Redeployment (24 page)

“So what are you telling me?”

“Don’t screw around like you did in college. Welcome to adult life. What you do matters.”

•   •   •

I found out
about Vockler a month later, alone in my empty apartment, bare walls and one lone chair next to the windowsill where I put my computer. The Corps had accustomed me to spartan living, though I figured if I ever brought a woman home, it’d probably give off a serial killer vibe.

The one thing the place had going for it was the view. Facing midtown from a side street off York Avenue, I had the city from Central Park to the Empire State. Late evenings when I came in drunk, I’d stop and gape at the constellations of apartments. And then, sometimes, I’d open my computer and check DefenseLink. The idea was to go through the Web site to see if anybody I knew had died. On their “Releases” section, there’s a mass of links running down the Web page, and I generally click on the ones that read either “DoD Identifies Marine Casualty” or, if it’s a bad day, “DoD Identifies Marine Casualties.” Then it takes you to a page with the names.

Earlier that night, I’d had a few drinks with Joe-the-lawyer
and Ed-the-banker. With them I’d reverted back to college, cracking dirty jokes and telling drunk stories, so when I sat down at my computer, I think I wanted to recover whatever it is that I am when I look at the names of the dead.

I sat in my chair and clicked on one of the bad ones, snapping my night in half. Joe and Ed drifted off, insubstantial.

The Department of Defense announced today the death of two Marines who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Lance Cpl. Shield S. Mason, 27, of Oneida, N.Y., and Cpl. James R. Vockler, 21, of Fairhope, Ala., died October 3 of wounds suffered while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. They were assigned to the 1st Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

For additional background information on this Marine, news media representatives may contact the II Marine Expeditionary Force public affairs office at (910) 451-7200.

The date on the release, October 3, was more than a week and a half before. I typed his name into Google to see what might come up, and a slew of news articles appeared. “Baldwin County Marine Killed in Afghanistan.” “Fallen Marine Returns Home.” And, bizarrely, an older article entitled “Home for Christmas!” I clicked on it.

A page opened with a photo of Vockler, his arms outstretched to the sky, while his two younger sisters give him a hug, one on each side. The girls only came up to his shoulders, and the photo looked as though it had been taken the day he left. Below was a block of text.

Today my wife and I watched our son, our Marine, Corporal James Robert Vockler, go off to war. Though it is hard for us to see our son embark on such a dangerous mission, we are tremendously proud of him and his brother Marines.

We drove down earlier this week with James and can report that he and his brother Marines are in high spirits. Despite the dangers, they are excited at the opportunity to do their mission, which will be to clear the enemy out of strongholds in southern Afghanistan. This is an important task they have been training months to do.

James is a 21-year-old Class of 2006 graduate of Fairhope High School. He fought in Iraq last year and returned home safe for Thanksgiving. He joins his Fairhope High School classmates Cpl. John Coburn and Lance Cpl. Andrew Roussos, who also fought in Iraq with him.

We look forward to the Marines accomplishing their mission and their safe return this Christmas.

—George, Anna, Jonathan, Ashley, and Lauren Vockler

I clicked away, back to the search results, and I looked around the room. Empty corners, a twin mattress lying pathetically on the floor. Quiet. I looked back to the computer. There were video results as well. I clicked on a YouTube link.

On the screen, a line curled around a school building—Fairhope High School, I guess. It looked like the images of Iraqis queuing to vote during those first elections, everyone patient and serious. This was Vockler’s wake. The whole community had come out to mourn. I thought I caught a glimpse of Boylan in his Alphas, but the video quality was too poor to tell. I closed the computer.

There was no alcohol in the apartment, and I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t know any vets in the city. I didn’t want to talk to any civilians. As I lay on my mattress, struggling with a violence you might as well call grief, I realized why no one had thought to inform me of Vockler’s death. I was in New York. I was out of the Corps. I wasn’t a Marine anymore.

•   •   •

That Saturday I went
to a documentary with Ed-the-banker. It was Ed’s idea. The film was about veterans dealing with civilian life, the four main characters ranging from a congressional candidate to a complete train wreck of a human being. One, a mixed martial arts fighter with PTSD, described an incident overseas where he’d shot up a civilian vehicle and killed a small girl about the age of his daughter.

