On the Home Front By Ben Nadler

Diego Torres Silvestre CC




On the Home Front

      We tried to stop the Iraq War. It sounds stupid now, knowing what’s happened since, but in the Spring of 2003, we really thought things could go a different way. 
      Hana and I had met the preceding fall, during our first semester of art school in New York City. Peacetime. She had long, red curls, and knew how to capture a body with a few curved lines. I was frantic, always covering the whole sheet with charcoal. We shared a joint in the park after an evening life drawing class. She suggested we draw portraits of each other, so we sat down on a bench with our sketchbooks and studied each other’s faces. I couldn’t do her beauty justice on the page, and I guess I can’t do it now either. She drew me in the manner of St. Sebastian, with arrows going into my bare chest, and wrote her phone number at the bottom of the page. 
      The next night, we went to a bar on Ludlow Street that didn’t card. On the walk downtown we passed the off-kilter townhouse on West 11th Street that replaced the building members of the Weather Underground had blown up thirty years earlier, during the Vietnam War. They were trying to build a bomb to attack a dance at a military base in New Jersey, but they didn’t know what they were doing and killed themselves instead. By the end of the term Hana and I were in a dizzy, teenage love. 
     We talked on the phone every night over winter break, when I was at my parents’ house in Pennsylvania and she was back home in Buffalo. She told me about her days:
     “Early this morning,” she said one night, “I climbed out onto the roof of my dad’s house to draw the bare treetops. The branches were blown around by the wind all night long, then the temperature dropped and they froze mid-movement. It was like my own secret Sea of Ice.” She made a few sketches of the branches before it started snowing and she almost slipped off the roof and broke her legs. She crawled back inside the window to make a cup of tea and call me. 
      Another night, Hana said that she had picked up her sister’s shift at the cafe. On the walk over, she ran into a kid she dated in the tenth grade, who was shoveling a driveway with his cousin. He told Hana he had enlisted in the army and was shipping out to basic training soon. She gave him a little kiss goodbye. “Don’t be jealous,” she told me. “I might never see him again. His cousin laughed at him, he blushed…”
      I told her about my days: My parents’ house was part of a tract built right at the edge of the Valley Forge National Historic Park. We moved there when my father got a job as an engineer at Lockheed Martin. People think Valley Forge was a battlefield, but Washington’s army just camped there for the winter of 1777. I spent half the days of January ‘03 wandering around the park in the snow, sneaking into reconstructed cabins to lie on the wooden bunks and smoke weed, imagining myself as a Continental soldier preparing for the coming Spring campaigns. 
                                                                                                                                      #

      A month was too long for Hana and me to be apart. On the bus ride up to Buffalo, I listened to folk punk tapes on my headphones and harbored a deep jealousy of the brave young recruit who stole a kiss that should have been mine. I looked out at the clean white and yellow lines on the black canvas of the interstate. If I could figure out the right brush strokes, I thought, I could change the direction the world was travelling in.  
      Hana was waiting for me at the Greyhound station. She ran up and gave me a big kiss of my own. We went to a big public cemetery, filled with miniature versions of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. I’d seen the originals on a school trip to D.C., but I understood them better on this scale. We drank vodka from a water bottle and rolled around in the snow between the tombstones, warming our hands under each other’s shirts. 
      Hana took me home to meet her father and stepmother, old hippies with a big PACE flag hanging off the roof of the porch they’d built themselves from salvaged wood. They were against the government, and weren’t even on the city electrical grid, but they didn’t seem concerned about the coming war. They thought everything would somehow be okay. Hana’s father told us a story about trying to levitate the Pentagon in 1967. I didn’t understand why he was so proud. They hadn’t accomplished anything. 

                                                                                                                                    #

      The war drums were banging loudly when Hana and I returned to the city at the end of January. We went to a coordinating meaning at building in Lower Manhattan, wedged into the corner where Lafayette hits Bleecker Street, that had been housing activist groups since the ‘60s. 
       There was no lock on the building’s door, and people climbed up a wooden staircase to a big open room on the third floor. There were plenty of young activists and students like us, but there were also lawyers in button ups, nuns in heather gray sweatshirts and black veils, and all kinds of other committed adults. Everyone was talking about routes and meeting points and media messaging, strategies and tactics, and I started to get a sense of how serious the movement was. 
      An old man in a clerical collar stood up to give a speech. “A lot of seemingly reasonable people,” he said, “Will tell you that war is regrettable, but there is no alternative. There is an alternative. The alternative is called peace.” It was all so clear. We were sure that if we could explain ourselves to the American people, make them see how things really stood, they would understand. 
        Hana and I spent Valentine’s Day with a bunch of other people in an East Williamsburg warehouse painting banners that said things like “NO WAR IN OUR NAME” and “NO BLOOD FOR OIL.” The work reminded me of first grade, during Operation Desert Storm, when my class spent days making looped ribbons out of strips of yellow construction paper. The more-experienced activists showed us how to cut U-shaped holes in the fabric so the wind wouldn’t catch the banners like sails and blow us backward. We sewed loops along the top edges to slide in hard PVC pipes.
                                                                                                                                   #

