READINGS

[Essay]

CoNSEquENCE
By Eric Fair, from the Spring issue of Ploughshares. Fair served in the Army as an Arabic linguist from 1995 to 2000 and worked as a contract interrogator in Iraq in 2004. In 2007 he wrote an article for the Washington Post about his experience as an interrogator.

enter my name into a search engine. There are 3,700 results. The word torture appears in most of them. I read the blogs. I read the comments that follow. I find more blogs. I pretend that those dont bother me either. I check my email: thirty-eight new messages.
Mr. Fair, Im not at all sure why you have your panties in a twist. It seems clear that you were a willing participant in the interrogation process in Iraq. This is old news.

I navigate back to the opinion page of the Washington Post. The comments section is still growing. More than 800 now. I read the new ones and some of the old ones too. I read my article again. I check email: fifty-seven new messages.
Mr. Fair, your words are empty and hollow. I do not accept a single one of them. But let me offer you a suggestion if you want to do the honorable thing: kill yourself. Leave a note. Name names. Until that day, I hope you never sleep another hour for the rest of your life.

the day I pack boxes; we are moving to Princeton. Ill be studying at the seminary, pursuing ministry in the Presbyterian Church. I hope no one there reads the article. The admissions office calls. I cant get most students to read a newspaper, let alone appear in one, the administrator says. Maybe your time in Iraq will become part of your ministry. I enter the seminarys administration building to file paperwork for my veterans benefits. I am early. The office is closed. other students wait with me. I avoid them. I look at the pictures on the walls. They are black and white, taken during the Civil War. There is a grainy photo of Brown Hall with a blurred image of a student walking across the quad. I wonder if he is a veteran of Antietam or Gettysburg. I wonder if he knew Andersonville or Camp Douglas. I enroll in a summer language class. I study Greek in order to read the New Testament more effectively. It reminds me of the Army. I studied Arabic in order to interrogate Arabs more effectively. I settle into a life of muggy morning walks to class followed by chilly afternoons in the seminary library. I arrive on campus in the early morning, review my homework, attend class, eat lunch, then spend the rest of the afternoon memorizing verb charts. I return home in the early evening, tell Sarah about my day, eat dinner, watch the news, get drunk, and read emails with subject lines like iraq, interrogation, and torture.
Eric, I still have a .45-caliber 1911. I suspect you know the firearm. Id loan it to you gleefully if you get really depressed. And Id happily take whatever legal consequence might come my way for having done so. Youd be doing the world a favor by removing yourself from the gene pool.

I keep pretending not to be bothered. Then I drink. In the mornings I pretend to have slept. I watch Sarah drive off to work. We both pretend our marriage isnt suffering. During

READINGS

11

With revulsion at the subhuman you and others like you surely are

I get to know my fellow students. There is a childrens book author from Boston, a mathematician from Los Angeles, a youth worker from Kansas, an actor from New York City, and a former NFL lineman from Florida. One is a recent college graduate. One has been traveling in Europe. One is middleaged. One is retired. There is not another veteran among them. I say nothing about Iraq. I mention in passing that I served in the Army, worked as a police officer, and went on to consult for the U.S. government, but I never mention the words Iraq, contractor, interrogator, or Abu Ghraib. As Greek consumes my mornings and afternoons in Princeton, Abu Ghraib dominates what remains of my days. I return home to the apartment and field phone calls from reporters in Philadelphia, filmmakers in Norway, psychologists in Boston, authors in academia, lawyers for Amnesty International, and investigators at the Department of Justice. Someone tells me to speak to a lawyer. The lawyer tells me not to speak to anyone. He tells me not to antagonize the government. He tells me to be honest. He tells me he will keep me out of prison. He tells me to focus on Greek. He arranges a meeting. I tell my professor I am sick. I leave behind verb charts, participles, and lexicons, board a train for Washington, and meet with Department of Justice lawyers and Army investigators in the shadow of the Capitol. I disclose everything. I provide pictures, letters, names, locations, firsthand accounts, and descriptions of techniques. I talk about the hard site at Abu Ghraib, and I talk about the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I talk about what I did, what I saw, what I knew, and what I heard. I ride the train back to Princeton. I start drinking more. Sarah takes notice. I tell her to go to hell. I sit for my final Greek exam in August. It is a passage from Pauls letter to the people of Thessalonica.
You yourselves know, brothers and sisters, that our coming to you was not in vain, but though we had already suffered and been shamefully mistreated at Philippi, as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in spite of great opposition.

