“Four be the things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.”
-Dorothy Parker
Idleness
2004
We were stuck behind the humvees on the banks of the Tigris, listening to the frogs peep. The small arms fire and RPG hits had stilled for a while. The rocks under us that covered the road indicated that that area had been swept for bombs and cleared. Because it was under constant observation, once cleared, it was good to go.
There were two humvees. We'd only just gotten them in Baghdad a few days earlier and even then they didn't come with good radios. The nearby Signal unit had mysteriously acquired some and put them in the vehicle. During earlier hours, when the shooting got really heavy, the squad leader would have to fall back from the vehicle as bullets pinged into the dust at his feet or into the doors of the vehicle. A week earlier we'd had canvas-sided humvees. We used hand held Walmart walkie talkies.
So did the insurgents. Specifically, they used our radios, or rather, the radios that had been given by a merc company to their local hires, guys who fled when the shooting started, taking with them weapons and radios. They turned the weapons on us and listened in to our movements for hours while we fell back from building to building under incredible fire from all directions. It sounded like popcorn popping at a brisk rate, except for the mortars, which sounded oddly dull.
You think about weird things when you suspect you're going to die. They couldn't evac us; too dangerous, too many shooters from all directions. That would just mean a re-enactment of the Battle of Mogadishu, except with a humbler, smaller cast. The insurgents had promised the QRF that they could extract us. They let them out of the gate of the base, then waited till they were directly across the river from where we were---and attacked. We had to watch.
It was not an entirely unreasonable idea that we might die. We were outnumbered very badly; we were running out of ammunition, and we had a gloryhound CPA functionary who figured his resume would take a hit if he evacuated the site.
Funny thing about getting close to death. Your body know it before you do. In over a hundred degrees, my bones turned cold inside me. I thought about it. Capture? Two or three days earlier contractors had been attacked in Fallujah, killed, and their bodies desecrated. Was that what would happen to us? It was enough to make me glad, in a way, that Mom had died so close to my leaving. She wouldn't have been able to stand it.
When the bullets started swwwwwwwwwwwwwwwshing past us again it was like the suspense was over, and we were back to something familiar.
Sorrow
2004
The three men stood at the gate, their faces haunted, their eyes bottomless pits of emptiness. They looked like they were some type of creature that would haunt you. They were looking for their brother's body, who had died in American custody. It was late March, early April, the year of Abu Ghraib. Neighbors were turning in neighbors who'd pissed them off, women who'd rejected them, people who were luckier than them, people who were unluckier than them. In all that, sometimes we got a real time, and gave out a real reward. One guy took his $2500 and bought the farm his family had been renting for three generations, bought a car which he drove part time as a taxi, fixed up his house, and had cash left over to save.
His neighbor was jealous and turned him in as Al Qaeda. I don't know what happened to him.
I don't know what happened to a lot of them. The box man of Babylon was one of the few whose fate I know, because his brother took over his box stall at the market, where a man with one hand and burn scars gave me yearning looks when, after his long absence and a mistranslation, I had thought he was dead. That day I greeted him with a huge hug, and he was, I gather, widely teased. I always bought things from him, and now I'm ashamed that I didn't do more. Some people think it's an accomplishment to bargain with people who are living on a few dollars a week.
I never got the box man's name, strangely enough. I bought his boxes and sent them home to people who sent me money, putting money in desperate hands. I had to explain repeatedly to people that if something happened, I wasn't responsible because, you know, war zone. Mail trucks got attacked and destroyed. The thing was giving people money to buy food and stuff, which was a small gesture as the scale of KBR's operation became bitterly clear to Iraqis, who were left hawking warn sodas and bananas by the road side. Saddam Hussein hated bananas, for some reason, or so people believed. It was a tiny act of revenge.
The box man listened to my clutzy description of what I wanted: a big box with the classic inlay work, big enough to hold things bigger than jewelry. Even though it was very hot---it was summer then---heavy thick mink blankets flapped on ropes hung between stalls. He moved with a limp and one hand was a claw.
