We had options.Īfter we left Texas our lives maintained surface similarities even as they began diverging in radical ways. Neither of us did more than one tour over there. From the descriptions I’ve read, Walker saw and did more. We both saw and did our share of awful shit.
He spent a year as a medic with an infantry company in the Triangle of Death, and I made my bones as a tank gunner in Sadr City.
Each of us was deployed as part of a combat arms unit at a time when the war was particularly deadly for U.S. I would have been just returned from Iraq, and Walker would have been on his way. It would have been in 2005 that our paths unknowingly crossed in Texas, if they did. No one in a position to make such judgments would have pegged us as budding literary novelists. We would have appeared as two pissed-off looking kids, sunburned in desert camo, waiting in line after work to buy some relief from boredom and toil. We didn’t know each other but it is possible we rubbed shoulders in one of the nightclubs in Killeen or at the 24-hour gas station near the entrance of post where you could buy liquor and smokes at any hour of the day or night. After basic training we were both stationed at Fort Hood, Texas. We both partied too hard and failed out of college in the early 2000’s, both then enlisting in the wartime army at twenty years old. I have a lot in common with Nico Walker, author of the recently released debut novel, Cherry. Hammered out on a prison typewriter, Cherry marks the arrival of a raw, bleakly hilarious, and surprisingly poignant voice straight from the dark heart of America. They attempt a normal life, but with their money drying up, he turns to the one thing he thinks he could be really good at – robbing banks. Soon he is hooked on heroin, and so is Emily. The opioid crisis is beginning to swallow up the Midwest. He and Emily try to make their long-distance marriage work, but when he returns from Iraq, his PTSD is profound, and the drugs on the street have changed. His fellow soldiers smoke they huff computer duster they take painkillers they watch porn. But as an army medic, he is unprepared for the grisly reality that awaits him. Desperate to keep their relationship alive, they marry before he ships out to Iraq. But soon Emily has to move home to Elba, New York, and he flunks out of school and joins the army. They share a passion for Edward Albee and ecstasy and fall hard and fast in love. A young man is just a college freshman when he meets Emily.
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