trich Bonhoeffer. I read Kurt Vonnegut. I pretend I will make a good Presbyterian pastor someday. The semester begins. I enroll in a preaching class. One week we study poetry. I memorize a poem and perform it in front of the other students. The professor asks me to read lines over again. My pace is too fast. I havent stressed the right words. Like a devils sick of sin. It still isnt right. I say it again. Good, he says. Bring that energy to the pulpit. I make new friends. None of them read newspapers. I join a flag-football team. I agree to volunteer as a referee. I show up for a game, don my striped shirt, and blow the whistle. Players from both teams are furious. I am a terrible referee. One player approaches me, grabs my shirt, pulls me toward him, and then shoves me to the side. See, see, this is what theyre doing. They cant do this. Its called holding! In Fallujah I am grabbing a detainee, shoving him to the side, moving him through a line of Iraqis who have just been taken from the battlefield. Some are still bleeding. One is missing part of his face. We are processing them, sorting them into groups for future interrogation. Well-dressed ones to the right, shabby-looking ones to the left, faceless ones to the medic. The well-dressed ones are likely men of influence. The shabby ones are the pawns. But the shabby ones never seem to understand directions. They just stand there looking dumb. So we grab them and shove them and push them. I return to the apartment after the game and find Sarah. I tell her about the student who shoved me. I tell her I will kill him. I am angry. I am yelling. I am yelling at Sarah. Thirty minutes later I am still angry. I am still yelling at Sarah. I say something terrible. I leave to buy whiskey.
I am a former WWII vet. You think you saw hell, well pal let me tell you that you havent seen anything that bad. Dont be ashamed, you did your job. What you saw was no worse than some college fraternity initiation ritual. Have a good life and sleep well from now on.

here is a break before the start of the fall semester. The campus is quiet. I spend time alone in the seminary library. I read Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. I read C. S. Lewis and Die12 HARPERS MAGAZINE / JULY 2012

I visit the seminary chaplain. She directs me to the office of student counseling. There is a multiple-choice questionnaire. I elaborate on additional sheets of paper. The head counselor calls the next day. She will see me personally. We meet. We talk about terrible things. She tells me I am smiling. She calls it a defense mechanism. I tell her more terrible things. I ask her if she thinks I am a terrible person. She smiles. She says no. I meet with a Ph.D. student from South Africa. He is working on his dissertation and wants to talk to me about forgiveness. He tells me about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that followed apartheid. Men were granted amnesty in return for their confessions. He believes we should consider the same thing in this

CouRTESy THE ARTIST AND EDwyNN HouK GALLERy, NEw yoRK CITy

Schoener Goetterfunken V, Heavenly thy Sanctuary, a chromogenic print with acrylic and inks by Sebastiaan Bremer, whose work is on view at Galerie Edwynn Houk, in Zurich.

country. He thinks I would be a good candidate for such a process. The other option, he says, is Nuremberg-style trials. He doesnt think thats a good idea. But there must be consequences, he insists. Forgiveness requires consequence. In the spring I appear on Radio Times, an NPR program out of Philadelphia. I skip a class on systematic theology and drive into the city. I take calls from listeners. Many have questions about my motivations for going public, some want to know what can be done to prevent future abuses, and others think I havent gone far enough. Some ask about torture, others about seminary. Someone wants to know what I think about Dick Cheney. The producer screens the last caller during a brief promotional break. The caller is angry. The producer wants to know if I am com-

fortable fielding his questions. I accept. He asks me if I believe in hell. The hour is up. The interview ends. I remove my headphones, gather my notes, and move out of the way. The producer meets me outside the studio and thanks me for my time. She leads me out a back door to the guest parking lot. It closes and locks behind me.
Eric, I hope you burn in hell for the rest of your life, you son of a bitch. Youre a piece of shit.

