Hunter's Moon Page 25
The other three were Michiganders: Bruce, whose pudgy body and receding hairline prefigured him in middle age; Larry, with a wiry build and an angular face; and Devin, whose story was to take up lodging in my brain. His peculiar look caught my attention right away. He’d kept his high-and-tight military haircut and wore a shadowy brown beard, but his large soft eyes, with their long lashes, had a feminine quality and shone with a gray autumnal light, producing the impression of a deeply held sorrow.
“… and each day we’ll conduct exercises to release toxins from the body, the mind, and the spirit,” Laura droned on. She was a practiced public speaker, making eye contact with each one of her audience before shifting to the next. “Under the guidance of veteran mentors”—motioning at Will and me—“you will learn to identify and release the triggers of the combat experience and how to reorder your life priorities.”
Showing anyone how to release the triggers of the combat experience was beyond me. I had no idea what she was talking about. I thought, Thank God, when she wrapped it up.
* * *
In the building of dream structures, Charlie’s and Laura’s construction methods followed the principle: if you try just about everything, something might work. The center’s regimen was cobbled together from Native American rituals, yoga, New Age mysticism, scraps of Eastern religion, and stuff I’d never heard of, such as “emotional-cleansing energy sessions.” The Native American part began with an uphill walk past the lake to the sacred forest. Charlie, with a tom-tom slung around his neck, led us there. He claimed to be a certified Ojibwa shaman. I wasn’t aware that the Ojibwa Nation granted shaman certificates, especially to white men; neither was it clear to me to whom the forest was sacred or what made it so—its pines and pointed firs looked no different from the rest of the woods.
We came to an open space beneath the trees that was surrounded by a low, circular rock wall. We filed into the enclosure and stood in a circle facing a pile of smooth stones. Each of us, our shaman explained, was to pick up three stones, representing what we hoped to be rid of, hoped to take in, and what we were grateful for, then toss them back into the pile one by one, voicing our wishes and gratitude aloud. Charlie beat on his tom-tom as we gathered the stones.
“We’ll start with Phil and go clockwise,” he said.
If I’d been forewarned that Will and I were to participate in this ceremony, despite our mentor status, I might have ginned up a list of things I wanted to be rid of, to take in, and be grateful for. But I wasn’t, so I froze, like a high school kid tongue-tied by a pop quiz. Charlie, however, didn’t seem to care; he went right on drumming—boomthudboom—and as a result, I missed much of what the others had to say. Except for Devin. I heard him in an interval between a boom and a thud.
“I’m grateful I didn’t off myself.”
A cleansing ritual followed the drum circle. Charlie must have learned it in shaman school. He lit a pile of cedar boughs and wafted the smoke over us with an eagle feather, purifying our spirits. We then marched to the gym in the main house, where the blond volunteer, now wearing spandex tights, put us through a series of stress-taming exercises. She bubbled with good cheer—positive energy, she would have said—explaining that these movements had been developed by a prominent yoga master. They opened valves in the brain, allowing stress-inducing toxins to flow to one’s extremities and thence out of one’s body. I needed a break from this nonsense. One of the exercises, involving bends and stretches beyond the capacity of my sixty-six-year-old body, allowed me to leave, pleading a pulled muscle.
Lying down in my room, I cussed myself for forgetting to bring a book or magazine. The only reading materials available were promotional pamphlets and brochures, two of which were capsule biographies of Charlie and Laura. Neither had had any training in professional counseling or psychotherapy, but Laura had graduated from the Body and Spiritual Medicine Institute, which granted her a diploma in Healing Touch Therapy, while Charlie, in addition to being a certified shaman, had been ordained a Minister of New Thought by the Center for Spiritual Awareness and New Thought (whatever and wherever that was). The scent of a hustle grew stronger, but I decided to take a kinder view of the couple. People had been flocking to health resorts for centuries, seeking miracle cures for every ailment from bad digestion to polio. Taking the waters at Bath or Baden-Baden or Warm Springs probably had never healed anyone, but it didn’t hurt them, either. I assumed that the Stiggs Center’s nostrums would likewise prove as harmless as they were ineffective, and at least the veterans’ wallets wouldn’t be any the lighter for it.