He drove to Baghdad for me. I didn't have the cash on me for him, but he understood. I was short three dollars. I promised I'd pay him back next week. I owe a dead man a debt.
Then his brother appeared at the market. Where is your brother, we asked? His brother was an ordinary-looking man, clad in a loose shirt and khaki pants of some sort. He looked like a statue in his grief, his face drained of all emotion but one----shock. One of the other guys----the ones who were college educated and spoke excellent English---they explained. A suicide bomber, they said. Like many Iraqis, he had a gate and a fence around his house. They burst through the gate, and detonated the bomb at night. Both he and a small child, a girl, had been killed outright. As he spoke, the brother wiped his eyes and turned away. He had been punished for working with the Americans. But they had no choice. The jobs went to KBR, most of them.
It's not my sorrow. It's not mine to take, to grieve, to use. But someone has to bear witness somehow. This is what collateral damage looks like.
A friend
2005
It's a year later, I'm back home and I snap at little things, flinch at loud noises and hear things that may or may not be there. I can't concentrate, can't relax, can't sleep, and can't sit by a window. Heat brings back an instant sensation of dread. The smell of dust makes a feeling of nauseated fear rise up in my stomach, but worse yet is Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. One neighbor burns whatever he's roasting, and the smell of smoke and burnt flesh comes through the open windows. My heart races in my throat, and I look around frantically through the house for something I can't even identify. Firecrackers set off my reflexes so bad that I lose twenty pounds in one month.
"You're not as funny as you used to be," said one friend. A former friend.
"You didn't have it that bad."
"You're just saying that because you have PTSD."
Different friends, all. And the symptoms have not gotten really bad. I'm still getting a little sleep, most often during the day, but it's more than what happens later, when I stop sleeping at all. The nightmares get so bad I flail around in my sleep, and scream and fight. My roommate comes out to find me with a bloody nose one time, a swollen eye that turns black the next day. A month ago, I tried to take a nap without first taking one of the anti-anxiety meds they give me. I woke up with a bloody split lip, the sensation of screaming as I woke up, and a terrified cat who was staring at me fearfully from across the room. When the nightmares are more run-of-the mill, he curls up under my chin and sighs.
One day while I'm still working my heart starts pounding horribly, even though nothing is going on. There's a belt being tightened around my chest and my vision starts to brown out. I stagger to the bathroom, collapse against a wall, and pass out. I ask one of the people there to call 911 because I thought I was having a panic attack. The paramedics say there's nothing wrong with my heart, but my blood pressure is sky high. Which is odd because for years I've actually had problems with low blood pressure. My boss agrees to let me go home early and I call some friends. My voice is weak and thready and I'm on the verge of tears, something that used to be impossible for me to imagine happening in public.
"Can you come get me?" I ask. They always said they'd do anything for me, just to ask for help.
"Oh, we can't!" They said gaily. "We've been drinking." They didn't ask what was wrong.
"I think something's wrong with me....I'm sick." I whispered.
"Well, we can't come get you. Why don't you try a cab?" Click.
People like to offer to help, I've found. What they don't like so much is actually helping. I called a cab and shivered horribly all the way home. It was ninety degrees.
There was a lady who came in to my workplace every week. She wore a veil and I tried out a tentative "Salaam aleikum," on her. She lit up like a sparkler.
"How did you know that?"
I explained briefly. We talked after that, every time she came in. She had come from Iran, fleeing the revolutionaries, and Americans could not tell the difference between a Persian and an Iraqi. Talk about liberating Iraq died a swift death early on in 2003. They were just brown people who were prone to terrorism, was America's consensus. She didn't say it in so many words but life had been tough for her and her family.We talked about Islam, recipes, weather, her children, and my cats. When I lost my job the day after my very first huge panic attack, I never got a chance to talk to her again.
A Foe
To present day
PTSD turns your world into chaos, and alters your reality so much that you might as well be living in a different country. It turns you into a different person. When you're a woman with PTSD, people have less sympathy than they do for male vets, because of unspoken expectations about how nice women behave, how women behave period, and how women are supposed to be the caretakers, not the people who need the care. When I was suicidal, it seemed perfectly reasonable to kill myself. I was somebody else, and that person thought that my family and friends would be glad to be unburdened of me.
