Redeployment (14 page)

When I turned back to the Divine Office, I read the words with empty disengagement.

•   •   •

That afternoon I met another Marine
from Rodriguez’s platoon, a lance corporal. He did little to calm my worries.

“This is fucking pointless,” he told me.

The lance corporal wasn’t Catholic, nor was he in need of religious counseling. He came to me when Combat Stress refused to give him what he needed—a ticket out of Iraq. I couldn’t give it to him either, but I tried.

“What’s pointless?”

“This whole fucking thing. What are we doing? We go down a street, get IED’d, the next day go down the same street and they’ve IED’d it again. It’s like, just keep going till you all die.”

He stared at me without breaking eye contact. I thought of Captain Boden.

When I asked him why he felt the way he did, I got a long list. Since the deaths of two of his friends six weeks before, he’d been having mood swings, angry outbursts. He’d been punching walls, finding it impossible to sleep unless he quadrupled the maximum recommended dosage of sleeping pills, and when he did sleep he had nightmares about the deaths of his
friends, about his own death, about violence. It was a pretty complete PTSD checklist—intense anxiety, sadness, shortness of breath, increased heart rate, and, most powerfully, an overwhelming feeling of utter helplessness.

“I know I won’t make it out of combat alive,” he said. “Every day, I have no choice. They send me to get myself killed. It’s fucking pointless.”

I tried to get him to talk about positive things, things that he liked, to determine if there was anything he was holding on to. Anything keeping him on the good side of sane.

“The only thing I want to do is kill Iraqis,” he said. “That’s it. Everything else is just, numb it until you can do something. Killing hajjis is the only thing that feels like doing something. Not just wasting time.”

“Insurgents, you mean,” I said.

“They’re all insurgents,” he said. He could see I didn’t like that and got very agitated. “You,” he said, hateful, “you want to see something?”

He pulled out a camera and started flipping through photos. When he got to the one he wanted, he turned it around so I could see.

I braced myself for something terrible, but the frame only showed a small Iraqi child bending over a box. “That kid’s planting an IED,” he said. “Caught in the fucking act. We blew it in place right after the kid left, because even Staff Sergeant Haupert didn’t want to round up a kid.”

“That boy can’t be older than five or six,” I said. “He couldn’t know what he was doing.”

“And that makes a difference to me?” he said. “I never know what I’m doing. Why we’re going out. What the point of it is.
This photo, this was early on when I took this. Now, I’d have shot that fucking kid. I’m mad I didn’t. If I caught that kid today, I’d fucking hang him from the telephone wires outside his parents’ house and have target practice till there’s nothing left.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Besides, some of the other guys . . .” He paused. “There’s lots of reasons somebody’s al-Qaeda. He’s driving too slow. He’s driving too fast. I don’t like the look of the motherfucker.”

After the meeting, I resolved that I’d do something. It wouldn’t be like with Rodriguez. I would push.

First I spoke with his platoon commander, Staff Sergeant Haupert. He informed me that Combat Stress had diagnosed the lance corporal with combat and operational stress reaction, which was common and not a condition recognized as an ailment or a reason to remove a Marine from a combat zone. Furthermore, he said, while the lance corporal talked tough, he performed his duties fine and I shouldn’t worry.

When I spoke to Boden and the first sergeant, I got the same. When I talked to Colonel Fehr, he asked me if I was a trained psychologist. When I talked to Combat Stress, they told me that if they sent home every Marine with COSR, there’d be nobody left to fight the war. “It’s a normal reaction to abnormal events,” they said. “Ramadi is full of abnormal events.”

Finally I talked to the chaplain at Regiment, a Presbyterian minister with a good head on his shoulders. He told me that if I really wanted to piss people off, I should put my concerns in an e-mail and send it to the responsible parties so there was a clear record in case anything went wrong.

“They’ll be more likely to play the CYA game if it’s in an e-mail.”

I sent an e-mail to the colonel, to Boden, to Haupert, and even to the docs at Combat Stress. Nobody responded.

