smiles, no doubt at my ignorance. “I have mine,” he says, unzipping his bag. He rummages through his training gear to the bottom, and extracts a thick cylinder of rolled brown and white cowhide.
“As near as my father can tell,” Nate says, unwrapping it, “this has been in our family for over a hundred and fifty years. He told me another family might have owned it before, and it was either lost in battle or maybe dropped when its owner fell injured or dead. He lifts it up with reverence. He doesn’t offer it to me to hold.
The twelve- or fifteen-inch-long handle is some kind of hardwood with black cowhide wrapped in the middle, a clump of brownish fur above it, then another band of black cowhide, and near the top one more clump of fur. I’ve seen photos of war clubs with a fist-sized rock secured to the end, but this one has about a ten-inch-curved piece of something black and hard looking. It’s not steel and I don’t think it’s a rock. One end looks a little like an axe and the other end a blunt snout, like a hammer. Whatever it is, someone has carved about a dozen shark-like teeth into the axe end.
“This would leave a fella lonesome for his skull,” I say. “What is the head made of?”
“Jawbone of a buffalo. See how this end has been ground to give it teeth?”
“Nasty,” I say. “Guess you could hit with the blunt end too? Like a hammer?”
“It’s all good.” He spins it in his hand so the hammer end is forward, and then snaps his wrist a couple times as if pounding in a nail. “You can bash someone’s head or any other body part with the hammer end.” He spins the blade side forward, snaps his wrist again to hit an imaginary target, then rips the blade downward. “I like to hack with it like it’s an ax and then slice downward a few inches to rip flesh with the teeth.”
“Gee, I was going to ask you to teach it to the tiny tots class until you mentioned the ripping flesh part.” He smiles. “Impressive. How often do you train with it?”
“Three or four days a week. I’ve created a routine of strikes, blocks, and combinations. There is no one to test me, but my father and grandfather approved when I demonstrated my skills.”
“You’ll have to show me. Not on me, of course, maybe on one of the white belts.”
Nate laughs, the first time I’ve heard him do so. It fades quickly. Silently he rewraps the club and puts it back under his training gear. He folds his hands on top of the bag. When he doesn’t say anything, I crack the window a little to let in some air. I’m not going to force the conversation this time. The ball is in his court.
Awkward silence. More awkward silence. Then, “How did you do it?” he asks softly, looking out the windshield.
“Meaning?”
Thirty seconds pass. “How did you survive what happened to you?”
I know he’s not referring to the shooting in the secondhand store. He means the one in the house, the hostage taker … and the hostage. Three cops have asked me this same question. They had been involved in deadly force encounters, all good shoots. Still, they were haunted by their experiences. I told them every day is a challenge because every day I wake up, I’m a killer. Alcoholics have the twelve-step program. There isn’t anything out there for cops who kill innocent children.
On two occasions, people who recognized me at the grocery asked the same thing. Actually, they asked how I could live with myself. My first impulse was to strike out at them. My second was to hope they’d strike me. In the end, I walked away without doing or saying anything.
When I tell Nate it’s mostly the ol’ one-day-at-a-time thing, he nods, as if he knew already knew it, but knowing wasn’t helping. “Do you feel like telling me what happened?” I ask.
He shrugs.
“I’m sorry, I thought you were wanting to talk about—”
“Sensei, have you heard the expression, ‘Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself’?”
I shake my head. “I haven’t but it’s interesting.” I wonder if my father knows it.
“I’m not sure if it applies to what is going on between our countries around the world because, as has always been the case, the grunts, the one’s doing the fighting, aren’t privy. Their job is to put on the war garb and go into harm’s way. Some go mindlessly into the fray, others go like wound-up robots, others go with a sense of doing something right for the indigenous people. Lastly, there is a small percentage who go in with the anticipation of getting to kill. I went two times with all those reasons except for wanting to kill.”
He shakes his head as he looks out the side window. He mindlessly drums his fingernails on the glass for a moment before clutching the fabric on his gym bag again. He takes in a deep breath and lets it out. “I killed during my first tour … three times. The first was two months after I’d been in Iraq, the second one after six months there, and the third man I killed during my eighth month. All of them were firing at us and all were armed. I … didn’t feel good about killing and I didn’t feel bad. I guess I felt … nothing. I kept thinking I should feel something, but there was nothing there. It was like white noise. Even when my captain told me that those I killed would not kill any more of us, still, I felt nothing.”
Can’t say I had the same experience. After I shot the tweaker who was about to shoot Mister Axelbrad, I felt horrible. I remember collapsing against the plate glass window outside of his store and losing my breakfast on the sidewalk, and losing it again when I got back to the office. For the two months I was off duty, I’d fluctuate between feeling giddy one moment and sinking into a deep funk the next. Doc Kari always says whatever I feel is perfectly normal because I experienced an abnormal event. It’s hard to keep that in mind sometimes.
Nate continues, “I was home for a few months and then I was ordered to go back over for a second tour, to Afghanistan this time. My wife was extremely upset, my four-year-old daughter was inconsolable, and I was having problems facing the possibility of having to kill again.”
Nate looks down at his bag for a moment and turns to me. “I said last night I’m not related to Geronimo or Cochise, but I possess their warrior nature. And I think being a member of the warrior class is an honorable thing. But somewhere along the line during my second tour things … my belief in acting honorably got … buried. I became miserable, anxious, angry, full of hate, and I wanted revenge—desperately.”
He pauses, his eyes focused on mine but his mind off in some dusty rock pile in the Middle East. My sense is he has had these thoughts before, but this is the first time he’s verbalized them.
“I don’t know, Nate. If I’ve learned anything about violence it’s that everyone processes what they see and do differently. Some have issues with it right away; others might not feel the impact for a long while; some never have a problem with it; some suffer all their life. There’s no wrong or right about how you feel. ”
He shakes his head, but I don’t think it’s directed at what I just said. It’s more like he’s trying to shake out something revolving in his mind. He’s silent for a moment, his eyes on his hand as it slides the zipper over and back on his workout bag.
“It’s not what happened in Iraq,” he says. “It’s what happened in Afghanistan. It’s what I … allowed to happen.”
I start to ask what he means but I decide
