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Anna too looks back on that night with humor, but in the moment her feelings were desperate. She and Alex had so little time.
“Our relationship went from zero to a thousand miles an hour in point two seconds,” she told me. “We were psycho for each other. We spent every minute we could together. I don’t think it was him going into the army. I think it would still have gone that fast even if he’d been going away to college at CU.”
Alex’s enlistment was already a fait accompli when they met. After graduation in June, they had only a month until he had to report to basic training. They went for a lot of long drives together in Norm’s black Jeep Cherokee, watched a few movies, but mostly they hung out with Andrew and Jenny and Alex’s guy friends around fire pits in one or another of their backyards. The group had known each other for years and fed perfectly off each other’s energy. Alex was both the most fun and the most responsible, staying sober—he was on a strict no-alcohol, no-sugar diet for basic—and driving everyone home safely from parties. His loyalty to his friends was incredible. Everyone relied on Alex. Anna had dated guys before, but Alex made it obvious she had only ever been playing around. He made her laugh harder than any guy ever had, but he also treated her with more respect than any guy ever had. He was handsome and popular. Up to thirty people from school attended his hockey games; his team was neck-and-neck for top ranking in the state. He had a touchingly close relationship with his family too, especially his father and his little brother and sister.
“It was strange how much my parents trusted him,” Anna said. “I’m still not allowed to have boys sleep over when I’m at my parents’ house, but for some reason he was allowed to stay, and I was allowed to go over there. I think they fell in love with him as fast as I did. They were totally okay with us not being seen for days, because they knew I was in good hands. It was really nice how well he meshed into my life and my family and how well I meshed into his.”
The only hitch was the army. No one in Anna’s world knew anything about it. Alex tried to prepare her for what life would be like once he left: weeks at a time without phone calls, months without visits. To show her the kind of work he would be doing, he screened his favorite movie for her, Black Hawk Down, about a 1993 operation conducted in Mogadishu by Rangers and Delta Force operators. It was obvious how inspired he was by this display of military expertise, the fast-roping and room clearing and hand signals and jargon, all of which he eagerly explained to her as it arose, but when the bodies started to mount, Anna couldn’t help expressing some misgivings. Alex hugged her to him on the couch and told her not to worry. He loved her; he would always come back to her. Though he tried to play it casually, keeping his eyes fixed on the screen, it was the first time either of them had said it. Thrilled, Anna told him she loved him too.
“Everything was so fast and so perfect between us that I just completely ignored everything bad,” she said. “I literally ignored it right up until the moment when they came and picked him up.”
Years passed. Anna graduated from LHS, made the cheer squad at the University of Colorado, pledged at a sorority, and completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She coached cheer at a Denver gym for a while, then went to nursing school and landed the job at Children’s. Through it all, she continued to think about Alex. Her parents did not want her talking to me. She wasn’t so sure it was a good idea either.
“It’s hard not wanting to go back to him,” she explained. “All of my relationships now, I’m always comparing everybody to him. He was amazing. He made me feel … he made me feel. If he’d stayed in the army, I don’t know if we would have made it, because I’m sure that would have been hard too. That kid probably would have done it forever if he’d been able to. I don’t know if I could have handled that. But I might have. So that’s hard. Nothing broke us up. It’s not like we stopped loving each other, or got mad at each other, or something happened between him and me. He treated me like a fucking princess. You know that stupid movie The Notebook? That was our life. We. Were. Perfect.”
Alex spent his final month at home in Greenwood Village giddy with the knowledge that he was army property already, halfway to becoming the man he had always wanted to be. Not only was he about to kick some serious terrorist ass, he was dating the love of his life and planned to marry her. He trained harder than ever for basic, played a last few hockey games, and took advantage of his remaining weeks of freedom to goof off in high style. Many of Littleton High School’s students drove to graduation in the BMWs and Mercedes they had been given as graduation presents; Alex drove his dad’s ride-on lawn mower. At a final party with his teammates for the Littleton Hawks, while the rest of them drank and smoked and played poker, bragging about the junior hockey teams they would be playing for in Canada next year, Alex charged into the kitchen stark naked and dove under the table to call in pretend airstrikes using his fist as a radio.