       The next morning, our seven-member affinity group took the subway together to the march starting point on Third Avenue near the United Nations building. The streets in all directions were already filled with people, and more and more kept coming. The newspapers would report that over three-hundred-thousand people attended the protest. A whole new city inside the larger city. We found our contingent, a hundred or so black-clad kids carrying the banners we’d made. 
        Police were everywhere, pinning us in with French barricades, cutting off roads, flying in circles over our heads. Now and then we’d catch a glimpse of the snipers pointing rifles at us from the roofs. The whole city had been under military occupation for a year—dress rehearsal for Baghdad—but this was the first time the guns were pointed right at us.  
        “Are you scared?” I asked Hana. She was pressed close to me.
       “No,” she said. “I’m not scared. How could I be? The world is with us. I’m only a little cold is all.” We were both wearing black knit caps and black hooded sweatshirts with no coats over them. “Why? Are you scared?”
         “No. Ready for things to get going. I guess I’m more bored than scared.”
        “Boredom,” she recited, “is always counter-revolutionary.”
       Mounted policemen rode into the crowd like Prussian dragoons. A fat, long-haired man with a hand-written “Vietnam Vet Against This War Too” sign duct-taped to the back of his wheelchair didn’t move out of their way. One of the horse cops began to slowly, dutifully trample him, until the crowd started shouting “Get those animals off of those horses.” A green-hatted legal observer filmed the scene with a camcorder.  
      The air was against us. There was no precipitation, only globs of cloud hanging low between the buildings. It wasn’t just that one day, though; the city was hazy the entire time I lived there. Everything in the city had a thin layer of dust on it, as though the debris from Ground Zero downtown had spread up over the entire island. Seventeen months had passed, but nothing felt any cleaner or more stable. The buildings and sidewalks were a little grayer than they should have been, and it was difficult to see or breathe. 
        After a few hours of milling about, we began to march downtown, rolling like a third river between the East River and the Hudson. We performed for a huge audience: News cameras transmitted images of us from tall antennas mounted on the backs of vans. Sympathizers toasted and cheered us from the fire escapes of their Gramercy apartments. A crew of union construction workers looked down at us from their scaffolding, their arms crossed across their chests. 
                                                                                                                                     #

       Our contingent broke away at 14th Street. We had swollen to at least two-hundred strong, and we were ready to make our stand. The official route continued straight down Broadway after Union Square Park, but a permitted protest was no challenge to state power. The moment we passed the bottom of the park, we pulled our bandanas over our faces and charged around the corner. Police in riot gear rushed us from the park steps, swinging their clubs.
       We raised our concealed PVC pipes to block the strikes and pushed back against their polycarbonate shields and masks. For a minute or two my body was tossed around from all sides, and I didn’t know where I was in space. A police helmet flew into the air. The hundred or so of us that remained together after the first charge rallied behind our banner, fighting our way west on 14th Street. We had lost track the rest of our affinity group, but Hana and I were still side by side. 
       Somehow, we made it to the corner of Sixth Avenue. I had never seen the avenue wide open with no traffic on it before. Then there were dozens of cops in the street, advancing towards us. I didn’t understand how they could appear from the other direction so quickly, but of course they had reserves waiting to be radioed for in this exact contingency. After all, their side was a lot more organized than ours. 
       There was a series of brief scuffles, pushes and pulls, and then we all knew that it was done, that we weren’t going to take eight blocks of city street and triumphantly rejoin the rest of the protesters at Washington Square Park. 
      Kids were thrown to the ground and handcuffed, and the rest of us scattered. I grabbed Hana’s hand, and we ran toward West 12th because it was our escape route onto the older, narrower Greenwich Village streets. A cop who had been knocked down was struggling under his heavy gear to right himself. As we passed him, he took a wild swing with his baton. It connected with Hana’s ankle, and she fell to the ground like a bird shot in flight. 
       That was the first time in my life I wanted to kill someone. I thought, “This man has a pistol. But if I had the gun, I would shoot him in his face.” 
       The truth is I had been afraid, all along, that I was against the war not for any moral reason, but simply because I was a coward and wars scared me. After that moment, I knew I was something far worse than a coward: Given the opportunity, I was capable of murder.
       With her arm around my neck and my arm around her waist, Hana was able to hobble along. We fell in line with another fleeing kid, who I recognized from the meetings and benefit shows. I didn’t know his name, only that he was on our side. The three of us dumped our bandanas and hoodies in a trash can and ducked into the stone arch entranceway of an old church. The inner gate was locked, so we just huddled on the top step. A Black Maria filled with captured protestors slowed down when it passed us, but it kept going.  
        It took an hour-and-a-half to get Hana back to her dorm room on 16th Street, because she could barely walk, and there were no buses or cabs on the cleared roads. We had to cut the tight black jeans off her swollen leg with scissors. Her ankle wasn’t broken, but the misshapen brown and purple flesh looked like the result of prolonged beating, not just a quick strike. I heated up some lentil soup while she called around to see who was free and who was locked in the Tombs. 

