Bronson Lemer | Volume 55, Issue 1 | Spring 2025
I am staring at a missing person poster for a man I served with in Iraq. It is morning, early November, 2021, and I am in my living room in Saint Paul, eating breakfast, when I see the poster come scrolling up my Facebook feed. The man looks the same. Same sandy-blond hair swept to the side. Same pursed lips shaped into a mischievous smirk. Same cherub-like cheeks and hairless jawline. Same faraway look. Same, same, same. Just a little older, a few more creases around his eyes. Still the same baby face I remember.
What I don’t remember is filled in with the details above the photo. Three years younger than me. Shorter than I remember him being. Eyes I had forgotten were blue.
I knew this man from the poster, or at least I used to know him. I joked around with him, slept next to him in a crowded tent in the Kuwaiti desert, rode into Iraq in the back of a truck with him at my side. But so much time has passed since we were those boys in that foreign place. So much has changed, and I don’t think I know this man anymore.
Just like most mornings lately, I am feeling a little anxious because I don’t know how to act in the world anymore. Something about the events of the last few years—a deadly virus, lockdowns, police killings, more mass shootings—has left me uncertain about how to be, particularly in public, and seeing the missing-person poster for a man I served with in Iraq has only intensified that feeling. I feel untethered, afloat in even more uncertainty, and I don’t know what to do to course-correct.
I stare at the photo of the man, and I wonder where the time has gone, how I can feel so old, and how he can look exactly like I remember him. How is it that—at least on the surface—all the years that have gone by haven’t changed him one bit while I have become overly-cautious about my presence in the world and afraid to leave my house?
All day I think about him.
Over there, he called me Frenchy or French Kid or once, when he was feeling a little punchy, French Slut. “Do they have MREs in the French army, French Slut?” he asked once, three weeks into eating meals-ready-to-eat every day for lunch. A week later, he asked a variation of this question while we were standing in line at the first Burger King in Iraq: “Do they have Burger Kings in France, French Kid?” We had that kind of relationship, the give-and-take that brothers have, the love-hate kind of relationship you form after spending so much time with someone else. He was the only one in my platoon who ever called me Kid.
He was also the only one in my platoon I called by their first name. To me, he was always Danny. Never the more formal Daniel or the shortened, grown-up version, Dan. Never his last name or rank like so many of us did in the military. Always Danny. A boy’s name. A name for a man with a baby face. Over there, Danny took on the role of little brother and I told myself that I would watch out for him the best I could, even though I was just a kid myself.
The night before we drove our convoy from Kuwait into Iraq, Danny and I talked about what to expect. We were on our backs, lying on our cots, staring at the ceiling of the white tent we’d been living in, while around us others packed and goofed around. Our heads were about a couple feet apart.
“You alright?” Danny asked.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I just lied. I told Danny that I was fine, that I was excited even, to finally be moving into Iraq. When he asked if I was scared, I took a little longer to answer him, finally just saying, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
To this, Danny leaned up onto one elbow and looked over at me.
“It’s alright,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”
The most famous missing person I remember while growing up was Jacob Wetterling, an eleven-year-old Minnesota boy who was kidnapped in 1989 while riding his bike home with his brother and a friend (after renting The Naked Gun from a local convenience store). A man with a gun forced the three boys to lie face down on the ground and then asked their ages. The man released Jacob’s brother and friend, telling them to run into the woods and not to look back, and then took Jacob.
I saw Jacob’s missing person poster everywhere—at the grocery store, on the news, at school, on billboards. I most remember the yellow sweater he was wearing on the poster and his smile. In October of 1989, I was nine, only two years younger than Jacob. I had a similar haircut and a bike and lived in a rural place. In a different world, I could have been him.
Jacob’s kidnapping went unsolved for nearly twenty-seven years. Then, in 2016, after years of denying any involvement in Jacob’s kidnapping, a fifty-three-year-old man admitted to sexually assaulting and then killing Jacob. The man then led investigators to Jacob’s grave.
Most missing persons cases aren’t like Jacob Wetterling’s. Most are resolved quickly. According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), more than 600,000 individuals go missing every year. In 2020, 543,018 records were entered into the National Crime Information Center’s Missing Person File. Of those 543,018 records, 540,872 were “purged,” meaning the person was located, the person returned home, or the record was removed because it was invalid (due to misunderstanding or never really being missing in the first place). This left 2,146 unsolved cases.
Still, 2,146 unsolved cases seem like a lot.
“For us, Jacob was alive until we found him,” Jacob Wetterling’s mother, Patty, stated in an interview after the plea hearing for her son’s murderer.