“We had a barbecue for Alex the day before he left,” Norm recalled near the end of our lunch. “It was sort of a happy/sad deal.”
By some quirk of army scheduling, the day before Alex left happened to be the Fourth of July. “Forty or fifty people came by. Some friends, some coaches, some teachers and administrators from his school who had all just taken to him.” Norm shrugged. “He was an easy kid to like. Anna and two of his best friends stayed up with him afterward. We watched a couple of movies. Four-thirty in the morning, I think it was, two guys in uniform came and got him. As soon as they showed up, Alex was gone within a minute. Maybe ten words exchanged. You know, ‘I’m Alex’s dad.’ ‘We’re here to pick up your son.’ They don’t give a flying fuck.”
It was a rare moment of bitterness from Norm. I asked him how it felt to have Alex gone.
“You know, it’s like anything else in life. So-and-so is going to die, because they’re a hundred years old and they have cancer, and you’re ready for it until it happens, and then you realize there’s no way you could be ready for it. Anna’s crying. His friends are bummed out. Everyone just goes their separate ways.”
I nodded. We chewed in silence for a second. The restaurant was empty now except for us and a few dusty shafts of late-afternoon light.
“How’s that?” Norm asked.
I thought he was asking about his story. The truth was that I was moved and astonished that Norm was talking to me like this, but I tried to answer with manly restraint. “Pretty sad,” I said.
“That calzone,” clarified Norm, looking uncomfortable.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s good.”
“I’ll tell you what, Ben. Of the people who go into the military, Alex was probably as well prepared mentally and physically as anybody ever is. He did his homework. He read voraciously. He knew what he was getting himself into. But”—Norm gave me a meaningful look—“he didn’t know what he was getting himself into.”
At the time of Alex’s enlistment, the army, confronted by the possibility of a longer-than-expected fight with an overstretched volunteer force, was studying the factors that helped and hindered recruitment via the USAREC Survey of New Army Recruits, a pink form that looked a little like an SAT booklet. Alex diligently filled in the bubbles with a number 2 pencil.
I enlisted because: (X) I wanted the adventure I will experience. ( ) I wanted the benefits I will receive. ( ) I wanted the skills I will learn. ( ) I wanted the pay I will earn. ( ) I wanted the money for education. ( ) I wanted the travel I will experience. (X) I wanted to serve my country.
From the statements above, which is the MOST important to you?
I wanted to serve my country.
From the statements above, which is the LEAST important to you?
I wanted the pay I will earn.
Typically, young people considering enlisting for military service experience some concerns or barriers to this decision. How significant were these concerns to your decision to enlist?
Religious or moral beliefs: Very unimportant.
Put education plans on hold: Very unimportant.
Loss of personal freedom: Very unimportant.
Fear of injury or death: Very unimportant.
Fear of basic training: Very unimportant.
Family obligations: Somewhat important.
Who was the LEAST supportive of your decision to join the ARMY? (Mark only one)
( ) Mother/stepmother. ( ) Father/stepfather. ( ) Athletic Coach. ( ) Teacher. ( ) Husband/wife. ( ) Boyfriend or girlfriend. ( ) Friend. ( ) Clergy member. (X) School Guidance Counselor. ( ) Sister/brother or stepsister/stepbrother. ( ) Extended family (i.e. grandparent, uncle/aunt, cousin).
I wasn’t at Alex’s farewell party. I was caught up in my own life, reading research papers on complexity theory in Berkeley, California, and spending my nights playing accordion with a group of grad school friends in the basement of our Oakland rental. Norm showed me a few pictures: Anna looking shell-shocked on the patio, Sam and Carly playing some kind of board game on the trampoline. It was incredible how young everyone was. Alex looked happy and playful, horsing around in the yard, throwing his arm over his buddies’ shoulders, holding a glass of water proudly up toward the camera. Norm had permitted the other graduates a beer or two from the garage refrigerator, but Alex was sticking to his training diet.
“He had a great personality,” Norm summed up with a shrug at the end of our lunch. “He was fun to be around. Just a gregarious kid.”
Even then, the blandness of his language unsettled me. It reminded me somehow of that flat suburban sunlight that suffused so many of my childhood memories. Who was my younger cousin really? What darkness, if any, lay under the cheerful smile of the boy in these photographs?
