Redeployment(56)

PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS




I learned words from among the languages of the earth

to seduce foreign women at night

and to capture tears!

—Ahmed Abdel Mu’ti Hijazi



Everything about Zara Davies forced you to take sides. Her attitude, her ideas, even her looks. She wasn’t beautiful, exactly, but only because that’s the wrong word. There were plenty of beautiful young people at Amherst. They blended with the scenery. Zara insisted on herself. She was aggressive, combative, and lovely.

I first saw her in Clark House at Punishment, Politics, and Culture. The course description read, “Other than war, punishment is the most dramatic manifestation of state power,” and since thirteen months in Iraq had left me well acquainted with war, I figured I’d go learn about punishment. Everybody in the class was white except for me and Zara.

The first day, she sat right across from the professor, wearing skintight jeans and a wide brass belt buckle, a thin yellow T-shirt, and brown suede boots. She had a dark caramel complexion and wore her hair natural, braided in the front with an Afro puff at the back. Though she was a freshman, she jumped into discussion right on the first day, setting the tone for the semester. She could be sharp and even a bit cutting when her classmates—the guys in khakis and polos, the girls either in sweatshirts or in expensively tasteful but boring clothes—said something she thought was stupid.

At the time, I tended to play the world-weary vet who’d seen something of life and could look at my fellow students’ idealism with only the wistful sadness of a parent whose child is getting too old to believe in Santa Claus. It’s amazing how well the veteran mystique plays, even at a school like Amherst, where I’d have thought the kids would be smart enough to know better. There’s an old joke, “How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “You wouldn’t know, you weren’t there.” And that’s really the game. Everyone assumed I’d had some soul-scarring encounter with the Real: the harsh, unvarnished, violent world-as-it-actually-is, outside the bubble of America and academia, a sojourn to the Heart of Darkness that either destroys you or leaves you sadder and wiser.

It’s bullshit, of course. Overseas I learned mainly that, yes, even tough men will piss themselves if things get scary enough, and no, it’s not pleasant to be shot at, thank you very much; but other than that, the only thing I felt I really had on these kids was the knowledge of just how nasty and awful humans are. A not inconsiderable bit of wisdom, perhaps, but it gave me no added insight into, say, applying Althusserian interpellation to Gramsci’s critique of ideological structures. Even the professor would yield authority when the discussions got to the social effects of rampant violence and criminality, like I’d tell them I’d seen “over there.” Zara was the only one who saw through me.

She was running her own game. As a black girl from Baltimore, she had a fair share of street cred. That she was the daughter of a physics professor at Johns Hopkins and a real estate attorney and was thus a million times more privileged than 90 percent of the white guys I served with in the Army didn’t particularly matter. Baltimore, everybody who’d seen an episode of The Wire could tell you, was a rough city.

My attitude was, she deserved the authority she took. The things you really deserve, no one gives to you, so take what you can get. And I liked having a sparring partner.

One time she cut me off right at the knees. I was midway through delivering an enjoyably self-righteous lecture to another student who’d made an offhand remark about the U.S. invading Iraq for oil.

“I was one of those people invading Iraq,” I said, “and I didn’t give a damn about oil. Neither did a single soldier I knew. And it’s frankly a little—”

“Oh, come on,” Zara snapped. “Who cares what the soldiers believe? It doesn’t matter what the pawns on a chessboard think about how and why they’re being played.”

“Pawns?” I said, indignant. “You think I was a pawn?”

“Oh. Sorry.” Zara smiled. “I’m sure you were a rook, at least. Same difference.”

She wasn’t scared to give offense, and I liked that.

When the class ended, though, so did my contact with her. Our social circles never intersected, and we’d only occasionally see each other on campus. Months after the class, though, she sought me out.

I was eating alone in Val when she sat down in front of me. I didn’t recognize her at first. By this time the yellow T-shirt, which I had loved, which had hugged her rib cage and clung to her breasts in such an expressive way, was long gone. No more short skirts, no more jeans worn tight around muscular thighs. She had a long brown dress that went all the way down her legs to a rather disappointing pair of flats. Her hair was in a shawl. Everything was demure, and yet, perhaps because this was college in late springtime and every other girl was walking around with half her tits exposed, Zara stood out even more in a crowd than she had before. At least to me she did.