DECEMBER 5, 2014
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/iraq-war-ptsd
I fell out of time in the summer of 2004. I fell back in about seven years later, on September 11, 2011.
The first fall was slow, more of a slide than a drop. It began as I moved around Baghdad, in the summer of 2003, with a growing sense of unease. On Memorial Day, while reporting for the Washington Post, I went on a 1st Infantry Division patrol in western Baghdad with another Post reporter, Anthony Shadid. I talked to members of the patrol, while Anthony talked to the Iraqis in the neighborhood. “Everybody likes us,” Spec. Stephen Harris, then twenty-one years old, told me. Anthony heard a different story. “We refuse the occupation,” Mohammed Abdullah, a thirty-four-year-old Iraqi, told him. “They’re walking over my heart. I feel like they’re crushing my heart.” (Anthony, who had been shot in Israel, in 2002, and was kidnapped in Libya, in 2011, died while covering the rebellion in Syria in 2012.)
The rest of 2003 brought a series of bombings in Baghdad—of the United Nations office, of foreign embassies, of the Red Cross—that clearly were designed to peel away potential allies from the United States. (The U.S. responded to these attacks with flailing and with moral errors, such as the torture of prisoners—and not just at Abu Ghraib.) In the spring of 2004, there simultaneously was a Shiite uprising on one side of Baghdad and a Sunni one west of the city, in Fallujah. Yet, the Americans seemed to think that all that was needed was a positive attitude.
In the back of my brain, an unconscious thought was growing, whispering, insisting on being heard: something is very wrong here. It hit me hard; it was a personal feeling. This wasn’t a matter of policy, this was a matter of my life: This war is going to be very different from the other conflicts you have covered, I thought, different from Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan. Something here has grabbed ahold of you. You have lost control of your future.
For reasons that I still don’t understand, my mental elevator-ride down accelerated on a trip home in early August, 2004. It began with a daylong flight on an Air-Force C-130 Hercules cargo plane. We flew from Baghdad, but, instead of going directly south to Kuwait, we first went north to Mosul, then sat on the hot runway for what felt like three or four hours. It was probably about a hundred and twenty degrees inside the plane. We took off dripping in sweat, froze in our wet T-shirts while in the air, and finally landed in Kuwait City late at night.
Kuwait brought an unhappy bureaucratic surprise. Because I had arrived on a U.S Air Force plane, I did not need—or have—an entry visa. But I was flying out commercially, and for that I needed an exit visa. Yet, I was informed at the airport that one could not be given to me because I was not officially in Kuwait—that is, there was no stamp in my passport. I hired a Pakistani taxi driver to help me make the rounds of government offices. The Kuwaiti officials seemed to delight in tormenting me. The cab driver, seeing my face as I emerged from the third Kuwaiti office of the day, said to me, sympathetically, “Sir, I told you these guys was sons of bitches.” He shook his head. I felt awful, panicky, as if the walls were closing in.
Looking back now, I realize that all this bothered me more than it should have. On the British Airways flight from Heathrow to Washington, the stewards, half on strike, were a bit rude, but it felt like they were poking me with sticks. When I got home, my house was in turmoil—a much-needed renovation was underway. It all seemed like a conspiracy to make my life more difficult. When my wife handed me an avocado-and-tomato sandwich for dinner, it tasted like ashes.
I left to go whitewater kayaking on the Youghiogheny and Cheat Rivers in West Virginia, a few hours west of Washington, D.C. I paddled hard for five days. On the sixth day, I was tired. On that final day, I was near the takeout—that is, the end of the river trip—when I came to the last hard rapid in the Cheat Canyon, where a three-foot-long pillar of rock juts out like a thumb from a clenched fist, angled over a small waterfall. At this Class IV rapid, I should have taken a right stroke, to edge the boat a bit to the left. I had been through this rapid a dozen or more times before and had executed that move successfully each time. Instead, this time, inexplicably, I took a left stroke, and the kayak shifted ever so slightly to the right. At the drop, my bow leaned off more toward the right, propelling my torso into the edge of the rock projection. It hit me so hard in my ribs that I felt almost lifted out of the boat, even though I was wearing a tight, heavy, rapid-proof sprayskirt. Just writing about it brings back an ache in my ribs.
I’ve never quite known why that accident happened. But I wonder now if it wasn’t completely unintentional.
I was able to paddle to the takeout but awoke the next morning barely able to get out of bed. I rolled out onto my knees, eventually rose to my feet, and drove home, where I had a deeply irrational argument with my wife. I blamed all that was happening on others. I felt that people were really pissing me off and that they just needed to listen to me more.
That was my low point—the late summer and early fall of 2004. I was in bad mental shape but did not know it. The best thing I could have done, I think, was to get some therapy. I didn’t.