The culture of the Blum family is a patchwork affair. In hacking off his Jewish roots, Al Senior endowed his descendants with the opportunity and the onus of making their own myths. Some of us have found them in sports, others in science, others in war, but there are times when it seems to me that some vestigial connection to an unconscious substrate of Jewish lore must remain. The best model I have found for the way the extended Blum family came to interpret what happened to Alex is the ancient Jewish legend of the golem.
According to Talmudic lore, the first one was Adam himself, who spent an hour as gathered dust, an hour as form, and an hour as golem, Hebrew for “unshaped mass,” before God infused him with a soul. Later golems, constructed by mere rabbis, never got that far. The best known is the sixteenth-century Golem of Prague, sculpted from river clay by Rabbi Judah Loew to guard the Jewish quarter from attack. The legend is told in different ways. Sometimes the name of God is written on paper and slipped into the golem’s mouth. Sometimes the Hebrew word emet, or “truth,” is carved onto its forehead. Regardless, language is what fills the golem with its mute, unquestioning half-life. Like Frankenstein, Skynet, or the Predator and Reaper drones that now buzz over conflict zones around the world, the golem represents action without agency, force without conscience, a lurch and a boom and no one there to blame. Inevitably it goes astray. In the end the rabbi manages to pull the slip of paper from its mouth or to erase the first character of the word from its forehead, turning emet, “truth,” into met, “dead,” and the golem collapses into a pile of inanimate mud.
Our own golem was dissolved by an other-than-honorable discharge from the U.S. Army in early 2007, while Alex was still in prison. What unsettled us most was that buried somewhere in whatever mud pile remained was the little blond kid who still grinned at us from old family photographs, next to younger versions of ourselves with whom we felt no discontinuity. Like the medieval rabbi Maimonides, whose “negative theology” held that God could not be described in positive terms but only in opposition to whatever was imperfect and human, we began talking about that Alex mostly in banalities and negations: loyal, dutiful, patriotic; not experienced, not skeptical, not capable of questioning, not aware. After a while it began to seem as if all we had left of him was a luminous emptiness defined against the shape of what was to come, a sculpture in negative space.
There was one more negation, of course, the most important of all, so well understood in our family that no one had to say it out loud: not guilty.
CHAPTER 2
BASIC
In America we thank our veterans at every opportunity, but we do not presume to understand what they have gone through. The military experience is sacrosanct, tarnished by any effort to assess it with civilian touchstones. The moment the infantry recruit walks down the cinder-block path from his childhood home at 0430 hours and enters a recruiting sergeant’s car via the passenger-side door, he crosses over to a new plane of existence. But in Alex’s case we had a few glimpses, transmissions from beyond.
As Norm told it, the change came on in strobe. First Alex was sent home five weeks into basic for a surprise convalescent leave. Because he didn’t tell anyone he was coming, he found the house locked and empty, the family gone to San Diego on vacation. Norm bought Alex a ticket to join them, then watched him stare for days at seagulls swooping through the mist above the waves, distracted and remote, dog tags dangling against his bare chest. Three months later Alex graduated from basic in a grid of other eighteen-year-olds, then flew home for another short leave. At first his efforts at military posturing—the crisp walk, the flat eyes, the gunmetal tone, all this set against the sprinklers and novelty mailboxes of Greenwood Village—seemed a little silly. He posed for photographs in the backyard wearing his dress uniform with his older brother Max’s AR-15 clapped to his chest, lips pinched into a line as crisp and proud as the fold of his beret, then flew back to Fort Benning for the Ranger Indoctrination Program. Norm looked up Georgia temperatures on the Internet whenever he knew Alex would be in the woods all night on field drills. It was often near freezing, sometimes below. In the rare phone calls Alex was permitted home, his voice was so thick and confused that it was hard to understand him. On his next visit, his affectations had stiffened. This was no act.
