Redeployment(88)

He mentioned the scene where the MMA fighter described killing the little girl.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling this was another area I could speak with confidence. “You know, I saw a lot of injured kids in Iraq…”

There I stalled. My throat constricted. This was unexpected. I wanted to tell him the suicide truck bomb story, a story I’d told so often that I sometimes had to fake emotions so I wouldn’t seem heartless. But I couldn’t get it out. I forced out, “Excuse me,” and ran upstairs to the bathroom, where I found a stall and cried until I got myself under control.

The incident surprised and humiliated me. When I walked out, neither Ed nor I said a word about what happened.





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When I got back to my room, I checked DefenseLink and scanned past the newest names—all of them meaningless to me. So I started Googling “1st Battalion, 9th Marines,” Vockler’s battalion, and then I started reading the articles and watching the YouTube clips that came up.

With the Internet you can do nothing but watch war all day if you want. Footage of firefights, mortar attacks, IEDs, it’s all there. There’s Marines explaining what the desert heat is like, what the desert cold is like, what it feels like to shoot a man, what it feels like to lose a Marine, what it feels like to kill a civilian, what it feels like to be shot.

I listened to the clips, sitting in my apartment. There was no answer to how I felt, but there were exams to study for, books to read, papers to write. Contracts, Procedure, Torts, and Lawyering. An insane amount of work floating in the back of my consciousness. I brought it to the front.

Over the following weeks, I stopped thinking about the Marines in Afghanistan. I did my work. Days spent busy don’t feel like time.





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I didn’t form friendships easily at NYU, and for the first year I didn’t date anyone. I’d started the year with contempt for my fellow students, but you spend enough time alone and you end up feeling somehow defective. And the girl who finally got to me, another student who was handling law school the same way a high-functioning alcoholic drives, she sniffed that out pretty early.

One day she pulled me aside to tell me the sorts of things you don’t tell people you don’t know that well, the sorts of things you tell only close friends or your psychiatrist. “I thought I could trust you,” she said after going through her whole history of child abuse, “because, you know, you’ve got PTSD, too.” I don’t have PTSD, but I guess her thinking that I did is part of the weird pedestal vets are on now. Either way, I didn’t contradict her.

“Look,” she said, “I’m tall, I’m blond. I can do the girl thing. But eventually I have to tell people. And they’re gonna think, This one is damaged.”

I nodded. That was absolutely what I was thinking.

“And I’m not comparing what I’ve been through to what you have.” That surprised me. “Mine is just, whatever, and I’m sure you’ve gone through stuff…”

“I haven’t,” I said.

“Well, I’m not saying mine’s as bad.”

It didn’t seem appropriate to tell her she’d been through infinitely worse.

We had sex a week later, when we were both drunk and lonely and after I’d told her about Vockler—partially as a way of getting it out and partially as a way of reciprocating for all the things she’d told me.





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The first few months we had a lot of sex, and I went on a lot of runs. You run fast enough, it gets better, all the pent-up emotions expressed in the swing of your arms, the burn in your chest, the slow, heavy weight of exhaustion in your legs, and you can just think. You can think in a rage, in sorrow, in anything at all, and it doesn’t tear you up because you’re doing something, something hard enough to feel like an appropriate response to the turmoil in your head. Emotions need some kind of physical outlet. And if you’re lucky, the physical takes over completely. When I used to do mixed martial arts, that would happen. You exhaust yourself to the point where only pain and euphoria remain. When you’re in that state, you don’t miss everything else, all the little feelings you have.

When I was in Iraq, I saw Marines come in injured and I’d go visit them with Lieutenant Colonel Motes, the incompetent * whose poor grasp of COIN was getting them hurt. A lot of them, they wouldn’t ask about themselves or about the terrible injuries they had. They’d ask about their buddies, the Marines with them, even the ones not hurt as bad. Inspiring stuff. Except when I saw those guys, they’d already been given anesthetics of some kind. Plus, all the really bad ones were unconscious. After the suicide bombing, though, some of the Iraqis we saw were in so much pain, they were just writhings. If their eyes were open, they weren’t seeing, and those whose ears hadn’t burst weren’t hearing, and I’m sure if they could have thought anything, they’d have thought about their sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, friends, but their mouths were just screaming. A human being in enough pain is just a screaming animal.