The Things They Cannot Say (3 page)

According to his own deposition in a Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) report, the Marine says he began shooting the injured Iraqis first with his M16 rifle, but when it jammed, he used his Beretta M9 pistol. I remember hearing the rounds while I waited outside the mosque. They were unhurried, with several-second intervals in between, the methodical nature of someone taking aim and shooting targets, rather than shots fired in fear or anger. Stranger and even more disturbing was what happened next. I entered the mosque with another Marine fireteam shortly after hearing the shots inside. I was surprised to see the bodies still in the mosque and even more surprised to see that four of the five wounded and captured insurgents who were supposed to be transported back to battalion headquarters were now either dead or dying from fresh gunshot wounds. Automatically, I began to document the scene, videotaping the dying men lying against the mosque's far wall. As I did, I saw in the corner of my frame a Marine (the same Marine, I would learn later from the NCIS reports, who had shot the captured insurgents). I tilted up slightly as I heard him say of one of the wounded men he had just shot before I entered the mosque, “
He's fucking faking he's dead—he's faking he's fucking dead.
”

Then I watched through my viewfinder as he raised his M16 and fired one final round into the man. It was an execution shot from point-blank range, blowing his brains out against the back wall of the mosque in which he had been slumped. I saw the proverbial pink mist that anyone who's ever witnessed a headshot claims to have seen. For a moment it mingled with the particles of dust riding the sunbeam from a mosque window to the rubble-strewn floor.

“He's dead now,” another Marine said, uttering a statement so profoundly redundant that it seemed simply an exclamation point to the act. Then the Marine spun on his heel and walked away, as if he had done nothing more than dispatch a rabid dog. In a killing such as this, there's a temporary vacuum in the air that sucks the breath out of anyone watching. I could feel my stomach rise to my throat. I knew that in this moment everything had changed. I had stumbled into a moral limbo where there existed the slippery concept that even in the mayhem of war, there were rules about killing. As technology was my witness, I had unwittingly become part of this unresolved conversation simply by pushing the red button on my camera.

When I confronted the Marine and asked him why he shot the man who had been wounded yesterday, he simply said, “I didn't know, sir, I didn't know.” He walked out with the other Marines and left me alone with Taleb Salem Nidal, who had pulled his blanket down and revealed his leg wound and the underpants he was wearing, his only clothing besides his shirt. He began talking to me in Arabic, asking me to help him. I watched him through my viewfinder, as I had the Iraqi who had been executed just moments before. Nidal's arms were outstretched, pleading. I told him I didn't speak Arabic, though the look on his face was clearly that of a man who knew he was in great danger, having just witnessed his wounded friends all being shot a second or third time. He fell back on his elbows, resigned, noting by my lack of expression that I would do nothing for him. He was right. I turned away from him as he lay on the floor, in his dirty white underwear, chunks of concrete and debris surrounding him.

I walked out of the mosque angered by the murder that I had just witnessed but somehow oblivious that Nidal could be next. I wanted to find the battalion commander and show him the videotape. Who was to blame? Was the Marine acting on his own or following orders not to leave anyone alive behind their lines of advance?
*
Ultimately it didn't matter. NBC and I decided to self-censor the report and not show the actual shooting, assuming it might be too inflammatory.
*
Our actions botched the story. By agreeing to censor the video, we kept important information from being part of the critical public discourse during a time of war. I had failed in my duty as a journalist and that failure haunted me for years.

I went back to reporting on war, but I never stopped thinking about what had happened in that Fallujah mosque. Wanting some kind of closure, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. government, desperate to get any other details. In 2007, three years after the mosque shooting, the full report of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service arrived in my mailbox. It was the size of a Manhattan telephone book and heavily redacted (sections blacked out for privacy protection of individuals named in the case and purportedly for other national security concerns). I took a deep breath and dug in, uncertain what I would find. It took me only twenty minutes and what I read made my knees buckle.

