Phil Klay - Redeployment

Rodriguez sighed. “Look at my hands,” he said. He put them out in front of me, calloused palms facing up, and then he turned them down and stretched out his fingers. “I look calm, right?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t sleep no more,” he said. “Hardly ever. But see my hands—look at me. Look at my hands. It’s like I’m calm.”

The conversation stayed with mewell after Rodriguez had gone. “You’re a priest,” he’d said, “what can you do?” I didn’t know.

As a young priest, I’d had a father scream at me once. I was working in a hospital. He’d just lost his son. I thought my clerical collar gave me the right to speak, so right after the doctors called time of death, I went and assured him his infant son was in paradise. Stupid. And of all people, I should have known better. At age fourteen, I lost my mother to a rare form of cancer similar to what struck that father’s son, and every empty condolence I received after my mother’s death only deepened my angry teenage grief. But platitudes are most appealing when they’re least appropriate.

This father had watched his healthy child waste away to nothing. It must have been maddening. The months of random emergency room visits. The brief rallies and the inevitable relapses. The inexorable course of the disease. The final night, his wife collapsed on the hospital floor in terror and grief, shrieking, “My baby!” over and over. Doctors repeatedly asked the father to authorize last-ditch attempts to keep his child breathing. Naturally, he did. So they proceeded to stab his son with needles, perform emergency surgery. Torture his child in front of him and at his request in a hopeless effort to continue a tiny, doomed life for a few minutes more. At the end, they were left with a very small and terribly battered corpse.

And then I came along, after the chemotherapy, after the bankrupting bills and the deterioration of his and his wife’s careers, after the months of hoping and despair, after every possible medical violation had denied his child grace even in death. And I dared suggest some good had come of it? It was unbearable. It was disgusting. It was vile.

I didn’t think hope of the life to come would provide comfort for Rodriguez, either. So many young people don’t really believe in heaven, not in a serious way. If God is real, there must be some consolation on earth as well. Some grace. Some evidence of mercy.

That father had despaired, but at least he was looking at life head-on, stripped of the illusion that faith, or prayer, or goodness, or decency, or the divine order of the cosmos, would allow the cup to pass. It’s a prerequisite, in my thinking, to any serious consideration of religion. What, like St. Augustine, can we say after Rome has been sacked? Except Augustine’s answer, the City of God, is a comfort designed for the aftermath of a tragedy. Rodriguez, that lance corporal, Charlie Company, the whole battalion, they were a different matter. How do you spiritually minister to men who are still being assaulted?

Having no answers myself,I reached out to an old mentor, Father Connelly, an elderly Jesuit who’d taught me Latin in high school and whom I’d had long conversations with when considering my own vocation. He didn’t have e-mail, so it took weeks to get his response, written on a typewriter:

Dear Jeffery,

As always it is wonderful to hear from you, though of course I’m saddened to learn of your difficulties. When you return to the States you must visit. You could even come to a class. I’ve got the boys reading Caesar and Virgil, of course, and you might have something to say to them about war. Come in spring. The flowers in the quadrangle are more beautiful now than I ever remember, and we can talk about all this in greater depth. But until then, I have thought about what you wrote, and have a few comments.

First you must forgive me, though, an old priest who has spent his whole life in relative comfort, for pointing out that your problem is nothing new. I don’t see why it qualifies as a “crisis of faith” to notice that formerly good men, under strain, experience a breakdown of virtue and become bitter, angry, and less inclined toward God. Suffering can indeed incline one to sin, but it can also be turned to good (think of Isaac Jogues, or any of the martyrs, or any of the mystics, or Christ Himself).

Your attempts to bring transgressions to command attention are salutory. But as for your religious duties, remember these suspected transgressions, if real, are but the eruptions of sin. Not sin itself. Never forget that, lest you be inclined to lose your pity for human weakness. Sin is a lonely thing, a worm wrapped around the soul, shielding it from love, from joy, from communion with fellow men and with God. The sense that I am alone, that none can hear me, none can understand, that no one answers my cries, it is a sickness over which, to borrow from Bernanos, “the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly.” Your job, it seems, would be to find a crack through which some sort of communication can be made, one soul to another.

I kept the letter with me throughout the rest of the deployment—always in the breast pocket of my uniform, always in plastic to protect it from sweat. There was a human warmth to the paper. It was signed, “Your Brother in Christ.”

“Who here thinks,”I asked the small group of Marines who’d gathered for Sunday Mass, “that when you get back to the States no civilians will be able to understand what you’ve gone through?”

A few hands went up.

“I had a parishioner whose six-month-old son developed a brain tumor. He watched his child go through intense suffering, chemotherapy, and finally a brutal, ungraceful death. Who would rather go through that than be in Ramadi?”

I could see confusion on the faces of the Marines in the audience. That was good. I didn’t intend this to be a normal homily.

“I spoke to an Iraqi man the other day,” I said. “A civilian, who lives out there in that city I’ve heard Marines say should be razed. Should be burned, with everyone in it perishing in the flames.”

I had their attention.

“This Iraqi man’s little daughter had been injured. A cooking accident. Hot oil spilled off the stove, all over the girl. And what did this man do? He ran, with her in his arms, to find help. And he found a Marine squad. At first, they thought he was carrying a bomb. He faced down the rifles aimed at his head, and he gave his desperately injured daughter, this tiny, tiny girl, to a very surprised, very burly corporal. And that corporal brought him to Charlie Medical, where the doctors saved his daughter’s life.

“That’s where I met this Iraqi man. This man of Ramadi. This father. I spoke to him there, and I asked him if he felt grateful to the Americans for what we’d done. Do you know what he told me?”

I held the question in the air for a moment.

“‘No.’ That’s what he said. ‘No.’ He had come to the Americans because they had the best doctors, the only safe doctors, not because he liked us. He’d already lost a son, he told me, to the violence that came after the invasion. He blamed us for that. He blames us for the fact that he can’t walk down the street without fear of being killed for no reason. He blames us for his relatives in Baghdad who were tortured to death. And he particularly blames us for the time he was watching TV with his wife and a group of Americans kicked down his door, dragged his wife out by the hair, beat him in his own living room. They stuck rifles in his face. They kicked him in the side. They screamed at him in a language he did not understand. And they beat him when he could not answer their questions. Now, here’s the question I have for you, Marines: Who would trade their seven-month deployment to Ramadi for that man’s life, living here?”