After the film, the couple who made the documentary stood up, answered questions, and then chatted with the audience at a small reception. I walked over and thanked them for making it. I told them that the difficulties of transitioning to civilian life weren’t covered enough and that I especially appreciated how they avoided taking political positions that would have interfered with telling the men’s stories. I had a sense I was the only veteran in the room and thus better equipped to talk than anybody else. If I’d seen just one single guy rocking one of those OIF combat veteran ball caps, I would have kept my fucking mouth shut.

“Very powerful,” I told Ed-the-banker as we walked out.

He mentioned the scene where the MMA fighter described killing the little girl.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling this was another area I could speak with confidence. “You know, I saw a lot of injured kids in Iraq . . .”

There I stalled. My throat constricted. This was unexpected. I wanted to tell him the suicide truck bomb story, a story I’d told so often that I sometimes had to fake emotions so I wouldn’t seem heartless. But I couldn’t get it out. I forced out, “Excuse me,” and ran upstairs to the bathroom, where I found a stall and cried until I got myself under control.

The incident surprised and humiliated me. When I walked out, neither Ed nor I said a word about what happened.

•   •   •

When I got back to my room,
I checked DefenseLink and scanned past the newest names—all of them meaningless to me. So I started Googling “1st Battalion, 9th Marines,” Vockler’s battalion, and then I started reading the articles and watching the YouTube clips that came up.

With the Internet you can do nothing but watch war all day if you want. Footage of firefights, mortar attacks, IEDs, it’s all there. There’s Marines explaining what the desert heat is like, what the desert cold is like, what it feels like to shoot a man, what it feels like to lose a Marine, what it feels like to kill a civilian, what it feels like to be shot.

I listened to the clips, sitting in my apartment. There was no answer to how I felt, but there were exams to study for, books to read, papers to write. Contracts, Procedure, Torts, and Lawyering. An insane amount of work floating in the back of my consciousness. I brought it to the front.

Over the following weeks, I stopped thinking about the Marines in Afghanistan. I did my work. Days spent busy don’t feel like time.

•   •   •

I didn’t form friendships
easily at NYU, and for the first year I didn’t date anyone. I’d started the year with contempt for my fellow students, but you spend enough time alone and you end up feeling somehow defective. And the girl who finally got to me, another student who was handling law school the same way a high-functioning alcoholic drives, she sniffed that out pretty early.

One day she pulled me aside to tell me the sorts of things you don’t tell people you don’t know that well, the sorts of things you tell only close friends or your psychiatrist. “I thought I could trust you,” she said after going through her whole history of child abuse, “because, you know, you’ve got PTSD, too.” I don’t have PTSD, but I guess her thinking that I did is part of the weird pedestal vets are on now. Either way, I didn’t contradict her.

“Look,” she said, “I’m tall, I’m blond. I can do the girl thing. But eventually I have to tell people. And they’re gonna think, This one is damaged.”

I nodded. That was absolutely what I was thinking.

“And I’m not comparing what I’ve been through to what you have.” That surprised me. “Mine is just, whatever, and I’m sure you’ve gone through stuff . . .”

“I haven’t,” I said.

“Well, I’m not saying mine’s as bad.”

It didn’t seem appropriate to tell her she’d been through infinitely worse.

We had sex a week later, when we were both drunk and lonely and after I’d told her about Vockler—partially as a way of getting it out and partially as a way of reciprocating for all the things she’d told me.

•   •   •

The first few months
we had a lot of sex, and I went on a lot of runs. You run fast enough, it gets better, all the pent-up emotions expressed in the swing of your arms, the burn in your chest, the slow, heavy weight of exhaustion in your legs, and you can just think. You can think in a rage, in sorrow, in anything at all, and it doesn’t tear you up because you’re doing something, something hard enough to feel like an appropriate response to the turmoil in your head. Emotions need some kind of physical outlet. And if you’re lucky, the physical takes over completely. When I used to do mixed martial arts, that would happen. You exhaust yourself to the point where only pain and euphoria remain. When you’re in that state, you don’t miss everything else, all the little feelings you have.

