There was one more negation, of course, the most important of all, so well understood in our family that no one had to say it out loud: not guilty.
In America we thank our veterans at every opportunity, but we do not presume to understand what they have gone through. The military experience is sacrosanct, tarnished by any effort to assess it with civilian touchstones. The moment the infantry recruit walks down the cinder-block path from his childhood home at 0430 hours and enters a recruiting sergeant’s car via the passenger-side door, he crosses over to a new plane of existence. But in Alex’s case we had a few glimpses, transmissions from beyond.
As Norm told it, the change came on in strobe. First Alex was sent home five weeks into basic for a surprise convalescent leave. Because he didn’t tell anyone he was coming, he found the house locked and empty, the family gone to San Diego on vacation. Norm bought Alex a ticket to join them, then watched him stare for days at seagulls swooping through the mist above the waves, distracted and remote, dog tags dangling against his bare chest. Three months later Alex graduated from basic in a grid of other eighteen-year-olds, then flew home for another short leave. At first his efforts at military posturing—the crisp walk, the flat eyes, the gunmetal tone, all this set against the sprinklers and novelty mailboxes of Greenwood Village—seemed a little silly. He posed for photographs in the backyard wearing his dress uniform with his older brother Max’s AR-15 clapped to his chest, lips pinched into a line as crisp and proud as the fold of his beret, then flew back to Fort Benning for the Ranger Indoctrination Program. Norm looked up Georgia temperatures on the Internet whenever he knew Alex would be in the woods all night on field drills. It was often near freezing, sometimes below. In the rare phone calls Alex was permitted home, his voice was so thick and confused that it was hard to understand him. On his next visit, his affectations had stiffened. This was no act.
It wasn’t until months after Alex’s arrest that Norm finally learned what had been happening on the other end of those phone calls. Alex spent a total of sixteen months confined at SeaTac Federal Detention Center before being released on bail in November 2007. In that time he experienced a profound transformation in his mind. Norm, who visited him there every single weekend, described it to us as a long, painful, halting emergence from his military identity. In the beginning Alex could not seem to hold on to the thought that the crime had in fact been real. He did hundreds of push-ups every day in his cell to keep in shape for the day when the misunderstanding was cleared up and he could rejoin his battalion on deployment. It was only eight or nine months into his imprisonment, after Norm gave him an award-winning science book called Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control by a British neuroscientist named Kathleen Taylor, that Alex woke up to what had happened to him. He spent the next month composing a 23,000-word manuscript reconsidering everything he had gone through in his training. When he was finished, Norm typed it up and emailed it to the entire extended Blum family.
I still lived in Seattle then, collaborating with a University of Washington biochemist on my dissertation research. I was sitting at my lab workstation in the UW Medical Center when Norm’s email arrived. The dedication page that opened the file was an uncanny glimpse of the Alex we all used to know: cheerful, insouciant, warm. He thanked Norm, Anna, and everyone in the family for their love and support, Paris Hilton “for making prison ‘hot,’” and his little brother Sam “for giving me the idea of figuring out, as he put it, ‘how you turned into such a jerk’!”
The writing that followed was far more reflective than I was expecting from an indifferent student two months out of his teens. I had never guessed there was anything inside that crewcut blond head except sports clichés and wisecracks.
BREAKING POINT: TEACHING AMERICA’S YOUTH TO KILL by Alex Blum
Growing up I always saw epic T.V. commercials of marines climbing plateau faces and soldiers rising as one out of concealment in an open field. I picked up a book about Viet Nam when I was five and stared transfixed at pictures of American soldiers patrolling in rice paddies. By the time I turned seven I knew that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be the All-American kid who grew up and fought against an evil enemy that threatened this country. I fell in love with Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers and was awed by the incredible sacrifice in Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. I saw the events in these books and many more like them as challenges and wondered if I could have made a difference if I’d been there. I read about the mental strength and physical struggles that Special OPS groups like SEALs, Rangers and Delta Force went through and wanted to see if I could make it. I wanted to be a part of the military as the country rallied behind its armed forces. I wanted to come back from war, hug my family and say, “I’m home.” I got lost in this fantasy often, not realizing it was just that: a fantasy. The United States doesn’t have an identifiable enemy anymore. It isn’t fighting a nation led by a mustached tyrant or a communist oppressor. The country certainly doesn’t rally behind its boys like in World War II and no soldier ever comes home from the violence and just moves on with his life, but that’s all hindsight.
I grew up in a stable, loving family and lived in a community completely devoid of violence. I had neither the drive nor the mental capacity to kill. So how does the Army turn a kid like that into a killer? It’s a process; a long, painful, mind-numbing, perverse process. It is a necessary process but something that I had never read about in detail and never objectively looked at until I was far away from it.
My experience comes from a small percentage of the Army, small but crucial. I was an infantryman, or 11 Bravo in military terms. Our indoctrination is unique to the rest of the Army. It is unique because ours is the only profession within the Army community that is sent directly to kill people. The rest of the Army’s recruits go through two schools: a modified Basic Training which is nine weeks and Advanced Individual Training or AIT which varies in length depending on the job. During the modified Basic they learn just that: the very basics of Army life. They learn how to march, how to handle a rifle and other aspects of life in uniform like rank structure and military time. When they graduate from Basic they are sent to AIT and learn in a college-like environment where the Drill Sergeants teach job skills and continue to mentor them. They work days and get nights and weekends off and when they graduate they are sent to a unit where they perform their job. After their training they are a part of the Army but in a sense they are just disciplined civilians. They are not killers. They wouldn’t raid a house and put two rounds into each person’s chest inside the structure or let loose with a .50 caliber machine gun into a group of people. So why would I? How is the rest of the Army still able to act and think like the people they were as civilians and 11 Bravos come out of Basic Training like a pack of pit bulls? Why is it that a soldier like Jessica Lynch would surrender and be taken prisoner and I would fight to the death? Aren’t both of us part of an Army of One? Isn’t it our most basic instinct to survive? Aren’t we both from a country where as children we were taught to respect and cherish life? It’s not because of sex or bravery that our outcomes would have differed. It is because my induction into the Army was completely different from hers.
As sunlight glittered in from Puget Sound across the monitors and glassware of the lab, the dark world opening out behind my laptop’s screen made all the molecular twiddling I had been doing for the past year in this room seem suddenly very paltry. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were dying on our behalf, and killing in far