It occurs to me that I am now twice as old as my high school friend who died in Iraq.
It seems impossible to convey, in a concise way, what it was like being an adolescent in the early 2000's, when the internet was more powerful than we could possibly understand, but not developed enough in order to make it useful the way it is (arguably) now. We were barely out of the 90s, when the availability of information and ideas and opinions beyond the mainstream kind of came down to whatever weirdos you actually knew in real life, or publications you just happened to stumble upon.
Being a teenager in a conservative town, living through but not yet understanding the cultural transformation taking place after 9/11, I mostly conceptualized war as the interesting thing we talked about in history class and also what drove the mechanics in a lot of the videogames my friends played. Nobody responsible for guiding my education knew what to do with me because they never considered creative work a viable career path, so I was mostly aimless and never had hopes to get into a Good College. When army recruiters came around, I entertained the idea because it was A Path. It was Different, and it was guaranteed to take me Away from the town I didn't particularly like. And they said I could be part of the Army Band, a musician! That's creative, and I probably wouldn't have to fight.
My friend and I were nerds. We shared a locker our junior year and sat together in the morning before class. He was soft spoken with a blond bowl cut and coke bottle glasses. When he took them off, the missing magnification made his eyes shrink cartoonishly, and I'd poke fun at him with an impression of Hans Moleman from the Simpsons. He would doodle a little drawing of a moose on things, it became a sort of signature.
George W. Bush led the USA in declaring war on Iraq. I had been convinced the lead-up was a bluff until it happened. Why would this folksy little man start a war? I didn't know anything. War was an abstract historical thing to me, it was tales of Roman battles, or the Axis vs Allies in the second World War, an event so mythologized as to become legend. Or Vietnam, the thing movies seemed simultaneously regretful and nostalgic for, the one my uncle was in but wouldn't talk about. Everyone seemed to know the war was a bad idea, I couldn't understand why it was happening, how it could happen.
My friend invited me and another buddy to his taekwando class as guests. I was amazed at the flexibility he demonstrated in the warm ups, he could sit with the soles of his feet together and pulled towards his body, knees splayed all the way to the floor, and then, folding forward, could touch his forehead to the ground. I was considerably less athletic than anyone else in the class, and struggled to accomplish any single element of that stretch. Afterwards, my friend offered us a demonstration of something cool he could do. He had our buddy put on some kind of padded helmet. The speed at which he did the next thing still stuns me, I missed most of the action due to a blink. With no visible preparation or warning, he effortlessly roundhouse kicked our buddy in the head with the speed of a lightning bolt. We vocally and exuberantly expressed our awe the way boys do when the coolest shit ever happens.
I didn't see my friend as much during senior year. Different lockers, different schedules, different social circles. I took a class that was entirely self-directed reading. You chose books, the teacher assigned them a number of points based on some gut check of how literary they were, then you read them, wrote journals, and discussed them in one-on-one meetings with the teacher. For a kid with undiagnosed ADHD, this was both a blessing and a curse. My inability to muster enough concentration to write the journals should have sunk me, but I think the teacher picked up on the mismatch between my intense interest in reading and analyzing fiction verbally versus whatever mental block was preventing me from writing it down. He was an older man with a dry sense of humor and that devil-may-care outlook that comes from being on the cusp of retirement. He was one of those teachers who cared about the art and the people more than the system and the rules, and I felt a connection to that. I think he understood something about me, that I really was trying, and let me get by with a D. It's funny looking back now, realizing that class probably saved my life.
One of the books I chose to read was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I think I was drawn to its satirical tone and the fact that it was thick enough to net me a good number of points. Reading that book was like waking up. World War II was supposed to be the glorious war, the righteous and moral war, the Star Wars of war. Catch-22 drew a direct line from those abstract legends of the 1940's to the confusion of my life, the madness of running up against stupid and arbitrary bureaucracy in uncaring systems, the sense of ennui and lack of direction, and exploitation and waste of human life I was starting to understand around me. The pointless, awful fucking war.
I avoided the army recruiters. I graduated high school, and stayed at home, and joined a band, and met a girl, and went to community college where I continued to be a mess. That's another story. Most of my friends dispersed to various state colleges.
