I thought about death

              We dance on the edge of the scream. Sing in the center of the shriek. Excavate the space 
              between the sigh and the gasp. Caress the velvet-gloved hand of trauma. Morph silence into 
              redemption and liberation.                                                                              Joan Miura


I thought a lot about death in Iraq.


I don’t so often think about it now, or, at least, not in the same way.
       In addition to the grief, or perhaps it was simply a part of the grief, the times that someone I knew well was killed I would find myself thinking about what the world would be missing without him, about the people who would miss him, the relationships and other lives also torn to shreds by the shrapnel of war. And, I found myself thinking about my own life. 

∆   ∆   ∆

Four men were riding in a humvee driving back to base from an Explosive Ordinance Disposal (E.O.D.) mission in the city of Samarra on the afternoon of August 18th, 2005. They were scouts, and the war had progressed to a stage where there was no front so the traditional role of reconnaissance wasn’t necessary, and their platoon was instead tasked to be the battalion’s Quick Reaction Force. When a medevac was needed, they took the medics out. When someone was being overrun and needed quick combat support, they went to help with the fight. When a bomb was discovered and needed disposal, they escorted the E.O.D. team out to the site and brought them home. That’s what they were doing that afternoon in the 135-degree heat of the Iraqi summer.
       As the story was told to me—which may or may not be what actually happened, but is the story I’ve been carrying since August, 2005—they were driving down a little dirt road outside the city when the road exploded beneath them. 
       Though the numbers sound implausible to me today, the hypothesis that made it to me in the days after was that insurgents dug a hole right in the middle of the road, big enough to bury what some American—based, most likely, on the profound level of damage to the truck, the size of the crater, and the amount of shrapnel in the area—estimated to have been between thirty and fifty artillery rounds and maybe as many as one hundred mortar rounds. Now, mortars are small, usually just four to ten pounds of steel and explosives. But artillery rounds are not small. They are one hundred pounds each, one hundred massive pounds of a combination of TNT and high-density steel that becomes molten, jagged shrapnel when it explodes, enough to kill or maim anyone within the 50-meter blast radius. If the estimate was right that’s between three and six thousand pounds of explosives and steel. The insurgents, a group of angry, hurt, and hurtful men, dug a giant hole, loaded however many artillery and mortar rounds into the hole, wired them together with some form of detonators and covered them over again, smoothing the road to make it look as inconspicuous as possible. Then they waited for an American military truck to drive over the spot.
 

And then they blew it up.

The detonation so altered the traditional fabric of reality that something as solid and

massive as an up-armored humvee covered in six tons of incredibly dense steel plating 

became malleable like paper or soft clay and when reality came back to normal the 

truck solidified in a form shredded and torn to pieces like confetti or shrapnel itself.

I haven’t verified what follows, but the version of the story that was told to me includes this wrenching detail: the first men on the scene—others in the same platoon, men who had been driving only fifty meters behind the demolished truck, who were good friends with the men who just drove over the gigantic bomb—thought that somehow the insurgents snuck up immediately after the blast and took two of the four men hostage, because they could only find two bodies in the wreckage. One, the platoon medic, Specialist (SPC) Ray Fuhrmann, was somehow even still clinging to life at first, though he died on the way to the aid station.

It was only later that they realized that, no, their bodies were also there, they had simply been reduced to very small pieces.





I didn’t know them well, but we had been in the same company back home. I had meaningfully interacted with three of them at least once. I had not met the youngest man in the truck, Private First Class (PFC) Timothy Seamans, but SPC Fuhrmann, as a medic, had helped me on more than one occasion in the battalion’s aid station—the Army version of the doctor’s office—while we were still in the states when I was sick or dealing with a knee injury. There were medics for whom being a medic was a job, and there were medics for whom it was a calling. Fuhrmann was a medic through and through. He was warm, caring, and by all accounts a great medic, with plans to go to medical school when he finished his time in service. They say he wanted to be a trauma surgeon.
       The team leader, Staff Sergeant (SSG) Jeremy Doyle, had done my staff duty for me. Staff duty is a twenty-four-hour garrison office duty where you sit at the front desk of the battalion headquarters answering the phones and relaying messages for twenty-four hours, and then go home half-delirious with sleep deprivation and sleep the next day away. I came down on the roster with an assignment to serve the duty on the weekend before we were to fly to Iraq in January of 2005, but I wanted to go to Orlando, Florida, my hometown, to be with the woman I’d met and fallen in love with just a few months prior. I made an announcement to the company that I would give two hundred dollars to anyone who was willing to pull the duty for me. SSG Doyle was the one who took me up on it. He was married but spent his last weekend in the states away from his wife for two hundred dollars so that I could be with the woman I loved.
       Sergeant (SGT) Nathan Bouchard was a jovial goofball that everyone knew and liked for his antics.

And then they were all just dead.

The grief over an event so large found its way into the Forward Operating Base’s porta-potties. The men were loved by many, and references to their deaths ended up in shitters all over our little base, accompanied by the expected “You will not be forgotten’s” and “All gave some, some gave all’s,” but also a few “What the fuck did they die for?’s,” and even one “Kill all these haji fucks for killing my friends.”
       The one that most grabbed me, though, was the one that said, “We need to honor their memory.”
       It felt true to me, but, to be honest, I also wasn't entirely sure what it meant. What does it mean to honor the memory of a fallen comrade? Beyond just pouring out some beer when drinking, or saying flowery but meaningless things about sacrifice and honor at parades, how does one honor the memory of the dead? The libations and empty speeches felt inadequate, but I didn’t have anything much better. I saw the examples of previous generations of veterans, with their struggles with addiction, criminality, domestic violence, and the lingering after-effects of trauma, and I naively saw that as failing to honor their fallen brothers. Part of me judged them for that, and wondered about how my generation would fare.
       So I entered into the shithouse conversation by writing something about honoring their memory by living well, living lives that meant something when we got home, when we got out.


