And for the record, the right-hand photo is OBVIOUSLY photo-shopped.

(click on photo to enlarge)

I got to know Kelsey when we were with their family at Assateague Island eating blue crabs. Kelsey sat next to me and started drawing with the crayons the waitress gave her. Then she turned to me and asked, “Are you gonna draw too?”

“Sure,” I said, “Give me some of them crayons.”

Kelsey handed me a few colors and I proceeded to draw child-friendly cartoons on the place mat featuring bunnies and ducks and shit. At some point I looked over to check on Kelsey’s progress and saw her finishing one of several stick-figure-esque portraits she had done. But something caught my eye. On every one of the portraits the man/woman she had drawn had X’s for eyes. This made me a tad curious.

“Say, Kelsey, what exactly are you drawing there?” I asked.

She pointed to the one she was working on, “This girl was shot to death by Mr. Porcupine.” Then she pulled another drawing out of her pile and pointed to it, “He was strangled by Captain Alligator.”

“Cool! They’re really good, Kelsey,” I said. Then I turned to my friend, Dave, her uncle, who was sitting right across from me, “Can I talk to you for a second?” Dave leaned in as I whispered to him, “I think Kelsey is drawing cartoon homicide scenes.”

“Yeah, she does that,” he replied.

So I just rolled with it. Kelsey and I kept drawing. Each in our own way. Then a young girl, about Kelsey’s age, came over from another table in the restaurant. She approached us, and seemed to want to make friends with Kelsey, but being that I was sitting in front I politely said “hi” to her first. The little girl then got shy and scurried off.

I turned to Kelsey, “Oops… I think I scared her off.”

Kelsey patted me on the back assuredly, “Don’t worry. I’ll go talk to her. She just wants to play.”

Then Kelsey got down from her chair and made her way around me. But before she left, she stopped, then turned and put her hand on my arm and said, “Don’t you love how little kids make friends? They can just come right up to anyone and say, ‘Hey, you wanna play?’ And that’s it. It’s that easy.”

I found that startlingly insightful for a seven year old. “Yeah,” I said, “I do love that. That’s amazing. How do you know so much about the circle of life already, Kelsey?”

Kelsey just looked at me and said, “Hey — you’re born, you grow up, you die.” Then she just shrugged and ran off to play with her new friend. Leaving me sitting there, pondering my existence.

The next week was Fourth Of July. Kelsey came over to Dave’s house for the holiday. Dave asked her what she wanted to do to celebrate America’s independence.

“I don’t know,” Kelsey said, “Burn the American flag??”

Dave thought it was pretty hilarious, but I don’t think her parents would have found it amusing. But I think that they are failing to realize how far ahead of her time Kelsey is. Think about it: Burning the American flag is a constitutionally protected right in America. In almost any other country in the world, such acts would carry some form of penalty. But America is so free that even doing something to desecrate it is protected by law. Burning the American flag is, in essence, the ultimate representation of just how free we are as a nation. Kelsey gets that.

…Or she just heard it in a Rage Against The Machine song.

The last time I came to visit Dave, he told me that Kelsey had spontaneously decided she wanted to do a research paper on the sun. Keep in mind, this had nothing to do with school. She just voluntarily decided she wanted to go to the library, research the sun, and write a paper about it.

In usual Kelsey fashion, the paper focused on how the sun will turn into a black hole which will suck Earth in and devour our entire galaxy into a black nothing. But it’s impressive nonetheless the passion for learning she displays at such a young age. Mind you, Dave quickly pointed out that our sun is not going to become a black hole, but rather a red giant, thereby making the crux of Kelsey’s entire thesis complete garbage (he gave her an “F”), but even he was impressed with her enthusiasm (he gave her an “A” for effort).

So maybe Kelsey’s not a genius. Maybe she’s just a morbid weirdo. Maybe she’s both! I figure you can take a look at the illustration that accompanied Kelsey’s research paper and decide for yourself:

My youth is not a period of my life I particularly like to reminisce on. Other experiences I’ve talked about may not always be cheery, but they’ve at least helped me grow. Most of those experiences of late adolescence and early twenties just feel like a period of pathetic loserdom. If I’m taking the brighter approach, I could say that it had more to do with feeling lost than with being an unredeemable person, but it’s still not something I like to think about.

I had a habit of disappearing sometimes when I was in a particular state of emotional collapse. In one such episode, I randomly showed up at my friends’ place in Syracuse, New York, having driven there overnight from Chicago on a whim, stealing gas as I went (this was back when you could still do that). I left my job behind with no notice, no word. When I finally returned I found out that there were some detectives that had been inquiring with my mom and stepdad about my whereabouts. They wanted to speak with me regarding a burglary. This was all a surprise to me as I had no knowledge of said burglary, but apparently the victim had been a client at the laserdisc store where I had been employed, and the crime coincided rather coincidentally with my spontaneous disappearance.

I figured the best thing to do would be to promptly agree to be questioned by the detectives and clear the air. I had nothing to hide after all. I was innocent (of that crime anyway). So I showed up to the station and was placed in an interrogation room with two detectives.

I’d thought of writing out the scene here in detail, as I’ve done with prior episodes in my life, but unlike many that I seem to have a fairly firm remembrance of, I can only remember the “feelings” of that encounter. Not the dialogue. And I figure it better to speak of it in broad strokes, because after much contemplation I don’t really see the point of getting into the specifics of what was destroying my psyche at the time. At this point in my life, I don’t think it really helps to talk about that stuff. And what’s more… I don’t want to.

But I remember that when the questioning started it was clear that the detectives were certain they were going to be interrogating the kid they were sure committed the crime. I was their best lead after all. But as they asked me to explain the odd timing of my disappearance right after a client at the store where I worked at was robbed of a large amount of entertainment equipment (all of it bought exclusively at our store), I realized that the only way to really ease their suspicions was to tell them the truth. All of it. Let them here every uncomfortable detail of what was going on in my life, and how I’d reacted to it. They had to know that I wasn’t a petty criminal. I was just a fucked up, confused kid who was caught up in a self-destructive cycle.

And as I poured my heart out to a couple of strangers, their tone slowly changed. You could see it on their faces. They went from seeming accusatory, to genuinely feeling sorry for me. Like they’d realized that they just dragged in a broken, pathetic character into their office only to have him be forced to say out loud exactly what it was that had made him broken and pathetic. Not that my story was so awful in the grand scheme of things, but I think I just managed to run into two cops who happened to be decent human beings.

The burglar had been attacked by the victim’s dog and killed it. And the investigation was able to determine that he’d received some pretty good lacerations on his legs during this struggle. So as if to add insult to injury, they were forced to ask that I end the interview by pulling down my pants. Which I did. Because the only wounds I had were on my arm. Which clearly were self-inflicted.

They thanked me for my time and told me I was free to go. They seemed to feel almost as bad as I did by the end of it.

The feeling as I stepped outside is something I wish I could forget. It was as if I’d finally realized that I’d never been, and never would be, the person I thought I was going to be. It’s a feeling that’s stayed with me ever since. As I stepped outside I pulled out a cigarette. I was barely able to light it, my hands were trembling so much…

CHAPTER 8: “THE CONFESSION”

After my blog entitled “The Posse” I got an email from my closest friend, O’Banion (which is not his real name, but the name I gave him). He was responding to the things I wrote, particularly the parts mentioning the fact that The Posse had facetiously given me an alter-ego by the name of “Marty” who basically represented the moments when my depression and/or slightly insane tendencies would show themselves (much to everyone’s dismay):

Yeah, Marty was a prick. And really, I think we all felt bad for you… not angry at Marty. Sometimes Marty was annoying… but mostly Marty was just depressing… and no one else wanted to be depressed. Depression scared me. And to be honest– I could never grasp it the way I do now. Now… I’ve been through some really fucked up anxiety… shit that I now have to deal with every day. And while Anxiety and Depression are different… the negative effects on life go hand in hand. Living with either thing is a shitty, shitty deal… I get it now completely.

But I never look back at you as if you were some terrible person that I have to “accept” now. The last time I saw Marty I woke up the next day to you shaking my hand and apologizing. It blew me away. It felt like a turning point for you… like Marty was slipping away… and he was. He did. I thought that was amazing… and believe me, I NEVER want to see Marty again. Fuck that guy.

O’Banion recently (and spontaneously) starting getting really bad anxiety and panic attacks about a year or two ago. No real reason for them. They were just hereditary and suddenly hit him. It was a big shock to him (and me) because he is one of those guys who always knew how to let things just roll off his shoulders and not stress out, and then all of a sudden he had this intense shit inside him that was completely out of his control.

When we were talking about it recently one thing he said was that there would be times when it would start to hit him, and it would get worse because he’d “fight it.” Allowing himself to get frustrated or upset that he couldn’t control it. And he soon learned that a big part of conquering it is simply accepting it. Just understanding that it’s out of your control and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. It’s like me and my friend Jessica would often say when talking about growing up with depression, “It never gets better as you get older. You just get better at dealing with it.”

I guess that struck me because I feel like most of the most embarrassing and self-destructive things I did in my early years stemmed from a lack of acceptance. And I think it was harder for me because I was always like this. O’Banion had this thing suddenly hit him, so I’m sure it was easier to separate himself as a person from the feelings he was experiencing. With me, the feelings were always there so I thought that actually was me as a person. I was, I am, every negative thing I felt inside me. To “accept” it would be admitting there was something fundamentally wrong with me as a human being. Slowly over time I started to realize I actually did have to separate myself from those emotions. That “it” wasn’t me. It was just the thing I had to work through so I could find myself. But it’s difficult when it’s all mixed in like that. You find yourself questioning what is real and what isn’t. It’s as if I feel most people, “normal” people, spend their lives convincing themselves that what they feel so deeply and the beliefs they hold so dear are real. I have to spend my life reminding myself that it’s all in my head. On the surface, that may seem like a defeatist attitude, but it’s not about being negative or pessimistic – it’s about surviving. I know myself too well to think any differently.

I figure some of these stories might have the effect of making people feel sympathy for me, but my reaction to those memories is quite different. When I think about that “Eric” I get consumed with anger. Like I would take utter delight in being able to kick the crap out of that fucking coward. I guess that may be one of the reasons that I prefer having friends who can humorously and honestly give me shit rather than friends who coddle me and offer endless speeches about how “it’ll all work out in the end.” It’s not that I believe it won’t, but if I can sum up my philosophy succinctly: I truly believe that if you hang in there, if you stay strong and never give up, if you believe in yourself and you keep on pushing yourself forward, then things will work out in the end… or they won’t.

I’ve had enough experiences in my life that I now know not everyone is destined to win. And there’s not always a rhyme or reason to it. Some people come home safe & sound and move on to live a good life. Some do make it back, but they can’t deal with it and never find what they were looking for. Some people come back broken physically. Or mentally. Or both. Some of them work through it and some don’t. And some never make it back home at all. But you can’t control that shit, so you might as well just keep trying. You just keep trying because that’s the way it is… You accept it.

Our friendship today isn’t a friendship. You’re one of my brothers. When I think about how close we came to breaking up… it scares me. The fact that we’re together today is because of you. You were big enough to accept what happened. You needed time away… and we definitely were out of contact for a while. But we came back together.

You are who you are, and you make no apologies for it. You’re up front… I don’t have to walk on egg shells with you like I do some friends… and worry about offending them. Everything’s out there.

O’Banion and were the kind of friends that just fell in love with each other almost instantly. But I have this strange tendency to solidify my closest relationships through some kind of dramatic episode or conflict that is eventually forgiven. A friend of mine said to me that maybe that was a bad sign, which made me laugh. But I really don’t see it as it being part of my need for conflict as much as it’s the only time when you know for sure if me and the other person truly get each other. If you can both look at each other and say, “Ah, fuck it. All is forgiven,” that’s when you know they’re your people. That’s when you know you’ll get through just about anything together.

For me and O’Banion it was when we both fell in love with the same girl. A girl we’re both still friends with today. She rejected me and chose him. And at first, it seemed like he was working it for himself behind the scenes while pretending to be my “confidant” and getting me to tell him the details of what was going on between us. All the while I had no idea he wanted her too. It was not really like that of course. Shit just gets complicated, and when he was willing to actually sit down face to face with me to tell me that he was now with her, I accepted it.

I obviously couldn’t tell you right away… especially with everything that had happened with your hand prior to all of that. You still had the thing bandaged and you were still wrestling with all of it. After the party at Queens I remember you yelling at me (seriously, yet playfully)… “WHY DID YOU HAVE TO SHATTER MY BALL OF LIES!?”

And I STILL TOLD YOU. To your face. I mean… that’s gotta be one of the manliest things I’ve ever done in my life. It’s right up there with that time I accidentally scared the shit out of a black dude. You handled it well… and I knew deep down you meant what you said to me about not wanting to lose me as a friend. But I knew I would probably lose you. I hated it. We definitely weren’t friends until after she broke up with me the first time. And then, when she and I had gotten back together – I refused to tell you. I wanted her to man up and do it herself. By that point it didn’t matter. You were over her… finally when I went up to New York to live with her, I emailed you myself. You didn’t seem to care, and by then I knew you didn’t.

What I remember about that episode is sitting in the E.R. in New York City. As everything started to swell up in my mind and my emotions and fear and heartache started to grow and grow uncontrollably, I punched a wall spontaneously as I walked down the street. O’Banion was there when it happened. I broke my hand, and as I was preparing to leave New York back for home with my tail between my legs, I had to go to the E.R. to get it popped back into place and casted.

I remember I had to tell the nurse what happened for the report, so I said that my friend wasn’t looking and accidentally closed a car door on my hand. The nurse came back in with the x-ray a while later and said, “So you say it was a car door that caused this?”

“Yep,” I replied.

She looked at me like a disappointed mother. “Really?? Because we’ve seen this style of fracture many, many times, and oddly it is almost always without fail caused by someone punching a solid surface, such as a wall.”

We both knew I was lying, but I really didn’t want a lecture so I just nodded through tight lips and responded, “That’s interesting.”

Then we just stared each other down for a moment before she finally uttered, “Uh-huh,” and walked out.

The doctor came in a while later. He gave me a little Novocain to dull the pain for when he had to pop the bone into place. He gave me a warning before going through with it. I looked away and grunted as I heard the snap. Then I sat there silent as he casually and methodically held it in position while wrapping it in the wet bandages of the cast to dry.

Halfway through, I turned back to look and watched him as he worked. Then out of nowhere, the words started coming to me. Slowly repeating over and over.

“I need help… I need help… Please… I need help.”

I couldn’t say it out loud. But it kept repeating in my head over and over and over and over. It was so vivid I almost felt like I really was saying it. But my mouth never opened. I couldn’t make myself say it. I just stared at him, even though he never looked up to meet my eyes. I stared right at him the whole time. Thinking it again and again until he’d finished and abruptly left the room.

After I left the hospital I lost my wallet on a city bus. Someone turned it in to the bus station so I was able to get my ID back (because I needed that to get on my flight back home), but they were nice enough to remove the last $300 I had to my name from it before turning it in…

I guess most of my comic sensibility has come from learning to laugh at how ridiculous our most painful moments can be. I saw The Royal Tenenbaums in the theater by myself shortly after that happened. I was still wearing my cast. When it got to the scene where Bill Murray was telling Luke Wilson that he thought Margot (whom Luke Wilson’s character was secretly in love with, and who was Bill Murray’s character’s wife) was having an affair, Luke Wilson reacts by punching through a pane of glass. I started laughing so hard that I think everyone in the theater thought I was psychotic.

I’ve felt like I’ve had to start over quite a lot. When O’Banion mentions me just up and doing stuff, it’s more out of necessity than any truly adventurous spirit. The draining part is that I can’t really remember any time when it hasn’t ended in failure. And they may seem an exaggeration, but I really can’t. Every experience has eventually left me broken, disillusioned, or both. Stand up comedy meant a lot to me because it was the first time I can really remember setting my mind to something and actually pulling it off. I achieved every goal I set for myself in comedy, and I did it rather quickly. Although, I’ve never figured out how to keep that momentum going. But I still think that it was an art form that really helped me get past many of the things that were eating away at me for a long time. And surprisingly, so did writing all this stuff and hearing the amazing feedback from it. Even from strangers. Because I don’t think I would have been able to even go back to those places on my own if comedy hadn’t helped me come out of my shell some.

I do remember your speech at our wedding. Actually, I had forgotten about it. I think that either makes me a really shitty person, or it demonstrates how completely out of my head I was that night. I remember most of that entire week… I remember it because I spent the whole week before my wedding cuddling up with you on the couch, drinking coffee, watching Goldblum.

That girl is my entire world man… nothing can happen to her. And you deserve someone that makes you feel the same way. I just hope you can keep in mind some of the things I’ve said here, because I know I don’t really get to say this stuff a lot. I know how down on yourself you can get… but to me, you’ve always been an inspiration in life, in so many different ways.

To be continued…

In this street, there were bodies all over the place. Laying crumpled up in the road, inside the buildings, there were even some tied to light poles hanging by their necks while young kids try to climb up to cut them down. The town was abuzz with both Iraqis and Americans. They were all going around gathering the corpses and lining them up neatly along the sides of the street. One side for the Americans. One side for the Iraqis. Everybody helped. Iraqis would drag American bodies to the American side, and Americans did the same for the Iraqi ones. They’d place them neatly next to one another, everyone lying flat on their back with their hands to their sides. Nice and organized.

Then the shells started dropping. Big ones. The plumes that lept up from the ground when they impacted were as high as the roofs of the buildings. They kept landing one-by-one on top of each other, getting closer and closer to where I was standing. Everyone started scattering for cover. Everybody except for me. I just stood there entranced, watching as they crept in towards me.

Then I looked back at someone. Technically, I wasn’t looking physically at anyone, but in the dream world I was looking at someone unseen. As if I was looking at myself. And as I looked at me/him, a grin started to creep over my face. And in my own head he seemed to ask me, “What are you smiling about?”

Then I held up my hand, gesturing towards the scene that was playing out behind me and I said, “This… This is real… This is life.”

“FOLLOW THE SIGNS”
March 5, 2012

It was in November of 2011 when the thought to go to Syria first occurred to me. Actually… that’s not entirely accurate. I’d been thinking of nothing but going to Syria for the past several months. And Libya before that. But I don’t think I ever considered it as something that was legitimately possible, or that I’d legitimately consider, until that time. Before that it was just something nice to daydream about, but I knew it would never happen.

Then I watched the PBS Frontline episode Undercover Syria. PBS managed to sneak a journalist into the country to embed with the inner circle of the protesters, and in going through the supplemental materials for the episode on their website I noticed something that caught my eye. An article stated that the journalist actually got into the country using a tourist visa.

A week or so later I saw that CBS had sent in a reporter as well. In her blogs on their website she mentioned also getting into Syria on a tourist visa. Both went in through Damascus. The CBS reporter even wrote that her American face made her a welcome sight to most of the residents of the city who had been lamenting the lack of tourists they’ve seen since the protests started.

All this time, it never occurred to me that if you wanted to go to Syria you could just walk in through the front door. I guess it made sense at the time. The regime seemed to be trying to sell their story that nothing was wrong. That their actions were perfectly legitimate, and that the protests were really just a few minor occurrences of “rebel rousers” that they have completely under control.

Because I fly on United Airlines for free, I could actually afford to do go there. Hop on one of their flights over to Kuwait or Dubai, and from there a round trip ticket to Damascus would only be about $220. I’d always wanted to see Damascus. For most people, this would not be the time for a visit, but much like my enthusiasm when I got deployed to Iraq, for me this was the time to visit. This is history unfolding in one of the world’s most historic cities, and I have a chance to see it. To be there. I mean, after all, what’s the point of living life if you never take advantage of a once in a lifetime opportunity to actually experience something real? I tend to think that most people consider experiencing life to be just the fun stuff, but I don’t buy that at all. Life is all of it. And if there’s one thing I took from my brief time in Iraq, it’s that there is a dramatic difference between learning about something and actually seeing it.