It wasn’t until months after Alex’s arrest that Norm finally learned what had been happening on the other end of those phone calls. Alex spent a total of sixteen months confined at SeaTac Federal Detention Center before being released on bail in November 2007. In that time he experienced a profound transformation in his mind. Norm, who visited him there every single weekend, described it to us as a long, painful, halting emergence from his military identity. In the beginning Alex could not seem to hold on to the thought that the crime had in fact been real. He did hundreds of push-ups every day in his cell to keep in shape for the day when the misunderstanding was cleared up and he could rejoin his battalion on deployment. It was only eight or nine months into his imprisonment, after Norm gave him an award-winning science book called Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control by a British neuroscientist named Kathleen Taylor, that Alex woke up to what had happened to him. He spent the next month composing a 23,000-word manuscript reconsidering everything he had gone through in his training. When he was finished, Norm typed it up and emailed it to the entire extended Blum family.
I still lived in Seattle then, collaborating with a University of Washington biochemist on my dissertation research. I was sitting at my lab workstation in the UW Medical Center when Norm’s email arrived. The dedication page that opened the file was an uncanny glimpse of the Alex we all used to know: cheerful, insouciant, warm. He thanked Norm, Anna, and everyone in the family for their love and support, Paris Hilton “for making prison ‘hot,’” and his little brother Sam “for giving me the idea of figuring out, as he put it, ‘how you turned into such a jerk’!”
The writing that followed was far more reflective than I was expecting from an indifferent student two months out of his teens. I had never guessed there was anything inside that crewcut blond head except sports clichés and wisecracks.
BREAKING POINT: TEACHING AMERICA’S YOUTH TO KILL by Alex Blum
Growing up I always saw epic T.V. commercials of marines climbing plateau faces and soldiers rising as one out of concealment in an open field. I picked up a book about Viet Nam when I was five and stared transfixed at pictures of American soldiers patrolling in rice paddies. By the time I turned seven I knew that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be the All-American kid who grew up and fought against an evil enemy that threatened this country. I fell in love with Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers and was awed by the incredible sacrifice in Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. I saw the events in these books and many more like them as challenges and wondered if I could have made a difference if I’d been there. I read about the mental strength and physical struggles that Special OPS groups like SEALs, Rangers and Delta Force went through and wanted to see if I could make it. I wanted to be a part of the military as the country rallied behind its armed forces. I wanted to come back from war, hug my family and say, “I’m home.” I got lost in this fantasy often, not realizing it was just that: a fantasy. The United States doesn’t have an identifiable enemy anymore. It isn’t fighting a nation led by a mustached tyrant or a communist oppressor. The country certainly doesn’t rally behind its boys like in World War II and no soldier ever comes home from the violence and just moves on with his life, but that’s all hindsight.
I grew up in a stable, loving family and lived in a community completely devoid of violence. I had neither the drive nor the mental capacity to kill. So how does the Army turn a kid like that into a killer? It’s a process; a long, painful, mind-numbing, perverse process. It is a necessary process but something that I had never read about in detail and never objectively looked at until I was far away from it.
My experience comes from a small percentage of the Army, small but crucial. I was an infantryman, or 11 Bravo in military terms. Our indoctrination is unique to the rest of the Army. It is unique because ours is the only profession within the Army community that is sent directly to kill people. The rest of the Army’s recruits go through two schools: a modified Basic Training which is nine weeks and Advanced Individual Training or AIT which varies in length depending on the job. During the modified Basic they learn just that: the very basics of Army life. They learn how to march, how to handle a rifle and other aspects of life in uniform like rank structure and military time. When they graduate from Basic they are sent to AIT and learn in a college-like environment where the Drill Sergeants teach job skills and continue to mentor them. They work days and get nights and weekends off and when they graduate they are sent to a unit where they perform their job. After their training they are a part of the Army but in a sense they are just disciplined civilians. They are not killers. They wouldn’t raid a house and put two rounds into each person’s chest inside the structure or let loose with a .50 caliber machine gun into a group of people. So why would I? How is the rest of the Army still able to act and think like the people they were as civilians and 11 Bravos come out of Basic Training like a pack of pit bulls? Why is it that a soldier like Jessica Lynch would surrender and be taken prisoner and I would fight to the death? Aren’t both of us part of an Army of One? Isn’t it our most basic instinct to survive? Aren’t we both from a country where as children we were taught to respect and cherish life? It’s not because of sex or bravery that our outcomes would have differed. It is because my induction into the Army was completely different from hers.
