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Fear Up Harsh
 Fear Up Harsh
Tony Lagouranis and Allen Mikaelian
NAL Caliber/Penguin
The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. You know, like one minute you’re trying to figure out how to learn Arabic and pay off your college loans, and the next you’re in the Army — because that’s about the only place those things can happen simultaneously. So, there you are, getting your training in the peacetime military, and the next thing you know 9/11 happens. Well, okay, nothing you can do about that. So, now that you’ve learned to speak Arabic passably, it turns out the only job you can get is as an interrogator. That’s not so bad, you think. The Army gave you what you wanted, and you’re an honorable guy, so you’re not going to renege on your part of the deal just because it now includes going to fight in an actual war — even if it is with a country you don’t believe we should be fighting. A deal is a deal.
After a stint in interrogation training — learning all about the Geneva Conventions and stuff — you fly to Iraq and get posted at Abu Ghraib prison. It’s pretty creepy there, but at least you don’t have to hang out with Lynndie England. As a matter of fact, you don’t even know Ms. England ever existed. Because, though your superiors hint that there has been some kind of scandal at the prison, no one will talk about it.
So you start practicing your interrogation techniques on real prisoners. You never believed that Iraqis were responsible for blowing up buildings in New York, but you now have enough experience with roadside IADs to know that at least some of them would like to blow up Americans here. That’s plenty of reason to go at them with all the guns in your arsenal. But, sadly, that arsenal, which includes a “good-cop, bad-cop” routine and various verbal humiliation techniques, just doesn’t produce much intelligence. Still, you find out that interrogation is fun. It’s surprisingly pleasing to have power over other men. You enjoy intimidating them. You’ll have to think about why those feelings might be dangerous later. You don’t have time right now.
You get sent to a prison in Fallujah. It’s a lot less secure than it was in Baghdad. Plus, now you have a commander who insists that you produce some real intel. You hear that some Special Operations guys stationed at the prison are getting information using much harsher tactics than you were taught. Sleep deprivation, sustained exposure to ear-splitting music, making prisoners maintain “stress positions” until they begin to have excruciating muscle pains, watering them down and leaving them in the cold, frightening them with vicious dogs – all of these interrogation tactics are rumored to produce the kind of information you need. It’s not torture, your commander tells you. It’s just more effective questioning. Plus, the Attorney General of the United States and every other top official connected to the White House has no problem with “enhanced” questioning methods.
Even though you’re a little worried that this kind of behavior is crossing some kind of a moral and ethical line, you succumb to pressure to start performing this “torture lite.” If the sickly, old man doesn’t want to talk, he might want to after 12 hours on his knees on the frozen ground. If those kids who were working two farms down from where an attack on U.S. soldiers happened — and claim to be innocent — don’t admit who did it, perhaps they will after an hour with a snarling German shepherd nipping at their family jewels. Sometimes it makes you feel a little bad when the kids piss their pants at the mere sound of a growling dog, but at least you get to feel like you’re in charge. Right?
Every day becomes like every day before it. Prisoners are rounded up. They’re brought to you for questioning, though most of them have very little, or no evidence against them of any crime. Some days you’re certain that the person who is suffering at your command, is innocent. You try to protest to your commander, but he is not interested in your ideas of innocence or morality. You begin to spend all your non-working hours drinking contraband alcohol. You knew you were going to have to find time to look into your soul eventually, but you put it off so long that now your soul’s come looking for you. And it’s mad. Really mad. You drink some more.
Eventually you are released from your commitment to the U.S. military. You go home to the States. You drink a lot more. But all you can think about are the cruel things you did, the lives you helped destroy, the ways you hurt and terrorized innocent men. You have nightmares. You have hallucinations. You have become mentally ill. The Army gives you medication to help you cope. Yet, what actually helps, is to come clean about everything you did. The next thing you know, you’re writing a book about how you became a torturer for the U.S. Army.
Sheesh! All you ever wanted was to learn Arabic.
The Year of Magical Thinking
 By Joan Didion
Knopf
Vintage Paperback
Since the 1960s, Joan Didion has been the foremost witness to, and reporter of life in these United States. With her essays, she invented much of what Americans think of as “the new journalism,” as it was once called — where the journalist is not unaffected by the story they tell, but isn’t exactly a full participant in it either. While lesser writers use this form as an excuse to discuss their every thought and feeling to the detriment of the reporting, Didion is adept at avoiding her own reflection when it doesn’t advance the story. As an author, she has the ability to stand apart from her subjects — even when she is the subject — and to write in a cool, rational voice.