I can’t really sum up my motives in a word. Because I honestly don’t know that I can even pinpoint them for myself. I’ve always said, “If you’re not conflicted, you’re probably doing it wrong.” And despite what a lot of people think, I’m very conflicted about the Arab Spring. I’m not at all conflicted about how I feel about the people. I respect them, and I want them to have their countries back. But even if they win, that doesn’t mean that happens. There’s a tendency nowadays to think of democracy and freedom as being synonymous, but I tend to disagree with that. It’s pretty safe to say that if Hitler had held legitimate, democratic elections in Nazi Germany during his reign in the 30’s he would easily have won. And if he had, then that would be democracy, but it’s not freedom.

I had no expectations for my trip to Damascus. If I’d gone to Syria, I could’ve just been killed outright and it would have been completely pointless. I could’ve been swept up in the fighting, joined the battle in the streets, liberated Damascus with the Free Syrian Army and been declared “Eric Of Arabia” by my thankful comrades. I could’ve simply had some good meals, visited some tourist attractions, and come home safe and sound. Maybe the whole thing was just an act of solidarity for me. It certainly didn’t seem fatalistic. I was actually very scared. Because despite my sad bastard sense of humor I truly do hope to live to be old and gray. But I wouldn’t be that upset to die there, with those people. At least if that happened I don’t have to be around when the euphoria dies out and everything goes to shit. But at the same time, I really only want to live to be old and gray because I want to see how the story ends. So I’d hate to miss something.

I guess it’s this never-ending conflict of emotions that allows me to lend myself to superstition. Because when you see how everyone is right and wrong at the same time, you start to wonder what exactly the right decision is. So then there comes a tendency in me to want to put it in fate’s hands. I follow the signs because I have no idea what the right decision is. Because I am lost. And when people are lost they need something to believe in. So if I am presented with a sign, why not believe it? After all, I truly believe it always comes down to this: If fate has a plan for me, it will protect me. And if it doesn’t… Well, then none of this shit even mattered in the first place, so who cares what happens next?

“YOU DON’T HAVE ANYONE”

I have not been sure what the next move should be for quite some time. Do I move to LA? To New York? To London? Stay in Austin? Quit comedy? Re-enlist? Travel more? Travel less? Write novels? Write film scripts? Write articles? Do the acting thing? Skip the acting thing? Go back to school? For what? For history? For journalism? For shits & giggles?

In November of 2011, I participated in the Seattle Comedy Competition. I had no expectations of it advancing my career, nor did I even know there was prize money involved. I just wanted the stage time because I love doing stand-up. Then the first week of the contest went really well for me, and I found out about the $5,000 prize money. This was one of those moments where I thought maybe it was a sign.

When I got to Seattle I immediately became super gay for my new best friend, Blake Wexler, who is an L.A. comic. I told him, “You know what? If I win this thing, I’m just gonna take the prize money and move to L.A. Start taking this comedy thing seriously.” My funds had been running low before I left, so moving had stopped being an option for a while. But with that prize money I could afford to do it. It’s a sign, right?

Then when we got to the second week of the competition our audiences completely changed. We started doing all these performance art theater venues full of rich, old, white people. It became very apparent that even though I could still enjoy myself at the shows, I had zero chance of winning. So I guess it wasn’t quite the sign I’d hoped for. What now?

As soon as Seattle seemed to be dwindling down, the articles about the reporters getting into Syria on tourist visas popped up. I started finding myself thinking about nothing but that. But I also thought, “Should I really be contemplating this?” I mean, I know my own history. And I know I can sometimes lend myself to doing really bat-shit crazy things. That’s why I try to keep an eye on myself. Since I’m kind of a lunatic. So for this one in particular, I really hoped that I could get a sign.

As soon as I left Seattle, I went home for Thanksgiving. And as soon as I arrived, my mother gave me a gift.

“I was going through your grandma’s jewelry box,” my mom said to me, “You remember the one you always liked to play with when you were a kid?”

I knew which one she meant. Grandma always kept it on top of her dresser back at their home in Marshalltown, Iowa. My grandma had passed away eight months earlier, and my mom had been going through a lot of her old stuff recently.

“Well, when I looked inside it I found this sitting right on top.” She handed me a pendant necklace with a Christian figure on it. “That’s Saint Christopher. The patron saint of traveling. It’s meant to keep you safe on your journeys, and since you travel so much… I just knew as soon as I saw it that your grandma meant for you to have it.”

I was kind of floored by the timing. I mean, c’mon, this is clearly a sign. Right as I’m asking myself, “Should I actually try to do this?” my mom hands me this pendant. Telling me I was meant to have it. This has to be a sign. And you have to follow the signs. I made the decision right then and there that as soon as I got back I would go to the Syrian consulate in Houston and attempt to get a tourist visa. If I was successful then I would go. No questioning it. Just go.

My relationship with my mother is one I tend to cherish. I admit I was always a bit of a momma’s boy. Not that I’m not still a bit too distant with her from time to time, but I’m like that with everybody. The interesting thing with her is that I never really feel uncomfortable telling her anything, even though I bet she finds some of the things I say a tad bit unsavory. I’m one of the few people I know who actually likes having his mom on Facebook.

She came downstairs during the Thanksgiving trip and saw me looking at the pendant. This was a day or two after she gave it to me. We started talking for a bit and she was asking me how I was doing.

“I’m doing good I guess,” I said, “Nothing really big going on right now.” I didn’t mention this Syria scheme then. I had decided I wasn’t going to talk to anyone about my travel plans until I physically had the visa to Syria in my passport.

“Okay. I just want to make sure you’re all right,” she said. “I worry about you.”

I hate it when she frets. My mom is like that though. She’s such a “mom” type of mom. I swear, she cries every time she says goodbye to me. No matter what the circumstances, every single time I visit, when it’s time to say goodbye, she cries. And she’s always worrying.

“Why do you worry about me so much, Ma?” I said to her.

“Because you don’t have anyone.”

I froze up inside. My blood went cold when she said that. Not that I think she meant it in the way I took it, but it really hit me hard. Of course, I just smirked and played it off like it was nothing.

“That’s not true.” I tried to make a joke of it, “In fact, I had someone just the other night.”

My mom doesn’t always appreciate my rather uncouth sense of humor. She just made a face at me. So I tried to set her mind at ease as best I could.

“I have my friends, Ma. My friends are very close to me. Really. They’re like family to me. Just as much as you guys.”

That seemed to make her feel better. I was glad to see her cheer up. But in the back of my head I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I do feel very close to my friends, but I admit I rarely feel like I’m actually a part of anyone’s life. I often feel like I’m just a tourist here. It bothered me that in my heart I think I agreed with her. That the more I open up to people about who I am and how I feel about the world, the more I feel like I don’t have anyone. But maybe that’s why I can get so invested in people halfway around the world who couldn’t be more different than I am. Because I find that people tend to protect their own. And when you don’t feel any allegiance to anything, or any direct connection to it, then everyone becomes as much “your own” as anyone else. At least, that’s how I’ve tended to react to it.

I do want to be part of the world. I want to be involved. To be a part of something. I want it more than anything, but it just never works out that way. I feel like all I’m allowed to do is exactly what I’m doing right here – reflecting on it. I always told myself that I would do whatever is asked of me. And I want to believe that I would. But therein lies the problem: Nothing is ever asked of me.

“POOR JUDGMENT DAY”

The Syrian consulate in Houston is just some little office in an industrial park, and it shares the building with several other offices. The Consul was a short, fat, old man who looked rather troll-like. I wonder if it’s weird for him being a representative of a country that the rest of the world looks at as butchers while you sit at your little desk eating Subway.

If it bothered him, he didn’t show it. He had a big ink stain on the front of his shirt, and he didn’t seem to worry too much about his job. In fact, I had to call his office twice a day for an entire week just to get an appointment finally set up. It made me worry that they were trying to stonewall people looking for visas, and that maybe he wouldn’t even be there when I arrived. But he was. He just sat me down in his office and looked over my visa application while I stared at the map of Syria on the wall. Damascus, Aleppo, Idlib, Homs, Hama, Daraa – all the places I’d been hearing about on the news for months. I wondered if I could find time to fit a visit to Beirut in there.

My favorite part of the Syrian visa application is that at the end of the form they ask, “Have you ever been to ‘Israel’?” And yes, Israel is in quotes. Apparently, if you answer “yes,” or if you have an Israeli stamp anywhere on your passport, you are barred from entering the country.

I also thought it was funny that since I forgot to print up photos for the form before the day of my appointment, I had to do it in a hurry and the only picture I had on hand was some copies on a flash drive of pictures I took of my face when I was in my Walter White (from Breaking Bad) Halloween costume. So this was my official visa application photo:

The fat man didn’t take any notice of it. He just looked over my paperwork quietly, and at one point he looked up at me and said with a slight accent, “You know, right now is not so good with traveling.”

“Yeah, I’m aware of what’s going on,” I replied.

He just shrugged and stamped the passport. Then he filled in some spots with his pen, and handed it back to me. That was it. Pretty painless. I wonder if having that visa in my passport means I can’t go to Israel now?

“PERSPECTIVE”

It was mid-December when I got the visa, and it stays valid for three months. Once I got it I started trying to figure out how and when to plan my departure. Since bad shit always tends to happen to me on New Years Eve, I decided I would wait until January to leave (more of that superstitious shit). Besides, that would give me time to visit some friends, and to see my family and tell them my plans. Just in case anything were to happen I wanted to see them before I left. At the time, a mere visit to Damascus itself wouldn’t be the most dangerous thing in the world (there are parts of Chicago that would probably be more dangerous for me to walk through at night), but I’m also very aware that everything can change in a heartbeat. You never know what’s coming next, and you got be ready. Especially in a situation where things were changing there every single day. It’s the kind of thing that made me wish I had more combat and/or medic training in my military background, but if Marie Colvin and Anthony Shadid can have the balls to go there without it then why can’t I?

Let me just say this – I was well aware of how insane this plan would seem to people. And I knew I’d have to deal with people ridiculing me for it, or being condescending (although I admit I wasn’t prepared for how much it would piss me off). In my heart, I know there’s no malice in them doing that. It’s just a matter of perspective. We may seem like we’re talking about the same thing, but really we’re not.

I only put the wheels in motion in the first place because I was following the signs. And because of that, I made a deal with myself that I would stay true to that all the way through. If fate didn’t want me to go, then it was going to do something to prevent my trip. Just like it did with the convoy duty in Iraq. If fate decides to do that, then I’ll follow the signs. I’ll cancel the trip without complaint. That was the contract I made with myself.

Things started deteriorating even more in Syria immediately after I got my visa. The Arab League monitors showed up and the violence actually escalated, even inside Damascus which had been able to stay relatively calm up to that point. There were even car-bombs going off there, which had never happened anywhere in the country before that. The government blamed Al-Qaeda the instant it happened, which made it seem like they were probably being orchestrated by the government itself in order for them to continue selling the “Islamic militant” angle to the revolution. Although now reports are coming out that it really may have been Al-Qaeda after all. This comes in the wake of Al-Qaeda’s recent decision to announce that they are kindly offering their assistance in helping the Syrian people stabilize their country (since they did such a bang-up job in Iraq). With them trickling in, and the government now seeming more and more willing to make westerners targets too, things there were starting to not look very hospitable.

I also got put in touch with an American who had been living in Damascus for several years. A sister of a friend of a friend. She was still living there as all this was happening, and I managed to get an email from her. It was rather troubling. Not in the sense you may think. It was filled with a good amount of useful information, and she didn’t seem too worried about my safety in Damascus as long as I watched out for myself. But between the info she seemed to be aligning herself with the storyline the regime was putting out. Saying that it’s merely Islamic militants trying to stir up trouble, and the Intelligence Agencies of the Syrian government were working hard to stop them. A storyline that everyone knew was complete bullshit. Was this how divided it had become there? That even an American was able to be fooled by this regime? Or could some of it actually be true? Because I do believe the longer you let the situation deteriorate, the worse the consequences will be.

I don’t really know. It’s possible she meant what she said, but I also believed it was more likely that she was just saying it to protect herself. I heard via my friend that during a phone call between her and her family over Christmas the line got cut off immediately after she said something she wasn’t supposed to. The government monitors everything. Every email, every phone call. I’ve heard many reports where Syrian-Americans have expressed the concern they feel due to not being able to get word from their families because those family members fear retribution if they say the wrong thing. And those same Syrian-Americans don’t even want try and contact their people themselves for fear of possibly putting them in danger.

So as all this stuff was happening, I had decided to go to Beirut instead of Damascus. From there I’d still be close enough to get to Syria if an opportunity to get inside presented itself. And if not, then I’d at least have good seats for the big game.

But I suppose it was not meant to be. During my visit with my family, my father and I clearly had ideological differences on the subject. And this was the part that I’d dreaded. Not the part where I make him worry about whether his kid is going to get himself killed. The part where I have to try and explain myself to him. Because I knew we would not see eye to eye on this, and on top of that, if I got riled up enough to truly try and defend myself I’d probably end up saying something hurtful. I don’t want to fight with him. I just wanted to tell him where I was going and be done with it.

When my father went back home after Thanksgiving, he wrote me an email saying that he could not support my trip, and that if I tried to go he’d cut off my flying privileges. Of course, he understood that if I could raise the money on my own then he had no right to stop me, but he sincerely hoped I couldn’t. I only get to travel for free on United Airlines since my dad works for them. I’m his “enrolled partner” since he isn’t married, but he can revoke that at any time. Without my dad’s passes it would be way too expensive since I only had about $1,000 total to spend for the whole trip.

So there it was. Fate said no. So I’ll listen. Per the contract I’d made with myself, I will not complain and I will not argue. The trip is off.

I wasn’t upset with my dad. He’s just doing what he thought was right, same as me. But it did bother me that the whole thing seemed to highlight just how far away from each other we can be even though we’re father and son. I know it was just that same old problem of perspective, but I often had to fight myself not to feel insulted by it. I mean, I believe he’d be worried if I’d gotten on the convoy duty in Iraq, but I don’t think he’d have thought of me as stupid. Because that would have been a cause he believed in, even though I’d say that was far more of a lost cause than this one. Also, I tend to think it’s hypocritical since Americans (including my father) visit China all the time. And they treat their people the same way the Syrian regime treats theirs. Hell, in another 20 years, Syrians may be acting like Homs never happened the same way the Chinese pretend Tiananmen never did.

I think that’s also why I get irritated listening to American politicians simply saying, “The Assad regime’s days are numbered.” As if to say, “Look, we don’t know how to help, but it’s all going to work out in the end no matter what, so don’t worry about it.” That’s horse-shit. Gaddafhi made it easy on us. He put a bullseye on his head then stood there and waited for the bullet. Because he was fucking insane, and insane dictators always hang themselves. Assad is not insane. He’s smart. He’s a man with a plan, and so far the plan is working out very well for him. It’s not even hard for me to understand his motives. He’s wrong, but I can totally see why he thinks he’s right. But everyone thinks they’re right. That’s why this shit never ends.

“EBBS AND FLOWS”

It’s been pretty hard reading and listening and watching it every day from over here. Not a day goes by when I don’t find myself crying for someone. Someone I’ve known, or someone I wish I had. There is no exaggeration there. Every… single… day.

Even with how bad things got, I think it would have been worth it to go. As worth it as anything else I can do with my life anyway. I guess what’s been interesting is that merely making this decision itself has allowed me to get people to open up to me about it. I’ve had some interesting interactions that I never would have had if this whole thing hadn’t had (almost) happened.

My father obviously thought it was stupid and reckless, but my brother, on the other hand, said he envied me. Even gave me some money to get his newborn kid a souvenir (that was before I told him what our dad had decided about it).

Many people thought it was awesome that I wanted to go. And some others just said, “Oh cool,” because they clearly had no idea what was even going on in Syria. And still many others have since put me through some of the most frustrating and utterly depressing conversations of my life. And never for the same reasons twice.

I even got into it with my best friend, O’Banion, when I was visiting him in Maryland. A man who probably gets me more than any other human being on the planet. And yeah, it got a bit too real. It made his wife cry. She even hit me a few times (but it didn’t hurt). Then the next morning she left me a letter. A letter that she’d actually written several weeks prior, back when she first heard of my plans. And it was one of the most moving things I’d ever read.

I don’t like getting up in people’s shit. I guess the only reason I do get heated about it from time to time with others is that when someone pushes me I tend to want to push back. I always know that there really is no such thing as “the truth,” but there is such a thing as nature. And it’s my in my nature to be obstinate. But when you meet someone that isn’t showing any flex on their viewpoints, and fundamentally disagrees with yours, you should always follow one simple rule: Shut… the fuck… up. A rule I regrettably find myself breaking quite frequently.

The frustration I get with people never stems from the fact that they disagree with me. I admit that I don’t know what the answer is. And I wouldn’t even tell someone they’re wrong when they say it’s not our problem, and that we should just stay out of it. I might even be willing to say that I think they’re right. It just depends on how it goes. The problem I have is that when you feel that really is the only choice, then it should tear you up inside. If should eat at you every minute of every day. It should be so hard to say it that you can barely get the words out without breaking down. And for them, it’s not. And for the life of me, I do not understand it. Maybe they know something I don’t.

I’d like to share something with you. I’m not sure you’ll see it as relevant to the topic at hand, but it feels so to me. It was from a documentary A&E did where they followed one Marine company’s tour of duty in Iraq in 2005. In fact, these guys left Haditha just a month or two before that famous incident where Marines were accused of going on a rampage and murdering 24 Iraqi civilians in the town. This company lost more guys than anyone in the Iraq war, which was exactly why they were getting a television program dedicated to them. I found that many of the Marines they spoke to were more candid than I’d ever seen troops be in these type of programs. At the end, one guy said the following to the interviewers:

“I just feel like the reason we got all this attention was because… a lot of us were killed. And that’s how I feel about it. I mean, if we all came back safe – nothing happened – there wouldn’t have been anything for us. Y’know, I’m sure they would have been proud of us, but… we wouldn’t have had a parade. We wouldn’t have had THIS. We wouldn’t be being interviewed. So, it’s, uh… I don’t know… I don’t appreciate this stuff. I mean, I just want people to know about my friends. And this is the only way I can do it, so…”

I’m not an activist. I think some people falsely think of me as such. That they think I’m trying to rally people to a cause. Or that I support this action, or that one. I don’t. I don’t know what’s going to happen next, and in many ways I don’t give a shit. There’s going to be dire consequences no matter what we choose to do, so I just sit here safe and sound and keep my fingers crossed. I guess for me personally I just figure that if there’s going to be consequences no matter what you do then why not just try doing the right thing? But I’m not trying to convince anyone to agree with me. Because if Iraq taught me one thing, it’s that it cannot succeed unless every single person is on the same page. The only way you can “fix” it is to get every single person in the world to agree about everything. And that’s not going to happen. People are diverse as a mutha fucker. They wouldn’t be people if they weren’t, and that’s not always a bad thing. You just have to do the best you can with what you’ve got.

I just would like people to know that even though it’s not all perfect, there are real people dying horrific deaths over there. People that may look or talk different, but are not different. Many of them are not jihadis, or nut-jobs, or rebel-rousers, or people stirring up sectarian tensions. Many are just brave fucking people, men and women alike (even children), who have been willing to go through a literal hell-on-Earth to fight for something as simple as wanting to live their lives. To be able to speak their mind, or simply tell someone a joke without fear of being tortured to death and dumped in a creek for it. Remember them. Carry them with you the way I do. It may be hard on you from time to time, but they’ve earned it. They’ve earned at least that much.

You have to protect your own. The people that carry it with them – those are my people.

“EPILOGUE”

One of the many conversations I’ve had on this was with my friend Lucas. At one point, he was asking me about this “follow the signs” philosophy of mine. “Because sometimes I’m not sure exactly what you believe in,” he admitted. He meant it in the spiritual sense. He knows I’m not in any way a believer in organized religions, but he isn’t always sure if I do or do not believe in a higher power. I expressed my philosophy to him in basically the same terms as I have already expressed earlier in this writing. But I also admitted to him that I’ve come to realize I may just be taking the easy way out by letting “fate” make my decisions for me.

