CONSEQUENCE :: Eric Fair

"I think I may go to jail for what I am about to say. And I think it is exactly what I deserve." 

I'm not certain I've ever had such difficulty boiling down a 240-page book to an essence. I'm ultimately of two minds about Eric Fair's Consequence. With respect to much of the content, I found it a momentous, gut-wrenching, searingly honest account of one man's experience with torture and interrogation as a civil contractor during a time of war. With respect to other parts of Fair's story and the prose itself, I struggled to connect.

Raised in Pennsylvania, Fair was a middling, sometimes-bullied student who found solace in his church and the watchful eye of local cops. These early influences impacted his life for decades as he struggled with a yearning to join law enforcement ("I want to be a quiet professional who saves starving refugees") and a pull towards the seminary.

Over the course of the next fifteen years, Fair followed a winding path that touched both leanings, including local law enforcement, Presbyterian college, the Army, a private military contractor, the NSA, and seminary school. The moral conflict Fair felt between his military and religious paths is one that arcs over the portion of his life shared in Consequence. Once asked about that conflict, Fair responded, "Sometimes it's necessary to lie to evil."

Diagnosed with heart failure as a young man, Fair's law enforcement/military career veered off into the private sector. A valuable commodity due to his ability to speak Arabic, he wound up working as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison, as well as in Fallujah and Baghdad. Fair unflinchingly details what went on at these postings, both what he took part in and what he observed:

I shouldn't be here. I should have quit by now. A single month at Abu Ghraib is enough to know that all of this is wrong, but I stay, in the hope of salvaging the experience and finding some way to excuse what I've done. With each day, the hole gets deeper.

I am silent. This is a sin. I know it as soon as I see it. There will be no atonement for it. In the coming years I won't even have the audacity to seek atonement. Witnessing a man being tortured in the Palestinian chair requires the witness to either seek justice or cover his face...I'll spend the rest of my life covering my face.

Even as his nightmares begin and escalate, his faith is tested, and he begins to avoid his wife, Fair gets mired deeper in the morass, returning to the fray over and over again as if he can't escape. Not an easy read, taking in Consequence felt something like a need to bear witness. Author Phil Klay (2014 National Book Award Winner for Redeployment) sums it up perfectly:

An act of incredible bravery. If we are, as a country, ever to fully account for the past decade of war and what it meant, we need those who participated to have the courage to tell us what was done in our name.

At this, Fair does a more than admirable job under difficult circumstances. As we know from the Abu Ghraib scandal, and what Fair confirms in the book, much of what went down there was gruesome. Rather than shy from that or make excuses, Fair shines a blinding light on his own actions and emotions, which were fascinating in a "can't look away from that car wreck" type of way. This is a book everyone should read to understand, as Klay puts it, "what is done in our name."

Written in a semi-journal format, Fair's prose is fairly plain and no-nonsense. It felt like it was taken almost literally from a diary he'd kept during these experiences. That made it both a little difficult to immerse myself in and also to follow at times, since there were time jumps and gaps that sometimes came unexpectedly.

I often wondered if something was a gap or if Fair just hadn't dealt with the issue in reality. At one point Fair's heart condition becomes so dire I had the distinct impression he was near death. Yet the next section had him simply proceeding status quo. He didn't seem to address the issue, either within himself or with his wife, whose reaction/response was deafening in its absence.

I understand this was not a story about Fair's marriage. And yet, in a way it was. Consequence is about all the consequences of Fair's path, and he includes the story of his marriage and the impact of his choices on it. So it was a curious omission, this lack of reaction to a supposed death sentence, and again made for a disconnect with the material.

Overall, I think Consequence is an important book. Important for its content, a real look at interrogation and the scary reality of private contractors, the impact of the "job" on the real people on all sides of the equation. The consequences are not to be taken lightly or swept under a rug, and Fair has done an admirable job of lifting the rug so we can all see the dirt.

