Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (5 page)

News writers depend upon the world to organize itself into some kind of tale, a story that can be told in short, recognizable form. People rise and fall; murder and redeem; cheat and reconcile. In Afghanistan, I kept waiting for a narrative to assert itself. A battle had begun, and so there must be a climax, there must be a resolution. I expected something to happen, in the end. The Afghans and the Americans would keep pushing forward, and sooner or later they would clash
with the Al Qaeda fighters. Osama bin Laden would be captured, or he would be killed, or something else would happen. But whatever it was, we would see it and we would be able to recognize it.

Instead, events flickered, split, and rolled away like mercury. To write about the battle in an organized way, to shuffle the pieces, tap the sides, and square it into paragraphs and quotations was a fabrication. The mujahideen pushed forward until they became ghosts, thinning out into the mountain air. The battle never reached a climax. The other side was never seen, it melted away. Osama bin Laden flickered into a hologram, elusive as a lick of light, hidden somewhere behind the maddening maze of liars and heroes and hidden agendas. American officials talked about “the enemy” and “the evildoers” and it sounded odd, empty, like a legend. Even in the heights of Tora Bora, on the front lines of this vague new war, the enemy was nowhere to be seen. He was just a rumor, secreted in shadows, and sometimes a few bullets rained down from his heights.

I woke up in an old Pakistani sleeping bag one morning, stretched on a fetid mattress in the Spin Ghar hotel, and found that, for the first time in months, I was too worn out and sad to get out of bed. The adrenaline had dried up in my sleep, and there was no other force left. I stared at the ceiling, craving Steve Earle, a Shiner Bock, a long drive on a Texas road with the windows rolled down. I thought about a half-forgotten day deep in the Rio Grande borderlands, an ancient bar with a broken jukebox, shooting pool with the door hanging open on the limpid afternoon until a big purple thunderstorm rolled in off stretches of mesquite. Impossible that those things still existed somewhere, that I was still carrying around the key to an apartment I hadn’t seen since early September.

I left Afghanistan—the light that falls like powder on the poppy fields, the mortars stacked like firewood in broken-down sheds at the abandoned terror compounds, the throaty green of the mineral rivers. In the back of the car, I stared into a scrubbed sky as empty plains slipped past. It was Eid al-Fitr; Ramadan was over, and a hungry land sat down to eat. Along the road women split pomegranates, and the red juice stained their fingers. Men roasted lamb shanks over open
fires, and children turned from the blaze to watch us pass with eyes like globes. The road was cloaked in the amnesia of holidays. We drew close to the Khyber Pass. The mountain route would drop us down into Pakistan.

Then everything slipped: A tire snagged on a roadside rock and the car spun out and swung in sickening loops. The grill of a cargo truck reared up before us, and I was certain I was about to die, so I closed my eyes. I remembered that drunks survive accidents because they don’t stiffen, and told myself to go limp. The car, this seat, was a fixed point in a slipping-away landscape. I was the axis now; the country, the mountains, the war, and the wide yards of dirt stretching back to Tora Bora revolved around me.

That was illusion, of course. I was the one careening. I was the one out of control. These old hills, what did they care? This smuggler’s path, the road to Pakistan and India and China—these things stood where they’d always been. I was the element that did not belong; we were the ones who had come plunging in. I remembered what Naseer, the translator, had said. “I am not afraid of killing. This is a country of killing. Only I am afraid for my family.” His eyes were calm and knowing.

There was a great, grating crash and everything, everybody slammed. The car stopped, shuddering and smoking, wrinkled as a steel leaf. I sat and breathed. Alive should have been impossible. I scrambled from the car and took the air, cold and sweet with gasoline. I was running then, pounding over the empty land. The adolescent guard laughed so hard his Kalashnikov clattered onto the rocks. I stopped and shook. The men looked politely away.

