Application of Impossible Things: A Near Death Experience in Iraq (14 page)

Jack got direct comms with the helo about then, according to my possibly faulty memory. I think I remember hearing the pilot’s voice on the radio. Things started moving. Jack jumped back out of the truck, and I could see men running and dust clouds billowing outside the window. Within a few minutes, the door beside me opened, and two men helped me out of the truck, pulling my arms over their shoulders.

I might have shouted. My right wrist became a sharp mass of pain as the man on my right pulled it across his shoulder. It didn’t slow us down. They ran me to the helo where a medic reached out to help me aboard.

‘How are you doing?’ he asked me.

I smiled. ‘I’ve had better days,’ I admitted. I think he grinned.

I was laid on a stretcher on the helo. Someone ran a blade up my left pant leg, the bloodier one, slicing it cleanly. But maybe that was earlier … a couple of vignettes have become wanderers in my memory, today happening here, yesterday placing themselves there. The cutting of my trousers is a nomadic event.

I like riding in helos and was curious to see what the inside of the medevac helo looked like. They shot me up with so much morphine, though, I don’t remember what it looked like. Darn it.

My injuries included broken teeth (some of which took a quick exit through my face), a heel broken by shrapnel; small shrapnel scattered in one leg, a broken wrist, a shattered forearm (ulna
and
radius), right hand littered with shrapnel, a hole in my skull exposing the frontal sinus, a skull fracture (isn’t that redundant?), shrapnel in both eyes and in my face and sinus, blunt force trauma injuries to one eye (which eventually led to a retinal detachment), and all the bones on the right side of my face broken.

One distraught medic told a friend that my hands were such a mess that my right hand might be useless and that in any case I might not pull through at all with the hole in my head. (This has been the best injury for jokes—think about it.)

As I admitted to the helo medic, I’d had better days!

The most effortless application of expanded awareness is the unconscious one. Our culture teaches us that intuition is
just
imagination, coincidence is random fluke, and flashes of inspiration are the subconscious inexplicably making some new connections. Call it instinct, hunch, intuition, or subconscious direction, I know these moments as communication: the Whole Self has found a clear path through a busy and belief-littered conscious mind. Expanded consciousness continuously communicates with the conscious mind’s perception.
How could it be otherwise? I am both focused and expanded consciousness. I am one personality.

After reading the first eight chapters, specific examples of expanded awareness at work within my post-blast account might be obvious. I knew immediately, for instance, before I even opened my eyes, that we’d been hit with an
IED*
and that the results were more than just a few scratches all around (a result more common than one might imagine). I knew that it had been Mark who had died, though it could just as well have been Ben, missing inches of his femoral artery. I also knew that I would live and recover—not that I would necessarily be in the same shape as I’d been prior to the incident, but I would be a workable version of my former self. It never even crossed my mind that my hand wouldn’t work or that I would die from the head injuries.

Rather than picking apart these and other specific aspects of my experience and possibly insulting the reader’s own ability to connect the details to ideas already presented in this book, I prefer to focus on a portion of the incident that encompasses what I find to be one of the most intriguing aspects of expanded awareness: the mystery of why I was unable to see anyone except the men who interacted directly with me. Over twenty armed men were on the scene. They were guarding the perimeter and moving around within the perimeter working on Ben, Mark, and Ian. I was later told that a good number of Iraqis stopped their cars and gathered at our perimeter to see what was going on. One man tried to cross the perimeter, causing some tense moments for our guards and colleagues. Yet while I periodically looked around trying to see what everyone was up to, I saw
no one at all
unless they interacted directly with me in some way.

When I view the incident from expanded awareness, it’s like watching multiple scenes interwoven and overlaid upon each other. All the people
in the scene are actively exploring their own probable realities, merging at times with other peoples’ chosen paths, then moving back out into their own separate experiences, combining with a small group or nearly the whole group, then splitting back off. Instantaneous decisions are made by our
Whole Selves
; instantaneous combinations and cooperative agreements are formed, discarded, and re-formed in another combination. The whole scene is extremely fluid and complex, yet it moves smoothly and with an oddly fine harmony. As physical time progresses, agreements begin to coalesce, gathering more people into choreographed interaction until the moment when the helo arrives, and everyone’s actions join in a symphony of collective focus. At this junction of time, everyone’s actions interact directly with each other’s, in a sense solidifying one version of collective experience.

This is a difficult concept, being so weirdly foreign to the standard beliefs that structure our perception. An illustration might assist in understanding what I perceive to be happening. Perhaps the reader recalls a classic English creative writing class assignment wherein students are asked to choose a short article from the newspaper and turn it into a full fictional account, creating the back-story of the article. The student makes up the circumstances, sets the scene, creates three-dimensional personalities for the characters, and describes the action leading up to the short incident reported in the newspaper article. For our purposes, imagine that twenty students were given the following news article:

Two US Army civilians and one security contractor were severely injured in a roadside bomb attack in southern Iraq today. Another security contractor was killed in the attack. The vehicle in which the four were traveling was one of a four-vehicle personal security convoy escorted by Iraqi Police. The injured personnel were air-evacuated to [xx] Air Base near the city of [xx], where they were stabilized before being flown to Baghdad, Iraq for further stabilization and emergency surgery prior to being evacuated to Germany.

