Hella Nation - Evan Wright [163]
We speak. “I feel like suicide, or going into a hospital,” he tells me. Dollard says he nearly died recently while smoking meth. “I couldn’t move. It was like my body had turned to ice.” He mourns wrecking the prospects of his film, then adds, “I failed Josiah in all of this.” A few days ago Josiah totaled the Humvee, and Dollard kicked him out. (Dollard subsequently found an attorney and helped pay nearly $5,000 to defend Josiah in his outstanding case, but in March 2006, he was convicted of receiving stolen property and sent back to prison with a four-year sentence.) “Do you think you could help get me to a hospital or something?” Dollard asks.
I call Impact House, and they agree to take Dollard back. I don’t reach him again until after midnight. I am about to deliver the good news when Dollard cuts me off. “I need a favor,” Dollard says. He informs me that he e-mailed a Marine Corps public-affairs officer who offered him an embed spot if he could get to Kuwait in the next seventy-two hours. The only problem is that Dollard’s credit card is maxed out and he can’t buy tickets. He wants to know if he can use my credit card to buy the tickets. “What am I going to do in a rehab?” Dollard asks. “I’m going to feel like shit no matter where I am. I’d rather be lying in a hole in Iraq than in a bed somewhere in L.A.”
Brian Michael Jenkins, a counterterrorism analyst with Rand, has argued, like other experts in his field, that a primary lure of jihad in radical Islam is the notion that war offers “purification.” I am beginning to think that it’s much the same for Dollard in his indomitable drive to purge himself of his afflictions.
I give him my credit-card number. In recovery-speak, people might say I’m “enabling” the “untreated alcoholic” by helping him run away from his troubles with a “geographic cure.” I know this because I have had my own struggles with drugs and alcohol. It’s probably why I like Dollard, feel a kinship with him in his madness. Unlike him, I haven’t had bad experiences with people in 12-step meetings. But from what I have seen, you just can’t force it on someone. The way I look at it, if the untreated alcoholic wants to take his geographic cure by going to Iraq, that’s his business.
The night before Thanksgiving a taxi delivers him to my apartment. Dollard wants to say good-bye. He gets out of the cab lugging his camera equipment, a few changes of underwear, and a jacket, all packed in several shopping bags. I give him an old suitcase. Stuffing his possessions into it, Dollard laughs, watching how badly his hands shake. He is totally blind in his right eye from his cataract, and the contact lens in his left eye—which he hasn’t removed for more than six months—is filthy. He nearly tumbles down the steps when he walks out my door. The apartment below mine belongs to a devout Mormon woman, who every year puts up a large fir tree in her window facing the courtyard. The tree is up, but not yet decorated. My neighbor opens her door as Dollard clatters past. “Hey, it’s fucking Christmas,” he tells her. “Put some shit on your tree.”
I yell after him, “It’s Thanksgiving, Pat, not Christmas.”
“Fuck it, dude. Whatever.”
THE THIRD ACT
THE MARINE CORPS SENDS Dollard to Ramadi. After the relatively calm national elections on December 15, 2005, a new wave of insurgent attacks erupts in Ramadi, making it one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq for U.S. troops. The media largely ignore the city. Dollard becomes one of the few Western journalists to continuously cover the battle for the city throughout the winter and early spring of 2006.
Dollard is the first reporter on the scene on January 5, 2006, when insurgents bomb a recruitment center for Iraqi police. An estimated forty men are killed and eighty wounded. Lieutenant Aaron Awtry, a Marine platoon commander who arrived with Dollard at the blast site, says, “We were the first ones at the scene, where a formation of Iraqis had been blown apart.