Disco Night Sept 11

DISCO NIGHT SEPT 11
BY PETER VAN AGTMAEL

INTRODUCTION
I was scared of war but also comfortable in it. I had felt it in me from the beginning of my
consciousness. I didn’t know what form it would take, but I always knew I would go.
When I was in fifth grade the first Gulf War started. I followed it obsessively. I was already
fascinated by the history of war, and suddenly my country was involved in one. A real fight
against good and evil, we were told. I had cut out a diagram from the New York Times that
described the equipment and weaponry that the soldiers carried. It got so worn out I had to
laminate it, cutting carefully around the edges. At lunch one day my friend Omid asked if I
thought the war was going to last a long time. I told him that Vietnam had gone on for more than
ten years, and it was possible he and I would end up in Iraq one day too. When the war ended a
few weeks later, I was secretly disappointed.
The night before going to Iraq for the first time I was staying in a hotel room in Kuwait. I walked
around in my underwear in front of a mirror wearing my new body armor and helmet and felt like
a real badass.
I went to a party in Washington shortly after returning from a trip to Iraq. I’d spent five of the
previous seven months in the country during the height of the insurgency and sectarian conflict.
One of the hosts was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and an acquaintance from
college. I got drunk and angry, and after brooding and swaying over a beer in the corner of the
party, watching across the black space of the deck at people laughing in that warm summer night,
I began reenacting the convulsive death of a soldier as he succumbed to grievous burns. I had
watched him die and the scene still coated my eyelids when I tried to sleep. My friends, looking
at me with fear and pity and confusion, ushered me quickly from the party before many people
noticed.
After my second trip to Iraq I was listless. The detachment briefly faded when I found out James
died. I was sitting at home with my folks. I excused myself and drove to 7-Eleven. I bought a
pack of Marlboros and a pack of Newports and sat on the curb in the parking lot, smoking one
after another. When Finken was killed a few months later I was too drained to feel much of
anything at all. I knew I’d be going back to Iraq, and was reluctant to confront my experiences.
To do so would acknowledge my fears, and I wanted to go back.
Shortly after, I went with Raymond and a few other amputees to a bar near Walter Reed. One of
them was drunk, and kept popping downers he’d been prescribed, chasing them with whiskey.
There was a table of teenagers next to us. We were doing a lot of drunken hollering and they’d
periodically glance over with looks of disgust. One soldier caught their stares, and started talking
loudly at them about all the kids he’d killed, and how much he’d enjoyed it. I started to ask him to
chill out but saw the other soldiers watching him, silently egging him on. After a few minutes, the
teenagers got up and left, and the soldier quieted, talked about sports.
One night I found myself trying to count up the number of dead and injured I’d seen from the
wars. I realized I’d lost count. A few deaths had been scorched into the top layers of my
consciousness. They were never far from my thoughts, and would claw to the forefront when
least expected and desired. But most of the others were hazy. I spent time looking at an edit of my
pictures and found dozens of moments that I’d forgotten. The memories existed only as
photographs. The sounds and smells and words of the experience were gone. I’m not sure what
that means. When a photo flashes on TV of the latest casualty, even the ghost of them that
remains in the picture already looks dead.
I told myself I’d remained healthy and stable despite the death and violence I’d seen. I didn’t
really question that I was no longer sleeping through the night and staying up late watching
YouTube videos of firefights. When I went back to war I felt at home. Stepping outside the wire
on my first patrol after a year away from Afghanistan, I felt a surge of contentment. At that
moment it was the only place in the world I wanted to be. One of my best friends got married that
day in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. My mom’s birthday was a few days later and I spent it
trapped in a cornfield as bullets cracked overhead. When I came home I did everything to excess,
enjoying it but with a hardness.
The path I was on meant death. If not of my body, then of a part of myself more essential than the
identity I had desired and created. The calling I felt could easily have been a false seduction. Yet
I’ve been lucky. These days, for the first time in my life, I have little desire to be at war. I wonder
if that ever-present urge will return. I miss it but hope it lies dormant. I have few regrets. It feels
like I should have more.
Despite all the death and confusion and isolation and impotence these pictures represent, I know
they can only be a slender document. There are so many simultaneous existences and we can only
be present in one. For every story that is recorded there are nearly infinite ones we’ll never know.
The real weight of destruction is still happening constantly in anonymity across Iraq and
Afghanistan and America, in endless repetition of all that has come before. If I found any truth in
war, I found that in the end everyone has their own truth.
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DISCO NIGHT SEPT 11

BY PETER VAN AGTMAEL

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