Consequence (28 page)

9.10

In July 2005, for the first time since Abu Ghraib, I attend a chapel service in Iraq. It's the same chapel I ignored after the day with Walid and his body. There is still a large television where soldiers shoot each other on the screen. Paris Hilton is still on the magazine rack; her cover photo shows wear and tear from too many trips to the portable toilets. Inside the chapel, there are aluminum folding chairs and an altar made of plywood. A loaf of bread and Hi-C grape drink will be served for Communion.

During the sermon, the chaplain references a well-known poem about footprints in the sand. The poem's narrator describes two sets of footprints, one for God, one for the believer. Occasionally, one set of footprints disappears. This is when God carries us.

I think of the portable toilets outside the
facility at Camp Victory. I think of all the sets of footprints I left while walking into
facilities. I think of God living in the prison with the detainees. The footprints that lead inside are mine.

I leave Iraq in August 2005. Karin meets me at BWI. We walk back to the car together. She's lost weight. I have, too. After three months in Iraq, I sleep with her and pretend I'm home.

 

10

Back at Fort Meade, I have thirty minutes for lunch. I take forty-five. No one cares. I take the long way back. From the cafeteria I walk into the main rotunda across the shiny floor engraved with the NSA seal. I take the escalators to the third floor. They're slower than the elevators. At the top of the second escalator, I feel sweat on my forehead. I lean to one side. The room leans with me, then spins, then darkens. There is an open lobby at the top of the escalator, then a short walk to a long overpass that leads to my building. I won't make it that far. The escalators and hallways are filled with other NSA employees returning to their offices from long lunches, so I'm forced to move out of the way. I ease myself onto the floor, but no one stops to help. At the NSA there is a joke about introverts and extroverts. Introverts, they say, walk the halls and stare at their own shoes. Extroverts, they say, stare at other people's shoes. No one stares at me. They just walk by. This is my heart failing.

A nurse at the NSA calls it a vasovagal response, a simple fainting spell. It isn't. It's heart failure. I've ignored my heart condition for more than five years. My heart has deteriorated. It is weaker. It is desperate for blood, so it steals blood from the brain. This is the beginning of my end.

At the cardiologist's office, I read the pamphlets with pictures of old people. There are articles about low-salt diets and proper exercise routines. There are advertisements for beta blockers and ACE inhibitors. There are statistics about successful procedures and surgeries. The cardiologist says no more trips to Iraq. He's concerned about the escalator incident. He talks about warning signs. He talks about cardiac arrest. He talks about sudden death. He says, “Who in hell let you go to Iraq?”

My father never took a sick day. In thirty-five years of teaching, he never missed a day of work. “It's just the right way to do things,” he would say. At the NSA, after my deployment, I take sick days as often as I can. I lie to my supervisor about sore throats and low-grade fevers. I tell Karin it doesn't make me feel guilty. She leaves for work and I go back to bed. I drink whiskey at lunch, then pour out the rest of the bottle. I drive to the liquor store and buy a new one. I drink enough of the new bottle to match yesterday's level so that Karin won't notice the difference. At night, I drink from that bottle, too. Sometimes I drink the whole thing. This complicates the next day. I buy a new bottle and hope Karin forgets where it all started.

She does not forget. Karin pays the bills, does the taxes, and keeps the records. She keeps the apartment organized. She cleans and organizes everything in the house, from the dirty dishes to the empty bottles. This is her way of showing love. But I hate it. I do not want someone to bring order to my life. I do not want to be told that I'm making poor decisions and drinking too much. Karin's order exposes me. I hate her for it.

My cardiologists recommend that I refrain from physical exercise, but I ignore them. I'm starting to feel sick now, but I still refuse to accept that anything has changed. So after work, I go on runs through Annapolis. The heat and humidity of Maryland make it difficult to breathe at times. I feel weak.

In October, Karin and I sign up for the Army Ten-Miler. She passes me at mile five. Young kids start passing me at mile six. At mile seven, just past the Lincoln Memorial, the race is rerouted. There's been a bomb scare at the finish line. We're forced to run an additional mile to an alternate finishing area. There's no water or food. After that, I walk another mile to the Metro. My chest heaves as my heart and lungs struggle to process the air. There is another fainting incident. Other runners stop to help. It takes me longer to get up. The cardiologist says, “Are you trying to die?”

Death scares me. Or at least, an easy one does. I do not want to die on an escalator or in an air-conditioned hallway or at the end of the Army Ten-Miler. I wanted to die in Iraq. I wanted to die like Ferdinand. That would have been fair. I wouldn't owe anything. Instead, I have a debt to pay. For Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. For the Palestinian chair.

At the NSA, I attend an awards ceremony for employees who have deployed to hazardous-duty stations throughout the world. Those who went to Iraq and Afghanistan are given special attention. High-ranking officers and civilians stand up front and talk about the ways the NSA is changing. There is a general consensus that the agency must become more aggressive and less risk averse in pursuing targets. The agency will need employees like us, willing to take the fight to the enemy. A new chapter is opening for the NSA, one that will launch us on missions never before considered. The speaker attempts to impersonate Jack Nicholson in the movie
A Few Good Men.
He says, “The American public needs us in the shadows, they want us in the shadows, and they will sleep better at night because we are in the shadows.” The audience laughs. Then he says, “It's a new world. It's a new NSA.”