One evening, there was a knock at the door, a local reporter. Here to talk about my friend. Oh you haven't heard? I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, he was killed by an IED just outside Fallujah. We haven't been able to contact his family for the story, they moved at some point and we don't have their current address. Another friend gave us your info, he said you knew him better.
I didn't know what to say. I didn't even know he had enlisted. He was a marine, and he was dead. My mind was blank, I could barely describe him. I pulled out my yearbook. They pointed the camera at his signature in the back, a doodle of a moose.
The funeral was intensely militaristic, to a degree that felt alien and sickening to me. He was in uniform in his casket, and his body was different. He was bigger, not the skinny awkward kid I knew, but muscular, his jaw square. In my memory, he was the nerd I ate breakfast with. In death, he was a marine. Completely. I looked at him, trying to square the uncanniness of seeing him, different. They made his lips the wrong color. Leaving, I tried to give my condolences to the family. Seeing his twin sister, I couldn't manage any words. I still can't imagine what she felt, like losing a part of yourself. In the parking lot I called my long distance girlfriend and broke down sobbing. I didn't recognize him, I told her. She said, that isn't him, you know. You know that isn't him.
It occurs to me that I am now twice as old as my high school friend who died in Iraq. He was nineteen years old. I've lived the span of his entire life, and then I lived it again. I think about who I was at nineteen, I didn't know anything, I didn't even know myself. I hadn't even lived, I was just getting started. We were kids. I dropped out of school, I played music, I had my heart broken, I made art, I fucked up relationships, I went back to school, I got depressed, I found my talent, I learned so much, I made videogames, I got married, I moved around the world, I made so many friends, I saw beautiful mountains, I made things I'm proud of, I met my heroes, I helped people, I learned about myself. A whole life in those nineteen years, and there's (knock on wood) still so much more ahead.
I think of him when I see George W. Bush. I think of him when I see Hans Moleman in the Simpsons. I think of him when I see a marine. I think of him when I see a moose. I think of him when I meet someone from Iraq. I think of him when I'm stretching, and I try to touch my forehead to the floor (I still can't).
I think of him in a selfish way, wondering at the alternate timeline where I had my shit together, where I didn't take the low-effort class sliding by reading Catch-22 and chatting about it, where I worked hard and transformed myself and got blown up for a bad cause. I think about him in a pitying way, wondering if he was as lost as me, and got swept up and used for canon fodder by a terrible machine that I was clever enough to escape. I think about him in a conflicted way, wondering if I ever really knew him, if we were friends the way babies parallel playing are friends simply because we were shoved together, if he really did believe in this cause and if, had he lived, we would have become too fundamentally different to be friends at all.
There's a thing I've learned about grief. I'd lost people before and I've lost people since, and when the hurt comes, it's so bad. You want it gone, you want to move away from it, you want to flush it out. But when it gets down to that last little bit of pain in your heart, you hold onto it, small and hard but eventually worn smooth by time like a stone pulled from a riverbed. The hurt of losing someone becomes part of loving them. To let that go completely would be the saddest thing of all. So you live a life collecting these pebbles in your chest, you carry their weight out of love, and when you feel your experiences rub up against them you cry and you smile and you feel a comfort in the sting of it. I don't believe in any higher being that actually cares about us, and I don't believe in any sort of life after death. And I don't think people live on in our memories, because that is not living. My friend's memory is not him. It will not make friends, or make mistakes, or fall in love. I don't have any explanation of why I carry him around with me, but I feel certain that it's right. And I hope that writing about him helps someone who is alive, someone who still has a lot of life to live. But mostly, I am writing about him for me. Taking a moment to appreciate the gift he gave to me, these memories, this grief.
I can't conceive of what it's like to be young now. The people born when my friend died are nineteen. The things that changed the world when I was in school, the internet, columbine, 9/11, are as distant and abstract to them as the Vietnam war was to me. History. What was once fallout is the only air they've ever breathed. And they haven't even lived yet. When I think of my friend, I think of them, and I feel hope for their future, and fear for their present, and I feel pain, and love. And I don't always know what to say, but I hope I still have time to figure it out. And I hope they get the time too.
