FORGOTTEN IN FALLUJAH

Jasper Johns Flag 1954-55 (dated on reverse 1954) (MoMA.com)

I knew nothing about the war in Iraq. In fact, I probably didn’t even know there was a war going on. The best I could do was to drive my shitty car out west to Pennsylvania and work a job I despised.

Well, it wasn’t really like that. I’m just being dramatic.

But it felt that way.

The highway was home to me, and I felt a little different whenever I got closer to my place of work. It was in Upper Darby. People there were forgotten. And maybe I was one of them.

It was hard to tell. Because I was young and this was a strange transition in my life that didn’t really make any sense to me at the time.

As I look back on it now—several years later—a decade, maybe—I see that it had been a time of learning about how Americans viewed each other. And it also taught me one of the most valuable and important lessons of my life.

That America viewed its veterans like refuse.

I’ll give you an example.

When I worked at that place—a catering company that had originated in Cherry Hill—the other employees were offered total turmoil. I remember getting into a fight with an elderly Turkish dude about catering orders, his friend had to come by his side. (I knew nothing about Turkish people at the time. Now that I’ve been to Turkey I wish I could go back in time and remedy the situation with some coffee or tea, a conversation, a cigarette. Ah. It’s important to understand one another.) Anyway, I got made fun of too for recycling of all things.

I want to say that the dude who made fun of me for recycling was Asian. But is that allowed?

I do not care about differentiating people in that regard. But I feel like we now live in a world where that matters?

I lived in Vietnam for 20 months during the COVID-19 pandemic. I realized that as an American, whenever I lived in another place for an extended period of time I forgot that I was in a foreign country. It could have to do with my own stupidity. But when I look back on it, it mattered more to me that I could be made fun of for RECYCLING…

So there was an employee at the job who had been an Iraq War veteran. I wish that meant something wholesome. But it did not.

You see, I worked in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania.

And it was in a shoddy forgotten neighborhood.

One time while smoking a cigarette out front of the place this black dude came up to me and he asked me for a cigarette. I gave him one. Then he asked for some money. I didn’t have much to give, but I did that too. And he called me a quaker and blessed my soul.

Then he walked across the street to shit in the alleyway.

“What?” he’d said when I’d given him the coffee. “No milk or sugar?”

The Iraq War veteran was much more fucked up.

He was a white kid.

And I no longer remember his name.

But his social skills were VERY bad.

He twitched whenever somebody spoke to him.

And the lady who ran the place, my boss, who was blonde, overweight, and married to a sweet Mexican dude with a goatee—she pulled me aside one morning…

“I think XXX is stealing…”

“What?”

She looked at me, and it felt like a cartoon occurrence. Where she might’ve been delighted to know that her flailing failing business could’ve been blamed on somebody else.

“Yeah, I think he’s stealing…”

She moved from side to side, nervously. It was a tick she did whenever she talked about something with great emotion. She had two (overweight) kids who did the same thing. But that was a side issue…

And I said, “Oh, how do you know that?”

It was early in the morning. And for whatever reason, she used to confide in me. She said that I had a dry sense of humor, and she liked that about me. She smiled, grinned. It was easy to understand that she was full of shit. She had some grandiose personality that had to be manicured into her BUSINESS. Really, it was a shitshow. She hired whatever riff-raff came her way. And I was one of them.

So I listened, tuned in.

“Yeah, he’s been stealing…”

“Okay…”

“I think there’s something wrong with him.”

“Sure.”

“We might’ve caught him on camera.”

“All right.”

And we had a few conversations like that. Where she’d iterate to me that Zach or Kevin or whatever his name was had been stealing from her. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t just talk to him about it. Maybe he’d been taking $25? Or maybe $2.50? That wasn’t the point.

The point was that he was stealing from HER.

And she was a lunatic.

And her kids were too.

And here was this poor fucking guy, riding into Upper Darby, Pennsylvania at 6, 7, 8 AM to deliver catering orders all the way across the state … for some lady … what the fuck?

I talked to him a few times.

And it was totally clear.

He was not in his right mind.

He stammered, stalled, forgot himself. He looked in the other direction sometimes mid-sentence. I pictured him rolling his eyes … nodding … balling his fists together. His vibes were strange, off-putting. Unique. It was almost as if nobody had ever listened to him.

And what he had seen.

One time, he talked about Fallujah.

Then, I’d listened.

And I wouldn’t report those words, it was all emotion.

The kid was terrified. Still.

It was clear that whatever he’d experienced, he’d held onto.

And that changed me.

I wondered about Iraq. I thought about my job, and the lady I was working for felt like such a tumultuous skeeve … I don’t know the appropriate word for her … but everything and everybody felt different at that point.

Soon, I learned that he’d been stealing nickels and dimes.

My boss kept putting that information into me.

Yet she never did anything about it.

She never fired him. She didn’t confront him. And she only talked shit about him behind his back.

Thinking on it now, I have no idea if he’d been medicated or not. Maybe he had been, and the only reason he stole was that he felt emboldened?

Or it’s possible that my boss had made the story up to embarrass him as a way of covering up her own incompetence. That seems highly likely and more probable than anything I can think of now…

Either way, I learned something I would’ve never learned elsewhere…

That Iraq really was a THING and the people that had gone there had been … had … whatever happened … they came back as someone else.

I can still see him wandering along the sidewalk, talking to himself. He seemed too innocent and sincere. But at the same time, he’d clearly been through hell. He stuttered in the building, shoddy as it was. And he paced like a maddened artist trying to figure out what his next composition should be.

There were dark pictures in his mind and soul that I’d never come to understand.

How could anybody?

He kept quiet about it all.

And now it’s been a decade later…

I still think about it.

That forgotten war, a horror story. Most people would rather put it aside, bury it, keep it away from their lives. And that’s understandable. Nobody wants to think about something that brings them pain.

But one thing I learned—some people don’t have that choice.

And isn’t that such a horrible way to live?