                                                                                                                                     #

      Our relationship didn’t make it to the end of the semester. We didn’t know how to talk about anything. Hana’s bruises had not yet completely disappeared by the time we broke up. After a few smaller actions, our affinity group stopped meeting. There were petty, internecine conflicts, and accusations that one member was an NYPD informant. Maybe she was, but mainly we were just surprised that so much work by so many people could accomplish so little. By then, the Coalition forces were in Baghdad. The president declared victory. 
       I went back to my parents’ house for the summer and found a job working the night shift at Wawa. Hana and I had been planning on moving into a room in Bushwick together for the coming school year, but now that that wasn’t happening, I decided I wasn’t going back to New York City at all. 
        My parents were disappointed with my decisions. When I went to art school on a half-scholarship at age seventeen, it seemed like I was bound for some minor glory. Now I was back home working food service. But where was the shame in that? I served good sandwiches to hungry folks. People need their daily bread. I myself lived on Wawa veggie shorti hoagies. My coworkers and I got high and joked around, but we got everyone’s order right. 
        When my shift ended in the morning, I’d ride my bicycle home. I could have used my mother’s car—I would have made it back before she had to leave for her bookkeeping job—but the idea of consuming gasoline was abhorrent to me. I didn’t want to participate in the guzzling that led to so much death. I believed my choices mattered. 
        My grandfather was living with my parents too, since his stroke. He was an early riser, so I’d bring home sixteen-ounce cups of coffee for us to drink while we watched the war unfold on the morning news. “You should join the army,” he said. “Better than any college education.” Nah, Grandpa. Not even better than running a deli slicer. Wawa never asked me to kill anyone.  
      One morning in July there was a story on the news about Uday and Qusay Hussein dying in a gun battle in Mosul. The photo of the brothers’ corpses released by the U.S. military was displayed on the screen. Locals questioned the veracity of the story, arguing that the corpses didn’t look like the brothers, the facial shapes were all wrong. Grandpa said, “Ain’t no conspiracy here. Dead bodies just swell up when they lay around for a while.”
      My father and I argued about politics. He didn’t want me to go in the army, but he spent all day at Lockheed Martin fine tuning war machines. The invasion was good for business. He’s just young enough that he missed having to go to Vietnam. His older brother and some of their friends went. On that school trip to D.C. where I saw the monuments, he gave me a list of names to find on the Wall. 
     Every Good Friday, for as long as I can remember, peace activists come and lie down in front of the entrance to Lockheed’s headquarters. The Upper Merion police drag them away to jail. The pacifist protestors neither comply nor resist. 
       “Don’t they have a point?” I asked my father.
      “Forget making a point,” he said, “Go back to college and get a career. Graphic design, computers, something marketable. Don’t worry about George Dubya Bush, worry about your own damn life.”
                                                                                                                                         #

         I saved up my Wawa money and moved to a room in a collective house in West Philadelphia. Sometimes my housemates threw shows in the basement. We would jump up and down and slam into each other while the bands went at their instruments like they were trying to chisel a statue of Hades out of marble. 
         I attended classes at the University of the Arts, and spent my free time wandering the galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I sat with my sketchbook and did little studies of prints from the First World War. Faces covered with gas masks.
         I first visited the museum years earlier, on a high school field trip. My friends wanted to hang out in the hall of arms and armor, but I was starting to get interested in painting and I went off by myself to the modern art wing, where I encountered Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam. I hadn’t read the Iliad yet, but the moment I stepped into the gallery the entire story washed over me at once. Twombly captured the weight of ten years of battle with just a bit of oil scraped across ten stretched canvases. I stared at Achilles shield, and the consuming fire. “War, horrid war, approaches to your walls!” 
        Some days, instead of going into the main museum building, I’d go to the little Rodin Museum down the Parkway. There, I’d I sketch Rodin’s hand sculptures over and over, trying to understand how to use my hands to depict other people’s hands. He has one sculpture called The Clenched Hand, where just by him showing us from the strained wrist to the tortured fingers, we understand how much pain the subject is in. I don’t know why portraiture is so associated with the face: It seems like people are more defined by what they do with their hands. 
           I quit art school for good and became a sign painter, working for the bars and restaurants in the newly-hip neighborhoods north along the river. Besides signs, I painted seasonal murals in the storefront windows. Every three months I came back and washed the glass clean and put up something new. A summer sun. A skeleton for Halloween. The war ebbed and surged. The bodies piled up. Sometimes when I was high up on my ladder, I would stop my work and look out over the Delaware, expecting to see rockets and planes coming our way.

​


Ben Nadler is a writer working between New York City and the Philadelphia area, where he teaches English at Widener University. His most recent novel, Prairie Ashes, is available now from American Buffalo Books. More at bennadler.com