STREET SENSE:  If this were not an important memoir on something of a taboo subject, I may not recommend it due to the writing style and sometimes choppy timeline. However, it is an important memoir, and I encourage you to pick it up if you don't already have a sense of what happened/happens at places like Abu Ghraib. I keep coming back to it, but it is important to know what our country and military are doing in our names, whether we agree with it and support it or not.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE:  Death scares me. Or at least, an easy one does. I do not want to die on an escalator or in an air-conditioned hallway or at the end of the Army Ten-Miler. I wanted to die in Iraq. I wanted to die like Ferdinand. That would have been fair. I wouldn't owe anything. Instead, I have a debt to pay. For Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. For the Palestinian chair.

COVER NERD SAYS:  I honestly don't remember the cover of the advanced reading copy I first saw. When the physical ARC showed up, I really loved the cover, though I assumed, correctly as it turns out, it was not the final cover. I wish it had been, it spoke to me much more than the final work shown above. I'm not sure why, but the real cover reads as fiction to me, not non-fiction. I get the boxes, the darkness, the shades, they just don't make me feel anything. I found the ARC, with its stark artwork and quotes, much more evocative. I think a great cover could have been put together with the images there. 

Raised by two schoolteachers in Bethlehem, Pa., along the Lehigh River, Eric Fair was a quiet, marginal student with a weight problem--one of "the kids who don't play sports and who buy their jeans in the husky section." Bullied, he sought shelter under the security of local cops patrolling his paper route and found refuge in the First Presbyterian Church. These early attractions to regimen and service manifest themselves throughout his life in a Presbyterian college, the U.S. Army, the private military contractor CACI, the NSA and seminary at Princeton. With a matter-of-fact, diary-like chronology, Fair's memoir, Consequence, tracks his gradual dissolution as military monotony, war, lies, guilt, marital stress, heart disease and alcoholism eat him alive. At the center of his disintegration is his role as an interrogator at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Trained in Arabic by the army, he joined CACI for a lucrative assignment questioning and badgering detainees. "They tell us torture works. It always has. It always will." Fair describes the pain and intolerable prison conditions with some detachment, distancing himself from what he sees and does. However, the cruel "Palestinian chair" torture tool pushes him over the edge: "I am silent. This is a sin. I know it as soon as I see it. There will be no atonement for it." Although sometimes hard to read, Consequence is Fair's effort to confess and find that atonement--made more disturbing because he may be just one of many trying to understand the barbarity of Abu Ghraib.

A HARD AND HEAVY THING :: Matthew Hefti

We carry the world. They did. All those young men did. They carried the world, and it was heavy, and they didn't know what to do with it. Was this the rest? Was this the war? Things had already spun out of control and they weren't always as black and white or as right or wrong as Nick liked to think.

I know nothing about war. Sure, I've read plenty of fiction and non-fiction pieces about war. Still, I know nothing about war. Those who have been through it often don't have the ability or the inclination to write about what it is to be at or return from war. To our benefit, Matthew Hefti has both.

I can't tell you whether Hefti's A Hard and Heavy Thing is realistic. But I'd place a hefty (heh, see what I did there?) wager on it. Without being theatrically graphic or glorifying, Hefti has a true gift for placing the reader in a scene without over-writing or getting mired in the details. It is no easy task to write a compelling long-action scene, war-based or otherwise, and he does it masterfully.

That being said, A Hard and Heavy Thing is not simply a book about war. It's about friendship, loyalty, failure, guilt, faith, regret, love (and a million other things), and how the weight of the world (and the weight of the world of war) bears on them. Boiled down, the plot revolves around young men going to and returning from war. For me, the book, written in epistolary form, is a love letter from one man to another in three distinct yet interrelated parts:

Act I. Home. "Dear Nick, Let's Be Honest; We Were Broken Before the War Even Started." Setting: Small-town Wisconsin. Nick and Levi, childhood friends yet opposites; Nick the spiritual "good one," Levi the doubting sarcastic. And Eris, the girl who completes the wobbly triangle.