In her latest memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, about the twelve months following the sudden death of her husband, the world she reports upon has become very close at hand and her interior world has become preeminent. This is her story, and in it Didion, reveals a self who is shaken to the core with sorrow, a self who walks through memories as if through a minefield. Ever the pro, Didion manages to report upon her own anguish with her customary cool.
The book begins with Didion recounting the last hours she spent with John Gregory Dunne, her husband of nearly 40 years. They had gone to visit their only daughter, Quintana at the hospital. They had returned home. They had built a fire in the hearth and Didion had prepared dinner. They sat at the dining table. “My attention was on mixing the salad. John was talking, then he wasn’t,” she writes, of the heart attack that lead to his death on their living room floor.
“Life changes in an instant,” she tells us.
Didion returns to this life-changing moment again and again during the course of the book, minutely revisiting the details in an effort to convince herself that Dunne is really dead — though she often thinks he's not — and that she really could not have saved him — though she often thinks she could have.
Meanwhile, back at the hospital — where, if you recall, daughter Quintana Roo was languishing — things are not going well. Didion’s husband is dead, but throughout the twelve-month period about which she writes, she must repeatedly spring to the aid of her only child who is sick with a series of life-threatening ailments. First, Didion must move Quintana from one New York hospital to another where she finally gets well. Well enough to attend her father’s (postponed for her) funeral. The next day Quintana gets on a plane to Los Angeles. But, later, “at ten minutes past seven in New York and ten minutes past four in California,” Didion finds out that her daughter is undergoing emergency neurosurgery at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.
She rushes to LA and returning to this locale, where she had lived for several decades, unleashes a flood of potentially crushing memories, that she knows “could be controlled only by avoiding any venue I might associate with either Quintana or John. This would require ingenuity. John and I had lived in Los Angeles County from 1964 until 1988.” Alas, as ingenious as she was at devising unfamiliar routes through town or avoiding too-familiar haunts, Didion’s time in LA is rife with flashbacks from her early marriage and her daughter’s childhood.
“At one point during the summer,” she writes, “it occurred to me the I had no letters from John, not one. We had only rarely been far or long apart. There had been the week or two or three here and there when one of us was doing a piece. There had been the month in 1975 when I had taught at Berkeley during the week and flew home to Los Angeles on PSA every weekend. There had been the few weeks in 1988 when John was in Ireland doing research for Harp and I was in California covering a presidential primary. On all such occasions we had spoken on the telephone several times a day. We counted high telephone bills as part of our deal with each other.”
Didion and Dunne’s deal included remaining together in a world where other couples routinely separated. They were intimates of the famous, traveled the world and were wildly successful in more than one glamorous profession. They were uncommon partners in art and life. “Life changes in an instant,” but the memories Didion shares make clear the singular enormity of her change, her loss.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion has dug deep to reveal her inner world and done so with a skill and intensity that elevate this writing to the level of her seminal early works contained in, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.
Didion won the 2005 National Book Award for non-fiction for The Year of Magical Thinking and subsequently adapted the book into a one-woman show, which is currently running at the Booth Theater in New York. It stars Vanessa Redgrave — another intelligent and dignified grown-up.
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BLESSEDLY BRIEF
 Penguin has released a series of small paperback books by a group of authors who, as they say, “enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted.” The list includes such provocateurs as Thomas Paine, Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius and George Orwell. The four essays that comprise, Why I Write, their Orwell offering, work as a credible snapshot of his contribution to Western thought and place the genesis of his ideas squarely within the era during which he lived.
In the title piece he says, “I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.” His reasons are, “sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse” and “political purpose.”
Certainly Orwell wrote to sway the politics of his time. The longest essay in this book,” The Lion and the Unicorn,” written during WWII, expresses the hope that his nation’s conflict with Hitler — and the fascism Nazis represented — would turn England’s working and fighting classes away from exclusionary capitalism and towards inclusive socialism. “England,” he writes, “is a family with the wrong members in control.” (And he didn’t even live to see Margaret Thatcher’s England.)
Short and bittersweet, Why I Write provides a few more reasons to love the man who warned us about the “Big Brother” who, as predicted, now rules almost every aspect of our lives. Let’s just hope Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale, isn’t that prophetic.
 most of which is done by women, by the way —
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