We're Doomed. Now What? Read online

  Tim Robbins arrived and the circus began. I was still the only Iraq War vet there. When it was the IVAW’s turn at the podium, José spoke, then Tim Robbins, and finally Jen got up and launched into a rambling jeremiad on the evils of patriarchy, our collective guilt for Native American genocide, the inhumanity of eating meat, the need to ban nuclear weapons, the dangers posed by global warming, Bush’s Supreme Court–led coup, and our need to pay reparations for our crimes against humanity. As Jen wound down with a quotation from Mumia Abu-Jamal, José asked me if I had anything to say. I shook my head.

  Still, I marched with them. We walked up Park Avenue and down Lexington to the United Nations, where people had set up tables at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. It was a nice walk on a beautiful day, and by the time we got to the end, I was sick of it, sick of the sanctimonious do-gooders cheering on the sidelines and their empty slogans, sick of how many different issues were piggy-backing on my war, from legalizing marijuana to freeing Tibet, and sick of talking to Jen and José, who had no right to call themselves “Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans.” A German reporter stuck a camera in my face and asked me how I felt about the war. I shouted back that it was a disaster, nobody knew what they were talking about, and nobody cared.

  I took the subway home from the march and threw my IVAW shirt in a drawer with my desert camo, disappointed and disgusted. Since then, the impulse to protest has passed. My confused rage has hushed to a quiet disaffection, and my bitterness mellowed and cooled.

  2.

  The last time I’d been to a protest had been in January 2002, a few months before I joined the army. George W. Bush had come to Oregon to give a speech, and a sizable crowd of malcontents had trooped out in the icy rain to the desolate strip malls of north Portland, where Bush was talking, with the intent of shouting him down.

  We were stymied from the start. The first problem was that our “free speech zone” was nowhere near the auditorium where Bush was speaking—you could almost see it over there, a half mile or so away, well past the police and fences. The second problem was that the police had us well in hand. We were cold, wet, and disorganized; they had horses, riot gear, and a plan. They kept us cordoned in a small rectangle near an intersection, and our docility in being herded was as notable as our agitation in chanting “Democracy!”

  A self-described “Anarchist Marching Band” livened things up with trombone and drum, various platitudes were shouted, and we all admired our own dedication and bravery in speaking truth to power on such a gray and dismal day. The protest ended darkly, with the police encircling some of the rowdier protesters and forcing them back with horses. Black-armored men waded into the clutch swinging truncheons, pacifying the malcontents, zip-tying them and throwing them into the back of a van.

  It had been a grim winter. After the attacks of September 11, I’d returned to Oregon from Moab, Utah, in part to try to make things work with an ex-girlfriend. They didn’t. I couldn’t find a job in Portland, she and I argued almost constantly, and as my meager savings from Moab dwindled, I left town and moved into my mom’s basement down the valley in Salem.

  I was twenty-five years old, with no college degree and no real prospects. My only significant job skills were short-order cooking and grassroots organizing, neither of which I wanted to put to use. What’s more, that August in Moab I’d had a bike accident that left me with a scarred lip, a broken front tooth, and a bill for several hundred dollars. I couldn’t afford any dentistry, so I walked around snaggletoothed. Then one night in Portland, I dropped my glasses, somehow chipping the lenses, and I couldn’t afford to fix them, either. Then the computer I’d brought back from Utah died.

  Down in my mom’s basement, I unpacked all the boxes I’d left there years ago—my books, mementos, and old clothes—and tried to make myself believe that coming home to this clammy, dank cave was some kind of moving forward, or at least coming back around on a higher plane, as if in a gyre.

  I could at least get some writing done, I thought, and sat down at my little desk in front of the electric typewriter that replaced my computer. I rolled in a sheet of blank paper. The rain outside falling from leaden skies onto the gray streets washed over the typewriter’s hum with a desolating patter.

