Consequence (22 page)

I rent a car and take Bagdasarov to the airport. We agree to meet in Baltimore soon. Beer and soft-shell crabs.

I still haven't called Karin. We've exchanged emails about the logistics of coming home and canceling the trip to the Maldives, but we haven't had an actual conversation since Fallujah. I could be back in Bethlehem in time for dinner, but I'm not ready to go home. Instead, I email Karin telling her I'm going to take the train. I write that it's something I've always wanted to do. It will take three days.

I drive to Albuquerque to catch Amtrak's Southwest Chief. On the way, I cross New Mexico's Gila National Forest. Somewhere along Route 180, I'm pulled over by a reservation police officer. He issues me a ticket for doing forty-five miles per hour in a thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone, and I'm consumed by something terrible. I tell the police officer to go fuck himself. As he walks back to his patrol car, I get out of my vehicle and tell him he's a lousy police officer. I wait for him to order me back inside, but he doesn't. I approach his vehicle. I shout more things. As he pulls away, I slap the passenger-side window. He never comes back.

I'm not sure why the police officer on Route 180 lets me treat him that way. Maybe he was afraid, or maybe he was simply more professional than me. Maybe he listened to the good training officers and ignored the bad ones. As I watch him drive away, I realize I might no longer be safe to be around.

I stand on the side of the road in New Mexico and stare into the pine forests. I think, for just an instant, of walking into the wilderness of New Mexico and never coming back.

8.2

I spend a few days in Albuquerque with my aunt. In the mornings, we walk in the foothills and exercise her two Irish setters. Occasionally she violates the local ordinance and lets them off their leash. They accost a man walking by himself. When he confronts my aunt, the terrible thing in me returns. The man leaves before I can harvest it. I was going to hurt him.

My father catches a flight to Albuquerque to join me on the Southwest Chief. He loves trains, and he cannot resist the opportunity to ride the rails cross-country. I agree to have him along as a way to test my limits. If I don't hurt Dad, maybe I won't hurt Karin. We sit in the train for three days and avoid talking about Iraq. There are no accusations, no apologies, no reminiscing, and no questions. The scenery is dull and repetitive and I think how good it feels to be bored again. The train is delayed. It takes an extra day to get home. It is still too soon.

8.3

At home, I sleep with Karin. We have sex, and I feel guilty, as though I'm doing something that can't be undone. I've had little time to process what happened in Iraq. But I know that I tortured. And suddenly everything has the potential to be something I can't undo.

In the coming days, I do things that make it look as if I'm adjusting to life back home. Karin and I watch the final episode of
Friends
and go to church. During the day there is exercise, trips to the grocery, and minor league baseball games in Reading. But Iraq comes at night. There are shrinking dreams and liquid nightmares and dark-room dreams. There is a great deal of whiskey.

I run into Don Hackett at a wedding in State College. The groom was a member of First Presbyterian in Bethlehem during my high school days. Don is conducting the ceremony. We stay in a local hotel along with the rest of the wedding party. Don and his family are a few rooms down, but I don't knock on his door. I do all I can to avoid him, but we're assigned the same table at the reception, where we laugh and tell funny stories about the groom.

Don's wife is the only one to ask about Iraq. She says they were saddened to see the prison photos coming out of Abu Ghraib. She says, “I hope it wasn't like that for you.” I talk a little about Abu Ghraib. Maybe I say something like “It's hard to imagine” or “It's not what you think.” This is enough to silence the table. When it's awkward someone tells a story about having played ultimate Frisbee with me on the front lawn of First Presbyterian Church. He makes a joke about playing Frisbee with an interrogator from Abu Ghraib. He says, “We always thought Eric was a nice guy; now we all know better.”

Karin and I take a trip with my parents to the house on Cape Cod where I spent my summers as a boy. It is August. The summer crowds are thinning out as families return their kids to school. I record a journal entry that is just an itinerary of restaurants and beaches. There are walks on Nauset Beach with Karin, and long swims in Crystal Lake in Orleans. There are fried clams and ice cream. I write about a sunset on Skaket Beach and the coffee at the Hot Chocolate Sparrow, and about a trip to Snow's, where my father and I shop for deck stain and a new downspout. The last sentence in the journal entry has something to do with wanting to move here and never go back.

8.4

We return to Bethlehem in late August. Karin goes to work and I stay at home. I take a walk on Bethlehem's south side and pass by the decaying industry. Bethlehem Steel is bankrupt now, although there are rumors about a museum and a commerce center. Some say the Smithsonian Institution will be involved. Others talk about a casino. For now, however, the buildings continue to fall apart. Bethlehem Steel has been sold to the International Steel Group. ISG decides not to revitalize the Bethlehem plant. The crumbling walls and collapsed rooftops expose the empty space inside.

At First Presbyterian Church, there is an argument about the placement of the American flag in the sanctuary. Dave Martin, the clerk of session, insists it belongs on one side, while a group of older veterans insists it belongs on the other. One of the older veterans is an usher on Sunday morning. He hands me a bulletin and escorts me down the aisle to my pew. He hands me a list of rules and regulations he copied and pasted from the Internet. One section is highlighted.

The flag of the United States of America should hold the position of superior prominence, in advance of the audience, and in the position of honor at the clergyman's or speaker's right as he faces the audience.

He encourages me to talk to Dave Martin and state the case. He says no one wants to hear from the older guys. It's time for the younger generation of veterans to take their place. Everyone supports us. Everyone loves what we're doing over there.