Taleb Salem Nidal, the wounded Iraqi who had been under the blanket and had tried to talk with me after the shooting, was himself murdered sometime after I left the mosque. His autopsy report detailed that his death was the result of the twenty-three bullet rounds fired into his back. When I bumbled out of the mosque with my videotape to seek justice for one summary execution, I had set the stage for another by ignoring the obvious probability that it would happen again. And it did. Had I simply walked Nidal out of the mosque, he might've lived. He had been the only witness besides me. Left alone in the aftermath, he never had a chance. To this day, I can't begin to fathom how I could have been so stupid. I never intended to get him killed, but with even a sliver more compassion in place of my “righteous” anger I might have saved him. His death is the pinnacle in the case against me. I have carried its burden ever since and in all but the last year or so, I've compounded the sin by bearing it with a complete and utter lack of grace.

My post-traumatic stress didn't begin with the realization of that final crime, but it certainly took me pro. I had indulged in all kinds of bad behavior throughout my “war career.” Drinking, recreational drugs and empty sexual encounters were part of my damaged-foreign-correspondent repertoire. According to the former VA psychiatrist Jonathan Shay in his second book on post-traumatic stress,
Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming
, veterans and I had a lot in common. “Veterans use many strategies to numb their pain, to silence the nightmares, to quell guilt,” he wrote. “Chemicals are only one such strategy, danger seeking is another, workaholism is another, sexaholism another still—and it is not an exaggeration to see it all.”

As soon as I felt the tinglings of discomfort brought on by trigger sounds of choppers, terrain resembling Iraq or Afghanistan or even seeing people in Islamic dress, I would find myself mucking into the past and waist-deep in melancholy, either disturbed by the recollections of being there or disturbed by the fact that I wasn't there. Either way, I delivered my anesthetics quickly and without guilt, knowing from books and movies that this was the way you dealt with the memories of war. Despite my deepening problems of addiction and abuse, I resisted any counseling or therapy, considering it a sign of weakness, for those who couldn't cope. But the truth was I hadn't been coping at all. My answer to the war within myself was to spend more time at war. I responded to the initial personal impact of the mosque shooting (before learning about the murder of Nidal) not with contemplation but with more conflict. If I had a theme song it would've been Elvis Presley singing “A little less conversation . . . a little more action.” I joined the giant Internet portal Yahoo! with the idea for a website called Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, a project in which I would travel alone and report on every major war on the planet in one year.

The Hot Zone simultaneously added to my collection of nightmares while helping me to contain them for another year and a half. I was in a new relationship, but that one also began to quickly unravel when I got back from my year at war and began writing
In the Hot Zone
, my memoir of that journey. It was then, in doing the research for that book, that I discovered the fate of Taleb Salem Nidal.

With that realization, I began a scorched-earth campaign that covered thousands of miles and another five years. No family member, no friend, no relationship was safe from my alternating anger and sullen isolation, though I did a formidable job of hiding both for long stretches, behind constant activity and bottomless martinis. I wrote and gave speeches touching the surface of my experiences, mistakes and realizations, but seldom prying deeper, not fully understanding the seismic shift they had set in motion in my psyche. I was just treading water, filling the void with kinetic energy and alcohol. I studied and earned certification as an emergency medical technician, I learned to rock-climb, I went on an expedition across Tanzania and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. At the time, I was with a woman eighteen years younger than me who was both bewildered and overwhelmed by the self-hatred that began to manifest as nearly total physical and emotional withdrawal. When that relationship ended, I was really on my own to do what I wanted with no pretense of obligation to anyone but myself.

I decided to flee to a beautiful but remote wind-blown rock north of Venezuela, the Dutch Antilles island of Bonaire. There I would trade my car for a bicycle, my camera for a mask and fins, and drop off the radar to work in a local scuba shop.