* * *
My newfound tolerance was tested that night. After dinner (fried chicken—again I wanted to embrace the cook), Will and I finally played our mentor roles. Charlie had arranged chairs in a circle in front of the crackling fireplace for a group session, Laura presiding, and the veterans talked about the monstrosities they’d witnessed and the damage their witnessing had inflicted. Will offered words of advice, words of encouragement; I read a passage from Lines of Departure about my own shaking, shuddering reentry into civilian life, for whatever good that did.
What balm could stress-taming yoga offer Adam, who had fought in Fallujah and could still smell the corpses rotting in its streets and had, just a month ago, been arrested for assault for flattening a guy who’d made the mistake of bumping into him from behind? What dream structures could be built to replace Alex’s bad dreams of the night the Taliban overran his platoon, so that now he had to check the perimeter around his house every night before going to bed? And could the Minister of New Thought minister to Larry’s mental wounds, bleeding afresh whenever a loud noise summoned memories of the bullet that splattered his best friend’s brains across a floor in a village near Kandahar? I was growing angry, so much so that when Laura asked, “Would you say you have anger-management problems?” I thought she was addressing me instead of Adam.
He was leaning forward in his chair, his big hands clasped. “Yeah, so what? You had to be angry to be what I was, an angel of fucking death.”
She flinched.
“I loved going out on night raids, I’ll admit it, loved it. I loved kicking down doors and killing fucking hadjis.”
“Hadjis?”
“Sand niggers; Arabs. Middle of the night, kicking down a door, a hadji on the other side with an AK, you don’t want to manage your anger, you go with it and kill the fucker. That’s how we took Fallujah, kicking down doors, house by house.”
Two things were obvious to Will and me: Laura had never encountered ferocity like Adam’s, and he was leading us on a mental return to Fallujah.
“Easy, bro,” said Will. “Stay frosty; we’ve all been there, we get it.”
Will’s physicality lent authority to his words. He summoned Adam back to the here and now from the there and then. Laura, relieved, turned her attention to Devin, who sat very stiff and straight, as if he were in a church pew.
“Do you have anything to add? We haven’t heard from you.”
He, too, seemed to be somewhere else and did not respond right away. “I was in motor transport, but I didn’t drive a truck,” he finally answered, his lips barely moving as he spoke. “I drove a wrecker, weighed seven tons. We chained up disabled trucks and Humvees to tow them, and…” Devin trailed off.
Laura encouraged him to go on, but he shook his head. “Maybe some other time, okay?”
“Of course. You’re under no pressure here,” she said in a palliative tone, and called an end to the session. “Oh, I almost forgot. Phil has brought some powerful binoculars to do some stargazing. Anyone who wants to is welcome to join him. I believe I will.”
The only takers among the five were Bruce and Devin. In the moonless dark, Laura leading the way with a flashlight, we trooped up to a fork in the same trail we’d taken to the sacred forest. The right-hand fork climbed to the flat, bare top of a pillar of Paleocene rock looming above the lake. We couldn’t see the lake; it looked as though the rock plunged into a bottomless pit. The m
oon had set, the skies were dark. The viewing session wasn’t going to last long; the night was as cold as it was clear. Devin gave me a hand extending and clamping the tripod’s legs. I fitted the 70-by-20s to the mount and swept across that immense, magnificent sky to train them on Orion, hovering just above the mountains’ rim in the east.
“Who wants to go first?” I asked.
Devin stepped up and, bending his knees, looked into the eyepieces.
“You should see four bright stars surrounded by what looks like a cloud.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s the Orion Nebula. The cloud is gas and dust that will form stars eventually. It’s kind of a star nursery.”
“Yeah? Hey, cool,” he said.
“It’s about fifteen hundred light-years away. In other words, the light you see started our way fifteen hundred years ago. You’re looking at the Orion Nebula the way it was around the time the Roman Empire fell.”
“Really cool,” said Devin.
