ALEX COHEN, host:
In our final weeks here on the program, Day to Day is replaying some of our most memorable pieces from the archives. Back in May of 2008, novelist Whitney Terrell visited Fort Hood, Texas to say goodbye to his friend Nate Rawlings. At the time, Nate was about to deploy for the second time to Iraq, and just to warn you, some of what you'll hear is graphic. Here's Whitney's story.
Mr. WHITNEY TERRELL (Novelist): In 2006, I embedded with a young army lieutenant named Nate Rawlings in Baghdad. Nate wanted to be a writer or a filmmaker. But at the time he was a combat engineer who's job was to search for IEDs or clean up after them.
Lieutenant NATE RAWLINGS (U.S. Army): So, we found pieces of the driver, we found his face, we found what was left of his skull. We found…
Mr. TERRELL: This is Nate describing a truck bomb that hit a barracks that year. How do you find somebody's face?
Lieutenant RAWLINGS: It was actually plastered to the side of a big round pole that was holding up power lines. The force of the explosion, since was literally sitting on top of the bomb had torn his face and it was at an angular pattern with one ear still intact, a big clump of hair.
Mr. TERRELL: Is there something that you turn to for solace or hope when you are faced with something like that?
Lieutenant RAWLINGS: Well, that's where it's a blessing and a curse to be a writer because you sort of think that anything you're doing now might have some use later on in life. That was the great quote from John Irving from "The World According to Garp" was that a novel is a place for everything you can't use in your on life if you're a writer.
Mr. TERRELL: OK, just to be clear, I am a writer. And I've no idea what I'd do if I found a face like that. When I hear Nate's story, I do think, wow, aren't I the one who's supposed to be quoting John Irving? It's not the first time that I felt like the war has somehow flip-flopped my generation. I'm 40, and Nate's at least in terms of maturity.
(Soundbite of people shouting)
Mr. TERRELL: A day after this conversation which Nate and I have in his apartment just outside Fort Hood, we drive over to the Fort itself and visit his company. They're heading back to Iraq for 15 months. And the sergeants, some of whom I patrolled with in 2006, are out advising privates on how to pack.
(Soundbite of people shouting)
Mr. TERRELL: Like Nate, they all look impossibly young. Many of these soldiers were on their third or fourth tour in combat. As for Nate, he planned to leave active duty this spring and go to graduate school. But he's been stop-lossed. So, like everybody else, he's heading to Baghdad. That means no grad school this or next fall since he probably won't have time to apply. It also means he's one of the few 26-year-olds in America who's looking forward to his 30s.
Lieutenant RAWLINGS: My uncle, when he came back from Vietnam and was 25 or 26, told his parents, I want to go medical school. And I think a few friends told him, you're away too old, you'll be 30 by the time you're going to be a doctor. My grandfather's response to him was, well, when you turn 30, you're going to turn 30 anyway. And so, I will turn 30 hopefully as a filmmaker as opposed to - or at least a film school graduate - as opposed to just turning 30 when I turn 30.
Mr. TERRELL: All right, before I give the impression that Nate is some kind of incredibly patient saint.
Lieutenant RAWLINGS: I worked pretty hard when I was sober, which was a good period of the time, at least more than half.
Mr. TERRELL: I'd like to point out that at Princeton, which is where he was sober half the time, he lived like a typical college kid. He wrestled. He played rugby. He was an officer in Princeton's version of Animal House, which is an eating club called Tiger Inn.
Lieutenant RAWLINGS: I was in charge of two hundred to three hundred extremely intoxicated and people who liked to do stupid things.
Mr. TERRELL: This part of Nate still exists. He loves the crowd. He's only alone when he comes home to sleep. And it's here in the shadowy half-empty apartment Nate rents outside Fort Hood. But I start to notice the ghosts who have come to populate his life in the past two years. Like the dozen or so men who died on his last deployment or his friend from Princeton's rugby team.
