Last night at the Writers’ Guild Initiative annual fundraiser gala, a couple of actors read a story of mine on stage. Peter Friedman and James Yaegashi read a piece of my new memoir about the time I went to the Mental Hygiene clinic in Portland.
In The Wax Bullet War, I think I was still too close to all that combat. I put that book through a filter. I still like the book, but for this new memoir, I’m trying to be as real and raw as possible.
I heard the piece went over very well and people were talking about it. I had just been to NYC last month and I’ve been so busy with our new documentary that I wasn’t able to make it to the gala this year, but I’m so honored it helped raise money for WGI and that such cool actors read the piece. The story is below.
Twist of Fate
So when I write about the war I jump all over times and places. I mean, chronology has no meaning when writing or even thinking about the war, but I found most books written by combat veterans ping around: Slaughterhouse Five, The Things They Carried, Paco’s Story, Catch 22.
So in this one moment, I’m in the low ceiling parking structure of the Portland VA hospital up on what we call Pill Hill. Deep in the bowels of the parking garage lies the Mental Hygiene Clinic. It’s the year 2004. I’ve been back from Iraq for a few months, but my unit is still fighting in the war without me. The Army sent me home early from Iraq because some people blew me up in an ambush. My ribs are still cracked, my right arm and right leg are in casts, but I’m not at the VA because of my physical injuries.
I’ve been a ghost of myself haunting my loved ones since coming back from the Army hospital in Fort Hood (now Fort Cavazos). Coming home soul-broke and getting divorced was bad enough, but not as bad as not being the dad my kids deserve. My son is only ten, and my daughter is only eight. What’s a divorce going to do to them? I don’t have the strength to keep my shit together, and this is a source of great shame.
A couple months before this moment at the VA filled with suicidal ideations, I was blown up and shot at very frequently until one day, men I never met stuffed an old Toyota Landcruiser full of explosives, and when I drove by while on patrol, they exploded the truck, sending my two and a half ton humvee fifteen feet into the air. Then they shot at us with machine guns and blew some more shit up.
My heart beats as fast as the machine gunfire, and blood spurts out of the compound break in my right wrist. This moment of hell stretches and changes the way I experience time for the rest of my life. Today, even twenty years later, I can’t tell if I’ve been carrying large pieces of that moment with me this whole time like some hopeless burdened beast, or maybe I left large pieces of me back on that Iraqi highway on June 13th, 2004.
The problem I’m having is that I can’t get the loop to stop in my brain. Flashbacks aren’t like the ones they show in the movies. You don’t just space out and lose yourself in the trauma. For me, the death and destruction, the insufferable pain, play nonstop on top of the present moment like an overlay. So here I am in the VA’s parking garage in my shitty Toyota revving my engine and thinking about driving as fast as I can into a brick wall.
I’m also in the passenger seat of the humvee telling Corporal Zedwick to skirt this suspicious looking truck.
Cars and trucks with veteran license plates pull in and out of their parking spots.
But I’m coming to after being knocked out, my head on Z’s lap after he pulled me out of the flaming humvee.
I’m staring with way too much intensity at the wall imagining my car crumpling like a beer can when it hits.
I’m also spitting black shit out of my mouth that tastes like battery acid and asking where Eric is. I see his body still sitting in the back of the humvee while smoke from the fire turns his uniform black, but he’s not moving. I scream for him to get out of there. He can’t hear me because he’s dead. The explosion blew the 50 cal off the mount and smashed his skull.
My heart beats so fast and loud that the rush of blood makes everything I hear wobble and distorted. Here and now, then and there, I’m doing my best to keep from screaming. I broke. I’m breaking. I’m broken.
I turn the car off and go into the clinic. I’m already late for my appointment.
High contrast, black and white, framed portraits of elderly veterans hang in the hall that leads to the reception desk. I mumble my last name and the last four of my social security number to the young guy behind the desk. He tells me to sit down and they’ll be with me in a few minutes. The place smells like a new carpet even though the floors are buffed sheet vinyl flooring.
I’m glancing at Fox News, playing on the television, but I’m also watching the secondary IED explode, sending Shane Ward flying like someone threw a ragdoll. I think about thumbing through one of the dog eared copies of People Magazine, but I’m also being loaded into Lieutenant Kent’s humvee while he returns fire on the hood and Winslow calls in the Nine Line Medevac request. Both my legs are bouncing furiously while I sit there, but I’m also screaming at no one in particular, asking,“Where’s Eric? Where’s Eric?”
“He’s dead. He’s fucking dead,” Winslow says.
I punch the windshield even though both my ulna and radius are broken. Each time I hit the glass there’s a sickening snap and blood splatters all over the inside of the truck. I’m screaming in pain, but I can’t stop punching, and at the same time the receptionist calls my name in the lobby of this fucking Mental Hygiene Clinic that they are making me go to because I’ve been exhibiting self-destructive behavior and symptoms of survivors guilt.
Of course now I can jump past the parking garage, the war too sometimes. I do this by overlaying good moments over the bad. Now I’m the grand marshal of a Veterans’ Day parade with my wife Kelly and younger daughter Jackie. Sitting next to us is Cora as a teenager and Karen, Eric’s mother. She only had the one son, so we asked her to adopt all of us. I jump to one of our Christmas mornings where we all unwrap presents and eat the holiday dinner she made for us. I jump to a time where I met up with Karen, her husband Mark, and Jackie in Arcata, California. They had taken her for a summer to the redwoods, and I had a few days off from fighting wildland fires in Northern California.
The farther I move away from the ambush in Iraq, the more moments I build up, the more places I can jump to in time, and now a lot of those places, those memories, are warm and comforting. I’m happy to be here right now, writing these words. That’s huge because PTSD me, thinking about crashing into a wall at the VA and killing himself, never thought he could be happy again.
Instead of ending it, I let time go by. This was immensely harder than it sounds, but I found that every moment that passes is another chance at better moments. I’ve decided that while that day the war almost killed me may always be used while describing me as a person, I don’t need to let it define me.
Sean Davis 