Because there is a cold hard truth to this tale that I don’t want to accept. And that is that there are no signs. At the end of the day you just make a choice, and you live with it. My mother didn’t give me that St. Christopher pendant because the spirit of my dead grandmother wanted to protect me on a journey into Syria. She gave it to me because that’s what a mother is supposed to do. And my father didn’t stop me from going on that trip because “the gods” had realized things were getting too dangerous and intervened on my behalf. He did it because that is what a father is supposed to do.

People will always tell you “that part of the world is just fucked up.” And they’re right. Of course, there was also a time when that same part of the world was experiencing its “Golden Age” while Christian Europe was rotting in the Dark Ages. This stuff goes in ebbs and flows. It has since the beginning of time. It will until the end of time.

The real reason those people in Syria are dying, and no one’s helping them? The real reason is because it’s their fucking turn. Tomorrow it’ll be somebody else’s. So I guess the moral of the story is that I should just be glad it’s not mine.

Every morning when breakfast time rolled around we’d rotate who’d go to the chow hall to pick up food for everyone. They had local Iraqis working the grill there. They’d fry up eggs for you, two at a time, but I always asked for four eggs because I was a growing boy. The cooks would usually have plenty of eggs already cooking on the grill so they could keep the line moving, but there was one morning when I got there that the line was empty. Because of this, the cook only had four eggs on the fryer by the time I stepped up to him. So as I always did, I asked for four eggs, but by this point a couple of guys had gotten in line behind me. Which means the soldier directly behind me now had to wait for the cook to make more eggs. And that’s when I heard his voice.

“Hey thanks. Way to screw me at the egg line, dude.”

I turned around with a big grin on my face. I legitimately thought the guy was just being funny. I locked eyes with this young Army fella who was giving me a stone-cold stare down. The smile immediately disappeared from my face. Was this guy seriously pissed at me because I took some extra eggs??

“Fucking Air Force. I swear to God.”

He said it like I wasn’t even there. Then he walked right by me and ordered his food. I just stood there for a moment. I seriously couldn’t even believe this guy.

I didn’t say a word. I just walked away and headed over to the salad bar to get some fruit. Less than a minute later this guy came over to the salad bar as well, right next to me. It was literally less than a minute. As tends to happen with me when someone rubs me the wrong way, I got an inclination to say something to rile him up. What passed through my head was, “Oh good, I’m glad you were able to survive the extra thirty seconds you had to wait in line. It’s no wonder you Army guys are so tough.”

But I didn’t say it. And you may be thinking I chickened out, but that wasn’t it. When I turned to look at him the first thing I saw was the Big Red One on his right shoulder patch (the “combat patch”). The Big Red One is the very well known insignia of the First Infantry Division. And even though I’d seen this Big Red One on a thousand different soldiers, this particular time I took notice. Because it suddenly dawned on me why he was angry, and it wasn’t the eggs.

This guy looked worn out. You could smell the sweat from under his uniform. You could even see a thick layer of dust on his DCU’s. Mine, on the other hand, were freshly washed. Not like they even needed to be since I sat at a computer 98% of the time.

When I got back to ATOC, I handed the other guys their food and sat down at my desk. Then I told them what happened with this Army guy. They all immediately started chiming in with their comments.

“Fuck that guy. I get so sick of hearing that whiny bullshit from the Army.”

“For real. You should have just stayed there in line and ordered another dozen eggs.”

“Yeah, then take one bite and throw the rest in the trash right in front of him.”

Everyone laughed. I smirked and nodded in agreement, but the whole time I was thinking, “No. You know what? He’s right… Fuck us… And fuck me most of all.”

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When I enlisted in 2002 there was not a shred of commitment in me to duty or country. Even the fact that I was living in New York when 9/11 happened had no bearing on my decision to join. I only enlisted because I had nowhere else to go. And no one who knew me could ever imagine me in the military. So I chose to enlist in the “cushy” branch of the military (Air Force), and signed up for an “easy” job (Linguist).

Truth is, I’d always had an obsession with military history and the tales of self-sacrifice from veterans of my grandfather’s era, but I also believed back then that the days of real soldiering were over. I figured this war in Afghanistan would be a cakewalk, and aside from those in the Special Forces, it would be fought by some kid sitting at a computer, pushing buttons to drop bombs on targets he’d never even see with his own eyes. So when Iraq started less than a year later, it suddenly felt like I’d missed my chance to be a real soldier in a real war. Iraq seemed like it was going to be the “big” show, and I was very disheartened that I was going to be sitting on the sidelines for it.

I became obsessed with the war in Iraq. Especially as it started to get more and more chaotic, and people’s feelings towards it became more and more divisive. So I started writing about it, and studying every little piece of information I could find. Through the media, the internet, the military. Anywhere I could get my hands on it. I realize now that I really wanted to be a journalist more than a soldier. But I still desperately wanted to be there. Be in the thick of it. Be a real journalist, not a chicken-shit reporter who never left the Green Zone. I guess the way I’d phrase it is that I dreamed of being Ernie Pyle, not Chesty Puller.

Honestly, the amount of information I pored over in just a few years was utterly ridiculous. And all it taught me in the end was that even if you ingested information 24/7, read every article, every blog, every intel report, talked to every Iraqi, every soldier, every politician – even if you personally fought there – you still can’t know. You can only guess. After all, every single person who was ever there has a completely different experience that is wholly unique to them. And it ultimately leads every one of us to different conclusions.

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In September of 2003, I “rocked out” of the linguist school and was put into Air Transportation. It was due to disciplinary reasons, not academic ones. My Korean teaching team leader and I had a strong dislike of one another. She was not well liked by anyone in my class honestly, or many of the other teachers for that matter, but one day we got into it and I got a little too vocal about my sentiments. That led to a meeting with the Senior Master Sergeant.

I could have still stayed in as a linguist if I wanted to, but when I went in front of the Senior Master Sergeant I flat out told him I had no desire to be a linguist anymore, and as far as I was concerned they could just send me to whatever job they wanted. I must have articulated my feelings reasonably enough, because he really went quite easy on me considering that he probably should have disciplined me far more harshly.

I was sent to San Antonio to work on a flightline where we had barely two flights a week. The entire terminal only had staff of twelve. It may have been boring, but it did afford me the opportunity to get deployed in the summer of 2004, which was an experience I’d been secretly wanting.

But I wasn’t deployed to Iraq. I was deployed to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in support of the Afghan mission. Once again, I felt like I was doing nothing while there was real war going on. Most of my shifts were spent sitting around with little or nothing to do, just like back home. Then after only two weeks we got word that a group of us (the handful of active duty Airmen not attached to the main National Guard unit there) were being forward-deployed to Balad, Iraq. We were told they didn’t need us there in Bishkek, and Balad did, but it was widely believed by many of us that the National Guard running the place simply wanted us gone because they felt like we were “crashing their party.” What I mean by that is that Bishkek was a loafer’s dream assignment, and “loafer” was pretty much how many active duty personnel would define the Reserve and National Guard troops. Not to mention that the terminal at Bishkek was full of pretty Kyrgyz girls working closely with us as translators. Some of the younger, fitter active duty Airmen felt the older, fatter National Guard were a little threatened by us. To be fair, most of the lower-level National Guard in that unit were good people, but many of their higher-ups did not leave much of an impression on us. I remember some of their own guys telling us there were some who had faked parts of after-action reports just to get medals. And I remember one Master Sergeant telling us fondly of his days in Panama where they had “hot and cold running whores.”

For me, I didn’t care what their reasons were. I was just excited that I would actually be going to Iraq. Things were really starting to heat up over there. It was just after the first fight in Fallujah following that incident where the contractors had been killed and had their bodies hung from a bridge. Just after we turned over control of the country to Ayad Allawi and Iraqi Interim Government. We even heard there had been a mortar attack on Balad itself just days before we left that killed three soldiers on the base. I figured now I’d get to be part of the “real” mission. Not that Afghanistan wasn’t a real mission, but back then it wasn’t really clear that Afghanistan was going to be a problem. If there were problems in Afghanistan, the media didn’t talk about them much. Not after Iraq became the hot-button issue everyone wanted to read about. Plus, we had the whole world behind us in Afghanistan. I remember we spent one night in Bagram on our way to Balad, and the thing that I always remember is seeing soldiers from fucking everywhere. I saw soldiers from countries I’d never even heard of. Countries I didn’t even think had armies. I guess that’s why back then I cared about the mission in Iraq more. Because it was the one we might actually lose.

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Back then, those of us in the Air Force only had to do 3-4 month deployments. Mine lasted three months, and I don’t try to pretend that my wartime experience was even remotely on par with the likes of the soldiers and Marines who went into Najaf or Fallujah that year. In fact, I didn’t even like telling people I was a “veteran” for years after I got out, because I felt like I hadn’t earned it. I would say, “I was in the Air Force,” but I couldn’t bring myself to use the word “veteran.” After all, I was just one of the worker-bees. But I now allow myself to say that there was something about witnessing the war with my own eyes, as opposed to watching it on TV, that changed me. And I’m not even really referring to the constant mortar attacks, but rather seeing the effects it had on people. Seeing the steady flow of coffins and wounded. Seeing guys on stretchers with wide, hollow eyes and skin that looked gray. Young kids with their faces peppered with shrapnel. Loading coffins that only weighed forty pounds because “that’s all that was left of the guy.” And us trying to laugh it off by making jokes like, “I didn’t know one of the Olsen twins joined the Army.”

One moment that always stuck with me was standing behind a C-130 in the middle of the night as a few Special Forces guys loaded the coffin of one of their own into the cargo hold. I had driven them out to the aircraft, but they asked me to hang back so they could have a moment alone. Then I watched as these big, burly, bad-ass looking dudes sporting long, bushy beards all came pacing back to the vehicle, wiping streams of tears from their eyes. I remember when the guy in charge passed by me he just gently patted my shoulder and said, “Thanks.”

All I could manage to do was look down at the ground and say, “Yeah.”

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On the third anniversary of 9/11, which was just one day after our replacements arrived, a mortar landed right inside of “Tent City,” where all the Air Force personnel lived. It landed maybe 40 meters from where I was sleeping at the time. I’ve never gone from the recesses of a deep sleep to complete alertness so quickly in my life. I literally flew out of my bed and threw myself hard against the floor. It was the start of three separate attacks the insurgents launched on that day, and was easily the worst attack I went through during my time there. Mainly because most of the time the insurgents were just shooting blind, so the only thing you really felt during attacks was annoyance. This was the one time where you knew they’d pre-sighted their targets. This time they knew what they were aiming at. They were aiming at us.

That first mortar landed right on top of this young Airman as he was stepping out of his tent to get some water. He walked right into it. Like it was fate or something. He lost both his legs right up to the waist, was castrated, and lost one of his arms. It was a miracle he lived. Someone later told me he’d earned the title of “the most severely wounded soldier in Iraq to survive his wounds” at the time. I can’t verify that fact myself, but it does strike me to think about that now. How uniquely tragic his situation seemed back then, yet today his story is one you hear told over and over again.

I never actually saw him lying there on the ground all tore up, his arm “dangling by a thread” as one of my co-workers described it, but I remember hearing him. The power had gone out in our tent while I was asleep, and it would get up to 130 degrees outside. With no A/C the air felt stale and wet. I was covered in sweat and it was eerily quiet as I strapped on my body armor while staying low to the floor. Then suddenly I heard his moaning break the silence, and I froze. I remember it felt like the loneliest sound I’d ever heard, and that moment seemed to last for hours even though I know it was probably only a few seconds.

Immediately I feel like I knew what had just happened, but somehow I couldn’t make myself comprehend it. Like I just couldn’t grasp the notion that someone had truly been hurt that bad. As if things like that can only happen when I read about them in the paper, or see them on the news. It can’t happen when I’m actually there.

It was a long time before the “All Clear” sounded. I stepped outside and walked over to the spot where he’d been hit. I could see the rocks were saturated with water. I realized it was because they’d washed off the blood and flesh before releasing people from their tents. And you could see all the surrounding tents were torn up from shrapnel. Some people were even climbing on the sandbags to collect the shrapnel pieces. Having a shrapnel piece was a memento everyone wanted to take home with them (I have one myself), but it felt morbidly inappropriate to me seeing guys clamoring for pieces of a mortar that just hit someone.

Yet somehow, as I stood there, I still couldn’t really let myself accept what had happened, even though I knew. Then I looked over and made eye contact with one of the first-responders that had helped tend to the wounded Airman. It was like the instant our eyes met I suddenly let it sink in. It instantly became real. He looked spooked. Like he’d just seen something no one should have to see. That look has always been burned in my mind.

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The war wasn’t just something I thought about after my time there. It was something I felt. And it was there every single day. It was as if I was finally putting a face to all the stories.

One day back in Balad, I got on the bus that traveled around the base. There was another First Infantry kid on it when I got on. He was a little guy. Short, and quite young looking. We were the only ones on the bus at the time. He could tell I was Air Force by the P.T. clothes I was wearing, and he started talking to me. His father was in the Air Force, but he had decided to join the Army instead. He seemed to want to just randomly open up to a stranger, and I relished the opportunity since I was still in my “journalist” mode where I wanted to gather more and more information and perspective.

He proceeded to tell me a lot of tales. One about a night when their platoon was surrounded and the insurgents just kept coming at them. They popped like forty to fifty of them, and not one of their guys got hit. He also told me about this other unit that apparently had a reputation. Said something about them calling in a bomb on an unruly crowd after they just got sick of dealing with them. Of course, gossip is rampant in the war zone, so who knows exactly what happened. Back then I tended not to believe those stories, but I know now some of them were unfortunately true. Some. But we both laughed about it anyway. Half-heartedly because I don’t think either of us really thought it was funny.

I remember I was taking mental notes of our conversation. Wanting to grill him for more stories. More perspective. I wanted to hear as many perspectives on this thing as I could. Like it was a puzzle I actually believed I could solve. So he kept talking. He told me a little about home, about his father’s time in the Air Force, and then he started saying that maybe he should have followed in his father’s footsteps after all.

“I’m tired of being a grunt.”

He looked down at the ground when he said it. And suddenly I felt a wave of guilt. Because I realized that I had been looking at this kid like he was a source, not a person. And for all I knew he could be dead tomorrow. He was just looking for someone to unburden himself on, and I wasn’t even really hearing him. I was just studying him. But at that point, I stopped taking notes. I just listened…

I said goodbye to him as I got off at my stop. He stayed on the bus by himself. I realized he was on the bus when I got on, and given the route we’d taken I’m pretty sure he wasn’t going anywhere. I think he was just riding around in circles.

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When I got back home I had intense feelings of guilt that seemed to grow with every passing month. And to this day, they’ve never really left me, but back then it ate away at me. I believed that I had to go back. After realizing what other guys were going through for a war that I said I believed in, it made it seem that I had to do something more. In many ways, more for myself than anyone else.

I had heard that the convoy protection duty, hitherto solely an Army duty, was now taking Air Force personnel since the Army was becoming more and more short-handed. I remembered seeing some of these Air Force convoy troops in Balad after they’d lost one of their guys to an IED (roadside bomb). They were even allowed to wear the Big Red One combat patch on their uniforms since they were attached to Army units. I admit, I wanted to have that patch on my uniform when I saw it.

This seemed like my opportunity to contribute. But being on those convoys was one of the most dangerous jobs in Iraq at the time, especially as IED’s became more and more frequent. So I decided that before I did anything I’d ask my wife, Jackie, if she would be okay with me volunteering for the convoys and going back to Iraq. I promised myself that if she said she didn’t want me to do it then I wouldn’t do it, and that would be that. So I sat her down, and I asked her. Without hesitation, she told me she didn’t want me to do it. But after only a month I started asking around anyway. And I won’t try to pretend it was the sole reason we separated, but I know she has often said that she felt I had “one foot out the door,” so I can’t imagine that my doing that helped things between us very much.

Over the next year, I talked to a dozen or more senior NCO’s and officers trying to work around the red tape. The problem was that my AFSC was “2T2″ (Air Transportation), and they were only taking “2T1″ (Supply) and “2T3″ (Vehicle Ops) for the convoys at that time. So I technically wasn’t eligible. But I knew that they could work around it if I could just find someone willing to put in the leg work.

It took me nearly a year to find that person. It was the Vice Commander of our squadron. He was a full-bird Colonel, and he was one of those rare officers who seemed simpatico with the enlisted folks. One day, he was helping us load up a deployment of Army troops, and when he came through the terminal I stopped him and asked about getting on the convoys. “Well,” he told me, “One thing I know about the military – if we want to make it happen, we can make it happen.”

So that was it. He was going to put it through and after some training in Camp Bullis, I’d be on my way back. I found myself feeling very ambivalent in that moment. Because by this point, my enthusiasm for “fighting the good fight” had faded away. It had now been a year since I’d come back from Iraq. Jackie and I had split up, and throughout the course of 2005 I’d grown to truly believe the war would end in failure. It just seemed to get uglier and uglier over there. So I figured I was probably risking all this for nothing. But there was this part of me that desperately wanted (for once) to stick to my beliefs. I would be a hypocrite and a coward if I didn’t follow through on this. Even though I no longer had any desire to.

I really don’t think I ever found myself fearing death, but I was absolutely terrified of being crippled. The thought of losing my limbs or being burned so bad I’d come back looking like a zombie haunted my thoughts. The only thing I could do to keep up my nerve was to tell myself that if it happens to me, that means that some other guy who would have had to go in my place is going to be okay now. I’d have to keep telling myself that so I wouldn’t get weak in the knees. So that I could somehow feel like it was worth it.

But it never happened. It was only a few days after I spoke to the Colonel that I received new orders to deploy to Talil on another Air Transportation deployment. This would be another desk job on a relatively safe, fortified Air Base.
Since the orders came down right toward the end of my enlistment I would be required to extend my term if I went on this deployment. The Air Force could not force me to do that, so I could either extend and go, or opt out and leave on my scheduled exit date. Basically, I was either doing this deployment or I was doing no deployment at all. There would be no convoys. And I’m not ashamed to admit part of me was relieved.

But before I could turn down the orders I had to talk with Murphey about it. Murphey was five years younger than me, and he was the only person in our tiny, little terminal that was ranked below Sergeant besides me. I knew if I opted out of the deployment he’d have to go in my place. So I asked him if he was okay with that because I really didn’t want to fuck him over. He clearly didn’t care though, so it was a done deal.

A couple months later, just before Murphey was scheduled to ship out, I was in New York on leave when my friend back at the base, Smitty, called me and told me that Murphey had committed suicide. He’d gotten drunk alone on New Years Eve, wrote “I Love Myself” on his chest, then sat in a bathtub and dropped a DVD player in the water. My final duty for the military ended up being my volunteering to escort Austin Murphey’s body home to his family… But that’s a whole other story unto itself.

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There is a moment I always think about. When we got off the plane in Nevada to unload Murphey’s corpse so we could drive it out to his parents’ ranch. As the plane parked at the gate, the pilot made an announcement for the passengers to stay in their seats because, “We have two members of our Armed Forces on board who are escorting a fallen service member home to his family. So please allow them to exit first to carry out their duties.”

It was dead quiet as we got up in our dress blues and collected our baggage. As we started walking to the exit some of the passengers slowly started clapping, which quickly spread throughout the cabin. Suddenly everyone was applauding loudly, and my heart started to sink. Because I knew they assumed Murphey had been killed in combat, not that he was just some troubled kid who’d lost control one night. So I hurried as fast as I could to the door, trying to avoid eye contact. I literally felt sick.

I think about that often. Because after the time I spent with Murphey’s family, consoling them (even them consoling me on occasion), I’ve noticed how seeing the parents of fallen troops really gets to me in a way in it never did before. It’s strange, but even though Murphey’s death was from suicide and not combat, the agony the parents go through in both circumstances seems almost identical. You can just see them struggling so desperately to try and make sense out of it.