The others took their turns. I showed them Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, low in the west, and the Pleiades, a glittering brooch in the heavens; the blue furnace that was Sirius and the glorious Hyades and Aldebaran in Taurus, the red eye of the bull. I saved the Andromeda Galaxy for last. In the binoculars, it showed only as a faint grayish smudge, for it was so distant that its light began voyaging to Earth when Lucy planted her footprints in Africa’s primordial mud. And all that out there, I said—stars being born, stars dying, galaxies turning—had been going on for thirteen billion years and would keep going no matter what happened on our speck of a planet.
“We aren’t as important as we like to think. We shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. Microbes on a grain of sand in the Sahara, that’s us.”
I was trying to stretch Devin’s and Bruce’s imaginations, to present the beauty and vastness of the cosmos to get them out of their own heads. I knew from my own experience that the psychic pain of war’s aftermath could be as isolating as acute physical pain; you are locked up in the prison of your memories, a kind of solitary confinement where no light shines.
“If we don’t take ourselves seriously, who will?” said Laura. It was a rhetorical question. “Shall we conclude? This microbe is freezing to death.”
We walked back. As I started toward my room, she tugged my sleeve.
“I’m not sure that was a good idea,” she said in the darkness, her breath pluming. “The stargazing, fine. What you said might not have been a good thing. These people feel like hell; they don’t need to hear that they’re microbes.”
* * *
It was a pleasure to hear her speak in plain language, and I explained my intentions as plainly as I could.
“Like I told you yesterday, it’s to put things in perspective. We get too caught up in ourselves. The vastness of all that out there”—motioning at the sky—“gets us out.”
“Oh, I know you meant well. But I question your word choice. Good night.”
Right after she left, I heard Will’s shrill whistle, the same one he used to call his dog, and saw flames shoot up from the fire pit near the main house. I went to him. He was sitting by the fire in a camp chair, smoking one of his awful cigarillos—the reason he was outside on such a frigid night. I took the chair next to his. He asked how the astronomy lesson had gone and I answered that it had gone okay and told him about Laura’s objections.
“She’s got her own ideas how to run things.”
“Mind if I hang with you guys?” It was Devin, bundled up in a parka, a watch cap pulled over his ears. “I could use a smoke.”
Will waved at an empty chair and Devin dropped into it and lit a cigarette. We were silent for a little, content to sit and stare at the flames flaring up, dying down, flaring again. Then Devin said he’d enjoyed the stargazing.
“That one thing you showed us, it began with ‘P.’ That was beautiful.”
“The Pleiades. It’s a star cluster.”
“I was thinking about that and the galaxy you showed us, and what you said…”
He fell into another silence. It was plain that Devin hadn’t joined us merely to smoke; I asked if there was something on his mind.
“If you want to hear it,” he said.
“We’re here to listen,” said Will. He reached for a log in the woodpile and tossed it into the fire pit; the rising flames made a circle of quivering light.
“Well, I’m here because I tried to off myself,” Devin said. “It was in my room at Northern. I’m in mechanical engineering there. I was in my room and looking at myself in the mirror. I had a handgun stuck here”—indicating his temple. He confided this without any vocal inflection; a voiceprint would have shown a nearly flat line. “I was going to give myself the death penalty. Don’t know why I didn’t go through with it. But I’m glad I didn’t.”
The next day, he went on, he called the VA’s crisis line, saw a psychiatrist at the hospital in Iron River, and spent two weeks in the neuropsychiatric ward.
“Hey, I’d appreciate it if you don’t mention any of this to the other guys. Or even to Charlie and Laura. I’ll do that when I feel like I’m ready.”
Will assured him that secrecy would be no problem and asked Devin what he’d meant, that he was going to give himself the death penalty. What for?
“I said I drove a wrecker over there? A recovery vehicle? One night—this was in Anbar—we got a call that there was a disabled Humvee down the road. It had run off the road and got stuck and we had to pull it out.”
It was difficult to hear what he was saying because of the quiet, tight-lipped way he spoke, but Will and I did not impede him with questions, sensing that any interruption might stop him altogether. Devin’s wrecker and two trucks left their base in a convoy. The rule was, he said, never stop or slow down for any reason, because insurgents could set off an IED or spring an ambush.