Later that spring, I attend a conference entitled No2Torture at Columbia Theological Seminary, in Georgia. The conference is attended by notable members of the antitorture movement within the Presbyterian Church. The speaker list includes Lucy Mashua, a torture survivor from Kenya. She
READINGS 13

endured female circumcision, and now as an activist she endures additional abuse. She is there to speak for the victims of torture. I am there to speak for those who tortured them. We break into small groups. Each group has a large placard identifying its purpose. My placard reads Victims and Perpetrators. Lucy, the victim, sits across from me. We are surrounded

by other participants who want to hear what Lucy and I have to say. We say nothing. A photographer approaches. We stand for a picture. People gather to watch. Someone says it is a vision of heaven: victim and torturer hand in hand. We are not hand in hand. I sit and listen to the speakers. They talk about torture. They talk about the Roman Empire and the early Christians. They talk about just war and the doctrine of last resort. They talk about Nazis. Then I am introduced. I read my article. They applaud.
My dear friend, you should be tried for treason. I hope that terrorist in your dreams catches up with you and reminds you that he is there to kill Americans including you. You have disgraced the uniform you once wore.

LITTLE GoLF PENCIL

By Mary Ruefle, from Issue 13 of Ecotone. Madness, Rack, and Honey, a collection of Ruefles writings on poetry, will be published next month by Wave Books.

[Poem]

t headquarters they asked me for something dry and understated. Mary, they said, its called a statement. They took me out back to a courtyard where they always ate lunch and showed me a little tree that was, sadly, dying. Something with four legs had eaten it rather badly. Dont overemote, they said. I promised I wouldnt, but I was thinking to myself that the something-with-four-legs had certainly overemoted and that the tree, in response, was overemoting now, being in the strange little position of dying. All the cops were sitting around eating sandwich halves, and they offered me one. This ones delicious, said a lieutenant, my wife made it. Seeing as it was peanut butter and jelly I thought he was overemoting, but I didnt say anything. I just sat looking at the tree and eating my sandwich half. When I was ready I asked for a pencil and they gave me one of those little golf pencils. I didnt say anything about that either. I just wrote my statement and handed it overit was a description of the tree, which they intended to give to their captain as a Christmas presentI mean my descriptionbecause the captain, well, he loved that tree and he loved my writing and every one of the cops hoped to be promoted in the captains heart and, who knows, maybe get a raise. Still, after all that sitting around in the courtyard eating sandwich halves, I had a nice feeling of sharing, so when they asked me if I had anything else to say I told them that in the beginning you understand the world but not yourself, and when you finally understand yourself you no longer understand the world. They seemed satisfied with that. Cops, theyre all so young.

Back in Princeton, I interview for a summer internship. A church is looking for someone to run its youth program and preach on a set number of Sundays. We talk about my background, my education, and my interests. They ask about my first year at seminary. I try to talk about class, but they read newspapers, so they ask about Iraq. They say I should preach about war. We talk about interrogation. They are interested. They ask more questions. I am tired, so I answer them. I talk about Abu Ghraib. I talk about the detainees. None of them would cooperate. None of them would work with us. None of them would tell the truth. They all pretended to be farmers or mechanics or fishermen. They pretended to be drivers or cooks or clerks. No one was Republican Guard. They all hated Saddam. They all supported America. No one was hiding weapons in the backyard or explosives in the irrigation canals. None of them knew anything about the teams of men burying artillery rounds in the highway. They insisted it was all a misunderstanding. But the rockets and mortars kept coming. Sometimes they killed detainees, melted their bodies into a mash of blood and flesh. IEDs killed our friends. And so we deprived detainees of sleep, or made them stand for long periods of time, or shoved them or grabbed them or manipulated their diets. We blared loud music, kept them cold, kept them lonely, kept them scared. It made some of them cooperate. Maybe it would work on others, too. Then I went to Fallujah. It was worse. More people were dying. My friend was standing next to a car. It detonated. He disappeared. They found parts of him the next day. We detained and deprived and grabbed and shoved and isolated and abused as best we could. I grew weary. I went back to Baghdad. It was quiet there. I thought about where Id been. I thought about what Id done. I quit. I went home. I applied to seminary. The interview ends. I return home. The church calls the following week and offers me the job.

14

HARPERS MAGAZINE / JULY 2012