I don't seek it out. Sometimes, days like this just happen.
John had gone off to church, while it was still dark out. I was here in the kitchen, having my usual big cup of coffee and taking a few minutes on the computer, before driving to North Branch NJ, to spend part of the day with the people at Combat Paper. I mentioned them yesterday -- a group started by young military vets from the Middle East conflicts, who've begun taking apart their old uniforms and making them into paper. A great deal of story-telling arises, because reducing a set of fatigues to postage-stamp sized fabric morsels is time-consuming, and stories will arise. And as someone said about the project, it's about the process, rather than the product.
But I'm not there yet. I'm still in my kitchen, with the cup of coffee -- the big cobalt blue cup, which is technically two cups' worth, but who's counting. And as I zip through one of the social sites, I'm stopped short by a photo, shared by a friend of a friend. I'm seeing a young man in uniform, atop a tank I think, gazing down serenely and with great affection at the viewer. 'Who is this young man?' I commented, 'and why is he looking at you with such love?' Saying 'beautiful young man' would have been more to the point.
'This is my nephew', I'm told. 'He died seven years ago today. His name is Steven. He is our hero.'
I am shocked, literally feeling my skin tingle, all the way down to my feet. I feel so stupid, but how could I have known? I send condolences, and talk about my immediate destination, and say that whatever I do for this day, it will be for him. Paltry gifts before an inconsolable loss.
It's only a half-hour drive, from this suburban neighborhood so close to New York City, but it seems to go further than just 30 miles. After the long hills on Rte. 78, I turn south, onto Rattlesnake Bridge Road (too cool to be missed, just for the name), and dip past big open fields with the open fencing used to keep horses in their place. Up along the horizon on my right, I'll pass a herd of grazing Texas longhorn cattle, looking prehistoric. Next to the cattle, there's a big pen for goats. Further on, there's a low wide creek lined with sycamores and willows; beyond that and about 200 feet up, sits a charming old white house with peeling green shutters. The road twists some more, and I pass on one side the campus for Raritan Valley Community College, and on the other a little mall that looks completely artificial, like large scale piece for a model train-set. I stop to get coffee at a Starbucks (how remote can we really be?), and in just a few more minutes, I'm pulling up to the printmaking facility, that sits right at the center of a fork in the road. There's only one other car in the lot.
I bring my coffee and the milk to the door -- I've made it my job to bring the milk -- and I expect the door to be locked. But it isn't, and it turns out there are two others already there -- one of the guys who founded of the project, and another young Mid East vet, who lives nearby, and is studying at the campus I've just passed. I notice, in passing (as I do more and more these days), that I'm old enough to be their father. I fix my high-price coffee; they've already begun brewing their own; when we're all armed with caffeine, we move to the table where the disassembly work takes place. The snick, snick, snick is me, working with the seam cutter. The young man from down the road has the rotary cutter, which has to be used on a polyurethane pad, to protect the blade. He's slicing camouflage fabric into strips, and then chopping the strips into chunks. The other young man pulls out a hefty brown leather scabbard, removes matte black knife with an eight-inch blade, and begins using this to cut through the seams running down the legs of his own uniform trousers.
In the way it is with three people, I was the odd man out, in so many ways. But really, would I want to have experienced what these two guys, both ex-Marines, had lived through, in their lives barely half as long as my own? They talked about the variety of camouflage patterns -- which ones make you invisible to the human eye, and which ones make you invisible to the electronic version. They talked about what it was like, to ride in one kind of helicopter or another. They talked about sand. They talked about...
'So, we had this helo landing pad,' said the man with the black knife, 'on the bank of the Euphrates River, and it was just about as big as this room' he gestured with the blade, 'and every once in a while, if the pilot didn't land just right, the helicopter would just literally fall over into the river. And there was this one time, they'd just dropped off their cargo, and there were still a few guys on board, and the pilot missed the pad, and the bird just tipped over and everybody went in.' '
Well, I was trained for this kind of duty -- we had these little black inflatable boats, like you see in the movies, and we dropped everything, to try to rescue those guys, but we were too late. And they were only in like, this much water,' he raised his arm to indicate ceiling height in the printing room, just over my head. I'm 6'2". 'but they were weighed down with so much gear, they just couldn't get out.' He snipped through another seam, on a pocket he said he never used.
'And they pulled out this one guy, and it was so weird, because his arms were like this,' he reached back, like a swan about to take flight, 'and it was like you could tell, he was just trying to get his flight jacket off, but then he drowned. When they laid him down, his eyes were open, and it was like he was looking at me. And, you know, he was smiling? He had this smile on his face, and his arms were open wide, even though he was dead.'
