BY_ MICHAEL WARE
FROM_ NEWSWEEK
MAY 28 2012
As thousands
of veterans return, one reporter faces the abyss—and survives. Plus, Anthony
Swofford on the epidemic of military suicides.
I should be
dead. I wish I was.
Those eight
words were not easy to write. It’s even harder now reading them back. Seeing
them there, sullen and sad and monosyllabic in their black and white.
For the
longest time I wished I was dead. I wished one of my multitude of near-misses
wasn’t. Later there then came a time—when I’d first stopped living in war and
first found Brooklyn—a time when I consciously, achingly desired death. Craved
it. Longed so hard and bitterly for it that it became some taut tripwire strung
within me where no one could see. But then, perhaps, thinking back, decoding it
anew, maybe the wish was not to be dead? Not entirely? Not when I drill down
into it. Maybe my wish rather was for all the pain to simply end?
Yes, that’s
starting to seem more like it. Maybe it wasn’t death I wanted so much as it was
oblivion.
I won’t tell
you how close I did or did not come in those angry days, after what feels now
like an unspeakable decade of reporting wars; wars from Lebanon to Georgia, to
Pakistan and Afghanistan; all mere accompaniments to six or seven years in
Iraq. But I will tell you of when, on a day I cannot distinctly remember, that
I came to know I wouldn’t do it. That no matter what, no matter how badly I
pined for it, I would nonetheless continue. Even if that meant being sentenced
to a slow, quiet torment for the term of my natural life. That was the day I
finally accepted it was a choice no longer mine to make.
I know one
day my now-young son will read this, hopefully when he himself is a man. I pray
not sooner. It’s for him, and only for him, that I resisted. Once I realized
even a deadbeat father, should I become one, is still better than the specter
of a dead dad, especially at his own hand.
The
decision, however, was far from palliative. I’ve since had thoughts, remembrances
of that urge, despite knowing the execution of them is off the table. Because
it doesn’t alter the immutable sense that my race is run. That I’m done. That
all the rest, now, is busy work.
To this day
my mind still reels with war’s usual kaleidoscope: dead kids splayed out, often
in bits; screaming mates; crimson tides from al Qaeda suicide bombings creeping
across asphalt. I still see ... things.
Other things
I cannot remember, even when told of them, but I know they haunt my sleep; I
tore my left shoulder right out of its socket during a dream one Friday night;
awakened by the hellish sound of someone screaming before realizing it was me.
So, yes, I still see things.
Mired in a
falsehood of self-medication, I applied blizzards of booze and drugs to buy me
time. To get me from one dawn to another sleep. To give me the time to
reconcile my decision to live. All stealing for me just one more day, one more
day. Though in a perverted way it helped save me, it didn’t immunize me against
the price for it all.
For now, I’m
deprived of the right to see the boy I’m still here for, though he lives but
blocks away and drives twice daily to school past my apartment.
I feel
chewed and spat out by my past employers. In the field it was only a
colleague—a mate and true brother in arms, with me everywhere—who helped me at
all. And then, in New York, two other friends, both cameramen, discreetly found
the doctor I went on to see in secret for almost two years. His bills came out
of my pocket, no recompense from those who paid me for my wars. From them came
only rebuke and lectures. Somehow I was in a blind spot of sorts in their mirror
of what was going on. After, when I’d quit, my health care evaporated, my
insurance checks halted. I don’t blame my superiors for their blundering,
though the sense welling within me that I’d been gravely wronged persists.
But all
that’s OK. I’m adapting, surviving, and, in time, I’ll overcome. Just as we all
have to out There. There, where our friends die. Where I won the lottery by
making it through, though I’ll never forgive myself for my fortune.
A soldier’s
lot once back is often with The Damned. For some it’s part of the service
offered as young men, and so it has always been. Return passage. Homecoming.
All too often they’re brittle deceits woven from straw so easily blown away by
no more than the coming home itself. By war’s nature it’s an alien horror
understood only by the few. Nothing will change that. Ever. Rendering a year’s
tour, commonly more, deposits of service and good will in faraway accounts
forever frozen, the contents never to be truly repatriated.
But so it
goes. We just have to suck it up. As we did the blood and sweat and sand. As we
did on patrol, or over watch. As we did on cordons-and-knocks, on sweeps, in
hides, in gun pits, in turrets, and on chopper doors. As we did killing or
capturing or merely waving to children through Humvee windows.
Because of
all of those things and more, our peace times are not necessarily so. But I
wish it less now than I did. To be dead, that is. Time’s passage let me
discover that the desire diminishes, that it mellows even as it rages, and
that, possibly, it eventually quiets. I know it’s been my silent brooding
companion; familiar, intimate. But I told the doctors. I even confided in my
parents, now elderly, and they have watched their son grow older than them right
before their eyes.
I’m here to
tell you none of us has any choice. Because living is there to be done and it’s
we who must do it. It must become our new mission. Because when our generation
was called it was we who answered. And our Fallen cannot be left behind. It is
we who must remember them.
So, if but
one of you reads this, sees this, stumbles over it and you give me just one
more day as a result, then this humiliation will have been worth it. Please
allow me just to say to you, with no particular expectation at all:
DON’T.
Michael
Ware, a native of Australia, spent many years as a foreign correspondent for
Time and CNN.