Redeployment

by Phil Klay

So there you are. You’ve been in a no-shit war zone and then you’re sitting in a plush chair, looking up at a little nozzle shooting air-conditioning, thinking, What the fuck?

The problem is, your thoughts don’t come out in any kind of straight order. You don’t think, Oh, I did A, then B, then C, then D. You try to think about home, then you’re in the torture house.

Getting back feels like your first breath after nearly drowning. Even if it hurts, it’s good.

And glad as I was to be in the States, and even though I hated the past seven months and the only thing that kept me going was the Marines I served with and the thought of coming home, I started feeling like I wanted to go back. Because fuck all this.

Here’s what orange is. You don’t see or hear like you used to. Your brain chemistry changes. You take in every piece of the environment, everything. I could spot a dime in the street twenty yards away. I had antennae out that stretched down the block. It’s hard to even remember exactly what that felt like. I think you take in too much information to store so you just forget, free up brain space to take in everything about the next moment that might keep you alive. And then you forget that moment, too, and focus on the next. And the next. And the next. For seven months.

Sir, I say, don’t let yourself think about it until we’re back in the States.

Your Marines see you fucked up over this, then they start thinking about how fucked up it all is. And we don’t have time to deal with that. We’ve got another patrol tomorrow.

So when I thought back on it, there were the memories I had, and the stories I told, and they sort of sat together in my mind, the stories becoming stronger every time I retold them, feeling more and more true.

Somebody said combat is 99 percent sheer boredom and 1 percent pure terror.

So it’s 50 percent boredom and 49 percent normal terror, which is a general feeling that you might die at any second and that everybody in this country wants to kill you. Then, of course, there’s the 1 percent pure terror, when your heart rate skyrockets and your vision closes in and your hands are white and your body is humming. You can’t think. You’re just an animal, doing what you’ve been trained to do. And then you go back to normal terror, and you go back to being a human, and you go back to thinking.

The trigger was there, aching to be pushed. There aren’t a lot of times in your life that come down to, Do I press this button?

And every little bit hurts.” He shrugged. “Until you’re numb.”

There are two ways to tell the story. Funny or sad. Guys like it funny, with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad, with a thousand-yard stare out to the distance as you gaze upon the horrors of war they can’t quite see. Either way, it’s the same story.

Some people love small towns. Everybody knows everybody, there’s a real community you don’t get in other places. If you’re like me, though, and you don’t fit in, it’s a prison. So our relationship was half boyfriend/girlfriend, half cell mates.

My ticket out of Callaway was what passed in our town for first class. The Marine Corps.

I had the nagging impression that he would see through me to what I feared I was—a fraud and a war tourist.

knew enough to know that the more senior people you could comfortably cc on your e-mails, the more everyone had to put up with whatever bullshit your e-mails were actually about.

“Even without hope, you must try.”

Geared up, Marines are terrifying warriors. In grief, they look like children.

Suffering, I thought, has always had its own mystique.

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.

But platitudes are most appealing when they’re least appropriate.

If God is real, there must be some consolation on earth as well. Some grace. Some evidence of mercy.

How do you spiritually minister to men who are still being assaulted?

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.

‘There is none righteous, no, not one.’ All of us suffer. We can either feel isolated, and alone, and lash out at others, or we can realize we’re part of a community.

“We are part of a long tradition of suffering. We can let it isolate us if we want, but we must realize that isolation is a lie. Consider Owen. Consider that Iraqi father and that American father. Consider their children. Do not suffer alone. Offer suffering up to God, respect your fellow man, and perhaps the sheer awfulness of this place will become a little more tolerable.”

Levin had been hit in the neck. PPE wouldn’t have helped. But I guess the sergeant major, like most people, needed death to be sensible. A reason for each casualty. I’d seen the same feeble theodicy at funerals in the civilian world. If lung disease, the deceased should be a smoker. If heart disease, a lover of red meat. Some sort of causality, no matter how tenuous, to sanitize it. As if mortality is a game with rules where the universe is rational and the God watching over maneuvers us like chess pieces, His fingers deep into the sides of the world.

I watched the Marines hug their parents, kiss their wives or girlfriends, and hold their children. I wondered what they would tell them. How much would be told and how much could never be told.

The things you really deserve, no one gives to you, so take what you can get. And

Perception is reality?”

‘Real life doesn’t fit on bumper stickers, so remember: If you tell too much truth, nobody will believe you.’”

Or rather, I didn’t know if she’d understand it the way I did, which is what I really wanted. Not to share something, but to unload it.

The weird thing with being a veteran, at least for me, is that you do feel better than most people. You risked your life for something bigger than yourself. How many people can say that? You chose to serve. Maybe you didn’t understand American foreign policy or why we were at war. Maybe you never will. But it doesn’t matter. You held up your hand and said, “I’m willing to die for these worthless civilians.” At the same time, though, you feel somehow less. What happened, what I was a part of, maybe it was the right thing. We were fighting very bad people. But it was an ugly thing.

I don’t trust my memories. I trust the vehicle, burnt and twisted and torn. Like Jenks. No stories. Things. Bodies. People lie. Memories lie.

As I lay on my mattress, struggling with a violence you might as well call grief,

Days spent busy don’t feel like time.

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.