But I did the second-best thing: I withdrew from reporting for a year to write a book about the Iraq war. From the start, I knew I would call it “Fiasco.” I was beginning to sense that I had undergone some serious changes. One day in the course of my research I was reading some news stories I had written in the fall of 2004, and I realized that I had no memory of writing them. This was very unusual for me—usually, I can look back at a story years later and recall conversations with sources and editors. But this sheaf of stories from November and December, 2004, were just blanks to me. That puzzled me then, and it still does now.
Still, I had a lot of energy and needed to let it out. I began writing the book in January, 2005, and finished it that December; it came in at just under five hundred pages. After typing the last words, I walked downstairs to where my wife was working on her own book and told her that I was done. She asked if I was happy with it. I said that I didn’t care if it didn’t sell a single copy. I had written what I had set out to say.
Yet, contrary to what I had hoped, or even expected, seeing “Fiasco” get published—and become a best-seller—brought no sense of resolution. I could not put Iraq away. I was shackled to the subject.
Iraq and its aftermath ran my life for several more years. I wrote another book on the subject, titled “The Gamble.” I consumed too much alcohol, and still do. I think I was a bit numb at times. For several years, until about 2010, my nights were spent in a mental box. My dreams were almost always of confrontation and frustration. Then there were those “black dreams”—I would sometimes jolt awake at night, dripping in sweat, fingernails digging into my palms, yet never be able to remember the nightmare. I grew to hate being in the same room as a loud television, especially if it was playing cable news or reality shows—it just felt like having shit thrown at me from across the room. I had long loved watching baseball, but I stopped going to Major League Baseball games because I had begun to find the stadium din, especially the blare of the loudspeakers, to be exhausting. In fact, I was always exhausted. I craved bland food—mashed potatoes, pasta, yogurt—to calm my churning stomach. Time came and went. I knew that my wife and two children, now adults, would pay a price for my changed behavior.
The moment of recognition came for me when a marriage counselor read aloud from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders the symptoms of P.T.S.D., among them irritability, nightmares, hyper-vigilance, and feelings of disconnection. He then looked at me and asked if these sounded familiar.
Over time I did better with my wife, which, oddly enough, enabled me to withdraw from the world a bit. For years, I had known that the only way to enjoy working in Washington, D.C. is to keep in mind that it is a pageant of power, Shakespearean at times. But, after 2004, I no longer enjoyed the game, mainly because the Rumsfeldian contumely, the shenanigans of ideologues, and the short-term memories of clownish officials were all getting people killed in a mindless war.
So, a few years later, when a generous buyout offer came from the Post, I accepted it. We moved to an old sea captain’s house on an island well up the Maine coast, several hours past Portland. There, I set to work on my next book and, more importantly, on trying to relearn how to live.
On September 11, 2011, I knew that I needed to observe the grim tenth anniversary in some way. I decided that the best thing to do would be to kayak, alone, up a remote sea cove on Cape Rosier, on the east side of Penobscot Bay, in east Maine. Nothing major happened that day, but, even so, it would change me. I would emerge reconnected to time, but in a way different from before.
This arm of the sea, called Horseshoe Cove, begins near open waters, where the bay meets Eggemoggin Reach. But, as you move north, it narrows and begins to feel more like a river, hemmed in by granite banks topped by stands of spruce and fir. Then, at the end, the water opens out to what feels like a small, remote lake. But it is salt water, so twice a day the current reverses, and the small rapids that had pointed north slacken and begin to flow south.
It was a bright, sunny morning, not unlike 9/11, ten years earlier. But this was Maine, so on this September day there was an autumn chill in the air that made it comfortable to stay in the sun, and away from the shadows.
For about thirty-five minutes, I paddled up the cove, the swift current of the flood tide urging along my sea kayak, a high-bowed, eighteen-foot-long craft made of Kevlar. At the salt lake, I crossed to the north side and beached my boat on a granite ledge. I sat in the midday sun and ate my turkey sandwich and my Fuji apple. Then I lay back in the sunlight on the long, dry pine needles. I didn’t sleep, but I closed my eyes. I felt the beginning of a sense of peace. This certainly was not a sense of satisfaction; it was more like acknowledging to myself, O.K., that’s done, time to move on.
But what stays with me most from that day is what happened next. Watching the water rise to the debris of the wrack line, I judged that the high tide was about to peak, so I got back into the boat. But when I got to the south end of the lake, I found that at the river-like section the water was still flowing in. The inward current was so strong that I could not ascend it, so I pulled up onto a flat granite boulder and sat waiting for the tide to turn.