C
oming home from war is a strange and isolating experience. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given all the books and movies detailing the strange and lonesome journey home from war. But after Afghanistan, I didn’t expect it. After all, it was only a few months. I knew I had been scrambled a bit by the things I’d seen, but I didn’t understand that I was returning to a country transformed. I couldn’t anticipate the changes in the atmosphere, and in the people I knew. There was still raw trauma in the air, and the remnants of a fear I had been too far away to feel in full force. I was carrying my own fear around, but I kept it quiet, turned my ribs into prison bars to trap it inside. This seemed to me proper, to carry it there, unseen.

And then I was at my mother’s house in Connecticut, walking known floorboards, the same naked trees in the windows, blocked by familiar walls. The silence of the house screamed in my ears, and my bones and skin hung like shed snakeskin that wouldn’t fall away. A plane lumbered overhead, slicing white blood from a bright winter sky. My eyes darted around, looking for cover, until I remembered with a start: planes in America don’t drop bombs.

I’d walk into a room and somebody would say, “… and Megan just came home from Afghanistan!” and all the faces would turn and exclaim, “What was it
like
?” And I would look for words in a mouthful of air.

I drifted down to New York to see an old friend, Lisa. I was trying to
stop feeling like a piece of wood, to shake the suspicion that I had one life and everybody around me had a different life, a different rhythm, bound together by implicit, inscrutable codes. I was still trying to get home.

Lisa had been a near-socialist, free-wheeling, hard-drinking international relations student when we were in college together, a smoker of cigarettes, an ingratiator of professors, a waster of hours and days. Then she’d gone off to a village in Burkina Faso for the Peace Corps and come back different, hardened, talking about God and MBAs and the bloody diamond trade. “There is nothing we can do. We might as well get rich.” She was alone for the holidays, and I wouldn’t have to explain anything to her. We drank wine, played with her cat, listened to songs from college, swooned on sofas. We cooked fish and drank more and finally we slept. I awoke in gray light on a futon, staring at pictures of Africa tacked to white walls. I tiptoed into Lisa’s room. “Coffee,” I told her.

“You remind me of the cat,” she muttered through her hair.

We drank too much coffee. Then we put on sweaters and trudged down 11th Street, crossed the West Side Highway to the Hudson River, and turned south toward the financial district and the remains of the World Trade Center.

“Do you really want to go?” Lisa said. “There are tourists.”

I did, but slowly. The Hudson was a sheet of steel. We sat on a bench by the river. Joggers bobbed past, heads swallowed in wool, legs in spandex. I was trying to explain how it seemed like a lot of dead people, dead Americans and dead Afghans and me stretched thin between them. The conversation was disjointed. We stood up and walked. The buildings reared up around us, swallowed the sky and the horizons. We were the only people in the entire city, walking between gray cliffs of downtown. In my memory, it is like that: a city hollow as a stage set, a place where we trespassed. “I used to run down there but now it’s all closed.” Lisa kicked a crumpled Coke can. The tin skittered ahead over the pavement. We followed its clunky dance down the street. I saw a poster, faded already and peeling from the side of a building: “These colors don’t run.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “America is like that now.”

“But what does it mean?”

“You know, like red, white, and blue,” she said.

I looked at her.

“You know how colors run? They fade, they run?”

“Oh!” I said. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” said Lisa. “So, the colors don’t run, but also, Americans don’t run. Like that.”

“Okay,” I said, and laughed nervously.

“Yeah,” said Lisa.

We were drawing closer and I was feeling sick to my stomach. Cold was seeping through my jeans and the coffee buzz was fading.

“Forget it,” I said. “We don’t have to go all the way down.”

“We’re almost there.”

“I don’t want to anymore.”

Walking back we came across a group of tourists. They wore red, white, and blue sweatshirts and stared somberly at the buildings. Their cheeks were ruddy and chapped.

I met another friend during the gray afternoon, and the two of us stole into a bar. We sat in the flat winter light, the bar deserted around us. I was into my second glass of wine when it came to me that I had to get out. Immediately. Out of New York. Away from the big buildings, the tourists, and the somber, awkward mood. It was more than I wanted: September long gone, and the clump of people who fussed nervously over the leftovers of violence, looking for grief and meaning in a hole in the ground. “I’m going straight home,” I told her. “What do you think?”

“You should,” she agreed boozily.