As sunlight glittered in from Puget Sound across the monitors and glassware of the lab, the dark world opening out behind my laptop’s screen made all the molecular twiddling I had been doing for the past year in this room seem suddenly very paltry. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were dying on our behalf, and killing in far greater numbers on our behalf, and none of us so much as argued about it over lunch.
Our three Drill Sergeants silently paced us from inside the red lines or Kill Zone as it became known. “All right you fucking shit bags” one of them said. “This is my god damn Bay; I own everything in here including you, so if you fucking piss me off I’m going to make your goddamn lives miserable!” He yelled as he looked at one of the recruit’s foot position, “You are standing in my goddamn Kill Zone! Get your goddamn duffel bags! Hurry the fuck up!” We scrambled to our lockers and quickly returned to the line. “Lift the fucking bags above your heads!” He turned to the Private whose toe had made contact with the red Kill Zone line and yelled “See what happens when you piss me off you fucking piece of shit, you fuck everybody!” By this time another Drill Sergeant had joined in; “You little fuck, your bitch of a fucking mom should have done the world a favor and swallowed your useless ass!” The first Drill Sergeant was now inches from the kids face yelling, “You’re going to get everybody here killed, you stupid shit! When you go to Iraq I hope you get blown up by a fucking IED so no one else has to suffer from your stupidity!” The third Drill Sergeant was walking around making sure the rest of us kept our arms locked and bags above our heads. I looked around the Bay at my comrades and thought “what the fuck did I sign up for?”
Alex’s drill sergeants were vets. Many had just come back from Iraq, where Zarqawi’s singularly brutal branch of al-Qaeda was doing all it could to spark a civil war between Sunni and Shia. Terrorists and insurgents were gunning down patrols, suicide-bombing markets, and firing mortars at coalition Humvees and fortifications by the day. May 2005 was the bloodiest month since the invasion, with 80 U.S. soldiers and over 700 Iraqi civilians dead. Now it was July, and the action showed no sign of slowing. New privates would be launching into a firestorm. The army wanted them hard enough to survive it. The walls of the bay where Alex slept were decorated with large glossy photographs of IEDs disguised as Coke cans, rocks, and teddy bears. In the stairwell was a wanted poster for a recruit who’d gone AWOL.
As recently as the Vietnam War, soldiers would spend the week doing push-ups and bayonet drills and then go into town on weekends to catch movies and blow off steam. Nowadays no steam is blown off. The lid comes down at the beginning of “Red Phase,” in which drill sergeants exercise total control over every aspect of recruits’ lives in order to initiate the “soldierization process,” and does not come up again for three weeks. As far as the family is concerned, the recruit simply vanishes off the face of the earth. Though drill sergeants are forbidden to strike recruits without provocation, Alex’s account made it clear that they had plenty of techniques for inflicting pain at their disposal. They seemed to take particular pleasure in forcing recruits into Catch-22s whose inevitable outcome was “getting smoked,” the army phrase for punitive physical exercise.
On Friday we were eating lunch chow and our Drill Sergeant was entertaining himself by placing contraband ice cream sandwiches on recruit’s plates and telling them to eat it. When they finished the Drill Sergeant would yell “You fucking shit head! You’re not allowed to eat sweets, you fucking cunt! Go run until I get tired!” The Private would sprint out to the track and run under the supervision of another Drill Sergeant. The Private was told to run until he began vomiting. Our Drill Sergeant gave an ice cream sandwich to one Private who said “I’m not allowed to eat that Drill Sergeant.” “Sure you are fucker, I said you could.” “I don’t want to get in trouble Drill Sergeant.” “You won’t get in trouble shit bird!” The Drill Sergeant said playfully. “Go ahead, eat it.” “I’m not allowed to Drill Sergeant.” The Drill Sergeant’s face grew hard and he screamed “everybody out of the god damn chow hall right fucking now!” We scrambled to put our trays away and tore out of the chow hall to our common area where we waited in formation at parade rest. “Jumping Jacks you stupid fucking pricks! No, you stay out in front. Come here fucker!” The Private who refused to eat the ice cream sandwich was pulled out of formation and made to watch as we paid for his “mistake”. “See fuckers, when you don’t listen everybody suffers! All of you are undisciplined little shits. God damnit! I hate this fucking Platoon!” He turned to the Private who was watching us and handed him a box of ice cream sandwiches. “As soon as you finish this box I’ll stop smoking these mother fuckers!” he said. The Private crammed ice cream sandwiches into his mouth and finished them as soon as he could. Our Drill Sergeant yelled at him “You little fucking pig! You’re not allowed to eat sweets, and your fucking fat ass eats a whole god damn box of ice cream!? Holy fuck Shit head! That’s all right, we’ll pay for that!” The Drill Sergeant sent the Private to the track and continued to smoke us. When the Private came back he was covered in puke and gasping for air. “Push with the rest of the fucking Platoon! You fuckers are gonna get fat from all these sweets. So I’m gonna have to help you burn those calories!” He quickly added the calories in his head and told us that each bar contained 20,000 calories. After smoking us for what felt like four hours, he said we had only burned 1000 calories and that we would pay for the rest later.