Sometimes I think we do a disservice by placing so much of this under the category of “war.” Because “war” is not just one thing. It’s an infinite number of things that people try to define in one word. True, it’s a collective experience, but it’s also a collection of individual experiences. I’ve always said that if someone told me the war was “good,” or that it was “bad,” then I knew they just didn’t get it. It’s not all heroic and noble, and it’s also not all vile and depraved. And you can’t really just say this is war. It’s not just war. It’s life.

One day I was sitting at my computer in Iraq reading some blogs. I started checking out some new Iraqi bloggers to see if there were any writers I might want to get into. I clicked on this one randomly, and what popped up was a blog with a Hello Kitty background. It kind of threw me aback. I soon realized the author was a fifteen year old Iraqi girl, and her blog was just about her day at school and playing with her friends (in between the occasional story of a bombing or kidnapping in the neighborhood). And I immediately started crying right there at my desk.

She was just a teenage girl, same age as my sister. Sounded no different than any fifteen year old girl you’d find back in the states. And I realized that the guys I knew who were actually there fighting – all they had to do was make it a year or so without getting killed and then it was over. They could come home. But for that young girl, that is her home. She never gets to leave that shit. This isn’t “war” for her… This is her life.

WALL STREET JOURNAL
“Switching Sides: Iraqi Teen Turned In His Father, Faces Dangerous Future”
By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS
June 14, 2004

His Intelligence Proved Useful, Says U.S. Military, Which Now Protects Him Finding Home in Shambles

HUSAYBAH, Iraq — One day in December, a smooth-chinned 14-year-old approached American soldiers at a checkpoint here and asked surreptitiously to be arrested. He told the soldiers that his father, an Iraqi Army officer under Saddam Hussein, led a 40-man cell of insurgents, and he agreed to show the troops where to find the men and their weapons.

The soldiers put a sack over the teen’s head, loosely cuffed his hands and led him away to a new life as an informant. U.S. officials say he has provided a wealth of military intelligence, allowing them to capture numerous insurgents in Iraq over the past six months.

But the teenager’s decision to turn on his father, who he says beat him, has cost him his family and his freedom. Since he began cooperating with the Americans, he has lived among U.S. troops, knowing that losing their protection would mean almost certain death at the hands of those he betrayed.

With the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government less than three weeks away, the troops who have used and befriended the teen are desperately seeking a way to get him to the U.S. The soldiers aren’t sure how they can legally take the boy — who isn’t an orphan — out of the country without it looking like Americans are stealing Iraqi children while there is no local government to stop them. It isn’t likely he would qualify for entry into the U.S. without special governmental dispensation. And even if soldiers get him to the U.S., they’d still have to find an American family willing to take in an illiterate, street-hardened youngster who speaks little English.

Insurgents in Iraq know the teen’s identity and that he has provided information to the Americans, according to the U.S. military. While U.S. commanders asked that his name and tribal affiliation not be disclosed, they are eager for publicity that might help the boy gain entry to the U.S. His story has been pieced together from interviews with him and U.S. military personnel, and from military records. While aspects of his personal history couldn’t be verified because people involved are either dead, in U.S. custody elsewhere in Iraq or have moved, soldiers and Marines who have dealt with the teen say information he has provided about the insurgency has been accurate.

The boy grew up in Husaybah, a border city of some 100,000, known for its smugglers of weapons, gasoline and other goods. His father was a powerful man around town, thanks to his ties to the Hussein regime. Speaking through a military interpreter, the teen says he had completed the equivalent of the third grade when he dropped out of school at age 13. He can’t read or write Arabic, except for a few simple words.

Some of his family memories are warm. He remembers his father happily cooking rice and dolma, grape leaves stuffed with mutton, tomatoes, peas and spices. But he also recalls the time his father brought home photos that pictured him beating a bound man with inch-thick cables. He thinks his father was trying to impress his mother with a show of force.

His father appeared to snap, the teen says, after Mr. Hussein’s regime fell in April 2003. He says his father spent time and money to build a network of insurgents to fight the Americans, and succumbed to frequent rages, beating his children more severely than ever before. Once, he says, his father tied his left hand to his left foot, and right hand to his right foot, and beat him “with anything that came into his hands.”

His body bears witness to the violence around him. His scalp is a roadmap of scars from beatings and an accident. The skin on the back of his left hand is disfigured from the time he says his father accused him of stealing money and used a red-hot spoon to punish him. The teen recalls crying for days, in part because his mother didn’t come to his rescue.

He says he joined the resistance at his father’s insistence, and never fired a shot. During his first operation, an ambush of an American patrol in November, he wedged himself into a pile of garbage from a local hospital, he says, trying to hide. He pulled his long-sleeved black T-shirt — the battle dress of the local mujahedeen — over his nose to mask the stench. Then he says he hid his AK-47 rifle amid the soiled syringes and empty food cans, and ran home to his mother.

After the gunplay died down, the teen says he retrieved his rifle from the trash, emptied bullets from his magazines, and told his father he had fired at the Americans. His father patted him on the shoulder and said, “I’m proud of you,” according to the boy. “You did a good job, my son.” The Americans are all “Jews and Christians,” he recalls his father saying. “They are strangers occupying our country. God will send our souls to paradise for fighting them.”

A while later, his father and others placed a bomb some 30 yards from an overpass above a stream and waited until a military convoy passed, he says. The idea was to flush the troops out with the explosion, then gun them down as they left their vehicles. The teen says he was supposed to fire on the soldiers.

Instead, he says he hid under the bridge in shallow water during the attack, hitting his head on a steel bar and opening a long gash on his head. The scar that runs back-to-front down the middle of his head is a result of that, he says. He spent the night concealed under the overpass, narrowly escaping capture, he says, by an American soldier sweeping the area with a flashlight attached to his rifle.

By this time his qualms about fighting were overwhelming, he says. He knew his father to be a cruel man, and his father’s description of the Americans didn’t match the soldiers he saw in the street, who sometimes handed candy or clothes to children they passed. “The Americans hadn’t hit me or tortured me, so I didn’t want to shoot them,” he says.

The morning after the bridge attack, he told his mother that he had been with his father. She was angry with her son and her husband. “You’re still a child,” he remembers her saying. “It’s not fair to involve you in all of this.”

‘I Want You to Be a Man’

The youngster tried to leave town once to stay with relatives elsewhere. His father’s men found him at the train station, he says, and hauled him home. His parents fought over the incident, and his father accused him of cowardice. “I want you to be my backup. I don’t want you to fear anyone,” he recalls his father saying. “I want you to be a man.”

“Do you think I’m a woman?” he says he answered. “I probably killed or wounded a soldier.” But the teen suspected his father knew he was lying.

The next day, Dec. 3, he told his family he had decided to go to Syria to find work. Instead, he put on a white robe, beige jacket and blue sandals and sidled up to American soldiers near the border checkpoint. Through a military translator, he convinced them he had information to provide, and asked that the soldiers make a public display of arresting him, so he would not be seen as a collaborator, according to military records.

The soldiers pushed him into a Humvee and drove him to their camp, according to the teen and First Sgt. Daniel Hendrex, of Dragon Company, First Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment.

The boy’s knowledge turned out to be immensely valuable, according to military records and officers who dealt with him. Soldiers immediately raided a yard next to the boy’s house and arrested his father along with a second man, according to First Sgt. Hendrex and his company commander at the time, Capt. Chad M. Roehrman. The second man was a Syrian, the boy says. Hidden from view, the youngster pointed to several spots in the yard, and in each one, soldiers dug up a trove of rocket-propelled grenades, rockets and hand grenades.

Under interrogation by Army special forces soldiers, also known as Green Berets, the teen’s father and the Syrian man denied any knowledge of the weapons. Then the interrogators, apparently hoping to get the men to confess, showed the prisoners a photo of the teen, revealing him as their informant, according to First Sgt. Hendrex and Capt. Roehrman.

The interrogators “thought that was the best and quickest way” to get information from the men, recalls Capt. Roehrman, who talked to the interrogators afterwards.

The interrogators had no evidence connecting the Syrian to insurgent activities, so they released him, according to Capt. Roehrman, a 29-year-old from Ellsworth, Kan. Inevitably, that meant the teen’s actions became known in Husaybah, according to the captain and first sergeant.

“The next day, everyone in Husaybah knew I had betrayed them,” the teen says. “I was terrified.” Insurgents constantly threaten to assassinate collaborators in the area, and frequently carry out those threats, according to U.S. military officials and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a U.S.-created force that polices the area. The teen says he was especially worried about his mother’s welfare.

“It was beyond risky” to reveal the boy’s role, says First Sgt. Hendrex, 34. “We weren’t happy with it when we found out.”

Yet even without the release of the second man, the teen’s family probably would have guessed that he had turned his father in, says Lt. Col. Gregory Reilly, commander of the First Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. “They can connect the dots,” he says. The boy “goes away and we show up.”

In response to questions about the incident, Col. Jill Morgenthaler, the top coalition public-affairs officer in Iraq, said the military is now investigating whether special forces troops gave away the teen’s identity. “We’re looking into this,” Col. Morgenthaler said in a telephone interview. “This really goes against the principle of keeping one’s sources secret for his or her protection.”

The boy’s father remains in coalition custody in Iraq, according to Col. Morgenthaler.

One day not long after the father’s arrest, First Sgt. Hendrex says he was in the squadron’s tactical-operations center when the boy pointed to a photo on a computer screen. “Mujahedeen,” he said, describing the man pictured as a major financier of insurgent operations. First Sgt. Hendrex checked the files and found the teen’s description matched military-intelligence reports. Soon the youngster had identified 30 of the 40 or so pictures the Army had on hand, according to First Sgt. Hendrex and military records.

“My jaw almost hit the floor,” First Sgt. Hendrex says. “Here was a kid who knew the inner workings of basically all the people we were fighting against there in Husaybah.”

The Army began taking the teen out on raids and patrols, with First Sgt. Hendrex — who became the boy’s closest American friend — as his escort and protector. Soldiers would dress him in a balaclava, a headwrap that covered his face, and dark sunglasses, and take him in an armored Humvee. At 5-foot-6, he was small enough to fit in the cramped area behind the feet of the turret gunner.

As they drove down the streets of Husaybah, he would identify people and houses. In exchange, he received a total reward of about $1,000, and the affection of those around him, says First Sgt. Hendrex. He figures the soldiers took the teen on some 25 operations between December and the squadron’s departure from Iraq in March. Military records show the youngster had a high rate of success in identifying alleged insurgents, whom he says he knew through his father.

On the day he approached U.S. troops, a soldier kiddingly gave the teen the nickname Steve-O. Another soldier thinks that was a reference to a character in Jackass, a raunchy MTV show. Along the way, the name stuck and became the teen’s code name in military reports and on missions.

Before the boy arrived, “we just weren’t getting a lot of information” from locals, says Lt. Col. Reilly, 43, from Sacramento, Calif. His tips led to arrests, which led to more intelligence, which led to more arrests. The boy “got the ball rolling,” Lt. Col. Reilly says.

The Humvee that Steve-O rode in during his operations came under attack three times. Once, a huge roadside bomb — made from a buried 155 mm artillery shell — blew up as they passed by the hospital. The teen and the first sergeant escaped unscathed, but three others in the Humvee were wounded.

The Army judged the risk worthwhile. The boy’s memory for names and faces was keen, First Sgt. Hendrex and Capt. Roehrman say. After a roadside bomb attack near a busy market street, Steve-O spotted the trigger man and led the soldiers first to the man’s house and then to the man’s grandfather’s house. There, soldiers found him wounded and hiding, according to the Army’s report on the operation. Steve-O even identified insurgents who were working inside the Army’s base, according to military records and First Sgt. Hendrex.

On their last mission together before the Army turned over control of the area to the Marines, the first sergeant agreed to the teen’s request to visit his home. “I wanted to see my mom one more time,” he says. The Army had earlier given her money and encouraged her to leave the area, First Sgt. Hendrex says. This time, they found the home in shambles, and the family gone.

While the teen remained hidden in a Humvee and out of earshot, First Sgt. Hendrex talked to a relative. The relative told him an Iraqi gunman shot the boy’s mother in the stomach in early January. The relative thought she was probably dead, but he wasn’t certain.

It took the first sergeant until the next day to get up the nerve to tell the boy the news. He took him aside in front of the squadron’s command post, its “Brave Rifles” logo above the door, and told him his mother had been shot by the mujahedeen. The boy sobbed, and the first sergeant wrapped him in his arms, both recall.

“Stay safe while we do everything we can to get you out,” First Sgt. Hendrex wrote Steve-O, just before his unit left Iraq in March. The note included a couple pictures of the youngster grinning, his arm clutching the first sergeant at this side. The first sergeant gave him a floppy camouflage hat with “Hendrex” stitched into it in Arabic. “When you get to the States, you have to give it back to me,” both the teen and First Sgt. Hendrex recall the soldier saying. The first sergeant is back at home in Fort Carson, Colo., where his regiment is based.

The Marines, who now control the area, have been more reluctant than the Army to use the teen as an intelligence source. He still identifies suspects when they’re brought into the base, Marines say. But Lt. Col. Matthew Lopez, commander of Third Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment, refuses to allow him to leave the base. It is just too dangerous for a minor, he says.

“It’s hard for me to comprehend how a 14-year-old could have been put through that by his own family,” says Lt. Col. Lopez, a 40-year-old Chicagoan who says his own mother had often taken in foster children.

Fast Friends

The boy picks up what English he can from the Marines, or speaks Arabic with the military’s translators. He quickly became friends with Marine Lance Cpl. Akram Falah, a 23-year-old Jordanian-American from Anaheim, Calif. They ate together and spoke Arabic together. Lance Cpl. Falah urged Steve-O to save his money. The teen teased the Marine by pronouncing his name, “Falalalalalah” — mimicking the ululating sound Arab women make when celebrating. But Lance Cpl. Falah was shot in the arm during an ambush in April, and evacuated to the U.S.

First Sgt. Hendrex says he and Capt. Roehrman are trying to get the boy to the U.S. They have contacted attorneys, lawmakers and the State Department. For the moment, First Sgt. Hendrex says, U.S. diplomats advise them to wait until there is a sovereign Iraqi government, and they know what Iraqi law will be regarding adoptions.

“What we’re doing is looking for a safe, caring place for him to live,” says Col. Morgenthaler. “The United States is one option.”

Stuart Patt, a spokesman for the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, says a minor without skills or resources would be unlikely to qualify for a normal immigrant or visitor’s visa. U.S. law bars adoptions without the permission of parents, unless a court rules the parents incompetent. “There has to be a court somewhere that has the capacity to remove the parents’ parental rights,” Mr. Patt says. “But the situation in Iraq is such that that’s not likely to be accomplished in the immediate future.”

The most promising option, Mr. Patt says, would be “humanitarian parole,” a special status that was granted to the Iraqi lawyer who helped free Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch after she was captured last year. Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, says that until officials receive a formal application for the youngster, “it would be impossible to say whether he would qualify or not for some form of parole.” No one has yet applied on the boy’s behalf.

“If we bring him into the States, we want to tie him into a Muslim family,” says First Sgt. Hendrex in a telephone interview. “We don’t want to pull him completely out of a Muslim context.” But the first sergeant, whose wife is pregnant with their first child, says if necessary the couple will try to find some way to adopt the boy themselves. The teen says he already considers the first sergeant to be like a father.

These days, he spends his time lifting weights, watching war movies or action films on DVDs owned by the troops, and hanging out with the seven Marines with whom he shares a plywood-walled sleeping area. He wears his hair Marine-style, tight on the sides and high on top, and sports a set of fatigues the Marines gave him. His bunk is curtained off by a zebra-patterned blanket, and he has wedged a stuffed bulldog into the metal footboard.

In a wooden ammo box, he keeps his belongings: an American flag folded with military precision into a triangle, deodorant sticks given to him by soldiers, a box of Crayola crayons, fingerless gloves for weightlifting, a digital camera and First Sgt. Hendrex’s floppy hat. If all else fails, some Marines say, only half-jokingly, they will hand Steve-O a rifle and march him onto the plane when the battalion leaves Iraq, in late summer or early fall.

At night, the teen says he sometimes wakes up in tears, thinking about his mother. For comfort, he assures himself all that has happened has been God’s will. “If they don’t take me to the States, I’m definitely going to be killed,” he says matter-of-factly. He says he would like to return to school and one day enlist in the Army or Marine Corps. “I just want to be one of the American troops,” he says.

“It never ends! It just goes on and on…”

September 11th, 2004
Balad, Iraq

This is the kind of story that begins one of two ways: Either with “Something evil was in the air that night.” Or else “It was a day like any other.” This particular story happens to be the latter. There was nothing uneasy about the 11th. In fact, my replacement had just arrived, so I was feeling pretty damn good. I was one step closer to going the fuck home. Plus, I was actually looking forward to leaving the desk for a while and getting out on the flightline to do some “man work” (up until now I’d only been out to work on the flightline 5 or 6 times). I usually hated being on the flightline, because I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing out there quite frankly, but at the same time I really prefer being outside and around the planes rather than feeling like a desk jockey.

After work, I decided I needed to get back to the gym that day, because I’d been lazy for a while, and I was feeling lazy yet again. But I needed to work out, and I also needed an excuse to shower (yeah, I was that lazy). So I pushed myself to go, and felt pretty good afterwards. I got back to my tent, rubbed one out, and went to bed (as was the style of the times). And when I finally fell asleep, I fell asleep HARD. The kind of sleep where you forget where you are, which was just the kind I wanted. That was probably about 1:00pm…

It started a little over an hour later. I’ve never in my life have gone from the deep recesses of sleep to complete alertness so quickly. The impact was by far the loudest (and closest) I’d heard yet. In about .02 seconds I barrel rolled from my bed and slammed flat onto the floor. I only peaked my head up long enough to reach up and pull my body armor and kevlar off the top of the bunk and let it fall to the floor. I strapped it on while staying low.

The second hit scared me even more than the first, because it was the first time I’d ever heard the mortar “zip in” as it hit. Not like the long whistle you hear when they fly over your head, but the sound of it tearing the air just an instant before impact. I could tell these were hitting inside tent city.

When you get to talk with Special Ops guys, it gives you some insider information that you eventually come to regret having. Like the knowledge that when the insurgents are hitting a juicy target like Tent City with such stellar accuracy, that usually means somebody has marked these spots ahead of time. Usually you know they are shooting blind, so you just kind of ride it out without much worry, but this time I just knew that I should be afraid, because they actually knew what they were aiming at.

So I curled up and laid on the floor as flat as I could. I think I said a quick prayer, but I don’t remember. After some tense silence, I realized my left elbow was stinging. Apparently I skinned it a little when I hit the floor.

As the silence lengthened, I started to feel calmer, so I sat up a little and grabbed the hand sanitizer from my wall locker and put it on my elbow (since my OCD reminded me that the floor was probably covered in germs). It stung like a bitch too (I started imagining myself letting out a Rambo scream as I treated my “wounds”, then I started laughing to myself). I put on some shorts and got comfortable, but stayed on the floor. Everyone was quiet except for the one guy who always talked too much (even now). I noticed the power was out again (which happens often). “Did they knock out the power?” I asked. “No,” the chatty guy answered, “It was already out.”

In the silence that followed, I could hear someone yelling nearby. I heard a man saying something I couldn’t decipher. They sounded distraught. Then I was able to make out a woman shouting, “We need some help over her!” Shortly afterward, there were some sirens from responding emergency vehicles. “Do you think someone got hit?” I said to my tentmates. No one said anything. We were still under “Alarm Red” status, and everyone just stayed on the floor and waited.