“Sometimes the hadjis would force civilians—a lot of times they were kids—to run in front of a convoy or flag it down, but you had to keep moving. We were rolling through a village that night when something like that happened. I had my eyes nailed to the taillights of the Humvee in front of the wrecker. I thought I saw a kid at the side of the road, waving his arms, and then he ran at the Humvee, and it looked like it clipped him, and he fell right in front of our vehicle. If he fell under the treads, he would have been squashed flat, squashed like a bug you stomped on; that wrecker was one heavy piece of machinery. We rolled and rolled. I hoped that he fell between the treads, because there would be enough clearance for him not to get crushed to death.
“We got to the disabled Humvee and set up to haul it out of there. It was buried to the axles in some kind of mudhole, like a little marsh in the desert. We got out and went to the back for the tow equipment, and holy Jesus, there was the kid, wrapped up in the chains. We saw him in the headlights of the Humvee that was following us. Don’t ask me how the fuck that happened, because I don’t know. We always kept the chains secured; maybe they’d got jarred loose and the kid grabbed them. They were wrapped around his arms and chest, his head even, and there was blood and hair on the chains. We’d dragged him five, six K’s; one of his feet was hanging on by just a few strips of skin. This was my second deployment to Iraq, I’d seen some shit, but that was the worst. It wouldn’t have been, if he’d been dead.”
Devin halted his narrative. He wasn’t looking at Will or me but into the fire, and I knew the fire was not what he saw.
“He was still alive?” asked Will.
“He was, yeah. A mess, but still alive and moaning. A really weird moan—it sounded like the muezzin. You ever heard that, the muezzin?”
Will shook his head.
“It’s the guy who calls Muslims to prayer. The kid sounded like that. Sergeant Jackson—he was in charge—Sergeant Jackson ordered us to get him out of there and we did, and we got blood on our hands doing it, and we laid him down at the side of the road, and you couldn’t believe he was still alive, parts of him looked like stra
wberry jam, Jesus, they did.
“We hooked up and dragged the Humvee out of the mudhole and now we’ve got to tow it back to base, and I said to Sergeant Jackson, ‘What about the kid?’ and he said he must be dead by now and we’ll have to leave him. Except he still wasn’t dead. He made one of those moans again. I said, ‘We can’t just leave him here like this in the middle of the fucking desert in the middle of the fucking night,’ and the sergeant said, ‘McIntyre, get your ass behind the wheel and let’s move.’ I’m standing over the kid—he was maybe twelve or so—and in the headlights I can see him looking back at me through the strawberry jam. It was that sound he made that got to me. I took my pistol and I shot him. I shot him in the face just to stop it. Or maybe like you would a wounded animal. I don’t know. I do know I couldn’t leave him to die out there.
“When we got back, the sergeant told us to hose the blood and hair off the chains and said that I’d better be a top soldier from now on, that I’d best watch my step and never give him any shit, because I could be court-martialed for murder. What do you think of that? He was going to leave that kid to die like roadkill and he called me a murderer. But you know, I started to call myself one. I kept seeing that kid’s eyes in all that red mess and I could hear my pistol go off and I went to the chaplain and he sent me to the division shrink and he diagnosed me as bipolar. They were going to give me a medical discharge for psychiatric reasons, which would have fucked me up for life. But my enlistment was almost up, had two months to go, and the army cut me some slack and let me out on an honorable.”
His cigarette had burned down to a butt in his hand. He flipped it into the fire pit and lit another. “All of that was seven years ago, and sometimes I still see and hear that kid. Maybe that’s why I put the handgun to my head, so I wouldn’t have to anymore.”
The fire had died down to embers, shrinking the circle of light. Long shadows fell across it, threatening to engulf it in darkness. Will stood and dropped another log into the coals, and as the tongues of flame licked skyward, expanding the bright circle, he moved behind Devin’s chair and laid his hands on the younger man’s shoulders. The pose reminded me of a sponsor standing behind a confirmand. I sensed that Will felt he had heard a true war story—no heroics, no excitement, and no redemption. Devin was as much a casualty of war as the nameless boy he had shot. Perhaps he felt forgiveness in Will’s touch, but of course he would have to find a way to pardon himself. I hoped he would. There was nothing Will or I, or Laura, or Charlie, or anyone, could say to make a soul so wounded whole again.