  Meanwhile, Afghanistan. The Patriot Act. Anthrax letters. While I sat in my mom’s grimy basement, rode the bus with the elderly, destitute, and lame, and applied for jobs at Wal-Mart and Target, while the rain dropped from the black branches of winter-dead trees, pooled in oily puddles, and flowed down the gutter to drain into the flotsam-choked eddies of the Willamette River, History had returned to the world with a vengeance. A new millennium had been born in fire, the American Empire was striking back, and I watched it all from where I’d fallen in my hole. This wasn’t how things were supposed to be happening.

  I’d dropped out of the University of Puget Sound seven years before, after my freshman year, to find my fate in the world, make my way on my own terms, and most of all, become a writer. The act was one of pure hubris. I can blame the many hours I spent that year underlining and annotating Nietzsche, I can blame James Joyce and his “silence, cunning, and exile,” I can blame a girlfriend for dumping me, my parents for not being able to afford my tuition, and Samuel Jackson’s Jules in Pulp Fiction for inspiring me to “walk the earth, like Kane in Kung-Fu,” but the real blame lies with my wild arrogance in deciding to remake myself in words.

  I spurned the safe path through college and decided I’d do things the hard way: I would spend the next year working and writing, reading and studying on my own, with my own syllabus, teaching myself style and technique. Then the following summer, I planned to hitchhike across the country to New Orleans, where I’d get a job and live the writing life.

  I had a great dream that once I got out into the world, I’d find myself a circle of like-minded souls who’d refused to take the offered paths and insisted on going their own way, a brilliant literary-artistic collocation such as was found in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s. I knew they were out there somewhere. All I had to do was find them, and once I did, I’d not only find the tribe to which I belonged, but I’d also find my fate, my connection to the greater world, my place in history. I’d join not just with other people but somehow with the Zeitgeist, and through it all I’d transform myself from the fat, nerdy, timid, white-trash loser I was into something stronger, more beautiful, and more profound.

  Dropping out to become a writer was also in some sense political. It was a rejection not just of who I was and where I came from, but also of who I felt I was supposed to be and the choices I saw offered. A life spent earning a wage to waste on useless consumer goods and empty diversions seemed sterile and bleak. Becoming a writer was a choice for self-determination in the most radical sense, and literature seemed deeply connected to the ideals of freedom and democracy I’d imbibed wholesale growing up in the last decades of the Cold War. As I read Orwell, Whitman, Twain, Havel, Mailer, and Solzhenitsyn, the connection between writing and freedom seemed ever stronger and ever more true.

  At first, things went more or less according to plan: I moved in with a friend in Salem, got a job, and started typing. The following spring, I said goodbye to the girl I’d been seeing, packed up the novel I’d written, and walked down Highway 99 with my thumb out. By the time I got to New Orleans, though, late in August, I was so lonely, stressed out, heartbroken, and busted, I only lasted a couple weeks. I had my mom wire money for a bus ticket home and, with my tail between my legs, slunk back to Oregon.

  Several other misadventures followed over the next few years, including a torrid affair with a German woman ten years my senior who flew me to stay with her in Hamburg; two summers spent on the pow-wow circuit with a traveling hot-dog stand; a variety of low-down, no-account jobs; a failed attempt to go back to school at Southern Oregon University; a year spent working as a grassroots canvasser and activist with the Fund for Public Interest Research; a car trip through Mexico
; the WTO protests in Seattle; a Rainbow Gathering; supporting a tree-sit; and a brief stint as a phone psychic. Through it all I kept writing, often badly, logging hundreds of thousands of words and hundreds of hours of revision.

  Eventually I landed in Moab, where I got another job cooking breakfast and settled in for the long haul. I thought I’d stay and write, become a desert hermit, and leave the world to its troubles. After the compromises of grassroots fund raising and the disappointments of the WTO protest, I was done with eco-warriors, tree huggers, and anarchists; I wanted nothing at all to do anymore with the politics of our fallen world.

  Then one morning I woke to find that several men had flown planes into the World Trade Center towers. I didn’t see it; I didn’t have a TV. My ex-girlfriend had called me and told me to turn on the radio.

