Connecting

If the Tommi story comes in three parts for me, as I think it is/will do, then we're passing from the first into the second now. Routine. Patterns. There is an odd sort of settling into war, into the realities of her being there. In one moment rockets are flying overhead and in the next friends are stopping by to play guitar with her. Others have built a veranda off one end of her bungalow and a putt-putt golf course outside her door (about which she complains bitterly, though I’ve lost her favorite word for the guys who play there … “the bridge club” maybe, I don’t remember). “We took a rocket last night” might pass in conversation between us now as easily as a report of her excitement for having scored a free manicure from a guy who coordinates “beauty services” there: he promises to “fix” her ragged cuticles. When she turns on the web cam, I watch her do Estee Lauder skin care before strapping a Beretta to her right thigh and slipping into body armor for a day of work at the gate. Routines. Patterns. Life at the gate, but life that makes no sense to me even when it's routine for her. How could it?

I’ve been thinking about connections, about what it takes to stay with my daughter who is away at war in a place so far beyond any context I have for knowing. I conclude from her telling, when I ask, that the common experience for a soldier there is to “let go” of anything more than periodic emotional forays into “life in the States,” to instead take up residence in a kind of ruptured experience, a place apart where stories lived in Iraq stay in Iraq – encasing two years of life in a tumor one trusts to remain benign. How else could it be? Where find the energy for building the cultural vocabulary needed to speak with those of us at home about a world being lived in/through there? Long days at the gate often make conversations short; it is enough to know home will still be here when the countdown is over. Life at survival, even when survival includes manicures, putt-putt golf, and friends over to jam the passing of a hot desert night, is still survival. I’ve lived stories of survival; there’s always more to tell than fits in the place made for listening.

This is the “Vietnam” I fear: the condition of so disjunctive an experience for soldiers returning from Iraq that, lacking any context for understanding, we fail to listen to them, or worse yet, we insist on listening only in the context of American values and understanding, making sense of war as “the right thing” and measuring “right” by an increased measure of American identity being exported in the name of liberty. Will that context work for a soldier who has been there to see – to know – another side of the story? Are we not composing the stories our soldiers are free to tell by imposing the force of our own willingness to hear, by defining a notion of “truth” before we’ve begun to listen? “Freedom” is changing hands in Iraq – trading places, but does this necessarily mean there is “more” freedom? Are there fewer atrocities committed simply because those being afflicted and those holding power have traded places? Are you able to hear what Tommi might tell you from Iraq?

Whenever news from the gate is "bad," Tommi asks me, “Do you really want to know?” I ask the same question and wonder, if I don’t, am I not just stuffing shit in a box and hoping the stink won’t get out?