http://www.npr.org/player/embed/472964974/473004679
I pre-ordered this book after seeing an op-ed by its author, and spent the past day and a half tearing through it. The name of his former employer, CACI,had long since been for me code for “detainee abuse,” and I had tried to write an article based on the company’s misdeeds when applying for a business-reporting fellowship for J-school (won by the far more deserving and-kick-ass Moira Herbst). By then, the Center for Constitutional Rights’ 2004 lawsuit against CACI on behalf of detainees was in the news, and going through the now-familiar paces of wars over classified information and webs of culpability.
The New York Times calls CONSEQUENCE “profoundly unsettling.” I think I can safely say that or those of us for whom the words “Abu Ghraib,”CACI” and even “torture” have become drearily familiar, it’s also quietly mindblowing.
In prose that simultaneously recalls Michael Herr, Charles Bukowski (the latter for the use of profanity) and Pilgrim’s Progress, Fair’s narrative makes you feel for this young Presbyterian who joins the Army to prepare for a career in law enforcement and ends up an employee of CACI, described by Fair as a mixture of Kafka and the Keystone Kops. But just as the reader is trying to absorb this new picture of CACI, Fair takes you to Abu Ghraib — first the muddy tents that shocked Aidan Delgado, then a moment in the “hard site” we all think we’ve seen.
There’s an aha! moment after CID tries to talk to everyone working in that site and Fair’Bs team realizes by elimination which soldier is about to blow the whistle: Joe Darby, who several months later “the Army will then place in protective custody” after SecDef Rumsfeld publicly thanks him for leaking those damaging Abu Ghraib photos.
I’ve been trying to embed Fair’s interview with Terry Gross above; if that doesn’t work you might want to click on the link and just listen. She gets him talking about the heart condition that almost killed him (for real), his faith journey and so much more.
I, of course, want to ask him different questions. I want to know if he’s ever spoken to a New York attorney named Aidan Delgado, who completed an entire conscientious-objector claim while working at another part of AG, and whether his pastor-wannabe self has touched base with the Brite Divinity School’s Soul Repair Center. He never uses the term “moral injury,” and I’d like to know why. I’d also encourage him to accept the help my friend Joshua Phillips has offered him, since we both see common agonies as described in Joshua’s book about soldiers who’ve tortured, None of Us Were Like This Before. After reading the latter book, I did wonder about the inner lives of contractors like Fair, and am both glad and deeply sorry to have been so richly answered.
Would also LOVE to curate a discussion among Fair, Delgado and Phillips, in which my words would be the least important.
I Ain't Marching Anymore 