An Army colonel takes the podium and gives a speech about why men go to war. It is the speech about a grandfather and his grandchildren. I heard the speech at basic training, at Fort Benning, and at language school. I heard it almost every other week with the 101st Airborne. I even heard a version of it at the police academy. A grandfather is talking to his grandchildren. In some versions, they are sitting on his lap; in other versions, they are standing at his bedside. The grandchildren ask the grandfather questions about his life. They ask him about whatever war defined his generation. Sometimes it's World War I, or Vietnam, or Korea. Mostly it's World War II. The grandchildren want to know what the grandfather did during the war. Then the story ends. The audience is left to consider the shame of a grandfather who can't say he did his part. Sometimes the speech includes a quote about people sleeping well at night because of rough men willing to do violence on their behalf. Sometimes it is George Orwell saying this, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Rudyard Kipling. Mostly it's Winston Churchill.

I play a round of golf with an old friend from the 101st. Like me, he served on an LLVI team. He was recruited by the same secretive unit that once recruited me. Unlike me, he stayed in and took the position. He's stationed at Fort Meade now. He travels to Iraq and Afghanistan often. He's seen terrible things. He's done terrible things. We talk about buying new drivers and pitching wedges. We talk about whether it's better to be in a sand trap or in the rough. We play dollar skins. He wins most of the holes, then refuses to collect the money. On the eighteenth fairway, we dare each other to hit into the foursome that refused to let us play through. Afterward, we drink beer and eat turkey club sandwiches. The Baltimore Ravens are on TV.

On the weekend, Karin and I return to Bethlehem and visit old friends. At dinner, one of these old friends asks what I think about Iraq. He asks this after he's told me what he thinks about Iraq. Another friend talks about her father who served in Vietnam. He never talked about what he did, and they always respected him for this. He didn't need to brag about his war. He was a silent warrior.

After dinner, we return to the friend's apartment. Her elderly neighbors need help moving an air-conditioning unit out of the attic. She introduces the old man as a World War II vet. She says, “You two can talk.” The old man is embarrassed about needing help with the air-conditioning unit. When we're alone, he says something about Iraq. He says he could tell we had it bad over there. I ask about Europe. He was a crewmember on a B-17. He says, “Of course I don't talk about it. I killed a lot of people.” He talks about the initial excitement of dropping bombs. Then he talks about finding out where the bombs were landing. He talks about finding out about the people the bombs were landing on. He talks about the families that were down below. The children. He says, “I don't think that gets forgiven.”

When we're done moving the air-conditioning unit, we go back to my friend's apartment. She thanks me for my help. She says, “Thanks for talking to Frank. He never talks about the war. I'm sure it was good for him.”

Frank dies a few months later. My heart will kill me long before I have grandchildren who can ask me what I did during the war. In the meantime, I keep drinking.

10.1

It is September 2005. I've been back from Iraq for two months. It's clear now that the insurgency is not in its last throes. There is more war to see, but I no longer have the courage or desire to see it. My career at the NSA is beginning to take shape. I've nearly completed my training program and will likely be promoted by the end of the year. My salary is rising. All I want to do is quit.

At night, I scream. The nightmares are all but intolerable now. Alcohol no longer has the effect I've relied on since those first interrogations at Abu Ghraib. It's been nearly two years. Things will get worse.

We sit through a sermon at an independent church in Annapolis that has a projector and a pull-down screen. In the middle of the sermon, the pastor stops to play a clip from a movie. It's
Napoleon Dynamite.
Two brothers are arguing. One stands up and slaps the other across the face. The congregation laughs and the pastor makes a point.

The sermon is terrible. The music is terrible. The children's chat is terrible. For the first time, I leave a church service before it's over.

That same month I reapply to the Princeton Theological Seminary. I tell myself I can't do worse than the
Napoleon Dynamite
sermon. But the truth is that seminary is my final hope for redemption. I should have listened when friends and family told me not to go to Iraq. They told me they always thought of me as a Presbyterian pastor. But those voices are no longer telling me to go to seminary. By the time I get there, I'll come to find that it is too late.

10.2

The application packet is similar to the one from 2003. It asks questions about my call to ministry. I do not write about my heart this time. I write about Iraq. I write about God's role in war. I write about not knowing whether God orchestrates pain or abandons us to it, and how God is either powerless to confront evil, or complicit in its presence. I desire to stand before God and ask him questions about all the terrible things that have happened. God has an obligation to answer these questions. I'm drunk when I write these things. I'm drunk or hungover every day now. By the time I'm sober, or at least less drunk, I've already driven to the post office and mailed the packet. I expect to be rejected again.

Two weeks later, I travel to the seminary for a campus tour and an interview. There is a large group meeting about financial aid, at which students ask questions about the application process. A number of students who have traveled long distances failed to schedule interviews. Local applicants are asked to surrender their time slots and reschedule for a later date. I ask whether this will affect our application timeline. A representative from the admissions office asks for my name and retrieves my packet. He says, “You're the Iraq guy. Don't worry, you're already accepted.”