In retrospect, it made sense. The lance corporal’s breakdown—his lack of empathy, his anger, his hopelessness—was a natural reaction. He was an extreme case, but I could see it around me in plenty of Marines. I thought of Rodriguez. “They’re all the same to me. They’re all the enemy.”

In seminary and after, I’d read plenty of St. Thomas Aquinas. “The sensitive appetite, though it obeys the reason, yet in a given case can resist by desiring what the reason forbids.” Of course this would happen. Of course it was banal, and of course combat vets like Eklund and Boden wouldn’t really care. The reaction is understandable, human, and so not a problem. If men inevitably act this way under stress, is it even a sin?

I found no answer that night in evening prayer, so I flipped through the books I’d brought with me to Iraq to cast about for some help.
“¿Cómo perseveras, ¡oh vida!, no viendo donde vives, y haciendo por que mueras las flechas que recibes de lo que del Amado en ti concibes?”

There’s always the saints to show us a way. St. John of the Cross, imprisoned in a tiny cell scarcely larger than his body, publicly lashed every week, and writing the
Spiritual Canticle
. But nobody expects sainthood, and it’s offensive to demand it.

•   •   •

A journal entry
from that time:

I had at least thought there would be nobility in war. I know it exists. There are so many stories, and some of them have to be true. But I see mostly normal men, trying to do good,
beaten down by horror, by their inability to quell their own rages, by their masculine posturing and their so-called hardness, their desire to be tougher, and therefore crueler, than their circumstance.

And yet, I have this sense that this place is holier than back home. Gluttonous, fat, oversexed, overconsuming, materialist home, where we’re too lazy to see our own faults. At least here, Rodriguez has the decency to worry about hell.

The moon is unspeakably beautiful tonight. Ramadi is not. Strange that people live in such a place.

•   •   •

Rodriguez spoke to me
again about three weeks later. By this time, Charlie Company’s AO had shrunk to less than half its original size. It was still dangerous, but they had far fewer incident reports than before. Rodriguez seemed calmer, though also strangely out of it. I thought of the little bag of Ambien.

“I don’t believe in this war no more,” Rodriguez told me. “People trying to kill you, everybody angry, everybody crazy all around you, smacking the shit out of people.” He paused, eyes downcast. “I don’t know what gets somebody killed, and what keeps them alive. Sometimes you can fuck up and it’s all right. Sometimes you do the right thing and people get hurt.”

“You’re thinking you can control what happens,” I said. “You can’t. You can only control your own actions.”

“No,” he said. “You can’t even do that all the time.” He paused and looked down. “I been trying to do what I think Fuji might have wanted.”

“That’s good,” I said, trying to encourage him.

“This city’s an evil thing,” he said. He shrugged. “I do evil things. There’s evil things all around me.”

“Like what?” I said. “What evil things?”

“Acosta’s gone,” he said. “Acosta ain’t Acosta no more. He’s wild.” He shook his head. “How can you say this place ain’t evil? Have you been out there?” He gave me a cruel smile. “No. You haven’t.”

“I’ve been outside the wire,” I said. “My vehicle was IED’d, once. But I’m not infantry.”

Rodriguez shrugged. “If you were, you’d know.”

I chose my words carefully. “This is a life you chose. Nobody forces you into the military, and certainly nobody forces you into the Marine infantry. What did you think you would find here?”

Rodriguez didn’t seem to have heard me. “When Acosta says, I’m gonna do this one thing . . . And Acosta’s got respect. Ditoro don’t. Ditoro can’t say shit because he’s a pussy and everybody knows. But me, I got respect. I can slow Acosta down.” He laughed.

“I used to think you could help me,” he said. His face turned vicious. “But you’re a priest, what can you do? You gotta keep your hands clean.”

I tensed up. It was as though he had struck me.

“No one’s hands are clean except Christ’s,” I said. “And I don’t know what any of us can do except pray He gives us the strength to do what we must.”

He smiled at that. I wasn’t sure I believed the words I was saying to him or if there were any words I’d believe in. What do words matter in Ramadi?

“I don’t think about God no more,” he said. “I think about Fuji.”

“It’s like grace,” I said. “God’s grace, letting you hold on to Fujita.”

