me try again. Why are you here?”
“They said I had to come.”
“Who?”
“The seminary. They said I didn’t have a choice. I think they would have asked me to leave if I didn’t start coming.”
“Really?”
“I don’t know.” I shifted in my seat.
“Okay, Benjamin. That’s fine. Let’s start small. Let’s get to know one another. Does that work?”
I nodded.
“Great,” he smiled, both eager and friendly. “Where are you from?”
“The Northwest.”
“Seattle?”
“No. Portland.”
“It’s rainy there.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And your family?”
“They live there too.”
He scribbled in his notebook before continuing. “Are you close?”
“I live in Denver.”
He laughed. “I meant—”
“I know,” I interrupted. “It’s just . . . they’re good people. I don’t think my issues are related to them.”
“Are your parents still married?”
“No.”
“How many siblings?”
“There’re seven of us. No. Nine. If you count everyone.”
“And where do you fit?”
“I’m somewhere in the middle. And, no, I don’t really talk to my brothers and sisters.”
“Why not?”
“Look, I’m here because of the war. What does my family have to do with it?”
“Nothing. Everything. They may not be the inciting incident, but they’re integral to how you will choose or not choose to handle your trauma.”
“Ok. Well. Then it was like anyone else’s family. There was a lot of hurt, a lot of . . . stuff. Some of us ran towards each other, and others of us ran away. I ran away.”
“And joined the Marine Corps?”
“Something like that.”
“And now you’re in seminary?”
“Yeah.”
“If you don’t mind me saying, that seems a contradiction.”
“When I was in high school, I wasn’t . . . focused. I struggled with both class work and peer pressure. I enjoyed sports, though. They were a release from the tension of having to fit in or get good grades or whatever. I could just go outside and play.
“One day at work—I bagged groceries at Safeway—this guy, no idea who he was, said, ‘You played well on Friday.’ I was a football player and had recently been written up in a small, local newspaper. I thanked him, thinking that he had recognized me from my picture in The Chronicle.
“He invited me to go to church the following Sunday. Why not? I thought. It turned out he was the pastor. He came down after the sermon and shook my hand. He thanked me for attending. I don’t know. I guess you could say I had a conversion experience.”
“Can you tell me about that?”
“Sure. It was . . . I was . . . you know, excited. I took the bait. I threw away my satanic CDs, told my girlfriend we had to . . . you know . . . stop doing stuff, bought a Bible.”
“So you would say that you were or are religious?”
“At one point, sure. Now? I don’t think of myself that way. My experiences didn’t always align with my pastor’s sermons. I never really thought of myself as inquisitive, but . . . I wanted answers. I mean, if I was going to stake my life on something as mystical as a two-thousand-year-old story about a guy who returns to life, then I really wanted to know.”
“Know what?”
“If it was real or not. If it was worth my time, my effort, my life. I wanted to know if it was really the religion, the philosophy for life.”
“And?”
“And then the war.”
“Which changed you.”
“Which changed me.”
“Can you say how?”
I shifted and started gnawing the side of my cheek. “Violence.”
“I see,” he said. “Well, we’ll get there, only maybe not today, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Would you say you were conservative? I only ask, because it helps me to understand your trajectory.”
“Yeah. On fire for the Lord and all of that. But then the war happened and I had too many questions. Being ‘on fire’ was . . . well, it was bullshit.”
“When compared to war?”
“Yeah.”
“But there was a season in your life when you really embraced your beliefs?”
“I don’t know why you keep pushing that, but yes.”
“I guess I’m just curious. Is that why you joined the Marine Corps?”
“I don’t know. I was an evangelical Christian, alright? I joined the Marine Corp. I went to Iraq. I came home with a lot of questions. Am I still an evangelical? Yes. No. I don’t know. I’m not really much of anything, I guess.”
“Our time is almost up,” he said, looking at his watch. “At some point, we’re going to have to talk about Iraq, about what you remember.”
“Remember?”
“Yes.”
“So much of it’s a blur. I remember some things, but other things are a convoluted mess. Like . . . like I made the whole thing up.”
“The war or your experiences?”
“Both,” I shrugged. “Like I made up the enemy so I could deal with what we were doing. And my experiences, too.”
“Why those?”
“Because they belong in a