  Within a few months, I was in my mom’s basement, listening to the rain fall. After everything, I was right back where I’d started but even worse off, and just as far from the Left Bank as I’d ever been. Moreover, I could see, if I kept on like this, there was a good chance I’d wind up slipping into drunken, self-loathing decrepitude, eventually writing bleak, dark-hearted stories about Great American Failures, if I managed to keep writing at all. This wasn’t how things were supposed to be happening.

  3.

  People always want to know why I joined the army. They meet me now and see my bookish demeanor, my sensitive green eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, and can’t seem to fathom why a thoughtful, seemingly intelligent young man might want to put himself in harm’s way in the service of American power when we’re engaged in dirty, uncertain, and morally dubious wars.

  The obvious answers are easy: adventure, excitement, travel, challenge. It was also a way to pull myself out of poverty. In 2002 I was back at my mom’s house after years of trying to get away, an unemployed, desperate, snaggletoothed college dropout, stuck in a dead end. I’d had enough washing dishes, mopping floors, and scraping by, and the army offered money for college, full medical and dental, a regular check, and combat pay.

  I also joined because I wanted to see. I wanted to see, first, if the American empire, out where it was happening, was as bad as all the Chomskyites said. I assumed it would be, but after several years of disappointment with the left followed by the frightening shock of 9/11, I was unwilling to take anti-imperialist polemic at face value. Furthermore, I was swayed if not convinced by liberal hawks like Christopher Hitchens and George Packer, who argued that in the “war on terror” there was something real at stake in terms of international peace, the spread of democracy, and the idea of a better world. Islamic fundamentalism seemed a real danger, and I thought maybe our open society, for all its deep flaws, was worth defending by force of arms. I wanted to see for myself what it felt like out there doing what Orwell called “the dirty work of empire.”

  I also wanted to see war. I wanted the material. All my life, from GI Joe to Apocalypse Now to Sartre, I’d been told that war was an experience beyond all others. It might destroy you, it might cripple you, but in it you’d confront yourself and the world in all its bedrock authenticity—there was no way around the physicality, seriousness, and death at the heart of war. It was inescapably true, in all its horrors, profoundly meaningful, in all its risks, and ultimately redeeming, in its test of character. I wanted to know what it felt like to get shot at; I wanted to know what it felt like to kill.

  I wanted disillusionment and wisdom. I wanted the equanimity and poise of Conrad’s Marlow sitting on a ship deck in the London dusk, telling the story of his boat trip up the Congo. I wanted to write with the confidence and authority of Hemingway, to be able to say how “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages.”

  I wanted the concrete names of villages. I wanted the shuddering opening to unknown vistas of the soul, truth in sudden flashes, something transformative and maybe crippling that would give me, like Edmund Wilson’s Philoctetes, power in my very wound. I wanted to cut through the buzzing anomie of our feckless consumer society and see through to the realm of the real, even if it meant suffering from it the rest of my life. I wanted to cross over from innocence to experience, like all those heroes of literature, and come back with a novel.

  Finally, I went to be a man. My dad was a sailor, and both grandpas, too, one uncle, a Navy helicopter pilot, and another did time in the National Guard. I’d been fascinated by all things military since I was seven or eight, and had collected patches, manuals, gear, and paraphernalia like I was stocking a tiny militia.

  One night when I was ten or eleven, I ran away from home. I waited till midnight, then put on full camo fatigues and a web belt, packed my canteen, poncho, Swiss Army knife, and lensatic compass, smeared my cheeks with Army-issue olive-drab face paint, and rode my bike out to my grandma’s house in the country, where I planned to live in the woods like Rambo or Patrick Swayze in Red Dawn.

  I was so frightened by the time I got there, I woke up my grandparents and slept on their couch. I was turned over in the morning to my father, the one whose fury I’d been fleeing.