They talked a little more, about what bits of equipment they were allowed to keep, after mustering out -- how they weren't allowed to have their knives, for instance, or their helmets. They talked about funeral duty, and how gratifying it was to be able to fold the flag just so. How they tried not to look at the crying moms. Then the young man with the rotary blade -- the local boy...
"Yeah, and our division was stationed along the Euphrates too," he said, "and one time, there was an engineering division working on a bridge repair, and one of their trucks accidentally drove off the edge of the work site, and rolled down the bank, and landed upside down in the water. And one of our guys -- he was this Asian guy -- he just dove right in -- even though the guys in the truck weren't from our group -- and he just swam down to try to get the driver out. But when he got down there and we figure he was trying to get the seat belt loose, the truck shifted, and rolled over, onto the driver's side. They both drowned.' We the living continued our dismantling. 'But you know?' he said, 'I guess maybe he was a Buddhist or something? And don't they believe in reincarnation? Because at his funeral, nobody cried. There weren't any tears. It was like they were proud of him, because of what he tried to do."
We worked some more. I thought of my 'hazardous duty' in Iceland, where suddenly being blown off ones feet, while trying to navigate a frozen sidewalk, was one of the greater challenges. That, and the one blizzard.
The local boy asked if a particular piece of cloth, made of different material, would work for the paper. The young man with the black knife pointed to a piece of the paper he'd made, to talk about the prominent threads we could see. 'You might not want these,' he said. The he turned the paper over, and there was a print on it, a reproduction of a photo. I couldn't really tell what it was.
"Oh yeah,' he said, 'that was me and this little Iraqi kid I got to know a little bit. He was always hanging around, even though he looked like he was scared to death of us. But his family was really cool about us -- all the Iraqis we met were, really. They'd always invite you into their homes, and offer you something to drink, even though... well, you'd always see a line of photos on the wall, mostly men, and these were their friends and family members who had been friendly with the Americans, and now they were all dead. They'd all been killed.'
'And in this picture, I was talking with this kid -- I hadn't seen him in a while, and I was kind of looking for him, to see if he and his folks were okay? And anyway, I went to their house, but they weren't there, and up in the rafters overhead, I noticed this perfect version of one of our assault rifles, but about half-scale, and it was made of plastic. It was just a toy, but you wouldn't be able to tell from far away. I reached up to get it, and it kind of snapped in half. I took it outside, and there he was. I felt bad, giving him his toy back after I broke it, but he didn't seem to mind. Anyway, this was the last time I saw him. When we went back a week later, everyone in that part of town was gone."
Or something like that. He probably used a make and model number for the rifle. I was just steadily ripping seams, and listening. Every once in a while, I might have something vaguely relevant to say, but mostly, I watched and listened, as these young men brought their memories out -- how odd, that both had witnessed drownings in a desert country. How strange to know that when one of them talked about how hot the air could be, the other could instantly feel that phantom heat from half a world away. How amazing that, for them, the Euphrates River had a palpable scent, an unquestionable reality, where for me, it has always been the stuff of remote geography or legend. The Garden of Eden.
Unlooked-for events like these bring me face to face with what I suppose I'll call emotional mathematics. I'm listening to these selected snippets of stories, from who knows what trove of memories these two young men have stored up inside themselves. I'm thinking of the still-living remains of a close friend's only son, who was blown up and burned, days short of his 35th birthday, while on his third tour of duty in Afghanistan. And without even multiplying these three lives by the factor necessary to take into account all those affected by these sad events, I wonder -- has any of this... misuse of irreplaceable human life made my country a nobler, or a better, or even a safer place?
Has any of this made me a better person?
Well, of course you know what my answer is. I'm embarrassed and ashamed that, when all of this foul madness began, ten years ago, I didn't have the courage of my convictions. I didn't manage to, say, chain myself across the entrance to the Holland Tunnel one morning. Or perform cartwheels on the George Washington Bridge, to the dismay of commuters. I'm paranoid about my own government, and frightened of incarceration -- having, in a way, already... been there, done that. Making art seems to be the only way that, at least in my own mind, I can address not only issues of mortality, but more specifically, what I consider to be our nation's crass, cynical and deeply institutionalized indifference to human lives. Making art. It feels pathetic and ineffectual, and a bit lame, but for the time being, it seems to be all I can do.
That, and standing quietly by, plying my seam ripper a couple of hours a week, and witnessing the inner lives of men and women who have been far more deeply impacted by these immoral, crass military actions than I will ever be. I can be there, and listen, and not try to fix anything. As all of us in that room quietly take things apart, and then put them back together again, transformed. Oh please, let this be enough.
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
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