Dissatisfied and hemmed in, restless and claustrophobic, turning more and more to drugs, it is no surprise that, like many young men, Nick and Levi enlist after the towers fall on 9/11, taking their broken selves to war. To, as Levi writes, "become part of the problem."

And so, they signed away their lives in a fit of youth. Long before they bled for each other, before they bled because of each other, they bled with each other for an America that, to them, on that day, was worth every drop...They joined in a fit of idealism and naivete. They joined in a fit of patriotism and zeal. They joined in a bout of underage drinking and hands covered in blood, in a fit of juvenescent exuberance with no intentions of ever looking back.

Act II. War. "This is Going to Hurt." And hurt it does, in so many ways. Nick and Levi are serving together, their unit out on patrol, Levi given a leadership role for the first time. The smallest of pranks, as small as a pebble that ends up weighing a million pounds, sets the stage for tragedy. As I mentioned above, this is a section beautifully done.

After Levi saw his best friend's Humvee disappear into a cloud of fire, dust, and gravel, both time and sound stopped, which left Tom Hooper flying through the air, suspended against a backdrop of smoke and flames, weightless and serene. His unbloused DCU-patterned pants were rumpled by the wind, his limbs were spread against the sky, one foot bootless but still covered by a green sock. Levi stared in wonder at his friend, who was not flying, but was simply the subject of a photograph, oblivious to his surroundings, or to gravity.

Act III. Home (?) again. "The Strongest Voices Often Go Unheard." It is difficult to describe my reaction to the third act, the nitty gritty of it all. It seems odd (and feels wrong) to say, but in many ways this section was the most difficult reading. Crazy, right? How can the violence of war be "easier" to read than the return home? And yet, it was.

This is owed to the intimacy and depth of Hefti's writing. I felt physically uncomfortable reading it. Drawn into it yet helpless to bridge the distance between Levi and Nick, frustrated as they circle each other like tightly wound clocks, continually failing to bridge the distance of the different burdens they carry. I cringed at many of the interactions taking place: between Levi and Nick, Nick and Eris, Levi and Eris, Levi and his family. I just wanted to make it all stop. I didn't like the feeling at all. I loved that Hefti's words made me feel that way.

A Hard and Heavy Thing started as a slow burn for me. I wasn't sure I would buy into the characters. Some of the time jumps were a bit jarring. The first act drew me in a bit, but I wasn't hooked to the barb until the second act when I bought all in. Then the third blew my doors off and still has me ruminating on all of the different elements carried through from the first act to the final, the spiritual and philosophical themes, the difficulty of it all. All growing out of one damn pebble. It's a really stellar work that I encourage you to read.

STREET SENSE:  The epistolary format of A Hard and Heavy Thing set it apart for me in the world of novels dealing with war. It felt utterly real and intimate, very voyeuristic, and Levi's head is a difficult place to spend time. That squirming discomfort makes the reader, at least this reader, contemplate issues she/he perhaps hasn't before when it comes to soldiers returning home. That alone should be recommendation enough.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE: So many, I squoze a few in above even though this review felt way too long. But here is yet another that I loved:

Most people don't realize how things can get serious so quickly. One second you're face down on your carpet listening to bad guitar-playing, and the next second there's a dying girl in your bathtub. One second you're playing with your best friend and his GI Joes under the pool table, and the next second Oma is pulling you off the barroom floor trying to explain that the crash was really bad and you have to leave right now, right this second, and then all you can do is stand next to your newly orphaned best friend as two caskets get lowered into the ground. Or, you're cruising along in your super-cool-guy Humvee thinking about chicks or cheese curds, and your best friend's truck disappears into a Hollywood ball of smoke and flame. The next thing you know, you're covered in blood and you're tossing around the severed limbs of your friends.

COVER NERD SAYS:  This cover is slyly genius. If you haven't really looked, do so, particularly the interplay of the font colors. That alone wins it an A in my book, but even absent that brilliant flair, the colors and fonts would have caught my eye. Well done.