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EVERYTHING
MAY 26 - Entire
contents are © 2005 NOW Communications Inc. story
URL: http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2005-05-26/news_story7.php
Houdini, get me out of this Awaiting
the call to By BEN SAINSBURY Got a letter in the
mail, go to
Every Thursday afternoon I
leave work early to beat the I'm a Canadian, but I'm
also a member of the Inactive Ready Reserve. So I'm uneasy on these weekly
trips. I hum army songs to distract myself from thinking about what life would
be like if I were to get the "battle call." Of all the disastrous
things that could happen to me overseas, nothing terrifies me more than my
nightmare of being an American POW trapped in a prison like Abu Ghraib. I'm not
nearly so afraid of driving over a land mine, being shot or getting hit by an
RPG (rocket-propelled grenade). When I joined the army, I
was given a Geneva Conventions ID card. If I'm ever captured, I'm to show the
card in order to guarantee my basic human rights. But after seeing the home
movies As I was telling you, I
used to be deathly claustrophobic. The thought of being confined or blindfolded
paralyzed me. As a kid I tried every home remedy to rid myself of this
asphyxiation phobia: I'd crawl inside my sleeping bag the wrong way, under my
comforter, under my bed and see how long it would take me to escape. When all the other kids
were playing with their Hot Wheels in the sand pile, I was creating elaborate
labyrinths full of deadly traps for ants. I'd grab the biggest carpenter ants I
could find and drop them into my mazes to see how long it would take them to
escape. If they happened to take a wrong turn, they'd end up fried by a
magnifying glass, set adrift on a piece of wood on the lake or consigned to a
pit where I made them fight other ants by grabbing their heads and forcing their
pincers to lock onto each other. In the winter I dug snow
tombs and threw dogs and kids in snowsuits inside and... that's enough. You get
the point. I realize now that these sadistic childhood games were a pathetic
attempt to overcome the terror and powerlessness I felt. That's how I know what
seduced those young U.S. prison guards into playing out the spymaster's game at
Abu Ghraib, where they believed you were either the victim or the torturer, one
or the other, zero sum, me or them, me or the ants. When I read Houdini's
biography at age 10, I thought I'd found the perfect role model. His ability to
escape from everything was empowering. I no longer had to play God with ants to
overcome my feelings of helplessness. Houdini's techniques were only tricks, but
if I learned some of them I thought I'd be able to escape the panic of my phobia
and be cured. In my basement, I asked my
brother and his friend Tommy to use a chair, a sleeping bag, a garden hose and
some rope to put me into something that I wouldn't be able to get out of. They
sat me in the chair, tied my hands behind my back, stuffed the sleeping bag over
my head and wrapped the hose around it. Tommy kicked the chair over and they
turned out the lights and split. I was trapped! We were living in I used to be a high
school stud. Now I’m crawling in the mud. A few months ago, the wife
and kids of an army buddy currently in My friend's wife, Sue, got
sick of waiting and took her kids to At night Sue asked me to
tuck the boys in. This was a difficult mission. A week before the family came
I'd wiped a bunch of photos that their dad had sent me off my hard drive. I knew
the kids would want to play Doom on my computer and – Christ almighty! – I
didn't want them seeing what their dad was really doing in "Why is my dad there
and not you?" "When's my dad coming
home?" "Is he going to
die?" I used to date the high
school queen. Now I date my M-16. I keep trying to figure out
what possessed me to join the military in the first place. I guess I was drawn
to the idea of being part of a group, belonging. I wanted to be a part of what
soldiers feel toward each other. When I got to boot camp, I
figured out that war is all a game, and mastering it became the greatest escape
of my life. I no longer had to be stuck being the same person every day. It was
all like a play, with the drill sergeant as an acting coach. I would wake up in the
morning on my cot, wiggle my toes, and there I was, the same old me. Then Drill
Sergeant Ballard would walk in wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses to look like
the Terminator, screaming, "Get the hell out of bed and into the pit."
As I did push-ups in the
mud day after day, living out my drill's torture fantasies, I would think about
how great it was to escape from myself: no more unpaid bills, dead-end desk
jobs, family obligations. I was free! I was an American soldier, the greatest
acting role I had ever been cast to play. And I got to play it over and over
again. That's what I thought. My
private life at the time was, to paraphrase the army's slogan, "a disaster
of one." All of us who fell for the trap had what we thought were reasons.
But the reasons behind the reasons are another story about power and men, and
finally about being so goddamn young that the military looks like a home when
it's really a cage. Then someone leaked to
Drill Sergeant Ballard that I was claustrophobic. "I went to SERES,
Private. I know just what you need." That's Survival, Evasion, Resistance
and During your incarceration,
they try to break you down by using a variety of torture techniques: sleep
deprivation, forced standing, choking in water, solitary confinement,
humiliation, etc. It's the "etcetera" that had me sweating. Drill Sergeant Ballard's
"claustrophobia remedy" involved stuffing the entire platoon "nut
to butt" into a medic transport truck that locked from the outside. He
proceeded to drive the truck around and around in circles. When he got tired of
that he stopped the truck, climbed on top and jumped up and down on the roof. I lay between two privates
in fetal position with my eyes closed. Mortified. I don't know what the hell we
were supposed to gain from his guerrilla psychotherapy exercise, but it failed
to cure my affliction. Standin’ tall and
lookin’ good. I should be in After basic, I was trained
as an army propagandist. I learned how to design "battlefield
advertising" leaflets that we drop from planes, gather intelligence from
POWs and use a loudspeaker. All through training I was
looking forward to the day I would get deployed and do my job for real. This was
during peacekeeping time, when It was very Peace Corps-esque
but with more perks: a signing bonus, student loan repayment and the GI Bill. Now I know that the army is
a two-headed beast: Nation Builder/Death Machine. The high school kids scraped
up to feed the monster only find out the truth too late. What I really did when
I signed up was to put my Social Security number into a lottery system. The winners are the ones
who use the army for the benefits, do their time and get out without permanent
mental or bodily harm. The losers are those whose numbers are called, who ship
out and are killed or permanently wounded for something they don't even
understand or believe in. The grunts and the
dog-faces on the killing ground are like the ants trapped in my maze. They may
think that God and the Flag are over them, but it's only fear that fills the
sky. Still humming, I pull into
a free parking space at Mailboxes Etc. I used to drive a
Cavalier, now I’m humping all this gear… I keep searching for a lost
Houdini chapter on draft dodging, but I know it doesn't exist. There's no
escape. I guess it's inevitable that the ants will get their revenge and I'll be
dropped inside the death maze, where I'll be at the mercy of a giant superpower
child that tries in vain to spread freedom by raising its huge fist and then
dropping the death blows of Shock And Awe on the sandbox of the world. I turn the key to the box
and find bills, student loan consolidation offers, a Costco newsletter and a
Pottery Barn catalogue. Phew. Looks like I've got another
week to plan my escape.
Let them stay Help the War
Resisters Support Campaign: • Contact PM Paul
Martin (pm@pm. gc. ca) and Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Joe Volpe
(minister@cic. gc.ca) and ask that they make a
provision allowing • Attend a vigil at
Brandon Hughey's refugee hearing on Thursday, June 2,
EVERYTHING
MAY 26 - Entire
contents are © 2005 NOW Communications Inc. story
URL: http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2005-05-26/news_story7.php |
