War and Pieces

Yesterday, I read Ethan Brown's non-fiction book Shake the Devil Off, which tells the story of a man named Zackery Bowen who murdered his girlfriend, Addie Hall.

Bowen was a veteran, a military policeman who served in Kosovo and Iraq. He also remained in New Orleans with Hall during Hurricane Katrina. He suffered from self-esteem issues that well pre-dated his military career, and he also had, at the very least, an evolving relationship with his sexuality (despite having been married and having Hall as a girlfriend, he was having affairs with men toward the end of his life). Brown does not make much of the self-esteem or sexuality issues in analyzing Bowen's actions.

Not only did Bowen murder Hall, but he did so in a gruesome fashion. He strangled her in their apartment in the French Quarter (located above a popular voodoo priestess's temple, which I visited on my own trip to New Orleans though I did not know anything about Bowen and Hall at that time). He then butchered her body and attempted to cook parts of her. He went on a bender involving much drinking and snorting of cocaine, spent princely sums at strip clubs, saw his closest friends and then killed himself jumping off the roof of a hotel.

I first heard about this book reading Dave Walker's excellent column in New Orleans's Times-Picayune devoted to the new HBO show Treme. I don't have cable at the moment, let alone HBO, so I'm forced to soak up information about Treme on the internet. Since the show delves so deeply into New Orleans's rich and unique culture, Walker courteously directs readers toward additional resources to find out about topics like Mardi Gras Indians or experiences of Hurricane Katrina.

What struck me most about Shake the Devil Off was not its descriptions of Hurricane Katrina but rather its descriptions of Bowen, both while he served in Kosovo and Iraq and after he returned home. Reprints of emails and letters he sent sounded eerily similar to correspondence I received from The New Guy while he was serving in a war zone in the same role Bowen had. Bowen's behavior when he returned was also chillingly familiar to me. With The New Guy, I experienced the same kind of explosive outbursts and inexplicable anger. During the relationship, my brother counseled me to get away from The New Guy and never have any further contact with him because he was abusive and dangerous. I took his comments to heart, but now I see how my life could conceivably have turned out.

It's not really for me to say whether the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan are just or whether we should have gotten into them in the first place or how we should extricate ourselves. What is clear to me though is that people are going off to these conflicts and coming back broken. Post-traumatic stress disorder, a subject on which I am no expert, seems to make it extremely difficult for even well-adjusted people to transition from combat back to civilian life. If you take someone like Bowen or, I suspect strongly, The New Guy who already has some mental health issues and add PTSD on top of that, you get a broken person. My heart goes out to The New Guy (as it would go out to Bowen, if he were still with us), but I am more convinced now than ever that I made the right decision to cut him out of my life completely. Just because I regret what happened to him and hope that he one day recovers does not mean I want to place myself in harm's way.