It took a while before we went into “All Clear”. I took off my stuff and went out of the tent quickly, wondering where the rockets hit, and more importantly, if anyone was hurt. As soon as I walked out the front door, I could see the emergency vehicles and a group of people gathered up in between tents G-7 and F-7 (about 40 feet from my tent, directly up the aisle). I wanted to go check it out, but at the same time I didn’t want to be a “gawker” (it’s a pet peeve of mine). Then I saw some other people just to my right, talking amongst themselves. They seemed to know what had happened. As I approached, I saw Truitt out there as well. There was an officer who said the first impact was right up there by G-7 and F-7 where everyone was gathered.

“Did anyone get hit?” I asked him, but just as soon as I finished my question, the “Alarm Red” siren started wailing again. Everyone just fuckin’ scattered, especially those (like me) who didn’t have their armor on.

I ran into the tent, grabbed the armor off the bunk again, and threw it on the ground. Again, I strapped it on while I laid down. Another tense several moments of silence went by before another close impact shook the tent. I curled up and laid flat on my side again, but this time I decided to wedge up between the sides of the tent (by the sandbags) and the wall locker behind me. I suddenly had this uncomfortable feeling that the bed would just give the concussion of the rockets something to hurl against my body if I laid underneath it.

As I laid there waiting to hear if there would be another hit, I started thinking, “Well this is definitely something worth writing about. Perhaps, I should make a note of the date… What is today anyway?” That’s when I realized what was going on. This was the insurgents’ 9/11 fireworks celebration. A little holiday “fuck you” from them to us. I immediately realized that this was definitely a pre-planned attack, and that this was not going to be the last one of the day. I’d be lucky if I got any more sleep tonight at all.

That one impact was the only one we heard in that second part of the attack. Several minutes later, “All Clear” was sounded again, and back outside everyone went (though a little more hesitant than before). I kept my armor on this time (although I did take off my helmet), and I met up with Truitt again. This time I walked over with him to the first impact site between G-7 and F-7 and decided to take a look.

They had cleaned up already, and there wasn’t any noticeable signs of the crater. Some of the sandbags on the ground were fucked up, but I remember thinking it didn’t look like much damage had been done at first glance. The rocks were saturated with water. I didn’t understand why at first (for some reason I couldn’t imagine someone had been hurt that bad), but then it occurred to me later that they had cleaned the blood off the rocks before releasing everyone from their tents (so it wouldn’t freak anyone out I’m guessing). I suppose I should have known what had happened by the looks on people’s faces. I remember one guy in particular that I made eye contact with had this look on his face like he’d just seen something REAL fucked up.

Someone pointed out the shrapnel holes on tent G-7, and then I noticed that ALL of the surrounding tents had shredded holes in them from shrapnel pieces. There were a couple guys actually climbing on the sandbags to pick pieces of shrapnel out of the tents to take home with them (a prized memento here in Iraq – one that I’ve got myself), but there was something about taking shrapnel from a rocket that actually hit someone that turned my stomach.

I saw Holguin walking by, and asked him if he knew what had happened. He said he’d heard somebody was hurt, but didn’t know who, how many, or how bad. He was looking for Tyloski because he knew he lived in that row of tents.

Everyone was standing around talking about the attack. There was a Chaplain standing nearby with a walkie talkie. I heard someone come over the radio. “We need people with type O negative or B negative blood to report to medical immediately. Repeat, anyone with O negative or B negative blood.” People quickly started asking around.

After that, I walked with Truitt down to the smoke pit by town hall. Menthol or not, it seemed a good time for a cigarette. We were sitting out there chain-smoking with a bunch of others, while two truckloads of Iraqi workers were being loaded up by their armed escorts. We watched them driving the Iraqis away. It felt kind of weird, looking at them after that, and them looking at us.

I heard later from one of our ATOC guys, that one of the escorts told him the Iraqis started making noise (what he said was cheering) as soon as the Alarm Red started wailing. MSgt. Moneymaker and Cpt. Neal said they heard a few “Allahu Akbar!!” go out from the same crowd. MSgt. Moneymaker says that he thinks maybe they were praising Allah for being spared (since some hit real close to where they were working at over by Town Hall), but most people didn’t buy that, and neither did the escort who was with them. He didn’t seem to get the impression that they were upset at all.

We’ve all been told in the briefings from OSI that they believe about 4 in 10 of the local workers are probably spying for the insurgents, and we’ve heard about how the Iraqi workers helped put the sandbags up in Tent City, and then the week after they were done, Tent City got lit up like it had a beacon on it. The escort said he got pissed off because he was actually being nice to those workers. But from now on, he planned to just “treat them like prisoners” like everyone else does.

If you know me, you know that I personally consider the costs of this war more in terms of the Iraqis than I do the Americans, but just the same, you can’t be too naive out here. I think back to my first days in Balad, before they started construction on the new aircraft parking area. At the ATOC building where I work, we have only port-a-potties out back and no sinks. That’s fine when you got to piss, but I’m kind of “icky” about public toilets in general, and washing with just hand sanitizer gel is not enough for me (I’ve since been forced to get used to it). At the time, they had a toilet trailer set up in the open dirtfield by the flightline where the construction is now happening. Apparently, it was set up for some Army guys, but never got any use, and now it just sat there secluded in the middle of nowhere, and no one goes there — except for me. I’d make the 5-minute walk everyday just to sit on a real throne, and wash my hands in a real sink. Since no one else went there, they were always clean too. It was the most relaxing part of my day quite frankly. I looked forward to it even more than my daily masturbation.

The first time I went over there, I came down the gravel path and saw 15 or so Iraqis sitting together eating lunch by their trucks… and that was all I saw. No escorts, no guards, in fact nobody as far as the eye could see. Just me, 15 Iraqis, and dirt. They all just sort of stopped and looked at me as I casually went into the bathroom. I had just arrived at the base, and my mind told me, “These are the struggling Iraqis. The ones we fight for”, but another part of my instincts were saying, “Hmm… I come here alone everyday, at about the same time to take a shit, and every day there is no one for miles around but these shifty looking Iraqis.” Even for a newbie I should have realized that any Iraqi with a second grade math ability could calculate that I was a hostage-taker’s wet dream. I should have just turned and ran. Just ran as fast as I could, flailing my arms, and screaming like the little bitch that I am.

Well anyway, after two cigarettes with Truitt at the smoke pit, I went back to the tent and found the power was back on (they fixed it much quicker than usual). I went ahead and went to the shower trailer to brush my teeth and shave (since I was still kind of awake), then I got back into bed at around 4:30pm, and tried to squeeze in a few more hours sleep before the next attack.

I went to work early to call my family (making sure not to mention this incident, and hoping it wouldn’t be mentioned in the news in the following days). On my way in, I saw a C-17 parked out on the flightline by itself. We generally send the injured out on C-141′s, but something inside just told me that the injured Airman was on it, which he was.

I eventually pieced together the whole story of what happened to him later on in the evening:

Apparently this Airman, named Brian Kolfage, was an Air Force cop who worked down in the customs area of the A-2 tents with this civilian worker I know named Wayne. Wayne is a solid guy, and he comes up by our office all the time (he’s the PAX guy for all the non-Air Force passengers). He gave me most of the details that he got from the guys in Brian’s unit.

When the rocket hit, Brian had JUST stepped out of his tent. Nothing could have helped him at that point. It was just wrong place, wrong time. Everyone heard the concussion, and a couple people got scraped with shrapnel, but thankfully, nothing real serious. The people in the nearby tents took cover like the rest of us until they started hearing Brian calling for help. Tyloski heard him too, and went out to see what was happening. Ty said he actually saw him lying there on the ground, his legs all fucked up, and one arm dangling by a thread. He said that at that point, there was already more than enough people around him, so he went back inside his tent. “I really didn’t need to see that shit anyway,” he told me.

Brian’s tentmate and friend, Cortez, had apparently gone out and tied off his limbs to prevent him from bleeding to death. He basically saved his life. Later in the articles I read, Cortez said that when he first came out and kneeled down by his friend, Brian just looked at him and said, “Dude, I already know. Just get me home to Nikki.” Nikki being his fiancé.

They got help as soon as they could, and had to take him out on a truck and immediately into surgery. The CASF (medical) people told one of our Lieutenants that he looked worse than they’d ever seen. He lost tons of blood and it was miracle he even survived the impact itself. His legs were both amputated almost all the way to the waist (and of course he also lost his man-parts), and the one arm was lost as well. Basically, there was nothing they could do for him here at Balad, so a flight mission was re-cut to Med Evac him out to Germany for medical care at a real hospital. His entire unit was there to see him off.

The fucked up thing is that in the military, the spouse and immediate family is everything, but otherwise, you’re not even a concern. Well, Brian had a fiancé… but not a wife. Therefore, the military had no obligation to tell her anything, so now it would be Cortez’s job to do it, and he had no idea what the fuck he was gonna say.

Even if this guy lives (and it’s a big “if” at this point), he’s got no legs and one arm. Will his wife stick by him? It’s a hell of a test of love. I think I’d almost rather just bite it myself. Wayne was saying, “What if he pulls through and then blames Cortez — ‘Why didn’t you just let me die?’” It’s too fucked up to even think about. His life is over no matter what. Not that he can no longer exist as a human being, but HIS life — The life he had before this happened — is over. All because he had to go get a bottle of water. By all accounts, he should’ve still been asleep in his bed when the damn thing landed. It was about 2:20pm, and he didn’t start work until 7:00pm. That rocket and him practically walked right into each other. Like it was fate. If that particular hit had been the second rocket to land and not the first, he would have been taking cover from the alarm like I was, and at most just hit with some shrapnel. At least a soldier in the field has a chance to fight back, or go out shooting. Bad luck is a shitty way to go out.

I think most everyone was effected by that incident. It’s one thing to have this happen just as you’re about to go home like I was, but we were at the tail end of a rotation and most of our guys JUST got here. My replacement and about 15 others had arrived THAT day. Now they start off their 4 months with this on their minds. It gives you a different outlook on your job to say the least.

Two days after it happened I was sitting with another guy waiting to get on the public computers, and I looked over and saw that he’d written his blood type onto his helmet. I never saw that shit before that attack. No one really worried about it that much. I mean, it affects everyone differently of course. Some people were shaken, some people were angry, some want to get more involved in the war, some just want to say “fuck this war” and go home — and then there’s also guys like our Lieutenant who simply said of the whole thing, “Jeez, one guy gets blown apart and everybody freaks out. What’s the big deal?”

I almost regretted not going outside and seeing what happened to him myself. I mean, I didn’t really want to see that guy squirming with his limbs hanging off of his body, but I think it’s important to SEE what happens here. To see the emotional impact as well. I watched a group of Special Ops guys loading the coffin of one of their boys into a C-130 the other night. There’s something about a bunch of big, bad-ass mutha fuckers with their dusty beards and tattoos, wiping the tears from their eyes, that puts it all in perspective.

Wayne said that it actually made him think twice about leaving his job in Iraq. “My wife doesn’t like that I’m over here, but she understands that at the same time it’s just something I feel like I have to do… I just want to see every one of these guys get on a plane out of here.”

I felt the same way for some reason. I told him how being over here, and doing my small part, just somehow makes me want to do a bigger part. I knew it was kind of crazy, but I had even been thinking about trying to volunteer for convoy protection when I get back. I’d been thinking about it for about a week, and somehow this incident (along with meeting Jassim, the 14 year old Iraqi) only made me consider it more. But at the same time, Jackie needs me around, and so does my family. I need to get my life together (specifically my life after the military).

I’ve always known I can’t make a career of this military shit, but at the same time I want to do something more with my 4 years than just send retirees on free flights to Hawaii. So who knows what the right thing to do is. But for some reason, the closer I get to it, the less I seem to fear it. Of course, I also feel like I shouldn’t be trying so hard to prove something. It’s complicated, and I should wait until I’ve settled back at home before making any serious decisions. I feel I have other things that need my attention more than just trying to prove whether or not I have the balls to take a bullet.

All in due time I guess. For those of us that have it…

ADDENDUM

Intelligence reports said that two Iraqi workers were seen in Tent City about a week before the attack “servicing” a potable water tank that hadn’t been touched in months (and I generally only see the Phillipinos working on them when I’m out there). They had a notepad with them and were writing stuff down while speaking to each other in Arabic. A troop approached them and questioned the two men about what they were doing there, to which one worker replied in broken English “servicing the water”. After he talked to them a while, the soldier told them not to come back to this area ever again and leave immediately, which they did… taking their notepad with them.

On the 8th, the same Iraqi worker was spotted on base giving a notepad to a foreign KBR employee. A troop approached them and asked what they were doing. The KBR employee then quickly hid the notepad behind his back, and the two said they were just talking. They were then told to leave the area, which they did… taking their notepad with them.

On the day of the attacks themselves, two Airmen who lived in the trailers just behind Tent City witnessed suspicious incidents as well. One Airman observed LNS workers who were hired to install bookshelves in the new trailers (currently being constructed to eventually replace the tents) taking cover behind concrete barriers and sandbags just minutes before the first rocket impacted. The Airman said he found this highly suspicious because the LNS workers typically do not seem concerned during most attacks. During one previous attack, the Airman said that when the workers were instructed by Air Force personnel to seek shelter they simply replied, “We have work to do.” The Airman also stated that during the UXO sweep following the attack, he noticed the workers lunch plates set up around the sandbags as well. He also said this was suspicious because they normally ate there lunch out in the open area around the trailers.

The day after the rocket attack, the orders came down from command: All helmets and flak vests will be worn at ALL times when outside of your tents or buildings. Even while working on the flightline. The base went into FPCON Delta (which is basically the same status military bases were in after 9/11). No foreign workers (specifically Iraqis) would be allowed on base until further notice, which fucked me over because Wayne was supposed to be getting me an Iraqi scarf for Jackie through some guys he knew, but now they wouldn’t be allowed in, and I was leaving soon. They also closed the gym and the REC center until further notice. It’s all overreaction at its finest. No vest, no lack of facilities, and no amount of “safety” speeches would have kept Kolfage from getting blown apart by that rocket. The only thing that might have saved him is if some dumbass had decided to take away an Iraqi’s notepad, instead of just giving him a stern lecture.

No big deal though. They re-opened everything a couple days later, and then removed the rule on the vests and helmets a day after that. I’m guessing they’ve hit their targets and feel pretty confident were back in the clear. Otherwise, they realize there’s really nothing that can be done about it. We’re in Iraq after all.

The 9/11 anniversary was big day of attacks all around Iraq. BIAP (Baghdad Int’l Airport) was hit especially hard. Thankfully, the news didn’t say much about Balad, what with the extensive damage all around the country, and especially in Baghdad. There were seven car bombs in Iraq (two they said did not go off), and even an attack on Abu Ghraib where a truck filled with explosives was driven into the main gate (Marines shot the driver dead before he hit his target). The news was mainly talking about the Arab reporter who was killed in Baghdad when an Apache opened fire on a crowd of Iraqi people gathered around a burning Bradley armored vehicle. Apparently, a couple guys put a terrorist flag into the burning wreckage of the Bradley, and there were reports of gunfire from somewhere on the street, and kids throwing rocks. U.S. military officials said they were worried they’d loot the wreckage for weapons, so they opened fire.

I wondered if this was just another day of “fighting in Iraq” for the American news audience. This was a pretty heavily orchestrated string of attacks by the terrorists (terrorist groups Tawid and Jihad {linked to Zaqarwai} took credit for the attacks that stretched all across the country). And the horrible incident with the Apache just made it that much more sickening. It bothered me to think that after something like this, it was more than likely that U.S. retaliation might kill a lot of Iraqi civilians.

That “thinking” that I was talking about before?… I keep doing a lot of it. You know growing up, you learn certain things. You learned that WWII was a “good” war, and that Vietnam was a “bad” war. I’m inclined to believe that they were all about the same. You take that as you want it. It’s not a pro-war opinion, it’s not an anti-war opinion. It’s just an opinion. I still greatly believe in what we’re doing out here, but that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.

More Al Qaeda operatives passed through Iran’s borders today carrying heavy weaponry. In Samarrah, a band of Iraqi vigilantes is terrorizing the terrorists. A young Iraqi boy turned in his father in to Coalition troops, got his mother killed, and had to seek assylum in U.S. The leader of a band of insurgents responsible for several IED attacks against U.S. convoys accidentally blew himself up along with two of his men. Locals now feel safe enough to reveal the location of the group’s hidden weapons cache to U.S. troops. An Apache launches missiles on a crowd of Iraqi civilians in the middle of Baghdad, killing a journalist, an 11-year old girl, and eleven others (footage available online). No report on how many of the 13 killed were actually bad guys. An Airman at Balad Air Base is “Wounded In Action” when he’s hit with a mortar just outside his tent, loses both legs and one arm…

And then those words start echoing in my mind again: “It never ends. It just goes on and on…”

I visited Kate in Chicago recently while on my way to go do some shows in Wisconsin. In case you hadn’t heard, Kate is one of four members of the illustrious “Posse,” which is the name given to an elite organization that includes me, O’Banion, Minnie and Kate. We all formed up in Phoenix in 2001 for the first of several trips we took together over the next couple years to such locations as San Francisco / Napa Valley, Ocean City and Las Vegas before we unofficially disbanded. Not that we stopped being friends or anything, it’s just that everyone kind of went down their own separate paths. Not to mention that everyone is also currently embroiled in serious relationships (except me of course). It definitely makes me melancholy to know that I’ll never get to have another night like the nights we used to all have together, but I know I’ll always have them in my life. And I know that I’ll be there at each and every one of their funerals. Because, as we’ve often pointed out, I will outlive everyone I know. And I will be extremely pissed off about it.

I’d say I’m the only member of the Posse who has still maintained strong ties with all the other members. I’ve always had a closeness to each of them I don’t have with any of my other friends. Not that there aren’t some friends that I feel as strongly about as I do them, but there’s a certain bond I have with the Posse members that no one else can really compare to. I guess it’s because they’ve seen me at my absolute worse and have still always cared for me like no one else has. They’ve known me more intimately, and for a longer time, than anyone else. And I think I also enjoy the fact that all four of us are very, very different types of people.

Kate is one of the easiest people in the world for me to talk to. On the surface, she would describe herself more as just your average American type of gal. A self-described “Top 40” girl who is definitely open-minded, but still more on the conservative side. She’s never really wanted anything more than just a regular life. Go to college, get a good job, meet a good man, and have a good home. So with my being incredibly not good at relating to regular people, it’s no wonder that it almost ended up that we didn’t stay friends in our early days. She admits that she really didn’t understand back then what made someone like me act out the way I often did. But now I feel truly accepted by her, and there really is no judgment in her. At least not with me anyway. I would take her advice over anyone else’s any day of the week.

I recall an incident from a few years back that illustrates how I feel about Kate. Her and I were with some friends walking downtown in Los Angeles and a grungy, homeless guy asked us for money, and when Kate (politely) said we did not have anything to offer he started cursing at her. I immediately lost my shit, and went off on this guy. And I’m realizing now something in particular about that incident. It takes a real “trigger” to set off my temper, even though I regretfully admit that I have a really bad temper (which I don’t think a lot of my more recent friends know about me). Back in San Francisco, when I was still with Jackie, the exact same thing happened. She (also politely) declined a homeless guy’s request for money, and he proceeded to call her a “white ass slut.” And during that exchange, all I did was laugh. Because let’s face it, “white ass slut” is pretty funny. And also because it was a generic insult that meant nothing towards Jackie. The difference with the incident in L.A. was that this guy said something specific about Kate that I knew she was sensitive about. So in that instant I knew he’d hurt her. And that was what made all the difference.

Granted, this guy was all talk and clearly didn’t want to actually fight anyone so the instant I got in his face he pretty much backed down, but then he started trying to redeem himself once he realized he was starting to look like a pussy. He started posturing and I just told him to get the fuck out of there because he was clearly just a pathetic chunk of smelly, homeless shit. I think at some point he did realize that he had the advantage of being the only one who had nothing to lose, even though he also realized that if push came to shove I would really have enjoyed curb-stomping his face.