I don’t want Danny to slip away unnoticed, like so many other missing people do. I want to believe that he can still be found alive, that he is still out there. I want to believe that he didn’t do what I think he did, what so many people do when they can’t see a future for themselves, when they can’t imagine walking through this world anymore.
I want to believe something else, something better.
Danny was reported missing on October 28, 2021, when he didn’t show up for his job as a drone operator in Fargo. His wallet and other personal items were found in his abandoned car on November 4, near a park in Bismarck, almost two hundred miles away.
Someone posted a link to a news story about Danny in the comments below his missing-person poster. The news story mentions that Danny biked across the state of North Dakota in 2010 and 2011 in order to raise awareness about PTSD, something I remember hearing about at the time. The article includes a picture of Danny being interviewed before his trip across the state in 2011. He is wearing a boonie hat and mirrored sunglasses and has that same baby face I remember. I can’t really tell from the photo, but it looks like he is wearing the desert-camouflage pants we wore in Iraq.
I think about Danny driving on the highway from Fargo to Bismarck. I have driven that stretch of highway quite a few times. It is three hours of mostly-flat rolling prairie, lots of time to think and dream as you’re zipping past truck stops and soybean fields and tiny towns of German and Norwegian descendants and Sandy—a statue of “the world’s largest sandhill crane” outside Steele.
In the news story, Danny’s cousin mentioned that Danny grew up in Mandan, just across the Missouri River from Bismarck. Danny never talked about his childhood when we were in Iraq. At the time, I just imagined it was the type of childhood you don’t really want to talk about, the type that only fills you with anger and pain.
Now, I imagine Danny being pulled across that flat stretch of nothingness, back to where he was raised. I imagine him stopping near the park, placing his wallet and phone on the passenger’s seat. I imagine him getting out of this car, walking straight down the middle of the road, the autumn air cutting against his skin as he makes his way towards the river. It is probably night. The moon may or may not be visible overhead.
I imagine him going home.
In Louise Erdrich’s story “The World’s Greatest Fisherman,” June Kashpaw wrestles her way out from under a man she’s spent the day drinking with and climbs out of his truck and into the North Dakota cold. She collects herself and then starts walking across the snow. She sees the lights over Williston, and instead of walking toward the city to catch her bus home, she decides to leave the road she had been walking on and starts crossing ranchland. She pushes her way forward, against the steady wind, against the falling snow, gradually, step by step, making her way towards home. She is later found dead on the frozen prairieland.
The homecoming story is a classic in literature. It centers the role of homecoming for both the homecomer and the welcomer, revolving around how the way home, those left behind, and the homecomer himself have changed. Because of these changes, Austrian philosopher Alfred Schutz argues that a veteran returning home may struggle to reintegrate because both the veteran and people they left behind have built up a system of “pseudo-types” about the other that may make it difficult for everyone to find common ground. The veteran believes those he left behind will react in a certain way. The people the veteran left behind believe the same thing about the veteran. It makes it difficult for both parties to connect when they don’t truly understand each other.
Krebs, the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s story “Soldier’s Home,” struggles with finding this common ground while communicating his experiences in World War I to his friends and family when he returns home. He returns to his small Oklahoma town in 1919, the year after World War I ended, after “the greeting of heroes was over.” He wants to talk about his experience, but no one wants to listen, so he decides to lie. These lies cause him to hate everything he had experienced during the war, even the heroic moments he was proud of.
“So it may happen that many acts which seem to the people at home the highest expression of courage are to the soldier in battle merely the struggle for survival or the fulfillment of a duty,” Alfred Schutz writes, “whereas many instances of real endurance, sacrifice, and heroism remain unnoticed or unappreciated by people at home.”
In his struggles to readjust to civilian life after the war, Krebs sees himself in a different world from the people around him. He watches women walk down the street but refuses to approach them because he’d have to put in too much work, and it is not worth it to him. When his mother asks if he loves her, he replies, “I don’t love anybody,” which causes her to cry. He puts his arm around his mother and utters the line that seems to sum up Hemingway’s story and the frustration so many people have in describing their experiences: “Please, please, mother. Please believe me.”
“Anyone finally found ‘home’ after leaving the military?” a Redditor named RandomMovingAverage asks, hypothesizing that they aren’t able to find a place to call home since they are used to a more nomadic lifestyle from their time in the military.
The replies below his question are filled with people relating to not feeling “at home” anywhere. One reply suggests that it was more about the loss of connections and how difficult it can be for many to find the same caliber of camaraderie and friendship outside of the military. Other commenters share their experiences of moving from place to place or backpacking around the world or living the “RV life.” “I felt the same way until I got married and had kids,” a commenter named LVL1NPC-JK replies. “Now they’re my home.”
