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Evil Hours
A Biogr a ph y of Post-Tr au m at ic
St r ess Disor der
David J. Morris
wanted the moment to end. I didn’t like being the topic of conver-
sation, and it took everything I had to avoid thinking about being
blown into tiny red pieces. This, in fact, was one of the first head
tricks I’d learned in Iraq, to systematically ignore the obvious: you
were always just about to die — get over it. I was wasted, too, and
my mind wasn’t right. I had been in Iraq for a total of nine months
by this point, and even though I had seen people killed by roadside
bombs, I’d never been hit myself, and somehow I’d come to feel that
I had my luck under control. But in posing the question, it was as if
the soldier had stolen that control, thrown me over to the forces of
chance that I had worked so hard to insulate myself from.
Later, I interviewed a prominent psychoanalyst, who told me that
trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time, you move from
one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After
trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked back-
wards into an eddy, or bouncing about like a rubber ball from now to
then and back again. August is June, June is December. What time
is it? Guess again. In the traumatic universe, the basic laws of mat-
ter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be
mustard gas.
Another odd feature of traumatic time is that it doesn’t just de-
stroy the flow of the present into the future, it corrodes everything
that came before, eating at moments and people from your previous
life, until you can’t remember why any of them mattered.
What I previously found inconceivable is now inescapable: I have
been blown up so many times in my mind that it is impossible to
imagine a version of myself that has not been blown up. The man
on the other side of the soldier’s question is not me. In fact, he never
existed.
The war is gone now, but the event remains, the happening that
nearly erased the life to come and thus erased the life that came be-
fore. The soldier’s question hangs in the air the way it always has.
The way it always will.
Have you ever been blown up before, sir?