I was surprised that it took perhaps another forty-five minutes before the water slowed, flattened, and finally reversed. It was such a quiet process that it felt like watching a secret unfold. Looking back on it now, I think that, when the rapid disappeared, it took some of my pain with it. At the beginning of the ebb tide, I got back into the kayak and paddled homeward, back to the mouth of Horseshoe Cove. This was all non-verbal, which I suspect is significant for someone who writes for a living and is intoxicated by words. Certain events had led me to a spot where I finally shut up and listened. I didn’t mind the silence. There was so much to smell, feel, and hear—the conifers, the flowing saltwater, an occasional gull or osprey, the prospect of a passing seal.
Why has that moment become so meaningful? Only now does the likely reason occur to me: I was unconsciously using that day to reset my sense of time. That is, I was ready once again to be in time, to be connected to its passage. But I was not ready to be tethered to the sort of time I had known. I was not going back to my old life, in which I rose to an alarm clock; ran to a series of interviews, press conferences, briefings, hearings; took nervous trips to war zones; and sometimes stumbled through Heathrow half-zonked on Ambien. That is, I was no longer working on deadline, as I had been since the early nineteen-eighties.
Since that day on that boulder in midstream, I have been back in time but still off the clock. That is, my life to a surprising degree is attuned to natural time. I attend to the tides, the phases of the moon, the seasons, the shifting winds, and, most of all, the rising and setting of the sun. (And, yes, I dislike the human intrusion of daylight-saving time, which feels like the theft of an hour of sun a day.)
Until I lived on an ocean island, I did not know that the full moon always rises around sunset. Now, I look forward to it. I hike when the tide is low, and my dog and I can cross sandbars to islands. I like to sail on the rising tide, when running aground is usually just a problem of waiting a few minutes to float off. My favorite month has become October, when the rays of the sun arrive almost horizontally, at times feeling like liquid gold poured across the water and woods. I have learned to read the weather, to know, for example, that, where I live, a wind out of the southeast almost always means fog or rain is on the way. I heed the saying that, “Mackerel skies and mare’s tails / make wise men lower sails.” When I write, I look out the window of my home office—at the harbor filling and emptying with the tide, and at the seabirds settling in to eat. Bald eagles come by in the winter, when they move in from the more exposed outer islands.
I came to the realization that there had been those two moments, of falling out of time and returning to it, while reading David Morris’s new history of P.T.S.D., “The Evil Hours,” which will be published in mid-January. One of the themes of his book is that the syndrome can warp one’s sense of time, making weeks and months flash by while one remains partly mired in the past. This untethering from time is unsettling, because it is a persistent reminder that one’s life is different from the people whom Morris calls “the normals.” “P.T.S.D. is a disease of time,” Morris writes. “Nearly all survivors report that certain traumatic memories communicate an uncanny feeling of timelessness.” (Not only does his experience intertwine with my own, so does his work. He mentions in the book that he gave a copy of “Fiasco” to his V.A. therapist in the hope of being better understood. I have never met him, but he thanks me in his acknowledgements. I read an advance copy of the book and was moved to blurb it—and to write this essay.)
Morris writes about his journey through P.T.S.D.—”I became a watcher of night skies, of cloud formations, of shooting stars.” To my surprise, after that day on Cape Rosier, my love of sea kayaking waned. Instead, I got more into sailing, eventually buying my own small sloop. This is how I explain that move to myself: Whitewater kayaking is a sport of hyper-vigilance. You must pay attention at every moment, or you will wind up upside down, wet and in the dark. Sea kayaking requires constant mindfulness, especially in Maine, with its relatively lonely and cold waters, heavy fogs, ten-foot tides, and high afternoon winds on many summer days. Sailing is yet another rung down. Nature still promises nothing, so helming a small sloop still asks for monitoring, but it is made much more forgiving by a deep keel, an outboard motor, and a cabin packed with helpful gear. If worse comes to worst, I can turn on the motor and gun for home. Or if the weather is too forbidding for that, I can find the lee of an island, drop anchor, and go below to get some warm clothes, books, and food. To me, sailing on Penobscot River on a pleasant August day is the complete opposite of war.
To my surprise, I also felt at home with the small island community—lobstermen, artists, engaged retirees. I feel more comfortable here than I ever did in Washington.
On the evening of the summer solstice of 2013, I moored my sailboat in the Fox Islands Thoroughfare, one of the most beautiful places I know. I relaxed in the cockpit of the little sloop, drank a beer, and watched the full moon rise, pulling an unusual twelve-foot tide with it. It glowed pink and orange in the sunset. This was something I could trust. Nature might kill me, but it doesn’t lie to me.
Am I sorry about all this? No. Would I do it all again? I don’t think so. But I did do it, and it is part of who I am. As Morris writes, “We are our scars, it seems.”
Tom Ricks is the author of five books about the U.S. military, including two about the Iraq war—“Fiasco” and “The Gamble.” He writes for the ForeignPolicy.com blog “The Best Defense” and is the national-security adviser at New America, a Washington think tank.