It seemed a good thing to say. Wise, even, maybe. But I tell you, I had no idea how hard it would be to follow through on in those first years, or that when I got home just going on living would come to feel almost impossible, sober, but not worth it, drunk.

∆   ∆   ∆ 

In late July, a month before the scouts died, an Infantryman from our battalion was killed by an IED in the city. He was driving a Bradley infantry-fighting-vehicle and had his hatch open two inches to get some fresh air in the outrageous summer heat. Insurgents detonated an IED when their vehicle drove past it and that two-inch gap let some shrapnel in too. I didn’t hear the name of the man until the battalion memorial service, when, while standing in formation with several hundred other men, I found out that it was Adam Harting, a friend of mine.

I had seen him in the showers just a few weeks before. Though his company was based inside the city and mine was based on the outskirts of the city, he had been on our base because he had just returned from the states on R&R. Our base had the helipad. He was waiting for someone from his company to pick him up. Sometimes it took a few days.
       We talked as we shaved, catching up. He told me about his time on R&R, and about the girl he met and fell in love with while he was home. I told him about how the woman who had been keeping my heart for me had just the month before told me she wasn’t as impressed with it any longer—it wasn’t able to hold her excitement without the rest of me—and that she no longer had the energy to do the things a heart needs done to keep pumping outside the body. I told him about how I’d told her to just send it back, and that when it arrived it was badly broken.
       I could see the aliveness in him though, that special way someone has when they are still in the magical bubble of the beginning of a wonderful relationship, the way I'd been before we deployed. It wasn’t even two weeks later that he was dead.



Some deaths, like the scouts that I knew but not well, didn’t hurt so much as invoke a heaviness and long thoughts on death and life. Other deaths, like Adam’s, thrust me into agonizing grief. Why did he have to die then? I was still so tender from my breakup that hearing of his death hurt that much more. Too, I was angry about what would become of his love. The Army has no systems for that. If you are married, there are respects paid and support systems to help. If you are in love but not married, there is nothing.
       Did she even know he was dead? How would the news find her? Had she met his parents? Would they tell her? Or did she have to find out from the media after days or maybe weeks of not hearing from him, the worry increasing until she got online and did a search, discovering it was the worst news possible? Had a friend of hers, maybe a few days into the silence, told her not to worry, that he was fine and that she was making herself crazy for nothing? Did she still speak to that friend after she found out his brain had been destroyed by shrapnel on a little sandy road in the far off city of Samarra, so far away from her, the woman who loved him? How did she find out? How would she grieve? My own broken heart ached with her and I didn't even remember her name.

∆   ∆   ∆ 

Some months before the scouts drove their truck through the portal to the other realm, as it were, I picked up my copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance again, rereading what Pirsig said of the ancient Greeks’ view of time. As they conceived it, he said, the future was something they walked backward into, not forwards. It makes sense: when walking forwards you can see everything in front of you, which clearly isn’t how time works. Walking backward, seeing only what has already been passed, is a more accurate metaphor.

In the weeks after the scouts were killed, though, a month after Adam died, three months after my relationship died, even that way of looking at it felt too weak.



I wasn’t walking backwards, President Bush had shoved us from a cliff.




                                                      In free-fall,


                             Facing skyward.    





                                                                                      I had no idea how far I was from the ground or




                                                             some obstacle






                                like a branch or a


                                                                  jutting boulder that would

    maim, or




                                   kill me.



                                       There
                                   was only the
                              furious wind rushing past
my ears and the sight of my friends and the men around me occasionally hitting things as we fell.









The feeling that came with the imagery of the cliff, bearing down on me over the weeks that followed, changed something in me. Instead of just writing something pseudo-wise on the shithouse wall, this powerfully uncertain metaphor for the course of life overwhelmed me with an almost violent urge to live well while I was still alive.

Which was immediately followed by an equally powerful confusion about how.


I had been given a clue, though, by one of the men who died.

Before we left Ft. Stewart for Iraq, Sgt. Bouchard had done a remarkable showtunes-style rendition of our division song in front of the company. He sang it in the over-the-top manner of the old-time stage performer and did the thing they do with their hat, taking it off and waving it, warbling his voice like they did, and we all loved him for what he did to the song that we hated having to sing every day before our early morning physical training:
              I wouldn’t give a bean, to be a fancy pants Marine, 
              I’d rather be a Dog-Face soldier like I am. 
              I wouldn’t trade my old O.D.’s for all the Navy’s dungaree’s, 
              for I’m the walking pride of Uncle Sam. 
              On Army posters that I read it says be all that you can, 
              so they’re tearing me down to build me over again. 
              I’m just a dog-faced soldier, with a rifle on my shoulder, 
              I eat raw meat for breakfast every day! 
              So feed me ammunition, keep me in the Third Division,
              Your Dog-Face soldier’s A-Okay.

He sang and danced, alone, in front of the whole company. Serious, old-fashioned, showtunes style. He gave us a glimpse of his soul and it was beautiful. It felt like a great loss when he was killed.

How many people would know that it was a great loss if I was killed? What beautiful thing had I done for the men I worked with? I was no showtunes singer, I couldn’t do what he had done, no matter how badly I suddenly wanted to. It wasn’t my personality anyway. I am much more reserved than he was, and that began to feel like part of the problem. I didn’t know how to connect, and the contradictory urges of wanting to be outgoing and my deep reservation produced great discomfort and confusion.
       All I could do was think about it and get on the Yahoo instant messenger in the internet café on base, passionately reminding my friends that we don’t know when our end is coming and that we have to really live today.

But what does that even mean in our culture?

I didn’t know, but the search was born.