![]() I never saw my drinking as out of control. Magoo, so I put them aside and instead began hitting the sauce harder. Psychiatrists prescribed Lexapro for depression and anxiety, Valium for low-level anxiousness, Xanax for full-on panic attacks and trazodone to help me get to sleep at night. It happens to reporters as well as soldiers. Since 2007, I have been diagnosed three times with post-traumatic stress disorder. A few months later, I began to have debilitating panic attacks. Not surprisingly, the weight of these things took a toll. If you didn’t, tiny particles of dust and rotting human flesh blown on the wind would attach themselves to your teeth and tongue and the roof of your mouth. Inside the zone, we all wore surgical-style masks. Nothing but bloated corpses, mostly naked - the violence of the tsunami had stripped away the clothes of the victims. Everything inside the tsunami zone was gone. I was sent all across the Indian Ocean basin by the United Nations as part of a team to write a report on the aftermath. Then came the Southeast Asian tsunami of December 2004. Reporting was my passion, but as I got older, the stuff I had seen began to collect in my mind, and it was increasingly difficult to get away from it. Then I’d go home to Virginia to sit in a lonely room by myself, sort it out and write it up - and, well, I’d loosen the screws at night with a couple of beers and a glass of wine at dinner. I volunteered to cover these situations - the bombings, the torture, the beheadings, all of it. I’d witnessed bloody rebellions in Africa, covered war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I had spent the previous two decades being paid to look directly at things that made most people avert their eyes. And while the descent from that lofty place to a state prison might have felt sudden, the sky didn’t fall all at once. I could get pretty much anyone on the telephone or to answer an email. Up until that day, I’d had a pretty good career: traveling the world as a war correspondent, author and sometime filmmaker. He was said to be an exemplary human being. He was a husband and father and grandfather, a farmer and churchgoer. ![]() The man in the blue car was named Wayne T. Because when I looked up, a blue car appeared suddenly from behind the curve and was now right in front of me. Driving back down the mountain, on a blind turn, I glanced down from the road to check my speed, and at once everything changed. ![]() I decided to scout a shaded stream on the other side of the mountain. Then I took out the fourth one, popped it and began thinking, You’re probably getting close. Then I went down the street to the local fly-fishing shop and talked to the guys who run it for an hour or so.īack at the river, there was still nothing going on, so I pulled out a third beer and knocked it back. I scouted the location a bit and finished two beers as I listened to the car radio. When I got over to the stream, the afternoon sun shone hard on the water, and the fish had yet to start moving in the river’s shadows. I put four beers into the car, thinking, Why not? I went over the mountain from where I lived then, in central Virginia, to the Shenandoah Valley and an easily accessible trout stream. 14, 2014, in the mood to celebrate a potential two-book publishing deal, I decided to take myself fly-fishing. Which is generous of them, because for 21 months I never got to see the stars and the moon. Good friends have lent me a guest apartment at their place, to stay in for as long as I need it. Where I live now, there’s a little more than 70 acres of Virginia farmland to kick around on, patrolled by an owl that, on some nights, I hear glide from the woods to hunt rodents scratching for grain near an empty horse shed. Aftermath excavates our century's darkest history, revealing that the destruction of the past remains deeply, inextricably embedded in the present.Every evening since I got out, I’ve taken a walk, just to see the stars and the moon and to listen to the night.
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