The

Evil Hours
A Biogr a ph y of Post-Tr au m at ic
St r ess Disor der

David J. Morris

An Eamon Dolan Book

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
B osto n   •   N ew York
2015

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 Prologue: The Warning

Have you ever been blown up before, sir?

Everything was fine until it wasn’t.
Apophenia: finding patterns where there shouldn’t be patterns.

These were the words I wrote in my journal on October 9, 2007, the

day before I was almost killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad. The
last line I wrote in the days afterward. Later, I went back and under-
lined it in a different colored ink, as if to emphasize that I had come
back to it in a different state of mind. As if I were leaving a clue for
some future version of myself.
I was in Iraq for my third reporting trip and had gone out on a pa-
trol with some soldiers from the First Infantry Division into Saydia,
a neighborhood that seemed, at least on the surface, to be relatively
peaceful. On our way back inside the wire, one of the soldiers asked
nonchalantly if I’d ever been blown up before. I considered the ques-
tion for a moment, and then, as the silence deepened, I sensed that
something was amiss. The words came awkwardly as I explained that
while I had spent the summer before in Ramadi, at that point the
deadliest city in Iraq, I was still a virgin in that particular area.
It was like my fate had been spoken: I had never been blown up
before, but everyone in the Humvee knew that was about to change.
According to the laws of grunt superstition, I was the injured
party, but somehow I managed to feel bad for the kid who’d asked
the question. As it happened, the soldiers in the Humvee were from
all over Latin America — Peru, Mexico, Guatemala — and they began
pummeling him in a variety of languages and accents for what he’d
done.
At the time, I felt embarrassed more than anything else and just

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 xii  •  Prologue: The Warning

wanted the moment to end. I didn’t like being the topic of conver-
sation, and it took everything I had to avoid thinking about being
blown into tiny red pieces. This, in fact, was one of the first head
tricks I’d learned in Iraq, to systematically ignore the obvious: you
were always just about to die — get over it. I was wasted, too, and
my mind wasn’t right. I had been in Iraq for a total of nine months
by this point, and even though I had seen people killed by roadside
bombs, I’d never been hit myself, and somehow I’d come to feel that
I had my luck under control. But in posing the question, it was as if
the soldier had stolen that control, thrown me over to the forces of
chance that I had worked so hard to insulate myself from.
Later, I interviewed a prominent psychoanalyst, who told me that
trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time, you move from
one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After
trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked back-
wards into an eddy, or bouncing about like a rubber ball from now to
then and back again. August is June, June is December. What time
is it? Guess again. In the traumatic universe, the basic laws of mat-
ter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be
mustard gas.
Another odd feature of traumatic time is that it doesn’t just de-
stroy the flow of the present into the future, it corrodes everything
that came before, eating at moments and people from your previous
life, until you can’t remember why any of them mattered.
What I previously found inconceivable is now inescapable: I have
been blown up so many times in my mind that it is impossible to
imagine a version of myself that has not been blown up. The man
on the other side of the soldier’s question is not me. In fact, he never
existed.
The war is gone now, but the event remains, the happening that
nearly erased the life to come and thus erased the life that came be-
fore. The soldier’s question hangs in the air the way it always has.
The way it always will.
Have you ever been blown up before, sir?

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