Rodriguez sighed. “Look at my hands,” he said. He put them out in front of me, calloused palms facing up, and then he turned them down and stretched out his fingers. “I look calm, right?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t sleep no more,” he said. “Hardly ever. But see my hands—look at me. Look at my hands. It’s like I’m calm.”

•   •   •

The conversation stayed with me
well after Rodriguez had gone. “You’re a priest,” he’d said, “what can you do?” I didn’t know.

As a young priest, I’d had a father scream at me once. I was working in a hospital. He’d just lost his son. I thought my clerical collar gave me the right to speak, so right after the doctors called time of death, I went and assured him his infant son was in paradise. Stupid. And of all people, I should have known better. At age fourteen, I lost my mother to a rare form of cancer similar to what struck that father’s son, and every empty condolence I received after my mother’s death only deepened my angry teenage grief. But platitudes are most appealing when they’re least appropriate.

This father had watched his healthy child waste away to nothing. It must have been maddening. The months of random emergency room visits. The brief rallies and the inevitable relapses. The inexorable course of the disease. The final night, his wife collapsed on the hospital floor in terror and grief,
shrieking, “My baby!” over and over. Doctors repeatedly asked the father to authorize last-ditch attempts to keep his child breathing. Naturally, he did. So they proceeded to stab his son with needles, perform emergency surgery. Torture his child in front of him and at his request in a hopeless effort to continue a tiny, doomed life for a few minutes more. At the end, they were left with a very small and terribly battered corpse.

And then I came along, after the chemotherapy, after the bankrupting bills and the deterioration of his and his wife’s careers, after the months of hoping and despair, after every possible medical violation had denied his child grace even in death. And I dared suggest some good had come of it? It was unbearable. It was disgusting. It was vile.

I didn’t think hope of the life to come would provide comfort for Rodriguez, either. So many young people don’t really believe in heaven, not in a serious way. If God is real, there must be some consolation on earth as well. Some grace. Some evidence of mercy.

That father had despaired, but at least he was looking at life head-on, stripped of the illusion that faith, or prayer, or goodness, or decency, or the divine order of the cosmos, would allow the cup to pass. It’s a prerequisite, in my thinking, to any serious consideration of religion. What, like St. Augustine, can we say after Rome has been sacked? Except Augustine’s answer, the City of God, is a comfort designed for the aftermath of a tragedy. Rodriguez, that lance corporal, Charlie Company, the whole battalion, they were a different matter. How do you spiritually minister to men who are still being assaulted?

•   •   •

Having no answers myself,
I reached out to an old mentor, Father Connelly, an elderly Jesuit who’d taught me Latin in high school and whom I’d had long conversations with when considering my own vocation. He didn’t have e-mail, so it took weeks to get his response, written on a typewriter:

Dear Jeffery,

As always it is wonderful to hear from you, though of course I’m saddened to learn of your difficulties. When you return to the States you must visit. You could even come to a class. I’ve got the boys reading Caesar and Virgil, of course, and you might have something to say to them about war. Come in spring. The flowers in the quadrangle are more beautiful now than I ever remember, and we can talk about all this in greater depth. But until then, I have thought about what you wrote, and have a few comments.

First you must forgive me, though, an old priest who has spent his whole life in relative comfort, for pointing out that your problem is nothing new. I don’t see why it qualifies as a “crisis of faith” to notice that
formerly good men, under strain, experience a breakdown of virtue and become bitter, angry, and less inclined toward God. Suffering can indeed incline one to sin, but it can also be turned to good (think of Isaac Jogues, or any of the martyrs, or any of the mystics, or Christ Himself).

Your attempts to bring transgressions to command attention are salutory. But as for your religious duties, remember these suspected transgressions, if real, are but the eruptions of sin. Not sin itself. Never forget that, lest you be inclined to lose your pity for human weakness. Sin is a lonely thing, a worm wrapped around the soul, shielding it from love, from joy, from communion with fellow men and with God. The sense that I am alone, that none can hear me, none can understand, that no one answers my cries, it is a sickness over which, to borrow from Bernanos, “the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly.” Your job, it seems, would be to find a crack through which some sort of communication can be made, one soul to another.