Monkey
Did not actually care to write about Libby tonight, except out of a sense of obligation, the whole thing being too sordid. I’ve been distracted by other things, starting with Teflon Don’s post that I linked below. War like a drug. I remember that feeling, being totally high on it. Not euphoric or tripping, just in another place while it was happening. War has the capacity to overcome you and take you away exactly like a drug, in all the ways a drug does.
But tonight I’m thinking about the dead again. Don knows about them. I edited an AP story tonight about 106 dead Iraqis in Hilla, and nine dead Americans north of Baghdad. Nobody I knew and nothing unusual about that job. I moved on to other work, but it came back later and I remembered the haunting bit Michael Herr wrote about being back in New York, awake in his bedroom and chain smoking for a couple of hours in the middle of the night, because he knew his living room was full of dead Marines. There was a frontend loader bucket with greenish-gray hands and feet sticking out the top in the back seat of my car as I drove home down the Southeast Expressway tonight. My tanker buddies had killed them several days earlier, because they wanted to kill us. It was entirely appropriate, and I had no problem with it. We had been passing them where they lay on the sidewalks, catching whiffs of them from the bushes for several days at this point. Now a squad of engineers with olive-drab cravats over their faces like bandits, latex gloves and black, bitter eyes were heaving them into the bucket. I caught a glimpse inside an empty cranium as its owner was hefted up and into the bucket. We stared at the engineers doing this horrible job as our M113 rolled past.
“Jesus. It sucks to be you,” said our stares.
“Yeah, we know. Fuck you,” their stares said back.
It sounds like PTSD. It sounds really disturbing. It’s only background noise. It’s not that big a deal.
But it is like a drug. My buddy Sig, the guy I shared that drink with the night they took Saddam for his drop, was treated for PTSD but went back four times. Maybe that was his therapy. Made sense to me. I spent three years trying to get my employer to send me back. Cleared to prepare five formal proposals, all eventually shot down. The newspaper was cutting back. When the editors finally approved a gig, I was in the middle of selling one house and buying another, and had to let it go to another reporter. It was a bitter disappointment, but I was secretly glad I didn’t have to tell my kids I was going. They were old enough to know by then what that meant.
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:09 am Comments (3) on Wednesday, March 7, 2007
3 Responses to “Monkey”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
March 7th, 2007 at 10:25 am
Forgive me for this. I can’t be that sympathetic to the adrenal-addiction that war creates. My father suffered from it all his life (WWII vet). Which is why he died in an alcoholic-related motorcycle accident three weeks short of his fiftieth birthday. Beware, Jules.
March 7th, 2007 at 10:34 am
I wanted to say something about this, but I got nothing.
March 7th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
I’m truly sorry to hear that, Rebecca.