  I was a sensitive kid. I loved to read, loved my mom, and cried at the slightest provocation. My dad made sure I knew this was unacceptable. His parenting style was taken straight out of boot camp, and he seemed to think that if shame failed to motivate me, fear would work in its place. The more he’d yell, the more I’d cry, the more I’d infuriate him, the more he’d threaten, the more I’d whimper and break. “You wanna cry,” he’d shout down at me, “I’ll give you something to cry about.”

  My dad was a large, red-bearded, red-faced bald man with thick, hairy arms and a bulging gut. He was a bully and, like most bullies, a coward and a liar—rough, uneducated, manipulative. For most of my childhood, he worked a succession of low-wage jobs, at a gas station, a porn shop, and a cannery, among others, but he eventually got certified as a marine electrician, which is what he’d done in the navy. He had a good job for a few years at the shipyard in Portland before he got laid off. He was not only massive and quick to anger, but also charming, mercurial, and funny. Even as I feared him I looked up to him, to his sheer physical bulk, his legendary years sailing the mythic Orient, his seething power and fickle affection.

  My mom insisted, with a fervor all the more dubious for its force and repetition, that I had been wanted and planned, yet simple calculations put my conception some months before her senior year of high school; my dad at the time had been twenty-five. I wondered whose plan I could possibly have been.

  It doesn’t take much to make a child feel unwanted. I was well aware, and early, that my arrival had cut short the glory days of youth my father enjoyed and my mother never really had. My father’s resentment at having to provide for a child he no doubt saw as a mistake was exacerbated by the death of his namesake, my younger brother Baby Dan, who died within a year of his birth, and my own failure to live up to Dad’s militant standards of masculine behavior. I often felt he’d prefer I simply didn’t exist.

  He prided himself on never hitting me. He didn’t have to. He bullied me with words, taught me to fight with them, taught me how they rend and destroy. One day when I was sixteen, he threatened me, like he always did when I pushed too far, but this time I dared him to follow through. I got in his face and shouted, “Hit me, then, if you’re gonna talk about it so much.” His fist spasmed and his eye twitched, then something happened: he seemed to shrink, diminishing in the half-light, like a gently collapsing red balloon. I turned my back on him that day, and for a long time after on what I thought it meant to be a man.

  I read French poetry, I did theater, I went in drag for Halloween, I fooled around with other guys, I grew my hair long and channeled my anger into poetry, activism, and protests. For a while I thought I was an atheist anarchist nihilist revolutionary, then a secret, starry-eyed Emersonian ascetic, then a rabble-rousing martyr for redwoods and butterflies. Anything but t
hat kind of blue-collar man my father was or the kind I thought society said I should be—violence-cheering, sports-watching, self-satisfied, anti-intellectual, domineering.

  I paired a sensitive, feminine side with a deep insecurity about my masculinity, an unstable self opening into a gut-wrenching fear pounded in by my dad that I was never good or strong or tough enough, and no matter what I did or how I struggled to find my own way, I still always felt like I was treading water over a bottomless sea, a feeling of emptiness of meaning and will I was sure would end only with my self-destruction. By 2002, after years of struggling to remake myself somehow like James Joyce or Nietzsche, I had nothing to show but hands empty with failure. In my mom’s basement, I faced a choice.

  “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,” Dr. Johnson said, and when I decided to join the army in that grim February after 9/11, that’s what I told my friends, the one who’d been a PETA activist and the one who’d marched with me against the President. They thought I was being flip, but my seemingly offhand remark held a truth deeper than I could have then admitted.

  4.

  I stumbled out of the cattle car and onto the drill pad, wobbling and sweating under two duffel bags and a backpack, while drill sergeants’ smokeybear hats circled like killer UFOs, shadowing bulging eyes and red faces screaming, “You better move, private!”

  When I’d rolled across the tracks to basic training, panting in the stuffy stink of fifty other recruits tense with fear and excitement, I felt an odd dissociation different from anything I’d felt before. In one way, I couldn’t believe it was me—the hippie, the weirdo, the poet, the anarchist—here to learn the craft of making war. In another, deeper way, it was like I was coming home.