He threw his bag down and then took his shirt off, but continued to back away any time I stepped near him. So I picked up his bag and casually told him, “You’re done,” as I LAUNCHED his bag down the street away from us. I swear it felt like I threw that thing ten blocks. Then he just kind of sank his shoulders down in defeat as we all walked away, while he begrudgingly went to go retrieve the bag carrying the only items in this world that belonged to him.

I just remember how Kate was really moved by that. And not in that bullshit, Jerry Springer, “I like seeing guys fight” kind of way. It’s that she knew that my seeing someone do something hurtful to her set me off in a very genuine way. As in, I was not just doing it because I felt I had to, or because I just wanted to start shit. On a purely instinctual level I just couldn’t even stand the idea of someone doing her wrong, no matter how minute it may have seemed at the time.

I also remember when we got home our friend Brad said, “That was awesome! I know you don’t like to brag, but I’m gonna tell that story to people. And when I do I’m going to tell them that you launched this dude’s bag all the way into the stratosphere where it has now formed into a new star that will one day save our galaxy when the sun finally burns out. Also, in my story the homeless guy will be seven feet tall and have bees coming out of his mouth.”

I do admit to sometimes feeling more protective of Kate than Minnie. Simply because, on the surface, you don’t feel like Min needs it. Minnie is well known for being an “emotional fortress,” although we in the Posse have all seen the other side of her too. She’s admittedly been a little shady in her personal life from time to time. She’s so guarded in fact, that if she read this she would be absolutely mortified that I’m talking about her, even in such vague, broad terms. And I don’t want to sound racist (just kidding – of course I do), but it could have something to do with the fact that she’s an Asian woman (also known by its scientific term: “manipulasian”).

Min and I have spent many a night together, just the two of us, creating interpretive dance numbers to our favorite songs (my favorite being set to Maxwell’s “Lifetime”). I rarely see her these days, but when I do I never hesitate to tell her anything. It’s odd because most people tend to feel “on guard” when they meet Minnie, but I’ve always felt the exact opposite with her. Even early on. I don’t know if it was just a coincidence of circumstances, but we seemed to get close rather quickly. The first night I met her we kind of latched onto each other at a party where we both felt out of place. Then she suggested we just go for a walk since we weren’t feeling the scene anyway. We walked and talked for a while, then we sat down and I abruptly leaned in to kiss her. She just pulled her face away and looked at me like, “What do you think you’re doing?” In hindsight, it’s kind of hilarious, but at the time I felt retardedly embarrassed.

Shortly after that I remember we went to some other shin-dig in Chicago proper, and there was some drama that unfolded with her and this boy she’d hooked up with. She was upset by it (although she kept up her stoic exterior), and I was her shoulder to lean on as we talked about that, and life in general, while we drove back into the suburbs at four in the morning. This is typically the role I ended up in with girls I knew. Where I’d console them when things didn’t work out with the guy they chose to fuck instead of me. It was really awesome (perhaps I should have put quotation marks around “awesome”).

We had a long drive back. It was 5:00am by the time I dropped her off, and for the life of me I cannot remember exactly what it was she said, but right as I was saying goodbye she said something that I really connected with and I just started smiling at her. She looked over at me and noticed me staring.

“What?” she said.

“I can just tell you and I are going to be friends for a very long time.”

I’ve always had this weird thing where creatively I always want to please Minnie more than anyone else. Because I really do value her critiques. She’s pretty blunt in her opinions on artistic endeavors, and I often find she’s right, even when I initially disagree with her (although I would never give her the satisfaction of telling her that). And she’s pretty blunt with me. She won’t hesitate to pick apart my shortcomings. But somehow even when she criticizes me I always still feel like I’m worth something. I guess I accept it because she actually gets me, and she still seems to believe in my talents and abilities even when she’s seeing it not quite come together the way she wants it to. And she’s not one to blow smoke up anyone’s ass, so if she believes in me I know it means something.

When I wrote this film script called Travel By Night back in 2001 while I was living in New York, I gave it to Min to read. It was pretty long. Almost 180 pages I think. Which would basically be a three hour movie. She breezed through it rather quickly and then immediately called me up. The first words out of her mouth were, “Eric… It’s genius.” I think it’s the most proud of myself I’ve ever felt.

David Banahan was named “O’Banion” by me when we first met due to the fact that I kept forgetting his last name. I mispronounced it repeatedly over several days. All I could remember was that he was Irish, so I just started shouting “O’Banion” at him. We all thought it was funny, so we just started calling him that. Even now, ten years later, his wife is listed as “Lisa O’Banion” in my phone, and I still refer to his parents as Ma and Pa Banion.

O’Banion is as much a brother to me as my own brother is. We were instantaneous friends when we met. I’d known Kate and Min for about three years by then, and I think they were almost annoyed at how much we clicked with each other. It was love at first sight.

I think that bond was taken to an awkwardly new level after we both fell in love with Minnie at the same time later that year. I was actually unaware of his feelings for her when he had to confess them to me. Which he had to do because he had to tell me that him and Minnie were now together, shortly after I’d told Minnie how I felt about her. And the thing about that was that while my feelings for Min were starting to get more intense, OB had been my confidant that whole time. And he never told me (or Minnie) that he felt the same way. So when I found out they were together it definitely felt like a bit of a stab in the back since he was the person I thought was helping me out through it all. It was like he’d been a double agent gathering intel to win the girl for himself. Obviously, that’s ridiculous, but that was kind of how it felt, even though the logical side of my brain never believed that for a second.

O’Banion made it a point that when it came time to tell me about him and Minnie that he tell me to my face. He even felt loyal enough to offer up a free punch to the stomach, but I simply shook my head and said, “Of course I’m not gonna do that. Life is short. I don’t have enough friends to get rid of you over this.” Although I should admit that when we reminisced about this recently we both noted that I took an inordinately long time to think about it before I said no. And the interesting thing about our relationship is that if we talk about THAT, we both just start cracking up. But if we start talking about our differing critiques of Lord of the Rings or 2001: A Space Odyssey, we get so heated that we have to go to separate rooms and cool off. And I am not exaggerating.

O’Banion is now married, and his wife, Lisa, is amazing. She feels like a member of the same family to me. She’s such a fuckin’ wonderful weirdo, and she cracks me up. She really is the kind of person that can put a smile on your face just by being in the room. Going up to stay with them in Maryland is like my home away from home.

Despite the fact that I now do stand-up comedy, I actually have always dreaded speaking in front of people. I’m better about it now, but as a kid I would literally throw up if I had to make a speech in front of the class. Even in High School I would take an “F” rather than give a speech. I’d practically have a panic attack if I had to get up there. I’d shake, my skin flushed, I couldn’t look anyone in the eye, and I’d start feeling extremely hot and light-headed. I still feel that way when I’m at an audition, which is why I have pretty much stopped doing them for the time being. Despite all this, I forced myself to get up at O’Banion and Lisa’s wedding and say something all heartfelt and shit. I told them that nothing made me happier than to see my friend rewarded with someone so wonderful, because as far as I was concerned no one deserved it more than him. It was literally the toughest thing to get out of my mouth. My first time doing stand-up comedy wasn’t even an ounce as uncomfortable as that, but I did it just because I wanted him (and her) to hear it.

I was talking about writing these “memoirs” with Kate when I stayed with her. She mentioned that it’s been a while since she saw a new one. “Well,” I explained, “I’ve actually had a number of shows this month so I wrote quite a bit more on the comedy front recently.” She nodded understandingly. “But,” I thought on it a moment, “I think I have also been having some trouble working up to the next chapter. I think I’m kind of hesitant to go back to that time. Because the next chapter is back when Marty was in his prime.” Saying that, I think Kate immediately understood why I was conflicted.

Marty was my infamous alter-ego. All the Posse members had alter-egos. For instance, Minnie’s was “Adrien Crane.” Adrien was the woman held responsible for all the things Minnie didn’t want to take credit for doing when she was drunk or impulsive. Kate’s alter-ego was “Virginia Benton.” Virginia was actually the responsible one. Kate herself had no problem having a drink or two and going out to have a good time, but when tax season rolls around – that’s when it’s Virginia’s time to shine.

O’Banion and I were on a first-name basis with our alter-ego’s. His was “James,” who was basically just O’Banion with glasses on (O’Banion is a pretty uncomplicated person). When they told me my alter-ego’s name was Marty, the first words out of Minnie’s mouth were, “We hate Marty.”

“Yeah,” Kate concurred, “Marty is a douche-bag.”

That night where I got all drunk and moody and climbed up on that roof and broke that glass in my hand and Kate had to drag me back inside and then I locked myself in the bathroom and wouldn’t respond to anyone pounding on the door? That was Marty. The night I broke my hand by punching the wall of that construction site? That was Marty. The night I yelled at O’Banion for trying to see me home safely and not giving me his food, then stumbled alone into the streets of New York at 3am shit-faced, yet still somehow beat him home even though I didn’t have a key to the apartment or any money? That was Marty. Marty’s not invited to the parties anymore. Not that he ever was really. He just sort of showed up at some point and pretended he was supposed to be there.

When I was talking with Kate recently I admitted to her, “I still feel ashamed of those years. I think that’s why I don’t want to talk about it.”

Kate brushed that off, “You have no reason to feel ashamed.” I think she could see I didn’t really believe her. “Seriously. After you just showed up in Syracuse that one time, I was so fed up with you. I had no intention of staying friends with you. Of course, I didn’t know Min and you were still talking, but seriously, I was done with you. And now I couldn’t be happier we stayed close. I just really didn’t understand what you were going through honestly. How old were we back then? Nineteen? I don’t think YOU even understood what you were going through. So I certainly didn’t. It was just something you had to work through. Now, if you were STILL like that – thirteen years later – then you could feel ashamed.”

It actually did feel good to have her say that. It was almost like she lifted the burden off my shoulders so I could think about those days again with a fresh perspective.

“I’m just glad to see you finally seem to be content again,” she added.

“You think so?” I asked.

“Last time we talked…” she paused on that, and I quickly nodded in acknowledgement. We hadn’t seen each other in over a year, back before she’d moved back to Illinois from L.A. Back then I’d kind of hit my rock-bottom morale-wise. I just felt so empty inside. And with Kate, it wasn’t just saying that I didn’t give a fuck about anyone or anything that really upset her, it was that she could just sense it in me. Because she knows me that well. She even broke down on me and spoke through tears telling me that she hated seeing me this miserable and hollow inside. And I just stood there and stared blankly, because I couldn’t even find it in me to let it affect me at that point.

Apparently, my words and the general way I carried myself now showed a marked improvement. “I can tell just by talking to you that there is a contentment in you that was far from there the last time we spoke,” she told me.

“I definitely am starting to feel like me again,” I said with relief. “I think writing about my life has actually been helping me get there. It’s a pretty interesting process too. It’s amazing how many things you forget about that are still buried in your memories. And I’m figuring out a clearer picture of how I feel about them, or even why things happened, when I go back through these events in my mind.”

I hated to admit it, but finally getting out of my relationship with Izzy and being alone these past several months was absolutely necessary to get myself back together. It just feels so depressing to realize that I seem to only keep myself together when I’m alone and not attached to someone. To some extent, I think that’s why I like to stay friends with my ex-wife. Because it tends to remind me that it doesn’t always have to be as chaotic as this. We didn’t work out, so there were definitely lessons to be learned there, but it wasn’t all melodramatic during the time we were together (although it was for a bit after we broke up). That failed relationship, though still listed amongst my many failures, still makes me feel that love can be something different between me and a woman than what it has tended to be in most of my relationships. And I really need to believe that.

Kate herself lamented how many times she found herself wanting someone so badly, wanting desperately to make a relationship with a certain person work, even though they didn’t make her happy. And she found it rather demoralizing that she couldn’t see it until she finally found someone who did actually make her happy.

“You know,” she told me, “I’ve never seen you so genuinely unhappy as this period while you were with Izzy,” she told me.

I hung my head. I knew she was right, but I hated acknowledging it. Mainly because it makes me feel bad to say that about her. I wouldn’t want her to hear that. Because I really don’t think it was her fault. She was as young as I was when Marty was in his prime. And she’s not been given an easy path as far as understanding people is concerned. So I truly feel that I should not judge her. Although, it probably wouldn’t matter that much now to have her hear me say that. I’ve noticed that most girls can very quickly get over a guy no matter how much they loved him as long as they have someone to transfer the feelings over to. So she’s probably not thinking much of me right now. I know that sounds cynical, but you’ll remember I’ve been through this so many times I’ve lost count. It’s really just a survival mechanism for women (and men too), but it’s a real bummer to know that no matter how much she loves you tonight, that look in her eyes can be gone tomorrow.

It’s rather sad-bastard to say it, but I know I only stuck around because Izzy was the only one who was willing to love me. It’s strange because there were certainly other women I was involved with during the three years we were together (since we were so on-again, off-again), but even though I know some of them COULD have loved me, none of them were willing to. Except Izzy. And I know in the end Izzy will end up reflecting on us and saying that she was genuinely miserable during her time with me as well. And that’s such a horrible thing to have to admit to. Especially in reference to two people who genuinely loved each other. But that’s just the way it is. Most people have trouble accepting the fact that love truly doesn’t matter. If the relationship isn’t healthy, it does not matter how much you genuinely love each other. And I really did love Izzy. I still have dreams about her, even now. But our relationship would never make either of us happy.

O’Banion once told me how he can vividly recall that he has only cried five times in his entire life (and that includes tearing up). Once over a girl. Twice over a different girl. Another time when his wife was diagnosed with a rare kidney disease. And one time while watching the movie 300… What a faggot.

Truthfully, his crying at the movie 300 was one of those weird times where it had nothing to do with the movie. It was just an inopportune time for other emotions that had been locked away to manifest themselves. Regardless, his friends will forever ridicule him as the pussy that cried during the film 300. Which we assume was because he gets really emotional looking at dudes’ rock-hard abs.

I bring this up because this subject has been coming up in some conversations I’ve had recently. People mentioning how it’s difficult to remember when they’ve cried, or that it’s simply difficult for them to cry at all. During one of these convos, I had to ask (albeit with some hesitation) if I should feel weird about the fact that I cry EVERY single day. Often, multiple times a day.

“Are you being serious?” one of my friends asked.

I sort of cringe while answering, “Yeeeeah.”

He seems a bit intrigued, “Really??”

“I actually teared up on the drive over here… Is that fucked up?”

“Wow. Well, I guess it’s a good thing. Being able to be that in touch with your emotions and all that, but… EVERY day??”

“Well, I will say this,” I added as an afterthought, “I don’t cry in front of people. It only happens when I’m alone. Because I still get really uncomfortable showing emotions in front of others. So I’m still KIND OF a man.”

I started bringing this up to other people after that night. Trying to gauge how common this could be. I’m gathering that the consensus is that it’s not a very common thing. Although, I find it interesting that no one has actually said they think it’s a bad thing. I personally don’t really know what it means, or why I do it. I just sort of embrace it now. And it doesn’t bother me at all. Except when it’s a break down. Those can be rough, but they’re not nearly as common as they used to be.

Maybe it’s because I don’t shy away from things that are painful. Not really “dwelling” on them per se. More like I just don’t want to hide from them. They make me who I am, and I don’t want to pretend it didn’t happen. I think a lot of people try to forget. I never felt that way. I don’t ever want to forget. And to be honest, I might be a bit of an emotional masochist. Not that I think any it really proves anything, or makes me a better person. It’s just my nature I guess.

“So, what do you cry about then?”

I tend to gloss over the answer when I get that question. After all, it can be anything. Memories, other people’s stories, maybe just a song or something, whatever. I don’t really know how to answer that. Because it can happen in really odd ways sometimes. Like when I found out about Murphey’s suicide I had one of the most memorable moments of weeping in my life, but it wasn’t what you’re thinking. I was in the airport, coming home from New York for New Year’s. My friend back in Texas that worked with us had called me and told me what happened. I was pretty dumbfounded by the news. I put in my headphones and walked around for a bit because I had several hours until my flight. Eventually I tired of walking, so I took a seat at the very back of the terminal. Then I looked up and started people watching. There was this group of teenagers waiting at one of the gates for their plane. I gathered it was some sort of a school group. They must have been a dance team because they all seemed to be working out choreography with one another. Then this guy and this girl take each other’s hand and go out to the main floor all by themselves. I remember “Starman” by David Bowie started playing in my headphones as they started ballroom dancing together, spinning and twirling each other all around the floor. The world around me seemed to get smaller and smaller as the music lifted almost in tune with their bodies. It was such a beautiful thing. It’s one of those rare times I didn’t even wipe my eyes. I just smiled as I watched them, completely unaware of everyone else around me. Letting the tears roll down my cheeks.

I recall how I kept repeating to myself, “I’m always going to remember this… I’m always going to remember this…”

O’Banion’s wife, Lisa, and I share this trait in common. Having an overactive cry-box. This strong emotional reaction to things. Which interestingly enough seems to draw people to her in a way that may similarly draw them to me. Because I think most people are such fucking robots that they enjoy folks like us that genuinely care about things. Although, it’s WAY easier to get away with it when you’re a woman. I still have to keep up at least a semblance of a front whenever possible.

The other night Lisa and I stayed up late playing “The Crying Game” together. We basically tried to see if we could find things that would make us cry in front of each other. It’s hard to do with another person there, especially when you’re trying, but we definitely welled up a couple of times. I played her some of the 9/11 testimonials that StoryCorps recorded for their archives. That shit always gets to me when I listen to it. I started with the one that always gets to me the most, which definitely had an effect on her, but the one that she almost lost it on was when she had to hear the kid start choking up talking about his pop-pop. It was actually funny in a very touching way. She just looked at me with her eyes watering, but was still half-laughing as she yelled, “Not the kid, man! You can’t do that to me! I can’t handle it when kids start choking up! Talking about pop-pop!”

After that we started talking about things that make us cry when we think about them. She talked about her father for a long time. I really enjoyed listening to her reminisce about him. When it got to be my turn, I wasn’t sure what to talk about, but since we were talking about family I brought up my great-grandma, Gi-Gi. Gi-Gi died when I was about 15 or 16, and I always felt very close to her. My mom had recently been getting more and more into our family’s history, which is actually pretty interesting. For instance, my mom’s side of the family is all Polaks and Russians, and we had a lot of boot-leggers in the family from the prohibition days of Chicago. We also had a couple relatives back in Poland who were survivors. They even had the Holocaust numbers tattooed on their arms. I’ve never met them myself, but my mom did when she was around eight years old.

Gi-Gi herself was the youngest of fourteen kids. Her and the oldest were the only ones to make it to adulthood. Although Mom said there was one other brother that lived to 22 before being shot dead outside a bar in Chicago over a poker game. Gi-Gi was also quite the “flapper” back in her heyday. I heard one story about her and her friends hot-wiring a cop car that was parked outside a bar, and taking it for a joyride while they fired the guns they found in the vehicle up into the air. I remember my grandma sitting there at the dining room table as Mom regaled us with this story.

Grandma just started laughing and said, “Yeah, Gi-Gi wasn’t as innocent as she seemed.”

“I don’t think I ever thought she was,” I replied, “I think that’s why I liked her.”

One day, my mom and I were talking about the family’s history and she told me something about Gi-Gi that I never knew. Back in 1941, Gi-Gi’s marriage was falling apart. She had two children at the time. My grandma, Helene, and my grandma’s younger sister whom everyone called “Mimi.” Mimi developed pneumonia and the family wasn’t able to afford the $85 shot of penicillin she needed. At the same time, my grandma’s appendix had burst when she was out playing one day and she had to be rushed to the hospital. Friends came together for the family and managed to raise the money for Mimi’s shot, but it came too late and she passed away. Shortly after that, the doctors told Gi-Gi that my grandma was also not going to make it. Faced with the simultaneous deaths of both her children, and an estranged husband that had already moved on to another woman, a nun at the hospital found Gi-Gi trying to climb out of a window in a bathroom on the 5th floor. The nun had to rush over and pull her back in to safety. And when I heard this, I almost lost my shit right then and there.

