I am in Norfolk, Virginia this month for rehearsals and a performance of part of my new opera at the Virginia Arts Festival. The work, Heroes, Monsters, Humans, deals with the Iraq War from the perspectives of, by turns, a young Iraqi girl, an American soldier, and his wife back home in the States. The work is, as my stage works tend to be lately, political in nature (last year, the Arts Festival performed scenes from my comic opera, The Most Fortunate Son, which is a satirical critique of class privilege in America, as told through the ascendancy of George W. Bush).
In any event, this trip has been framed by two very different and very poignant experiences. While flying from Atlanta to Norfolk (which is a large Navy town), I sat by a 22 year old returning from Iraq for fifteen days of leave. We talked for the whole hour of the trip; he had been flown from Iraq to Germany to Ireland to Atlanta to Norfolk, a trip that had taken him almost three days. He is stationed in Southern Iraq, where things are calmer. His perspective was interesting; he had volunteered for duty in Iraq because of the money (he is paid more over there for hazard pay), and made a point to say that he wasn’t “tied up” in all of the “other stuff”—meaning the politics. I imagine it would be a great benefit for one to have that kind of disengagement, which he extended to the dangers of his work there as well. He told me that driving around those roads, he just thinks of them like normal highways, not letting his mind think about the risks.
As we got off the plane, I asked him what he was planning on doing on leave. He said he was going to drink beer and go camping. Camping would be the last damn thing I’d want to do after living in tent in Iraq for the last seven months, and I think he picked up on my amazement. He said, “I want to be near some trees”.
Talk about taking things in my life for granted.
Three fun things I learned from him:
(1) There is no alcohol in Iraq
(2) Everything there smells like shit and diesel
(3) It takes the Navy over three days to get you from Iraq to the States; it takes them 18 hours to get you from the States to Iraq
After arriving and checking into the hotel here, I stepped outside to try to find a place to eat lunch. As I was looking around, a young man standing outside the hotel looked at me and just started talking. The first thing he said was “What the fuck are you looking at?”, which left me rather stunned. As we began to talk, his hostility left as quickly as it had come.
His name was Kevin, 23 years old, also in the Navy. There was something haltingly wrong with him—drugs, alcohol, PTSD, I have no idea—but something was very wrong. He would begin to talk about his inability to say things, vague language about hiding things, and various other secretive and veritably strange phrases. He started crying at one point, and then immediately smiled and told me the bag I was carrying made me look like a “fag”. It was the strangest conversation I have ever had in my entire life. It was like an emotional rampage—up, down, angry, sad, defeated, aggressive—all in the span of about half an hour. Even stranger was that his language was so vague. He said very little that was not abstracted, and several times offered me cryptic advice about secrecy (?!) I cannot capture the nature of this conversation very well, but suffice is to say it was very odd, frightening, and in a way, moving.
These experiences would have been very poignant in their own right, but having them as the first experiences of this trip, which is centered on my Iraq War opera, is a very strange feeling. It somehow seems fitting.