But in the spring of 2009, a week before leaving for Bonaire, I learned that I had been awarded a prestigious yearlong Nieman Fellowship for journalism at Harvard starting in September. I might have been able to escape journalism for a few months, but not forever. The Nieman was a competitive award that paid twelve domestic and twelve international fellows a stipend of $60,000 for the privilege of being in residence at Harvard University for nine months and doing nothing more than auditing classes in any particular subject that caught their fancy, from undergraduate history courses to medical school dissection labs. The initial idea was to give journalists a more well-rounded education—a Renaissance year. The only thing the Nieman Foundation asked of you was that you be engaged with the university and your colleagues. If there was a caveat, it was a minor one: while they did not forbid you to use the year to work on book projects, they discouraged it as an interference to the atmosphere of academic and collegial immersion. But after leaving Yahoo! News in 2008 I was back in the freelance world, which meant I couldn't afford to let a paid year go by without taking advantage of it. I had to write this book. And in that well-intentioned effort, I had no idea how badly I would squander this gift.

It began with my housing choice, which was to live in one of the undergraduate “River Houses” called Dunster, which kept a furnished, two-bedroom apartment open for Nieman Fellows each year. Usually international students grabbed the space, but I took it after being told how difficult it would be to find a spot in the high-priced Cambridge apartment market. The following August, I settled into the dark, cold and cavernous two-bedroom on the ground floor and began to research and plot out this book. Often that took place with a glass of red wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Harvard rules, however, forbid smoking anywhere on campus within twenty feet of a university building. That, I surmised, would make it impossible to reach my keyboard. Instead, I set my chair by the window and blew the offending smoke outside. Unfortunately it traveled up to the sensitive nose of some undergrad who ratted me out. After I ignored the e-mails from the resident assistant in my section of the building, the RA went to the house master, who was usually a tenured professor, and their family who lived in a house next to the residence hall. In this case it was a professor of business and his wife. They were a Mormon couple not particularly impressed by my behavior. Soon I was sitting in front of Bob Giles, then the grandfatherly curator of the Nieman Foundation, who reminded me in a polite but firm way that while I was living in a dorm for undergraduates, I didn't have to act like one. I was a forty-seven-year-old man getting reprimanded for smoking at school. It was definitely time to move. Dunster House had been bad for my self-esteem anyway, considering that if I had just worn a maroon polo shirt, like the building maintenance men, I would've likely been mistaken for one since they were so much closer to my age.

I moved out and rented a studio apartment overlooking Cambridge Common, where George Washington first took command of the Continental Army. It was on the second floor and full of light and character. My bed wedged perfectly into a small alcove, allowing me to lie on it and read while watching over the seasons, first the leaves, then the rain and finally the snow falling to the ground below. It was perfect. This would be the place where I would fight my own revolution, the battle against myself. But almost immediately, I began to lose. I frequently skipped my classes and social outings with fellow Niemans under the pressure of getting work done on the book. But as I stared at my computer screen transcribing notes from an interview with a soldier or Marine, the crushing weight of the stories that they shared with me often set off the anger and despair lodged in my own unresolved narrative. Thinking about their stories forced me to think of my own and the choices I had made in war. I countered these unpleasant thoughts by lying on my back on the hardwood floor next to my fireplace, drinking shots of whiskey and smoking cigarette after cigarette, exhaling the smoke into my chimney, reminding me of the indigenous people I once reported on from Chiapas, Mexico, who drank Coca-Cola and burped skyward, believing it to be a prayer to God. My God, I believed, had become bored with my prayers and my stories.

It was not inertia or laziness that kept me from making progress on the book. It was the shock of finally being forced to continually confront the psychological detritus of my years at war. Being in a safe environment where I was encouraged to be introspective loosed the lid of my jack-in-the-box issues. Whatever control I thought I had, I quickly lost in the repeated examination and judgment of my past. I saw the face of Taleb Salem Nidal everywhere from my dreams to the soot stains on the fireplace.