I was telling Lisa about this, and I started telling her about how much I love hearing these tales of my old relatives, because there’s so much about them I don’t know. My grandma passed away just this year, and at the funeral the priest was telling the story of how my grandparents first met. Then he spoke about my grandma’s youth and her being such a tomboy back in the day, which is something I really knew nothing about. She’d had a pretty bad case of rheumatoid arthritis for as far back as I can remember, so even though it didn’t seem out of character for her, the days of her being nimble and active were pretty foreign to me.

And that’s when Lisa won The Crying Game. I started having a very genuine moment of emotion. She even called me out on it, which kind of made me laugh. And I had to confess to her, “You know, I literally just realized that that’s why it gets to me so much. I mean, part of it with Gi-Gi is that I know ‘that place’ she was in all too well, and I hate imagining anyone I love in ‘that place.’ Even if only for a moment. But truthfully I think it’s really because I loved them so much. They were such an important part of my life… And I never even knew them.”

I honestly never realized that before that moment. Only now that they’re dead am I starting to learn even a little bit about who they really were. What made them the people they were. I wish they were here now so I could ask them. Not as a grandson, but just as a person. As someone who genuinely just wants to know who they are and hear about their trials, their triumphs, their faults and strengths. All that stuff. Even the stuff they don’t usually feel comfortable talking about.

Currently, Lisa and I are working on making mix-tapes for one another of songs that always make us cry. Being that we both agree music is usually one of the biggest triggers for all that emo bullshit. I already have quite a few tracks selected myself. It’s gonna need to be at least three albums long.

I also have quite a few films that make me get soggy too. In fact, I’ve kept this Film Diary since May of 1998. It’s a log of every single film I’ve watched with ratings next to them. Originally, I’d planned to write reviews too, but there was just no way to pull that off with all the films I watch. I showed it to a friend of mine once, and he asked me, “What do the asterisks mean?” I just kind of grinned and told him to guess. So he studied all the movies with the asterisks penned next to them, trying to figure out the pattern. It took quite a while before he finally nailed it.

“I got it! They’re movies you’ve cried at!”

“That’s it,” I affirmed.

“Wow… Look at all these asterisks. You are a fucking pussy! You should be ashamed of yourself.”

I cry at a lot of movies. I have no problem admitting that. If the emotion is captured well in a film it’s because someone has actually been through that at some point, or in some way, so it’s just as real as anything else we feel ourselves. Although, I think it’s when you can personally relate to the feeling being portrayed that it really gets to you. There’s lots of films that get to me. Bang The Drum Slowly, Raging Bull, Shanghai Triad, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I actually had a moment similar to my friend who cried at 300. I cried at Armaggedon. I’ll never live it down, but I SWEAR it had nothing to do with that shitty film. I was in a very emotional place, people!

I always cry at the end of Band of Brothers too, but probably not at the part you’re thinking of (if you’ve seen the series). Not that I don’t get deeply moved at the final line of the series, which is Dick Winters reciting the conversation between Mike Ranney and his grandson (as taken from Ranney’s letter to Winters). I think that was the perfect way to end that series, but it’s not the part that gets me. The part that always gets me is the eulogy for Lewis Nixon.

Nixon was the one played by Ron Livingston (best known as the lead character in Office Space). He was the unit’s Intelligence Officer, and Dick Winters’ closest friend both during and after the war. I remember watching the miniseries once with my friend, Minnie, and there is a point where Nixon has just come from a jump with another unit where the plane took a direct hit over the drop zone. Everyone died except Nixon and a few others who were close enough to the door to get out. In the scene, we see Nixon coming back to rejoin the 101st just after it happened, and Winters comes in to his room to make conversation (Winters is completely unaware of what happened). He mentions that Nixon now probably has more combat stars over his jump wings than anyone else in the Division, to which Nixon self-effacingly replies, “Not bad for someone who’s never fired his weapon in combat.”

Winters looks surprised, “Really? Not even with all the action we’ve seen?”

Nixon throws his boots on the floor and flippantly responds, “Not around.”

It’s then that Winters asks him how the jump went. Nixon casually tells him how the boys “blew up somewhere over Germany” as he pours himself a rather large glass of whiskey, ending his story with the remark, “Oh well. Wasn’t me.”

At that point, I turn to Minnie and say, “You know if I’d been in World War II, I totally would have been Nixon.”

“Oh yeah!” she concurs, “I figured that out like one episode into the series.”

I laugh, “I know, right? I’d end up being that surly smart-ass who gets put in Intel or some shit like that even if I was in an elite combat unit. Somehow never even having to fire my weapon, and never being wounded in a unit where EVERYONE had at least one Purple Heart. My wife would write me to tell me she’s leaving me and taking MY dog with her. I’d get demoted for being insubordinate and/or drunk too often, and I wouldn’t even give a shit. Then I’d wander around town at night, breaking storefront windows looking for my favorite brand of whiskey.”

Nixon and Winters friendship is one of the cornerstones of the Band of Brothers story, and it’s easily my favorite part of it. Because Winters was a religious man who preferred his nights in. He never swore, he never drank. And Nixon was… none of those things. I actually bought Winters’ book that he wrote after the miniseries came out. The passages where he writes about his friendship with Nixon are my favorites.

“On the surface, no two individuals were more diametrically opposed in temperament than Nixon and I,” Winters wrote. “Despite the differences in lifestyle, I sensed we shared mutual feelings and ways of looking at life. I could understand him and help him understand me, as well as understand himself. Our friendship evolved naturally, and he soon became my closest friend. Lewis Nixon was the finest combat officer with whom I served under fire. He was utterly dependable and totally fearless.”

Just reading that passage again started to make me feel choked up.

Winters also elaborates on the eulogy given to Nixon at the end of the HBO series. In the film they say Nixon “had some tough times after the war,” but nothing else. Winters elaborates on these tough times, mentioning how Nixon’s alcoholism kept getting worse, he went through multiple divorces, which also included the divorce of his parents, and his sister committed suicide.

Now, in the end of the miniseries, they go through what happened to all the main characters after the war, using a voiceover narration from Winters’ character. When they get to Nixon’s character Winters’ character is heard saying, “Lewis Nixon had some tough times after the war. He was divorced a couple of times. Then in 1956 he married a woman named Grace and everything came together for him. He spent the rest of his life with her, traveling the world… My friend Lew died in 1995.”

And that’s where I always lose it.

I shouldn’t have to explain why…

We start walking through the buildings and she looks up at one in particular that overlooks all the bright lights and flashing signs that adorn the district. “How great would it be if you fucked me on that balcony overlooking the city?” Then she looks over at me with that devilish, yet affectionate, look in her eyes. She just wants to see me get riled up with sexual frustration, but this time I’ve reached my breaking point.

I grab her hand and pull her with me. We start walking down the streets hurriedly, me practically dragging her along. She starts to laugh at my eagerness, “Where are we going, Eric?”

“To the first hotel I see.”

I can see she gets a rush from hearing that, but she still tries to play it sensible, “The hotels here will be at least $200 a night.” I ignore the comment and keep looking around. “You know we only have a couple hours before we have to get back.”

“I don’t care,” my eyes are still scanning the blocks for a place to get a room. “I have to steal a few moments with you,” I look over at her, “Right now.”

I can tell she loved it when I said that.

A few hours later, we’re in the hotel room and she’s just finished showering. I’m laying in the bed as she comes out from the bathroom wearing a thin white dress with nothing on underneath. I can see her body just faintly through it. She crosses in front of me to get some things from her purse. I sit up on the edge of the bed, watching her brush her hair. She crosses back in front of me towards the bathroom, but I take hold of her hand and pull her back to me. She stands in front of me looking down. I run my hands up her legs pulling her dress up as I go. I look up and meet her eyes. She bites her lip. I fucking love it when she does that.

I pull her down to the bed with me. We lie next to each other kissing softly.

“You know what I like about being with you?” she says. “You always make me feel really sexy.”

“Well you don’t make it difficult. I don’t think anything turns me on more than turning you on. And you do the same for me. That’s how it should be, right?”

“Mmmmm-hmm,” she affirms seductively as she leans down and kisses my chest. She sits back up on top of me and smiles. “I like that you understand women… Most men don’t.”

I always remember her saying that to me. It was such a beautiful thing to say, and I don’t even know if she realized how awesome it was when she said it. Truth be told, I’m not sure if I can fully trust her judgment on that one. Although, maybe when you’ve had years and years of failure and humiliation you do start to learn a few things. But fuck it – just take the compliment.

I don’t really believe men (or women) who try to act like there’s some actual system to love, sex, or relationships. It’s really just about how two people connect. I’m sure there’s women out there that would say I was awful in bed, and didn’t have a fucking clue. And I’m equally sure there’s women out there that would say I was caring and compassionate, and great in bed. It all depends on the connection we had. Besides, I’m pretty sure I only understand the women that are as crazy as I am. If I was put in a room with a sane woman I probably wouldn’t know what to do with her. Lucky for me those don’t exist.

“Well, I’ve been accused of many things in my life,” I tell her, “but understanding women…”

“Oh, whatever. Girls like you. You know it.”

I suppose she just hasn’t known me that long, “Well, I’ll admit… I have my moments.”

She looks at me mischievously, “Is this one of them?”

“Are you kidding me!? This has been one of the best weekends of my life!”

She smiles widely, “Me too!” She kisses me excitedly. She seems so happy.

But the giddiness starts to subside a few moments later. And then her face starts to betray what she’s really thinking.

“I don’t want you to go,” she whispers.

I understand how she feels, but at the same time, we both had to know how this was going to end. Although no one ever thinks about that in the moment.

“You know I have to go.”

“I know.”

I almost start to get upset that she’s acting as if she’s supposed to be the sad one, “I’m going back home to an empty apartment. You’re not. So between the two of us, I’m the only one that should be upset.”

She looks away. I know I shouldn’t have even brought it up, but I tend to have problems keeping the proper amount of silence to maintain a relationship (or an affair for that matter). I can’t seem to help but constantly say what I’m thinking. Which is the death of any relationship.

“He doesn’t deserve you, y’know.”

She scoffs, “Yeah, right. That’s why I’m here with you.”

“Exactly. You’re here with me because you’re not happy.”

“Is that your woman’s intuition talking?” she jokes.

I laugh a little, but I’m trying to be serious, “He treats you like a trophy. Like a piece of jewelry he wears to show off to his friends. He doesn’t want to love you. He wants to own you.”

She doesn’t respond. I feel I should back off now. She’s still pretty young after all, and I know saying this stuff never makes a difference anyway. It only serves to put a damper on the good moments. She knows I’m right. Women’s instincts are usually pretty sharp, yet for whatever reason it never seems to stop them from doing what they do. It’s endlessly frustrating though. He only treats her like that because she lets him. If women don’t demand more from men, they won’t give it to them. And if I told her all that, she’d totally agree with me… then she’d go back to him anyway.
But who am I to talk? Did I ever tell her to leave him and run away with me? She wanted me to. Even years later, when I saw her again after they’d split up, she wanted me to. I know it. I’m pretty sure deep down I was glad it was so convenient for me. I love the romance, and she was one of the best ones I’ve ever had, but at the end of the day I always seem to have one foot out the door. With her, I could let myself get completely swept away with no consequences. Because with him waiting for her back home, I don’t have to make a real commitment. In a couple days I’ll be an ocean away, and nothing is going to change that. So I can safely tell myself it’s not my fault. But why dwell on that? At the end of the day, we were just two people who loved being with each other. The nights I had with her were some of the best of my life. So I think I should choose to dwell on that.

“I like that you understand women… Most men don’t.”

That was literally the second most wonderful thing a woman has ever said to me.

I’ll save the first for another chapter…

CHAPTER 5: “FINALLY BECOMING A WOMAN”

I lived in Olathe, Kansas from ages nine to fourteen. Back then I was living at “the cool end of the nerd spectrum.” Which is a quote I stole from Matt Groening, who was a childhood hero of mine, although “cool” is probably too strong a word to describe my stature. I’m just saying that I wasn’t beaten up daily or anything, but I certainly was still a nerd. And I definitely felt ostracized when I did try to hang with the cool kids. Which I think I only did on occasion because I wanted to feel “normal,” not because I actually liked being around them. I felt way more comfortable with my other friends, most of whom were sort of half dork, half juvenile delinquent. So I may not have been a complete nerd, but I’d be lying if I said I’ve never played a game of Dungeons & Dragons in my life, or loudly quoted Monty Python & The Holy Grail even when there were girls within earshot. I had Leave It To Beaver hair and hand-me-down T-shirts. I definitely didn’t get the impression that any of the pretty or popular girls would ever go for someone like myself… and I think it’s safe to say I was right.

Everybody always talks about what they wanted to be as a kid when they grow up. For me, it changed about every other week, but it was always something creative. Writer, video game creator, artist, musician, film maker, cartoonist. The latter was one that I had some success with in Junior High. I drew a lot back then. I remember I liked drawing the Simpsons characters, and being that me and my fellow Junior High students liked anything fucked up and dirty, I had a period where I made a splash drawing X-rated Simpsons comics filled with sex and violence.

I sometimes feel I thought about girls in a sexual way at far too young an age. As far back as age seven or eight I can remember wanting to get all up in them guts (although I wouldn’t have even known how to find them guts back then), but I still had a very traditional, romantic-at-heart nature bred in me. I think it’s because I was raised by the women in my family. My brother always seemed more like my father’s kid, but I was definitely a momma’s boy. My mom, my grandma, and my great-grandma, Gi-Gi, were the ones that I took my cues from. Maybe I’d watched too many movies, but I still believed in the fairytale back then. I thought I would grow up to be one of those fabled men who loves one woman like no other man has ever loved a woman. The kind of man that makes all of his wife’s friends jealous because of how well he treats her. And on our 50th anniversary I’d stand in front of our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren and tell her that she is just as beautiful as the day I’d first met her. It took me quite some time to find out that I was about as much the opposite of that man as one can be.

If there was ever a girl I projected that fairytale feeling of love onto it was Emily Cook. The girl who lived across the street. I was in love with her the entire time we lived in Olathe. I’d laid eyes on her playing in her front yard when we were pulling up to our new house for the very first time. I was nine years old at the time, and I was totally smitten (and I didn’t even know what “smitten” meant yet).

It’s funny how moments of humiliation stay with you more vividly than any other memories from your youth. Probably because they’re the ones you want to forget the most. I vividly remember in that first year in Olathe I could never stop looking at her face. I just thought she was astonishingly beautiful, and apparently she’d noticed me staring on more occasions than I realized, because one day in gym class she made a point to call me on it. She caught me looking over at her and she snapped her head in my direction, shot me a stern look, and forcefully mouthed the word, “What?!”

I immediately looked away, totally embarrassed. It was simultaneously the feeling as if I’d been caught peeping, mixed with the feeling of her basically saying, “Never gonna happen, dude. Get over it.” It was a feeling I’ve learned to become very familiar with.

I was of course horribly terrified to talk to her (as I always am with any woman I like), yet somehow I worked up the nerve to knock on her door one day to call on her (and yes, I did just use the phrase “to call on her,” because apparently I grew up in the 1930’s). For a time there, I did this a lot. God, I must have been so annoying to her. Although, if I was, she did a good job of being cordial about it. I think that was just her nature though. She always seemed like a kind hearted person. In fact, one of my fondest memories of her was one night just before I moved away. By now it had been four and a half years since I first started being a lurker on her doorstep. My parents had just told my brother, sister, and I that they were getting divorced and we’d be moving. It was more of an upheaval than any of the other prior times we’d moved, because up until Olathe we’d moved every single year to a new town. We’d been in Olathe four and a half years by that point, which made it the only place we’d been allowed to get comfortable with. Not only were we leaving the only place that had started to feel like home, but my parents were splitting up, my brother would also be leaving to go to college, and my dad was moving to Oklahoma while my mom, sister, and I would be going to Illinois. It was a lot of change all at once. Even though we’d always been constantly moving, there was always a certain kind of consistency (especially with my brother around) that allowed us to still feel like a family in those early years, but this time all that was going to be over with. The divorce probably affected my sister the worse since she was only five. My brother and I had seen it coming for a while by that point.

I was shooting baskets in our driveway late one night. I was by myself. Emily came out of her house and walked across the street over to me. I was actually staring at her with some confusion. I even looked around because I didn’t understand why she’d be coming towards ME, but I didn’t see anyone else around. She walked up and said she’d heard about me moving and my parents and all that. She expressed her sympathies and wished me well. We had a short, but enjoyable conversation together. It’s been far too long for me to remember what we talked about, but I never took the gesture as if she felt at all about me the way I felt about her. Like I said, she was just a very kind person, but it meant a lot to me to have her do that. She absolutely did not have to, and I’ve always felt thankful to her for it.

Emily seemed like a girl that was in a position to where she could have been in with the “it” girls at school, but yet didn’t seem that interested in going that route. I always remember her coming outside and sitting on her front steps, reading a book, while the rest of us boys would be playing football in my neighbor’s yard. My neighbor was an old man who lived alone and had the most amazing lawn you’ve ever seen. Seriously, the grass was so thick it was like being tackled on a grass mattress. A grasstress. We probably did an inordinate amount of damage to his lawn with our constantly playing on it, but he never said a word. He was an old widower and I think he just liked seeing the neighborhood kids out there having a good time. My mom always spoke well of him too, and we were genuinely saddened when he passed away.

During our games, I would always catch myself trying to do some show-boating when I could see Emily was outside. Even though I’m sure she was too wrapped up in her book to notice me diving for the ball needlessly. But I did it anyway.

I’ve always sort of felt that Emily Cook was the purest form of love I’ll ever know. Because I was still completely innocent then. And it was a love that never had the chance to be tainted since we were never together, and I’ll never see her again. Reality can’t touch it. And it may seem like it would only sadden me to imagine that kind of love with a girl that never returned my feelings, but honestly, it’s better to imagine pure love exists inside you somewhere, than to imagine it doesn’t exist at all. It helps to keep you from becoming too cynical. Although so far it doesn’t seem to have worked for me.

I never had any experience with girls in Olathe with the exception of my first kiss. It was with this girl, Jenny, who seemed to have a reputation among the kids that knew her as the sort of “town whore.” Apparently she thought I was cute or something, so this “friend” of mine (who was a total douche) worked it out one night that we all ended up hanging out together, and then we went to the Elementary School playground. We started playing Truth or Dare. It all appeared to have been pre-meditated. Like my “friend” was setting it up at the girl’s behest or something. I bet there’s something there I’m forgetting (or simply blocking from my memory). It’s odd thinking about it now, because I don’t know why it happened. It feels like it was out of nowhere. I don’t remember even knowing this girl before or after that night, and if my “friend” was doing this just to help out the girl then it seems odd that him and his boys only seemed to talk about her when they were talking shit about her. Then again, maybe he actually thought he was doing it as a favor for me. Or maybe he just thought it was funny. Who knows?

When it came to be my turn in the Truth or Dare game, this “friend” dared me to make out with her. Not just make out actually, but to make out with her while she laid on top of me, took off her shirt, and I felt her up. So that was my first kiss. French kissing this girl I didn’t even know while she laid on top of me, barely clothed, and I felt up her tits. I can’t remember much about her honestly, except that she was actually a really good kisser. And that I really enjoyed boobs.

We walked back home after that, and when we got back my “friend” excused himself to leave for his house. As he left, he said, “But you two can hang out if you want.” The girl was totally up for it, but I told her I needed to get home too. I just wasn’t wanting to take it any further for some reason (and I could tell it could’ve gone much further). I don’t know if it was some traditionalist morality steering me, or just plain cowardice. It’s hard to say. Maybe a little of both. I think part of me realized I didn’t really like her, I just liked boobs and making out. But I’m sure it was also the fact that I knew now anything we did was going to be part of the rumor mill, and I have this real weirdness (even still today) about people knowing my business. She was disappointed that I didn’t stick around to take it to the next level, but she still asked if she could see me soon. I apathetically said, “Sure.” Then she went her way, and I went mine.