I don’t know what Danny did when we got home from Iraq. We were National Guard members, so once the deployment was up, many of us went back to our civilian lives. I spent time with my family. I moved back into my apartment with my same roommate, the one I came out as gay to when I returned from my first deployment to Kosovo in 2000. I got a job at a sandwich shop while I waited for a new semester to begin so I could finish my undergraduate degree. My enlistment with the military expired while I was in Iraq, so once the deployment was over, I signed a few papers releasing me from the military and moved on. I didn’t go to “drills” one weekend a month at the armory north of town. I didn’t talk to anyone I served with in Iraq. I tried not to think about that year I spent over there. In essence, I disappeared. I broke the ties I made with Danny and so many others I served with. I told myself I wasn’t going to reach out to anyone I served with. I wanted a fresh start and the only way I saw to do that was to try to forget about being over there.
On the sidewalk in front of me someone has spray-painted a message that seems tailor-made for me. Seven letters and a question mark, scrawled in black paint on dusty concrete: Can U See?
I am out for a walk around my neighborhood and this question has stopped me in my tracks. I stand before it, repeating the question over and over in my head. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, I have become hyper-aware of my surroundings, always paying attention to what is going on around me. I’ve spent hours walking my neighborhood, creating mind maps of what I see, what I notice, and what I haven’t paid attention to before. I stop and read the plaques next to benches or on art. I catalog the trees I see along the bluff, the different birds I notice, the neighbors I see and where I think they live. I don’t want to miss anything. To some extent, I have always been this way. I’ve always been good at noticing my surroundings. But after seeing Danny’s poster and wondering what happened to him, something has changed. I am no longer just noticing my surroundings, but instead questioning what I see, poking and prodding to better understand. This mystery of Danny’s disappearance has made me question so much of what I see around me.
But can I really see what is going on? Will I ever be able to?
The thing I can’t get over is where Danny went. If he did something to himself, why haven’t the authorities found a body? If he wanted to start a new life, why leave his wallet in his car? Where has he gone?
They made a television show about U.S. soldiers in Iraq called Over There. The show follows an infantry unit on their first tour in Iraq and features some of the stereotypical situations from the war in Iraq: improvised explosive devices (IEDs) taking off limbs, soldiers shooting a motorist who does not stop at a checkpoint, insurgents kidnapping an American civilian.
I couldn’t watch Over There. By the time it aired in 2005—the year after I returned from Iraq—I had already moved on. I’d boxed up all my uniforms and medals and trinkets I’d collected over the years and got back to the life I was living before the deployment, a life I’d considered interrupted by having to support a war I didn’t entirely believe in.
This strategy of making a clean break from the military worked for a couple of years, but then I started to slowly let the military back in. I started writing a memoir about my year in Iraq because I couldn’t stop thinking about my time over there. I accepted friend requests on Facebook from a few people I served with, thinking that it would be good to still keep some connections. Mostly, I started paying a little more attention to the issues impacting my generation of veterans: depression, post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD), and burn pit exposure.
“In a sense, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began with a burn pit,” Jennifer Percy writes in reference to the burning pit of rubble created when the Twin Towers collapsed on 9/11.
In an article in The New Republic, Percy examines burn pits used in Iraq and Afghanistan, the soldiers who had gotten sick from them, and the growing public concern over how we are treating our veterans. She compares how the United States Department of Veterans Affairs denied that Agent Orange contributed to the health issues of many veterans who served in the Vietnam War to how the VA responded to burn pit exposure illnesses (by denying that there was any connection between health issues and burn pit exposure).
Percy’s article was the first to truly make me sit up and pay attention. Her article made me finally do something after years of just sitting on the sidelines and waiting. I sought out other news stories about burn pits, researched studies on the health effects of having served and lived near a burn pit, and, ultimately, registered for the Airborne Hazards and Open Burn Pit registry created by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Most importantly, Percy’s article made me wonder if anyone else I’d served with was constantly thinking about the burn pit we’d all lived next to while we were in Iraq.
I rarely talked to anyone I’d served with after I got out, but when I did, I heard secondhand snippets about how others were coping. This was how I heard that Danny went back to Iraq for a second tour, this time with a different unit, and that he’d started working out during that tour. I’d heard he’d gotten buff, that he seemed like an entirely different man because of that deployment.
Once again staring at the photo from Danny’s missing person poster, I think about this different man Danny had become. He appears to still have a baby face, but how much of this man would I even recognize today? How much has changed since the year we served together? Since I told myself I’d keep him safe while we were over there? I used to know this man from the poster, but now he feels too much like a stranger to me.
