order, or if providing the information is difficult for him.

“Airborne school takes three weeks,” he says. “After that I was sent to Fort Bragg. You go through the reception area. They in-process you, do all your paperwork. You get assigned to a job. Whatever they need. I was a cook. I studied cooking. I got my associate's degree in culinary arts.”

I notice that his sense of time is disjointed. Was there something memorable about this “in-processing” in the reception area of Fort Bragg that makes him recall that moment? Did he provide that detail to demonstrate his annoyance? I wonder, too: Did my insistence that he provide me a timeline make him think that I'm slow? Perhaps he doesn't remember that he already told me that he studied cooking. Or perhaps he doesn't
know that it is the sort of thing I would remember. He doesn't know that I, too, love to cook. Running a café is one of my fantasy jobs.

“So I cooked down there,” he says. “It was horrible. I worked seven days a week, sixteen hours a day. From four thirty in the morning until eight thirty at night. On top of that, you're staying in shape. It's really hard. Every six weeks you get a weekend off.

“And then I got deployed. They don't give you much warning. You have to inventory your equipment. You have to clean your weapons. Make sure everything is ready.”

He goes on at some length about these difficult preparations. I grow impatient with his detailed recitation of bureaucratic requirements, with the military jargon.

I cut him off. “What did you do when you got to Iraq?”

“The first time I was in Iraq I cooked. You cook off of MKTs.”

“What are those?” I ask. Once again I find myself impatient. Why all this jargon? Did this boy forget how to speak English? Perhaps, it occurs to me now, acronyms and jargon cauterize feeling.

“Mobile kitchen trailer. It unfolds into a Bunsen burner. Like you would use in the woods. But we have big military ones that run on jet fuel. Everything comes in packages. Mostly you just heat stuff up. But it's hard. It's hot. You've got to do all this with a gun on your shoulder. Eventually they built us a kitchen. Then we could cook burgers, hot dogs, pizza,” he says.

“How long did you do that?” I ask.

“Seven months,” he says. “You cook, but you also have to do the infantry stuff. Hunting for people. You could be in the middle of a burger. They will say, ‘We're going to the base.' We always had our weapons on while we were cooking. That was annoying. You don't want to get it covered in food because it wouldn't work. But we had to be ready to be called up to the base, any time.”

“What were the dates you were in Iraq?” I ask.

“First time August of '03 to April of '04. Second time August of '05 to April of '06.”

“Do you think you had PTSD when you came back?”

“No, not the first time,” he says. “Not the second time either.”

“So it's April 2006. You're back from your second tour of duty, and you are on your way to Canada…”

“Yes. But then I was handed orders, stop-loss. The orders said they needed cooks. But when I got back to Iraq for my third tour, I didn't serve as a cook, I was in the infantry.

“Before, I was cooking for infantry guys, helping out the infantry guys once in a while. But now I was an infantry guy. Out doing door-to-door searches. I was doing something I hadn't signed up to do, wasn't really trained to do.”

I am puzzled.

“I had only two months of basic training,” he explains. “When you're a cook, you have to go to the range and shoot your weapon. You get called out to help. But most of the time you're cooking. I was an expert at the cooking part. I was mediocre when it came to the infantry part. The other guys were regular infantry guys. That's all they did, on a daily basis. But they needed people to fill some empty slots,” he says. So that was that.

“The day I was injured, we were on a foot patrol,” he says. “We were out walking. It's ten
AM
, my group's time to go out. I was the NCO in charge that day. That means I was the first guy to knock on the door. I was the first one to come around the corner. The first guy anyone would see. We checked a couple houses, no problem there. We talked with the people, tried to find where the bad people were.”

I am very nervous now. Petrified of what might be around the corner.

“Where was this?” I ask, trying to anchor myself with latitudinal lines.

“I don't even remember where it was,” he says. “Some hut in
the middle of nowhere. A bunch of little buildings with a river running through it. They needed our help.”

Of course it was in the middle of nowhere, I say to myself. We are lost out there. It's a sea of unpronounceable names, where you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys.

“We were walking through the woods. Not exactly woods, but that's the closest word for it,” he says.

I think of all the scary stories that take place in the spooky woods. “Hansel and Gretel.” “Little Red Riding Hood.” Stories my son once loved to hear.

“We came out of the woods to a main road. I told everyone to stop. There was a fifty-foot crater. Filled with water. They like to use those over and over.”

What does this mean, over and over? I want to ask. I want to put the brakes on this story. I need to slow him down, to make sure there is time to see the scary thing around the corner. But I discipline myself to stay quiet. I can ask questions later.

“They set off bombs in the same place again and again,” he explains, answering my unvoiced question. “I went up to see if it was okay. Everything was fine. I get up to turn around, to say to my guys, ‘Let's go.' That's when someone with a detonator set it off. The bomb. It was buried in the ground.

“As soon as the bomb went off, the shock wave knocked all of them down. After that it was gunfire and screaming and yelling. Anything that isn't friendly, that isn't a U.S. soldier, is a liability.”

His words are coming out chaotically now, associating from the sounds he heard, perhaps still hears.

“You get rid of that liability asap,” he adds. He doesn't spell out the letters, as I would, but creates the word
asap
out of the acronym. “Instantly,” he continues. “No one knew who had set the bomb off, so whatever you see, you just eliminate it.”