The next day we were playing basketball and now everyone was aware of it, which really made me uncomfortable.

“So I guess you got a girlfriend now, Krug,” they said.

I didn’t really relish the idea of being Jenny’s “boyfriend.”

“I guess so,” I said sheepishly.

I really just wanted to pretend it never happened. I was curious for sure, but not enough to keep this thing going. And now with everyone knowing about it and making comments, I just became uncomfortable and even irritated by it.

Jenny came over to my house the next day looking for me. She knocked on the door and I saw it was her. I just didn’t want to deal with any of this, so I opened the door, abruptly said, “I got chores to do,” and slammed the door in her face. That was it. My first break-up. My mom heard me at the door and asked who it was. I just sat back on the couch and said, “No one.”

Shortly after that I remember being on the bus home from school. It was crowded and my “friend” and a few other dudes were sitting towards the back. I was sitting closer to the front, not far from Emily Cook. They started shouting over at me, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Hey Krug!” I just ignored them. “Hey Krug, where’s your girlfriend?” They knew I was done with her by that point, but for whatever reason they were fucking with me. I don’t know what their motivation was. They clearly didn’t respect Jenny enough to “defend her honor.” My guess is they were just picking on me because they felt like it, and they had ammunition now. A lot of kids I hung out with eventually seemed to turn on me at some point once they realized I wasn’t one of them.

“Krug’s got himself a girlfriend now!”

“Yeah, I heard she sucked your dick that night after I left. I do know she likes sucking dicks.”

I see Emily looking back disgustedly at the commotion. I got sick to my stomach. More from her hearing it than actually caring what they were saying to me. I feel now that she was probably disgusted with them that day, but for some reason I felt like she was disgusted with me at the time. Obviously, nothing really happened between me and that girl (aside from the French-kissing with boob rubbage that is), but I especially didn’t want Emily to know anything about it. Not that it really matters, but I was just like that. I mean, I didn’t want anyone knowing about my business, but especially not her. I just tried to ignore the comments until we got to my stop. I think I muttered something like, “Fuck you,” as I walked off the bus and went to my house, but it only made them laugh at me more.

Thinking back on it, something else about that story that I find fucked up is how that girl could have a reputation for being the “town whore” at age twelve or thirteen. Seems kind of unbelievable, but it is a pretty fucked up world after all. I’ve definitely heard tales more disturbing than that one. One of my ex’s revealed to me that she had lost her virginity at age eleven, and I wouldn’t doubt from the way she talked about her past that there were plenty of boys who knew her as the “town whore” at a very young age. It’s sad to think that she probably didn’t even know it. Although, even if she didn’t, I’m pretty sure she figured it out once she got older.

“This world preys on the weak,” I told her once. She just sullenly nodded in agreement.

One time, around age twenty, I was hanging out with this girl back in Aurora, on the ghetto side of town. We were hanging on the stoop and this young kid who was knocked up walked over to say hello to everybody. There was a short hi-and-bye conversation, then she took off. I looked over at the girl I was with and said, “She seemed really young to be pregnant.”
“She’s only nine,” she told me.

My jaw just dropped. I couldn’t even fathom that.

“You know the worst part?” she added, “The dude who knocked her up is ten years older than her.”

When I was in New York with my most recent ex, back when she was still modeling, she took me with her to one of them exclusive night clubs in NYC where the club promoters bring all the young models so that the rich and famous have plenty of eye candy (or actual candy) to play with. The promoter is driving us around in this Escalade and he stops to get this one girl and her friend. She gets in the seat in front of us and I notice my ex starts typing something into her phone. She puts the phone in front of me and shows me what she’s written. It says, “That girl just had her sixteenth birthday.” I looked over at her with wide eyes. She just nodded in agreement.

The world is a ghetto…

When we first moved from Kansas to Illinois (as I’d just turned fifteen) I initially took it as a chance to reinvent myself and no longer be a nerd. I was thinking maybe I could make one last ditch effort to be a normal High School kid. I traded the hand-me down T’s and Leave It To Beaver hair for the classic plaid flannels and the “butt-cut” hair (a la Brian Austin Green). I even tried out for the soccer team when I first got there, but I sucked and I hated it. I have no idea why I did that. I felt absolutely no relation with the kids on the team. I didn’t even know how to talk to them, plus I hadn’t played in so long I didn’t even know what I was doing. My sports phase had ended by then, but if I was going to play any sport I don’t know why’d I go back to soccer. Baseball was the only thing I’d ever really been good at, but by then I wasn’t even into that anymore.

I guess it was around this time I just stopped trying to fit in because I realized I never would. I ended up like some kind of old hermit in High School who resembled Christian Slater in Heathers (minus the homicidal tendencies). I even had the black trench coat (and for the record, this was before those coats were associated with the Columbine massacre). I always said that if I’d actually gone to my High School reunion no one there would even know who I was.

In the latter part of my High School years my friends and I actually knew a lot of the Goth kids who would dress up in their Goth shit, and try real hard to be freaks. One time we were at some party where a bunch of them were, and my friend Brian pulled me over to them. He said, “You see this guy? This guy is a genuine freak. You posers pretend to be freaks, but you’re just trying to fit in like everyone else. This guy is the real deal. That’s why you would never spot him in the middle of a crowd. Because he’s a real fuckin’ weirdo. Not a suburban kid pretending to be a vampire.”

I have no idea why, but I kind of felt flattered when he said that.

When I first got to Illinois, I remember trying to flirt with a girl just to see if I could. To see if a girl would actually find me attractive if I was in a situation where I had a clean slate on the social scale. Because honestly, I didn’t even know if that was possible. I had this group that I hung out with for a short time there during that first sophomore semester, so I just picked a girl who was in that clique and decided to see if she’d like me. Her name was Lisa, and I wasn’t even really that into her, I was just curious. But it worked and she did like me, but then I didn’t really know what to do with her after that.

Then almost immediately after this minor victory I met this phenomenally hot girl, Allison, at another one of our get-togethers. I immediately bailed on the other girl and started talking to Allison instead. It was so shitty, and I could tell it really upset her, but I was fifteen, and if you ladies didn’t know this, teenage boys are total dicks. That’s why your fathers hate them.

Much to my surprise, Allison really dug me too. And I was SO unbelievably oblivious. I distinctly remember when we were outside at one point, my friend Dave physically grabbed my arm and threw it around her because I was so unaware that she wanted me to get closer to her.

She was really fun and quirky, but also seemed a bit unaware (as I’ve since found most hot girls are). We went out one time, and we ended up back at her house at the end of the night. We sat on her couch for the longest time, her repeatedly looking up at me and laughing nervously. And me… just sitting there.

Knowing what I know now, I know that she was thinking, “Why isn’t this guy kissing me??… Is he gay?” Yet, in my ignorance, all I was thinking was, “Why does she keep looking at me like that? Boy, I wish I could kiss her, but her parents are upstairs and I’m sure she’d get mad if I tried it. I don’t know though. How are you supposed to know when you can kiss a girl? It would be rude to do it now of course. Right? I mean, we barely know each other. I wonder if she even likes me. And if we kiss how long do we have to do it for before it gets boring? Seriously though, why does she keep staring at me like that?? It seems like she keeps staring and then she starts laughing nervously. It’s so weird. Man, I’d really like to kiss her. Maybe I should. I don’t know. Now she just seems frustrated about something. I wonder what it is? Well I guess I really shouldn’t kiss her at this point. She seems like she’s confused or something. Like someone is doing something that’s bothering her. I wonder what it could be? Maybe I should ask her. No, she probably doesn’t want to talk about it. I should just go since we’re just sitting here staring at each other. It’s getting awkward.”

The next day when I talked to her on the phone she called it off. She said she’d just come out of a relationship and wasn’t over him, and that maybe it’s best she doesn’t get involved with anyone right now. That was that. Just writing about it is pissing me off. That girl was a fucking ten, and I was a fucking moron. And it’s easy to blame my obliviousness (which was genuine), but a lot of it was simply me being a pussy. Between all the feelings of alienation, and failures to know how to relate to other kids my age, and especially women, I just gave up on myself. Thus began the isolation…

That train ride to Chicago was quite a memorable one. After Kate dropped me off, the train ended up being delayed seven hours at the Tucson station. So I waited. I was sitting in the lobby of the station waiting and waiting and waiting. Then at one point, a couple cops came through the doors and headed out to the platform. Then a couple more cops came through. Then an ATF agent. Then some FBI guys. Then some more cops. They just kept coming and coming.

Curiosity compelled me to get up and go out to the platform. I saw that the train I was waiting on had just arrived, and there was a swarm of agents and police officers surrounding it. All the other awaiting passengers had also moved outside to watch the commotion. Then all passengers already on the train were ordered off of it. There was a huge crowd of us just hanging out gossiping about what might be going on. Then a couple Feds with a dog the size of a small bear walked onto the train in search of some rather unlucky fellas. We could all hear the dog start barking when they found them. I swear this dog was so gigantic you could practically see the train car shaking when it started going off.

This was when I met Sarah and Bradley, a young couple from Arkansas who were trying to get back home as well. We spent most of the trip together (up until they disembarked), smoking a lot of cigarettes in the smoking car together with the other passengers. I hate to admit it, but even though I genuinely liked Bradley I don’t think I would have made nearly as much an effort befriending them if I hadn’t wanted so desperately to plow his girlfriend. She was a beautiful blonde girl, and pretty cool to boot. Not that I would have even considered doing it while they were together, but they were both about nineteen (and before you make your comments, remember I was only twenty-two at the time), so c’mon – you knew it wasn’t gonna last forever. And actually, I did stay in touch with Sarah after that trip for quite a while. And her and Bradley did break up. And we did make plans to see each other. I can’t remember why, but it never actually came together. And then I joined the Air Force. And then I met Jackie… C’est la vie. I so would have plowed her.

The Feds took two Middle Eastern looking gentlemen in handcuffs off the train and into a building off to the side of the train station that looked like a big, open warehouse. I remember Bradley snuck off to sneak a peek in there. He looked inside and then got this look of “whoa” on his face. He came back over shaking his head, “Dude in there just smacked the guy right in the face.”

“Seriously??” I asked.

“Yeah. They were asking him questions or something, and then he just like back-handed him upside the side of his face.”

It took a while before they finally started putting all us passengers back on board. When we finally got boarded on the train we started hearing that it was one of the attendants on the train who called these guys in. She saw they had some suspicious looking ID’s on them, and so she made a call in to the authorities. The Feds met the train at Tucson and pulled them off. There were a lot of arrests in the aftermath of the attacks, so I have no idea what they were accused of, or if they actually did it, but I HEARD from the people that worked on the train that the officers verified their identification was in fact fake. They were on the news the next day too. I remember because the attendant was a big, sassy black lady (as if there’s any other kind), and she held up the newspaper with both of their pictures on it proudly proclaiming, “That’s right! I caught them two right there! Mm-hmm!!” and everyone in the train car gave her a big round of applause as she humorously took a bow.

It’s sad to say this, but the time immediately following 9/11 was kind of amazing. It really felt like people were treating each other the way they should have been treating each other all the time (if you weren’t Middle Eastern that is). Everyone on that train was a friend. Everyone talked to strangers about their lives, their feelings. No matter how different we were socially, culturally, monetarily, racially, politically – we were a family for that brief moment in time. There was a family from Staten Island that was about as loud as they come, and at any other time they would have been borderline obnoxious, but not this week. We were all one. They shared their food they had brought with us, and we all grieved with them when we heard that two of their relatives, fire-fighters, had died in the towers.

Only in suffering do I really feel people find their humanity. Granted, at times, people let their trials have the complete opposite effect on them, but I still say it’s in those tragic and heart-felt moments that we really see each other without all our preconceived notions. It’s the horrible catch-22 of the whole fucking mess. We fight, die, and struggle in the seemingly vain hope to create a world where none of this has to happen ever again, yet if we succeeded it probably would not be a world worth having. Because without the suffering, we don’t appreciate the joy. Without having experienced real tragedy, we rarely find true compassion.

If only every day could be 9/11…

By the time I got back to New York, I had three job offers waiting in my inbox. All of them from Life Insurance agencies, who were now finding themselves busier than they’d ever been. My job search was finally over.

I started working at Amalgamated Life, in a building on Broadway directly across from the Tisch School of Arts building at NYU. About a month or so after working there I was taking the 4 train back to my place in Brooklyn during rush hour. I was stuffed into a subway car so over-crowded that I could barely breathe. When we got to Fulton Street the train stopped and opened its doors. More people tried to cram inside the already full car while the train remained stationary for an inordinately long time. The conductor eventually made an announcement that a delay up ahead was going to be holding us up at this station. All the while, more and more people would rush downstairs trying to cram into the full cars.

I’d had it. I pushed through all the people on the train and escaped the claustrophobic mess. I just left the station and decided to get a bite to eat and walk around lower Manhattan until enough time had passed that I could get on another train without having to dry-hump whoever was standing in front of me.

I walked around aimlessly for about a half hour or so. I paid no attention to where I was going. I was just staring at the street in front of me. As I walked further and further, I noticed that the streets seemed to be getting dirtier and dirtier. There was a layer of grime over everything, and I started feeling a grit between my teeth. I kept spitting, trying to get it out. I could smell something odd in the air, and taste it in my mouth. I looked up and realized I’d walked right to Ground Zero without even realizing it.

They were still doing heavy clean-up at the time. The base of the towers were still intact, with flood lights and work crews milling around them. I could see into the lobby of one of the towers as a fire hose was spraying down the upper part of the wreckage. The lobby still resembled its former self, as if it had simply been painted over in black.

The area was roped off, but it had already become quite the tourist attraction. A family to my left was taking pictures like they were at Disneyland. And a guy to my right was waving flyers and cat-calling to passers-by, “We got hot, hot ladies! Happy hour prices all night! Check ‘em out!”

I just stared at him, but he never looked over at me. There were about four or five NYPD officers standing behind him shooting the shit. I suppose what he was doing wasn’t illegal, but I really wished they’d told the guy to take his business elsewhere. But I guess the President had asked America to get back to business as usual. He was just doing his part.

Honestly, outside of the fascination I had with the comradery 9/11 created in the country (which lasted an astonishingly short time before we all became polarized as shit), and the extreme way it dominated the conversations of everyone who was living in New York at the time, I didn’t really put too much thought into how 9/11 was going to change the world. And I know that sounds crazy, but I actually remember just feeling it didn’t really mean all that much in the grand scheme of things. It was a horrible, horrific thing that was perpetrated by a bunch of random, fundamentalist douche-bags who saw an opening and took it. They caught us slippin’. They got lucky. And they’d probably never get that lucky again.

I just spent my days going to work, watching my budget, and trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. I remember I even thought about making my first go at stand-up comedy back then. I went to one open mic and it was so painfully bad that I just dropped the idea all together. I guess I had moved to New York when Minnie did because I thought I had to make a change in my life. But I really had no plan at all. Minnie had just graduated from Syracuse and was so busy getting her life started that I barely saw her. I was just isolated and alone in a city that takes very little pity on the meek.

Up to this point, all I’d wanted to do was make films (which is about the most difficult art form to break into when you’re flying solo). I spent pretty much my entire High School career being a recluse, going alone to multiplexes or art-house theaters, hopping from theater to theater in the same day to watch several films in a row. Reading books written by, and about, filmmakers. Some about film, some about their lives. Watching laserdiscs, and finding old records in shops around Chicago. I loved how all the films made throughout the 20th century could let you see so many other cultures and eras from so many different perspectives. For a kid who grew up all over the suburban Midwest, to me, films (and novels too) at their best were part of an art form that allows one to share in the experience of life collectively with others. To learn from each other’s experiences and grow together through each other’s thoughts and feelings.

This was my education. I paid little attention at school. I graduated with a 1.8 GPA, and I didn’t even know if I had a diploma waiting for me the day I went to graduation. I’d failed American Literature (a required course) two times already, and my passing it the third time was completely dependent on the grade of my final paper, which was turned in at the very end of the last day of school after my teacher granted me an extension when I simply didn’t turn it in the first time. I have no idea why my teachers always took pity on me. One of the “Deans” at our school (they were like “Vice-Principals”) actually was supposed to kick me out of Lit Themes (another required course) when I had my 7th truancy in my last semester, but he didn’t do it. I made no excuses for him. Didn’t have any elaborate stories as to why I’d skipped so many times. But he just decided to give me another shot anyway. Just like my American Lit teacher did. And again, I didn’t know why. I just shrugged and said, “Okay, I won’t do it anymore.”

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated what he did, and I kept my word because I do believe in gratitude. Although honestly I don’t think I really would have cared if they’d kicked me out.

It wasn’t education that I hated, just the way schools go about it. I believed (and still believe) school in America is just about “qualifying” for your place in society, not about education. And I rarely meet students in higher education who contradict this sentiment (even the good ones). To me, a good teacher makes all the difference, and I find there are disappointingly few of them. For instance, I fucking love History as a subject, but I still slept through all my History classes. Up until I got Mr. Iverson. He was a young guy and it was his first year teaching. So he was still optimistic and a go-getter.

Now, since age thirteen I’ve been obsessed with the Holocaust. I was fascinated with the dark side of human nature as much back then as I am today. And that led to my obsession with WWII and then other wars, and later on that spread to other tales of human rights abuses and the like. Ultimately, I primarily became focused on 20th century history (with a particular fondness for the first half).

Iverson was a great history teacher because he didn’t believe in just having students memorize names and dates. He wanted you involved. He only gave essay tests and he didn’t grade on whether you could name every little fact related to the subject. He just wanted to see that you listened and responded to what we learned about. And unlike a lot of college professors, he didn’t demand you respond to it the same way he did. He wanted you to make your own decisions even if they contradicted his own. I did well on all his tests, but still only got a “C” because I never did homework. But I couldn’t ever sleep through his class, even if I tried. That’s why he liked me, because even though I was about the shittiest student he had, he could tell I cared ten times more than the other kids.

He even put together a Holocaust Education Day at the school for all the students. He had speakers who were all actual survivors. He also had one guy I heard speak who was in the American Army unit that liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp. One of my most vivid memories from that day was the Q&A with that veteran and Iverson afterward where I asked about what the American public and government knew of the atrocities before the camps started being discovered.

“We didn’t know” seems to be a commonly uttered phrase from people (even Germans) at that time, but I’ve always wondered how true that really is. It’s hard to definitively prove one way or another, but there were definitely newspaper reports long before the war ended that showed, directly and indirectly, evidence that the Holocaust was happening, although most were relegated to the back pages. I’m certain the American government knew, but definitely didn’t make much effort to disseminate it. Not even to the military on the ground, otherwise those guys wouldn’t have been so shocked when they found the camps for themselves.

I guess in some ways I liked the solitude and simplicity of this time. But truthfully, I was pretty morose, depressed and lonely during this period of my life too, but it kind of worked for me. I didn’t really want to be a human being. I did not drink, smoke, do drugs, or go to parties. And I had no interest in girls. In fact, I got genuinely irritated when girls would try to flirt with me. I just wanted nothing to do with it. It all seemed so silly and superficial. I guess that was before I found out how totally sweet banging quiff feels. But back then, I could see nothing fun nor beautiful about it. When some hopeless romantic would say “eyes are the windows to the soul” my immediate thought was always, “What if I popped my eyes out of the socket and showed them to you? Think you’d still feel that way? No you wouldn’t. You know why? Because the eyes don’t mean shit. It’s just the way they’re framed in someone’s face, and whether or not you find that face appealing. What you’re really trying to say is, ‘Ugly people don’t have souls.’”

I’ve often said that my “rebelling” as a teenager was to rebel against other teenagers, not my parents. I hated that kids my own age didn’t realize how stupid we all were. It was as if I looked at how they acted like a bunch of arrogant jack-asses, and treated each other poorly just to satisfy their desires, and somehow I really thought that I could keep myself from becoming one of them. But in the end, we’re all human. Whether we like it or not.

And I most certainly do not…