My sisters did not send me a single letter or care package when I was in Iraq. Late in that year, the battle lines were drawn when I asked my brother in law if he had done any work on the computer I had loaned him, with the understanding that he would pay me twenty bucks a month and eventually buy it. Distance makes people careless. He hadn't done so. He dodged the question, repeatedly. I pressed the issue, and told him that to get to the internet cafe I had to walk a mile each way in 120 degree heat. He refused to answer, then I got angry and informed my power of attorney would be sueing him for it. "You're not the only one in Iraq, you know!" he said in one email. He called me fat and various other things---rich indeed, coming from a guy who topped the scales at three hundred pounds. I'd lost forty pounds and didn't even know it. My small sized uniform hung off me like a sack.
Was I easy to get along with? Oh, hell no. But I was dealing with stuff for which I had no vocabulary, no knowledge. The hallucinations started when in battle of wills with the VA, they first cut off my transportation---on the grounds that I didn't have a visible disability--and then refused to refill years-old prescriptions unless I came to the VA. Without any medication to dampen the panic attacks. I stopped sleeping for days on end, not by choice, and started having all sorts of hallucinations. I had to go cold turkey on anti-psychotic med (for sleep), an anti-seizure medication (duh), though they refused to examine me for a head injury, an anti-depressant---after three suicide attempts---and an anti-anxiety medication.
I remember this old man in Iraq who got put in for a double murder by a neighbor. I consulted with the other interrogators, and we worked out what he should be like, what he shouldn't be like. We figured out what we should be seeing---and what we shouldn't be seeing. Liars always try too hard. Innocent people are all over the map. When liars try to fake that, there's a whiny tone to it.
We set our scene; the big huge grumpy XO played the mysterious intimidating smoking guy in the corner, and I was the naive newbie.
The tent had to be 140 degrees. When I walked in there, the prisoner stood up. More paperwork on him had arrived. He wasn't the subject of the tip; a relative was. The old man had been there by accident, waiting for a ride in his grandson's shiny new car, to take him to the hospital to visit his wife. A few minutes of conversation and I abruptly stood up because I couldn't stand it any more. The old man once again stood politely.
I went outside in a fury. "Who in the bloody fuck arrested this guy? There's no fuckin' way he did this. He wasn't even supposed to be there. And the son's got a brand new car?" My instincts said interview the person putting in the tip but we weren't allowed to do that.
I don't know what happened to him. Maybe the PTSD is punishment for not trying hard enough to find out, because finding out meant trying to stop anything but his release.
My therapist told me to stop watching horror movies. She said they were causing my nightmares.
In Iraq, a married NCO harassed me for ages, and another NCO teased me about it. Neither regarded it as sexual harassment. Later on, someone who I thought was a friend, somebody who I thought regarded me as one of the guys, tried to put a move on me. I was horrified, in some ways, and he turned hostile the next day.
The VA put me in a therapy group with sex offenders. The same therapist, upon being informed of this, shrugged. "There's jerks everywhere."
So tell me who's friend or foe, which is which, because I'm confused. "They're all terrorists," "We should just turn the place into a parking lot," versus the old man steading himself against the flimsy table, the grief-stricken box man, the lovely woman I saw one day, as I guarded a humvee and she approached me in a flowing burka, wearing bright red heels and lipstick. Or maybe it's the friends who say I'm not as much fun, that I need to lighten up.
Monster movies. Hah. Vampires only come out at night and can be killed with a stake. Zombies are vulnerable to head injuries. And for werewolves, there's always silver bullets.
She wasn't listening, I guess.
So tell me again, who are my friends, who are my foes, why silence seems to wait for the sound of gunfire to fill it, while the emotion I feel is for other peoples' grief. I can't seem to feel my own, and I think it's selfish to appropriate that of other people, somehow, as if it were a prosthetic for all the emotions that seem to have disappeared.
Four be the things I am wiser to know.
Wiser's not the word I'd use. But it'll have to do.