Mr. RAWLINGS: I had a friend who had played rugby with in college at Princeton and he was wounded in an IED strike, I guess about a year ago, and he's been recovering down at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. If he's still there when I come home for the next tour I certainly will visit him, but for now, because I'm so preparing myself to go back, I have chosen not to.
TERRELL: Do you feel guilty about that?
Mr. RAWLINGS: The one thing I always did fear wasn't death, I mean, if you die, you die. But, you know, being so disfigured that you cannot then function you just don't want to see too much of what is possible before you have to go because you know there's a very likely chance you'll see it with yourself, with your men, when you're over there on patrols.
TERRELL: Conversations like these make me wonder just exactly how much the war and this premature introduction to death is going to change Nate, not just as a person, but as the writer or filmmaker he hopes to be. It's like watching a photograph develop before your eyes. He's different certainly than the young man who wrote flowery emails back to his Princeton professors describing moonlike glimmering on the Euphrates when he first arrived in Iraq. In those letters, which I've read, he sounds like a naive college kid off on an adventure. Now, his language is growing darker, leaner, more direct. Before we shipped out, he wrote me toward the end of his first tour. I talked to my guys' families, many of the mothers, my own included, admitted that more than the loss of a son, what scared the most was that their little boy would die alone, scared and in pain.
(Soundbite of cafeteria crowd)
TERRELL: I wait until we're at dinner that evening, however, before I actually bring up my own concerns about Nate.
Mr. RAWLINGS: Because I worry - I'm going to talk about Nate like he's not here - I worry about how this stuff is going to affect him.
We've driven an hour in the Austin, Texas just to have dinner with Nate's best friend, Rob Pelegrini and Rob's fiancee, Jen. Rob has just returned from Iraq were his battalion lost close to 20 minute now.
Mr. ROB PELEGRINI: You know, I've not seen many very changes in Nate. I mean, he's an (bleep)-hole. Oh, are we still talking about him like he's not here?
(Soundbite of laughter)
TERRELL: We are here because Rob and Nate trained together. And Nate has told me that if anyone can explain how the war has changed him Rob's is the man.
Mr. PELEGRINI: Hopefully, you know, he was a little jumpy and a little jittery and a little standoffish to society. And I say that because, well, I think Jen's experiencing that with me and hopefully we're at the tail end that. But I've snapped a few times and she's been like whoa, (laughing), there's the couch, buddy.
TERRELL: Okay, so basically Rob doesn't really answer my question. But then something interesting happens. I look across the table at Nate and I can tell he's disappointed in Rob's answer too. Clearly, there's something about the relationship that he's trying to get across to me. Then to my surprise, Nate begins to tell me story about a phone call he made to Rob when he was in New York City.
Mr. RAWLINGS: I was on the subway listening to my iPod and I remember got off the subway when I called him. And I was like, why am I having so - this is so enjoyable to walk here in New York City, walking around Manhattan, listening to music. It's like I've never walked around New York before.
TERRELL: And here, the first time, I see Nate respond to the war, to what's happening to him as a writer or a filmmaker would. Because if you want to get across an emotion in fiction, the best ways to come out obliquely, like through a phone call you had about music with your best friend when you're on leave from Iraq.
Mr. RAWLINGS: He said because that allows you to be in a crowd of people and be completely alone and be fine with it. And the whole time I was in Iraq I thought about him every time I listen to any kind of music, I, you know, either I was absolutely alone or in the crowded people, if I could pop in headphones. I felt fine with it. And it took a lot of comfort in that, and that helps get through a lot of the craziness.
TERRELL: And yet inside this story is apparently innocuous story. I think if you listen closely, you can hear…
Mr. RAWLINGS: To be in a crowd of people and be completely alone.
TERRELL: What it feels like for soldier like Nate, to be around the rest of us, that vast majority of Americans would who have not fought this war, even when he does come home. For NPR News, I'm Whitney Terrell.
(Soundbite of music)
BRAND: And just this final note on Nate Rawlings. He's due to come home at the end of this month. Stay with us on Day to Day from NPR News.
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