Knox
“Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.”
—Hypatia
HE WAKES TO a strip of light through the crack in the black-out drapes of his bedroom.
He’d finally bought the curtains a few months ago in an effort to sleep more than a few hours each night. The difficulty was in getting to sleep in the first place, but once he did fall asleep, the blocking of sunlight sometimes prevented him from waking at the crack of dawn.
He’d once been a great sleeper. He could go to bed at ten and wake up at seven, feeling renewed, rejuvenated.
His deployment in Afghanistan had changed all of that.
Dr. Thomason, the psychiatrist he reluctantly sees once a week, tells him PTSD is responsible for his inability to go to sleep. Trauma rewires the brain, convinces it that it must always stay on guard. To lower awareness is to invite disaster. And if a person is asleep, how can he stay on guard?
He’s tried the artificial versions of sleep inducement: Ambien, Halcion, and Restoril—the last of which was supposed to make him stay asleep in addition to falling asleep. They all work for a couple of hours. But his brain usually wins out. It yells and screams behind the artificial veil until inevitably, finally, he comes wide awake, often in a sweat, as if he’s been running or waving his arms frantically trying to get his own attention.
It isn’t as if his SEAL training hadn’t prepared him for the horrors of war. In a six-month program that included its own Hell Week, where the dropout rate was as high as ninety percent, he’d withstood the tests of torture himself and knew that every man has an eventual breaking point. The key was holding out just short of it.
Among the methods used to teach him how to survive torture had been five nights of sleep deprivation and a handheld generator the size of a cell phone that when applied to his nipples made him lose control of all bodily functions.
So he’d arrived in the Middle East fully understanding the depths of depravity to which a human being could stoop in a quest to torture, demean, break.
And still, nothing really prepares you for its reality.
Eyes open, he stares up into the darkness of his bedroom, letting each word of the long memorized Code of Conduct for members of the US Armed Forces march through his mind.
I am an American, fighting in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.
I will never surrender of my own free will. If in command, I will never surrender the members of my command while they still have the means to resist.
If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.
If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners. I will give no information nor take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades. If I am senior, I will take command. If not, I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me and will back them up in every way.
When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am required to give name, rank, service number and date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability. I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to their cause.
I will never forget that I am an American, fighting for freedom, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free. I will trust in my God and in the United States of America.
During captivity, he had recited the code so many times that his brain had become programmed with each word, set on an endless cycle of repeat. It was the repetition of this code that saved his life. His determination to hang his will on every word.
He’d been one of four captured from his unit after a two-hour shootout on a blazing hot afternoon when they had finally surrendered in exchange for the life of another team member bleeding out in the center of it all. Their surrender had gotten him help, and he’d ended up in a German hospital recovering two days later while the four of them endured round after round of torture that made his SEAL training seem like child’s play.
Each time they’d come for him, when his number had again risen in the line of order, Knox turned his mind to the code, hammering each word into his resistance like nails into a coffin. The words allowed him to make himself not present, to hang what was happening to him on a higher cause. He’d used it like anesthesia, so that his own screams had registered as if they were coming from far away, rising up out of someone else.
Lying here in the dark, those screams echo in his mind, and his eyes fly open. He doesn’t want to see the memory on the back of his eyelids so he vaults out of bed, turns on the shower in the bathroom, and stands beneath the freezing spray until the screams are gone, and he can close his eyes without seeing himself in that torture room.
Only then does he get out of the shower, pull on some clothes, and head out of the apartment, hitting the sidewalk at a run. He doesn’t stop until his watch beeps ten miles.