For more than 13,000 words, basic training went on and on and on. Belongings dumped in a field, bayonets jammed into straw dummies, teargas pumped into a sealed chamber of trembling recruits, profound and accumulating sleep deprivation, getting smoked, getting tricked, getting insulted, getting threatened, weeping, puking, getting smoked for weeping and puking. What makes the grass grow? Blood, Drill Sergeant! As I continued reading, I kept glancing around at my lab mates with that self-conscious lack of expression you see on the faces of people reading pornographic novels on public transportation.
This non-stop, continuous negative reinforcement erases any and all self confidence you once had. You firmly believe that you can’t do anything right. At the time, you can’t see that they are intentionally and methodically breaking you down, removing all of your self esteem. You just believe that you are incompetent and unworthy of anything. You operate under complete and total fear and try to do anything to avoid more pain, embarrassment and humiliation.
Was all this a surprise? Not exactly. I’d seen Saving Private Ryan. I’d seen Full Metal Jacket. I was familiar, on a basic cultural-memory level, with the archetypes at play. There was the fat Private Pyle type, so chronically out of shape that he didn’t understand that the most he had ever exerted himself in his life was about one third of the baseline he needed to sustain here. There was the Joker type, who could not bring himself to accept the authority of the drill sergeants as legitimate and had to swallow his laughter down to a bitter, festering place whenever they bellowed in his face on the theme of his mother’s genitalia. And of course there were the screaming, stomping, cursing, toiletry-scattering drill sergeants themselves, who appeared to have watched all the same movies I had and strip-mined them for material. What I hadn’t seen before was a portrait of the interior life of the guys who only ever appeared as extras in these movies, for the obvious reason that they were of zero narrative interest: the ones who bought it. Who respected the drill sergeants as heroes whom they desperately wanted to please and live up to. Who overloaded their rucksacks by thirty pounds on marches and met secretly in stairwells on “rest days” for extracurricular physical-training sessions to prepare them for the Ranger Indoctrination Program, which they knew was going to be a whole lot worse. Who viewed the breakdown of their own bodies under all this strain as a shameful mark of weakness. Who wanted to be ready for Iraq.
In the seventh week of basic, after sleeping outdoors through a pounding storm that ended with cottonmouth snakes flopping in puddles in the recruits’ tents—weeks later they would learn that this had been Hurricane Katrina—Alex’s right leg started to hurt.
The following morning we had a five mile run for PT. Afterwards we marched to breakfast chow and I was in so much pain with my leg that I fell out of formation and was on the verge of blacking out. A Drill Sergeant came up to me and screamed “Get up you fucking pussy!” “Roger, Drill Sergeant,” I said and painfully tried to catch up with my Platoon. When I couldn’t keep up the Drill Sergeant dropped my buddies to do push-ups and made me stand in front of them and watch. “This little pussy thought the run was too hard and thinks he’s better than all of you! He thinks he’s allowed to rest while the platoon continues to march!” I was overwhelmed with guilt and when I tried to join them I was told to stand and watch. My leg progressively got worse as the week went on and by the weekend I was fighting back tears every time I put pressure on it.
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