Dave Martin has been at the church for decades. He was an engineer with Bethlehem Steel and plays saxophone in the church's contemporary worship band. Dave Martin yelled at me once after I tore up the church's front lawn playing Frisbee with a group of high school students. I approach him after the service and make the case for moving the flag to the other side of the sanctuary. He says, “You guys just don't give up. When are you going to let this go?” I spend the next month embroiled in a battle to move the flag from one side of the sanctuary to the other. There are emails and phone calls and roundtable meetings.

I visit my grandmother in the Presbyterian retirement home. American flags and yellow ribbons now dominate the hallways. My grandmother and I talk politics. She is glad to have me home. I tell her I might go back. She hands me the pile of newspaper articles denouncing the war in Iraq. The pile has grown since I left. I concede the point. The war in Iraq is wrong. But I'm still obligated to do my part. There is still time to fix it. There is still an opportunity to do it the right way. I tell her these things as if I'm talking about U.S. policy, as if the Army can change its overall strategy and fix the problem, but I do not talk about what I've done, and I do not tell her that I'm going back in hopes of saving myself. She says, “Well, I just don't understand.”

I show her pictures from Baghdad, the ones where I'm standing in front of statues or murals or landmarks. She says these are nice. We talk about the heat and the sand.

8.5

I exchange emails with Blee and Bagdasarov and learn that Blee has taken a job as an analyst at Guantánamo Bay. He says it's nothing like Iraq. Bagdasarov has accepted a job with another contracting company that is sending interrogators to Iraq. He'll conduct interrogations, but not for the Army. He'd rather do something else, but the pay is too good to turn down. He offers to put me in touch with his hiring manager, but I decline.

In September, I reapply to the NSA. I tell Karin I need a job, I need something to do, I can't just sit around and think about Iraq. And I tell the same old lie about seminary, that I'll keep it in mind and revisit the application process when the time is right. But for now, the NSA will keep me employed and keep me involved. I have every intention of using the NSA to get me back to Iraq, but I don't tell Karin this. As always, Karin doesn't want to argue. She doesn't want to tell me what I shouldn't do.

I went to Iraq the first time to reclaim my identity. I want to go back to Iraq to escape the new person I've become. I can't erase the interrogation booths, but I'm determined to replace them with something better.

Ferdinand gets a head start on his journey back to Iraq. He's in Arizona, training with DynCorp and meeting his new team members. DynCorp is taking good care of him. He has all the equipment he needs. There are weapons and body armor. He'll be serving on a protective detail for the State Department. There's still an opening for me. I tell him I'm going to give the NSA another shot. He deploys to Iraq a week later.

8.6

Though the NSA expedites my hiring, I'm still required to undergo a polygraph examination and personality test. The polygraph for the NSA is considered one of the most thorough within the intelligence community. It probes the candidate's private life in order to discover issues concerning which someone might be susceptible to blackmail or coercion. This is what the examiner says to me before beginning the test. Then he says, “Is there anything you want to tell me now?”

I sit in a room and answer questions about my driving record, criminal past, sexual behavior, and drug use. When I answer yes, I'm given the opportunity to explain my actions. When my transgressions are deemed reasonable, we move on to the next question. Every answer is thoroughly examined. The examiner encourages me to be completely honest. Any deception will be exposed once I'm hooked up to the machine.

I'm hooked up to the machine and the questions are repeated. Simple baseline questions are added to determine how I react to the truth. There are long pauses between each question. The room is dark and warm. I'm tired.

“Is your name Eric Fair?”

“No.”

I've accidentally lied about my name. I was half asleep when the question was asked. My heart rate accelerates and my blood pressure increases. I feel my hands and my face warm up as the blood rushes through my veins. My body betrays me as it reacts to the lie. The examiner tells me to relax. After a long pause, he asks whether I'm ready to continue.

“Is your name Eric Fair?”

“Yes.”

“Other than what we discussed earlier, have you ever done anything you're ashamed of?”

“No.”

The last stage of the hiring process is a personality test and a meeting with a government psychologist. The psychologist looks over my test results. He has some concerns. He says, “There are signs of instability.” He also says my answers show a tendency to put myself in a better light. He says, “You seem a bit insecure. Is there someone you're trying to impress?” I'm no longer hooked up to the polygraph machine. I tell him no.

In the late summer of 2004, I have experience in places like Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. I have firsthand knowledge of the Baath party, Ansar al-Islam, the Fedayeen Saddam, Sunnis, Shias, Chaldeans, Iranians, Syrians, Jordanians, the Republican Guard, the Mahdi Army, and a host of individuals with connections to Al-Qaeda in Iraq. I am proficient in Arabic and conversant in the Iraqi dialect, I am knowledgeable about the growing crises in the Sunni Triangle, and I have served in a variety of positions within the intelligence community. The NSA hires me back into an entry-level position.

8.7

Karin resigns from her position as an engineer and moves with me into an apartment in Annapolis. She feels as though the job with the NSA is a good decision, and she wants to be supportive of what sounds like a promising career. But she isn't aware of the extent of my deterioration. She can't see the guilt and humiliation, and I'm not ready to admit that I've done things that can't be undone.

Karin takes a job at the front desk of the local YMCA. In the evenings, from the apartment in Annapolis, we take walks through the campus of the U.S. Naval Academy. We sign up for a tour and peer into a first-year student's room that has been opened up for the tour group. Neatly pressed uniforms line the closet. Neatly shined shoes are displayed near the bed. An older woman from the tour group says, “It looks like a prison cell.” The tour guide leads us into the dining hall. There is a large mural of a naval battle from the War of 1812. The young tour guide tells a story about James Lawrence and how he died and how he said, “Don't give up the ship,” and how the Naval Academy football team has adopted this as their battle cry on the football field and how recent graduates from the school are living out this creed on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of them have been killed. Graduates from the Naval Academy who earn commissions in the Marine Corps are often the first to die in any war. The tour guide seems very proud of this.