On the curb I flagged a cab to Penn Station and bought a ticket on the next train to Hartford. If you have cash in your pocket you can change scenery just like that, leave and forget. Everything in America is easily gotten, I remembered—as long as you can pay for it.

I have a friend, a Russian man. He told me about his mandatory stint in the Soviet army. He said, “Every single day was absolute shit. I was beaten and abused. I froze my feet, my ears, my balls off. And yet when
I remember it now, it was the best time of my life. Because I was young and I was overcoming obstacles. When you are young and you live through an unbelievably hard time, you remember it later as the best time of your life.”

And that was part of it, too. I dreamed about dead children and bullets on mountain passes. But then I was already nostalgic, for Afghanistan and for myself in Afghanistan, for the rush of sights and feelings, the crystal cut of every moment, sun so sharp it sliced newer, flatter surfaces. Now I was shipwrecked in the trappings of home, car, job, and country.

It was a strange time to come home. From television screens and podiums, politicians urged America to be frightened, and the people nodded and agreed to be afraid. Mortality predictors glittered on the television networks, meters striped in the colors of the rainbow—red for severe, orange for high; angry, flashing hues. Never blue for guarded or green for low. Terrorism had become the most important question—everybody thought so, all at once. I read that terrorism had inspired Americans to appreciate their families; to report suspicious behavior; to eat macaroni and cheese for comfort. People had begun to imagine the country as a place waiting to get hit, defined by impending violence. And yet there was the war. We were warriors abroad and victims at home, and it didn’t add up to anything coherent.

It was January when I unlocked the door and cracked into the museum vault of my Houston duplex. I could barely shove the door open against the landslide of mail, months’ worth of defaulted bills and defunct magazines and slick department store circulars, all the yellowing
Houston Chronicle
s and
New York Times
es that had come until the subscriptions petered out, shoved through the slot and drifted against the door like blown snow. The answering machine was littered with September 11 messages, the voices still wet with emotion that had since dried out, like fossils from another time. I wanted to tell you we’re all right. I wanted to tell you I love you. Where are you?

The country moved forward around me. The Enron story was breaking in Houston and I couldn’t muster any interest. This is a great story, reporter friends said, you’ve got to get a piece of it. I shrugged.

My neighbor, Duc, had moved to Houston from Brooklyn. Until September 11 we had never had a serious conversation. We cut up,
watched
The Simpsons
, drove down to Galveston with raw chicken and string to catch crabs.

Then it was January and we were sitting in a cluttered bar and Duc had just come back from visiting New York. We were talking about the war and how Osama bin Laden was nowhere to be found, and then everything got tense. Nobody wants to talk about civilian casualties in Afghanistan, I said. That’s because who really cares, Duc said. You don’t mean that. Yes I do. They can’t kill that many of our people and get no reaction. But a lot of the people getting killed in this war didn’t kill our people; there’s a difference between Afghan civilians and Al Qaeda, don’t you understand that? I don’t care, he said. And his eyes flicked and I thought I saw tears buried down behind them. I went to New York.
I saw the firehouses
. Whatever happens to those people, they deserve it. And I sat there thinking that the country was in bad shape, really, if sardonic Duc had turned so dead serious. We sat there, each cradling our own ugly memories and resenting the other’s, suddenly nothing to say. I swallowed at my beer, resentment growing in my throat, the jukebox wailing. But this was America now, America at this moment, altered. The emotions were not the same. You behaved one way if you were attacked, and a different way altogether if you had invaded. Here at home, people still felt assaulted, they believed they had the moral high ground. But I had seen U.S. warplanes drop bombs on villages of mud brick, and children killed and bin Laden vanish and the future of a broken land becoming the moral responsibility of my own country. September 11 already seemed very far away, buried under the war it had called down.

I am losing America
, I thought as I lay in bed that night.
I got caught out on the other side, stayed out there too long, and now I can’t get home
.

I would put on a dress and sit in a restaurant that shone and clinked, but I was sure that everybody could see the filth in my face, and hear it in my voice. I was just a web of skin and underneath were dirty hospitals, naked rocks, cold wind, the bullets and shit and desperation.