For this illustration, let’s assume the twenty writing students had all worked in southern Iraq for at least six months, either as civilian government employees or as personal security contractors. This will assume that each creative writer shares with the others at least some rudimentary information about the environment and setting, personal security companies and vehicles, the standard response of a team to an emergency situation, and various other useful details. Even with that shared base, there will likely be wildly varied versions of the action among the twenty stories, along with some surprising similarities and overlaps.

Now imagine that each different story written by these creative students was being acted out, all on one stage and at the same time. Each of the twenty stories would have a full complement of actors; let’s say thirty people. Aside from the four principals, there would be two Army civilians, one US Army Reserve sergeant, one US Navy Reserve commander, ten personal security guards, and twelve Iraqi Police. Twenty stories multiplied by thirty personnel makes three hundred figures on stage. To approximate the ease with which I perceive the action to have occurred in the real incident, it might help to imagine the actors on stage as ghosts. The ghosts are ephemeral enough to move through solid objects, including each other.

All of the twenty creative stories would include the two scenes in the original article: the moment of the blast and the air evac. Between those two collectively agreed upon actions, the twenty stories will differ. Yet within some of the stories written by the twenty students, certain actions might show up in three of the stories, or eight, or sixteen. The only time one writer’s ghosts will interact with another’s is when the two (or six, or seventeen) stories include a nearly identical action within the scene. Otherwise, the actors move through each other, each group acting out its own scene without interference. For instance, let’s say four stories nearly identically describe the blown up truck rolling down the road, turning off onto the desert. Imagine that sixteen of the stories nearly identically describe the other team vehicles converging around the blown up truck, and seven stories describe the team leader opening one of the doors on the blown up truck. Assume that two stories are nearly identical in their description of men administering First Aid to one of the victims, and two others are identical in their description of men helping another victim out of the blown up vehicle and into another vehicle.

You the reader can continue imagining your own examples of moments or details that are shared by some of the stories and the many ways in which the stories never overlap each other. I’m not big on math, but I suspect someone could break the twenty stories down into units of action for each of the three hundred ghosts on stage, then cross reference those units among all twenty stories and three hundred ghosts and come up with an astronomical number of possible points of overlap and difference.

Within the ghosts’ complex matrix of overlapping action, time and space must be understood as Time/Space, so that although a nearly identical action takes place at an estimated ten minutes after the blast in one story and fourteen minutes after the blast in another story, assume that the ghosts acting out the action will intersect at that junction of action as if no time difference existed. And I apologize for this, but to complicate matters further, keep in mind that one story may attribute an action to men A, B, and C while another story attributes the same action to B, D, and Z.

All the actions that are shared between stories will look like convergence points on the stage full of ghosts with action suddenly coalescing in this corner of the stage while flowing back apart and coming together on another area of the stage.

Obviously from a physical consciousness perspective, this would all look impossibly chaotic and aggravatingly incomprehensible. Yet there is sense to each action within each story. There is order in every scene. And as the air evac moment nears, all these impossibly complex, overlapping and separate strings of action begin to merge on the evacuation, coalescing into that more-or-less collective interaction.

In fact, even the details of the collective action of evacuation will differ—an example of the
continuous
exploration of probable realities that I suspect we experience as Whole Beings while we focus within physical reality.

This is the closest illustrative description that I can give of what I perceive to be the reality behind my inability to see any action at the scene in the aftermath of the
blast. In
talking with the others involved in the incident, we find that our memories don’t match up in time sequence or in details of action. As one small example, Ben is convinced that the window beside him was blown out entirely while I vividly remember seeing the Iraqi policeman look in at us through the gun port, which was still in place, set into the glass of Ben’s window. Perhaps we’re both correct.

My understanding is that the exploration of probable realities is a constantly occurring activity for all of us. Optional realities and paths of experience are perpetually created, formed, and chosen or discarded as a path of focus. Yet we’ve taught ourselves to sublimate this complexity. We tune out the creative back-story of fluid probable realities. We teach children how to order perception in a way that we’ve been taught, creating and maintaining a specific version of our functioning world, focusing on some things, and relegating others to
imagination
for reasons that we’ve lost track of but that must have once served—and still serve—our Whole Selves’ creative purpose. The tight focus we’ve chosen to highlight doesn’t negate the fact that this creative exploration goes on all the time; it only blinds us to the process.

In this context, I wasn’t seeing individuals moving around the scene of the incident unless they interacted directly with me because I occupied a unique string of reality, only occasionally drifting into a junction with the others. One thought that I had while lying on the ground admiring the blue sky was that in the silence, it felt as if I was in
between
every
thing that must be happening around me. Perhaps I was.

As one might imagine, this aspect of the experience has provided me with hours of imaginative entertainment. My ideas about time, space, and reality continue to be transformed by this concept the longer I carry it around. It can make my head spin, to tell the truth. If my understanding of this portion of my experience is correct, my personal history becomes a much more complex picture. When I remember something from my childhood that no one else in the family remembers, for instance, perhaps this phenomenon explains it: perhaps we split off into different probable realities and rejoined after experiencing different events. Taking it a step further, combining probable realities with simultaneous Time/Space suggests that the past itself (as well as the future) can actually be altered through intent, through thought, at any point that we take the time to re-imagine the scene.

I sometimes wonder what others who run across these concepts of Time/Space and probable realities (psychics, mystics, cutting edge quantum physicists, people we call mentally ill) think about as they drive home from work, or as they argue with the car repair shop, or as they watch the nightly news. I wonder how they handle what others consider rote interactions with other people or how they think about daily decisions and choices.