When I was in Iraq, I saw Marines come in injured and I’d go visit them with Lieutenant Colonel Motes, the incompetent asshole whose poor grasp of COIN was getting them hurt. A lot of them, they wouldn’t ask about themselves or about the terrible injuries they had. They’d ask about their buddies, the Marines with them, even the ones not hurt as bad. Inspiring stuff. Except when I saw those guys, they’d already been given anesthetics of some kind. Plus, all the really bad ones were
unconscious. After the suicide bombing, though, some of the Iraqis we saw were in so much pain, they were just writhings. If their eyes were open, they weren’t seeing, and those whose ears hadn’t burst weren’t hearing, and I’m sure if they could have thought anything, they’d have thought about their sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, friends, but their mouths were just screaming. A human being in enough pain is just a screaming animal.

You can’t get there with pleasure. You can try, but you can’t.

•   •   •

“Think termites,”
I told Ed-the-banker two weeks after the breakup. We were in his apartment in the West Village, drinking his Scotch. It felt very grown-up.

“There was a medical researcher named Lewis Thomas,” I said. “Thomas had something of a poet’s mind.”

“I’m sure that’s a useful trait in a doctor,” Ed-the-banker said, since he wasn’t the sort to let you complete a thought.

“Thomas says if you put two termites in a patch of dirt, they’ll roll it into little balls, move it from place to place. But they don’t accomplish anything.”

“Like poets,” he said.

“Thomas was the poet,” I said. “Not the termites.”

He was smiling broadly now. He finds all my problems amusing, which I guess they are if you’ve got the right perspective.

“They’re little Sisyphuses,” I said, “with their little balls of dirt. I’m sure for a termite, it’s a regular old existential crisis.”

“Maybe they need a termitess.” This is Ed-the-banker’s solution to most problems, and it’s generally not a bad solution.

“They need more termites,” I said. “Two won’t cut it. If they had enough brain cells to feel, they’d feel lost, awash in the loneliness in the heart of the universe or whatever. Nothing to depend on. Just dirt and each other. Two won’t cut it.”

“So what? Ménage à trois?”

“It doesn’t help to add only a few more termites. You might get piles of dirt, but the behavior is still purposeless.”

“To you,” Ed-the-banker said. “Maybe pushing around little balls of dirt is like, the termite version of watching Internet porn.”

“No,” I said, “they’re not excited until you start adding more and more termites. Eventually you reach critical mass, though, enough of the little fuckers to really do something. The termites get excited, and they get to work. Thomas says they work like artists. Bits of earth stacked on bits of earth, forming columns, arches, termites on both sides building toward one another. It’s all perfect, Thomas says, symmetrical. As though there’s a blueprint. Or an architect. And the columns reach each other, touching, forming chambers, and the termites connect chamber to chamber, form a hive, a home.”

“Which would be the Marine Corps,” Ed-the-banker said.

“Two hundred thousand workers all yoked to the same goal. Two hundred thousand workers risking their lives for that goal.”

“Which would make the civilian world—”

“A bunch of lone little animals, pushing their balls of dirt around.”

Ed-the-banker laughed. “The civilian world,” he said, “or corporate law?”

“Either,” I said. “Basically, I’m not sure which little group of
confused, hopeless animals I should join, and how I can possibly bring myself to care about what they think they’re building.”

“I told you,” he said. “You should have gone into finance.”

•   •   •

That was last fall.
And now, two weeks after the phone call from Boylan that woke me up in the middle of the night, he’s here, trundling into Grand Central like an oversize toddler dressed in a hand-me-down suit he’s already outgrown. The breast pulls, the pant cuffs show too much of the socks, and his grin indicates a blissful lack of awareness of how absurdly his body has been crammed into the clothes of a lesser man. I’ve seen Boylan ripped, a hulking giant. And at the end of our shared deployment, I’d seen him a gaunt, enormous skeleton. But I’ve never seen him looking so soft—pudgy in the middle and fleshy in his face. He had a staff job in Afghanistan, and it shows.