I mention Danny’s disappearance to my brother who lives in Bismarck, where Danny’s vehicle was abandoned, but he seems nonplussed. It doesn’t seem to faze him. It is just another horrible thing happening during a horrible time. I don’t push it while talking on the phone to him, but I do feel disappointed. I don’t know how to make people understand why Danny going missing is so important to me. Do I say something about how cruel it seems for someone to survive two deployments to Iraq to now go missing? Or do I tell them that I feel guilty for still being alive in this messy world? I don’t know how to get people to care about one person when so much of the world seems so awful right now. How do you get people to care about anything? I can’t go to Bismarck and make people care. I live in Saint Paul, 435 miles away, too far to help with the search. Too far to be of much good. But I can do what I can from my end. I can share Danny’s missing persons poster. I can hope.
Danny has been missing for fourteen days.
When I search online for an answer to this bigger question, the concept of “disaster fatigue” keeps coming up. Disaster fatigue is “a form of emotional exhaustion that can reshape how people make choices,” Rasha Aridi writes in her article about the residents of Lake Charles, Louisiana, who first were hit with a large number of Covid-19 cases and then with two “record-breaking” hurricanes, all in 2020. When the second hurricane hit six weeks after the first, residents were so fatigued and exhausted from all the different risks that it made making choices about their own safety difficult. While 2020 may be an exceptional year in disasters, it has helped researchers and emergency planners think more intently about disaster fatigue when designing interventions used to keep people safe.
Psychologist Steven Taylor saw a different example of disaster fatigue at a party where people were discussing the footage of Afghans clinging to planes when the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan. One person at the party found the footage “funny” and others agreed with him. Taylor was horrified. He started to consider how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted people’s ability to empathize with others. We have become so inundated by the vast number of tragedies that we just tune out the next awful event we see in our newsfeeds or hear from the media. It has all become too much. We are left numb to the world around us.
The day after I first saw Danny’s poster, I shared it on my Facebook feed and asked people to help me spread the word. I don’t normally post such things, at least since I’ve cut back on how much of my life I post on social media, but I felt compelled to share Danny’s poster because for once I actually know the person people are looking for. Or at least I used to know him. I thought I was going through the same things Danny was since we both returned from over there. We were both trying to find meaning in our lives, to wedge ourselves into a society we feel unmoored in. But, with Danny, there was something else going on. I wonder now if he struggled with what so many other veterans struggle with while readjusting to life as civilians. They can physically be in one place, but mentally, they are miles away. In their mind, they are still over there.
When I logged back in the next day, only one of my “friends” shared the poster, which felt pretty disheartening. I tried to convince myself that it was just disaster fatigue, that after a few years of so many awful things, no one wanted to add to the continuous scroll of depressing news. Then another horrible event scrolled up my feed and took my attention elsewhere.
Lately, I’ve taken to flipping through the Soldier’s Manual of Common Tasks that I keep next to my desk. The version I have is pocket-sized, as thick as a brick, and was published in October 1994. When I went through basic training in 1998, all U.S. Army recruits were issued copies of the manual. Within the pages of the manual were instructions on how to perform common tasks such as loading an M16, detonating a Claymore mine, donning a gas mask, and evaluating a casualty.
The manual is as boring and dry as you’d expect it to be, so there is no reason to believe it would provide comfort to anyone. But it has. It is. I flip through it sometimes when I’m feeling particularly anxious about the news or when I find myself stuck in an afternoon malaise that leaves me questioning what I am doing with my life.
I did the same in basic training. We were told to keep the manual with us at all times, in the cargo pocket over our right thigh, always within reach so when we had down time or during the bus rides to the weapons range or field practice, we could pull out the manual and read up on applying a dressing to an open head wound or identifying topographic symbols on a military map. I was constantly on edge during basic training, bursting at the seams with anxiety over feeling overwhelmed and out of place. Plus, I was just figuring out that I was attracted to men, and I was trying to hold back everything I was thinking about the recruits I found myself living and training next to. Because I was this ball of nerves, when the drill sergeants told us to pull out the Soldier’s Manual and start reading, I listened and did what I was told without question.
Now that I am no longer a soldier, I have no real use for the information in the Soldier’s Manual of Common Tasks. I don’t need instructions on how to construct an individual fighting position or how to employ hand grenades. But the fact that all this information is laid out for me seems soothing to me somehow. First this, then this, then this. Just follow along. Just take it step by step. I find myself flipping through it now looking for clues that I can use, messages that mean something to more than just basic training recruits. The world feels especially chaotic now, so I appreciate anything to help me feel a little less adrift and not quite so helpless.
In a messy world, is it too much to ask for clear instructions on how to be?