Time Travel: A Review of “Midnight Highway: What I Didn't Say About the Fort Hood Deaths”
Micro Review of:
“Midnight Highway: What I Didn’t Say About the Fort Hood Deaths”
By May Jeong
Off Assignment
3 October 2023
It’s a great premise for a series: journalists excavating what they left out of their reportage. May Jeong’s contribution for Off Assignment’s column, “What I Didn’t Say,” elucidates her experience reporting on a rash of deaths at Fort Hood, America’s largest military base.
Nothing about the assignment boded well. It was Jeong’s first after lockdown, and she was “desperate for [her] old life in motion.” But she couldn’t stop weeping during her preliminary interviews. She experienced “sufficient auricular discomfort” that she went to multiple doctors to get her ears checked. When she arrived at the base’s location in Killeen, TX, it was, “energetically,” the worst place she’d ever been. It must’ve been destabilizing; she writes that during lockdown she missed being on assignment, “where, embarrassingly, [she] suspected [she] was [her] best self.”
Jeong takes readers on the same journey through time that she underwent while reporting. “Somehow,” she writes, “[the disappearances on the base] registered as an echo of all the other disappearances and ambiguous losses I witnessed working in Afghanistan, which in turn was—and I am only guessing here—yet another echo of the myriad severings my own family experienced by way of partition, dispossession, and immigration.” The essay is full of echo, stretching across three distinct states of mind: driving down desolate interstates and one-lane highways around Killeen; reporting in Killeen; and reporting around the world, from Kabul to Beirut to Sicily. We accompany her from place to place, while the echo reminds us that all of our experiences live within us at once.
There is, of course, a temporal back-and-forth inherent to writing about different phases of one’s life. What’s more compelling, and what Jeong does so adeptly, is draw readers into the way she time travels in her mind. What she didn’t write about in that Vanity Fair article is being pulled over and handcuffed by state troopers, at which point she finds herself laughing uncontrollably. “Usually when this happens,” she recounts, “I let my memory return to previous reporting trips: maimed children in a hospital ward or human remains stuck to the chassis of trucks following a drone strike come to mind. But these images, often readily available—perhaps too readily—were not accessible this time.” Even in that profoundly tense situation, facing state-sanctioned violence, she was unable to drift off to other grisly scenes. In both her tears and her laughter, she could not compose herself. Her journalistic remove from Killeen was obliterated. Without being a journalist, she was neither her best nor her worst self, but simply herself, being forced to lie on the gravel in the shoulder of that “lonesome country.” There was nowhere for her to go, physically or temporally. Perhaps it follows that in Killeen, she is mired in the present.
May Jeong is a writer for Vanity Fair. She is the winner of the 2022 Ida B. Wells Award administered by the Newswomen’s Club of New York. Her upcoming book on sex work was awarded a 2022 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. Her reporting from Afghanistan, where she lived from 2013 to 2017, was awarded the South Asian Journalist Association’s Daniel Pearl Award, the Bayeux Calvados Normandy Award for War Correspondents, and has been recognized by the Kurt Schork and Livingston Awards. She lives on land ceded by the Lenape people in the Treaty of Shackamaxon in 1682.
Hallel Yadin is an archivist and writer in New York City. Hallel’s work has appeared in Longreads, Syllabus Project, Eclectica Magazine, and more.