2023-03-24
A man grapples with his father’s dementia, a crumbling marriage, and the psychic fallout of the war in Afghanistan in Liddick’s memoir.
The author, a lawyer in the United States Army, revisits a period of several years beset by personal and family traumas. The most dramatic was his 2018 deployment to Afghanistan, where he was tasked with vetting the legality of drone strikes on suspected terrorists who were dispersed among the civilian population. The assignment was a pressure cooker in which he watched real-time aerial surveillance video of suspects loitering in villages and tried to decipher ambiguous situations with life-and-death consequences: A missile strike that he approved might eliminate enemy fighters who endangered American soldiers—or kill innocent civilians. When a commander ordered reckless strikes that killed children, Liddick felt torn between his duty to speak out and pressures to stay silent. He came home with intractable PTSD, complete with nightmares, panic attacks, and migraines, which frayed his marriage while he coped with his father Ray’s 13-year struggle with Alzheimer’s. These events frame a meditation on Liddick’s complex relationship with his father, illustrated by the plainspoken letters Ray sent to the author in Marine Corps boot camp (“Get used to dealing with morons! You will have them throughout your life”). Through a succession of homely reminiscences of Ray—building a pond, rescuing Liddick from a swarm of yellow jackets, expressing his embarrassment when Liddick over-emotes in the end zone after a touchdown in a juvenile football game—the author’s father emerges as a sympathetic, ebullient figure who was also possessed of a volatile temper and a tendency to “go along to get along” that his son sees in himself. As Liddick fights to regain his mental balance, memories of his dad provide a connection that steadies him.Liddick’s narrative combines a loving but fraught father-son portrait with a suspenseful and evocative depiction of drone combat in Afghanistan (“I can see the point of impact,” he writes of a strike gone wrong, “but where I expect to see one body, there lay two, their dark clothes in stark relief against the settling sienna dust”) that left him lacerating himself over his participation (“all of it derived, in an unbroken chain of events, from my need…to be the person others wanted me to be: a lawyer who said yes, who never strayed from his lane, who allowed them—us—to kill”). He conveys all of this in prose that is psychologically penetrating and steeped in vivid, novelistic detail; recalling a nursing home visit, he writes, “I find Dad at the far end of an interminable hallway. He stands at the opposite window, gazing out at something, at nothing. I stare down the tunnel, my vision blurred at the edges, as the refracted light bathes his sagging body….Melancholy overtakes me as I begin walking the long, sad fluorescent tunnel, destined to meet him, where, I don’t know.” The result is an intense exploration of guilt, with familial bonds of love providing a wandering but indispensable pathway to redemption.
A searing story about the moral costs of war and the healing power of remembrance.
