Contemporary Authors

1. Cherry : a novel https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061588 Walker, Nico, author. Cherry : a novel / Nico Walker. New York : Knopf, 2018. 1 online resource. ISBN: 9780525520146 (ebook) 2. Cherry https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056634 Walker, Nico, author. Cherry / Nico Walker. First edition. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. 317 pages ; 22 cm PS3623.A359552 C54 2018 ISBN: 9780525520139 (hardback)9780525435938 (paperback)

• Buzzfeed - https://www.buzzfeed.com/scottbuzz/passing-the-note-is-the-bang-how-a-war-hero-became-a-serial?utm_term=.wtmqJmgP0#.lfeQlJdjr

  News
  Videos
  Quizzes
  Tasty
  As/Is
  Reviews
  More
  BuzzFeed Hispanic Heritage Month
  Voter Registration

  17 Husbands Every Pregnant Woman Would Totally Clone If...
  18 Wrong Number Texts That Will Melt Your Cold, Dead...
  24 Sweaters That Prove That Sweater Weather Is Better...
  23 Halloween Tumblr Posts To Tide You Over Until...
  Literally Just 14 Tweets From This Weekend Alone That...
  14 Hilariously Angry Notes People Left To Be Found, OK?
  29 Tweets From This Month That Were So Funny, They Got...
  29 Shower Products That'll Make You Think, "Why Don't I...
  19 Teachers Who Are Serious Experts At This Whole...
  Chris Evans Dragged Kanye West To Smithereens Over His...
  21 Memes That Will Make Libras Laugh And Then Feel...
  31 Things About "Pretty Little Liars" That Make No...
  16 Pictures Of People Behaving Like Animals On Planes...
  Ryan Reynolds Left Another Fire Comment On Blake...
  21 Amazing Things That'll Make Curling Your Hair So...
  15 Real Things That Actually Exist Even Though They...
  Pete Davidson Joked A Lot About His Relationship With...
  Take This Overly Random Quiz And We'll Guess A Very...
  14 Budget-Friendly Decor Ideas That'll Make Your Home...
  Here’s What The First Shopping Mall In America Looked...
  People Who've Had Miscarriages Share What They Wish...
  17 Tweets About Self-Care That Are Waaaaay Too Real
  18 Tweets From This Week That Are Freaaaakin'...
  25 Trader Joe's Snacks That People Actually Can't Live...
  How Well Can You Do On This Pop Culture Of The Week...

  Big Stories
  How A War Hero Became A Serial Bank Robber

  Army medic Nicholas Walker returned home from Iraq after 250 combat missions, traumatized and broken. His friends and family couldn’t help him. Therapy couldn’t help him. Heroin couldn’t help him. Pulling bank heists helped him.
  Posted on May 30, 2013, at 9:55 p.m.
  Scott Johnson
  Scott Johnson
  BuzzFeed Contributor

  Around 11:45 on the morning of Saturday, April 23, 2011, a young man wearing sunglasses and a blue hoodie walked into a U.S. Bank in Lyndhurst, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. His name was Nicholas Walker, and in his right hand he carried a green Hi-Point .45 pistol. Walker approached one of the teller windows, jostling to the side a woman who was already being helped, and pointed the weapon briefly at Rosa Foster, a bank employee facing him from the other side of a bulletproof glass wall. A video camera captured the moment. Foster, who was pregnant at the time, later told the Lyndhurst police that the robber said, "You know what this is," before demanding that she hand over the cash from her register, which she promptly did, passing bundles of bills in $100, $50, and $20 denominations, $7,426 in total. Walker stuffed the money into a white plastic bag. Then he ran out through the same door he had entered.

  Outside he climbed into a black Ford F-150. In the space behind the cab were several old items of clothing — a few unwashed sweatshirts and T-shirts, some hats and baseball caps. Walker tossed the money and the pistol into a grocery bag on the passenger seat and pulled out of the parking lot. He turned south on Richmond Road. Then he tuned into his favorite station, AM 850 — The Jim Rome Show, a nationally syndicated sports talk program. As he drove, Walker tried to change his clothing. He reached into the backseat and grabbed for another shirt. He took off one hat, revealing a mop of recently dyed jet-black hair, and placed another on his head. The pickup was a mess — cigarette butts, drink containers, and food littered the floor. Walker himself was a mess. As he changed, he noticed once again the burn marks on his arms where he had stubbed out cigarettes.

  Walker heard the sirens before he saw the patrol cars, so he sped up. He was pretty sure he'd been identified, but he wanted to make it home anyway — maybe he'd have time to buy some drugs and off himself. Still on Richmond, he drove past gas stations, chain restaurants, and parking lots, weaving back and forth across lanes to increase his distance from his pursuers. Pretty soon the howl of the sirens had all but vanished and Nicholas Walker floated in an eerie but familiar kind of calm — the sort of calm he had only ever felt in Iraq, right after a bomb exploded, or just before he kicked down a door and burst into a living room. In those precious few moments, the world seemed like a peaceful, almost acceptable kind of place. In that way, a bank robbery was a lot like the war: The worse things got, the easier it was somehow to cope. The tension that had been building all morning had now been released.

  And then he hit traffic. At the corner of Richmond and Cedar, Walker came to a stop. He sped westbound on Cedar and bumped into a car. Then he swerved to the side, scraping along another car. Now the police were catching up. He swerved violently into oncoming traffic and then back again, running a red light at the entrance to the Legacy Village mall and then hurtling over the edge of the road and into a Burger King parking lot, which he sped across, dropping off a 5-foot embankment. Police caught up, and Walker found himself on the opposite end of a gun. Sirens wailed, and more police cars pulled up quickly.

  He heard a voice say, "Get on the fucking ground."

  More voices joined in, and soon he was engulfed in a chorus of obscenities: "Scumbag." "Fuck." "Asshole." Officers threw him facedown against the vehicle. More policemen than he could count had their pistols trained on him. An excruciating pain raced up his spine from the car wreck — he'd broken his back.
  Do not fucking cry, Walker thought to himself, as police cuffed him, read him his rights, and bundled him into an ambulance. Whatever you do, do not cry.

  Nicholas Walker, Nico to his friends and family, is a U.S. Army veteran with an exemplary record of service as a medic during the very worst years, and in the very worst areas, of the war in Iraq. He is also a convicted bank robber — and not just the garden variety; in only four months, Walker managed to rob nearly 10 banks (an 11th attempt was aborted), making him one of the most prolific individual bank robbers in Ohio. "It's definitely in my top two, in terms of robberies by one individual," said Art Hernandez, a federal prosecutor who helped send Walker to prison for 11 years in 2012. "It's one of the most unusual [cases] I've ever prosecuted."

  For his service in Iraq, Walker received seven medals and commendations for valor. A former comrade in arms named John Endsley wrote in a letter to the court, "Doc Walker [was] the epitome of what it means to be honorable." I met Walker recently for several hours over two days at the Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Kentucky, a minimum-security facility where he is currently serving his sentence. He was almost 6 feet tall, slight with delicate hands, blue eyes, and blond hair molded in a prison-issue crew cut. We sat in the prison's visiting room under the gaze of two guards who had been told to keep a close eye on both of us.

  Walker fidgeted often and had a twitch in his left eye that wasn't there before the war. For the last several months he had been taking Prozac, which helped calm his anxiety and lift his depression. Nevertheless, he moved nervously, wringing his hands and repeatedly rubbing one thumb back and forth over the other. At times he kept my gaze for long periods, while at others he couldn't seem to look at me at all for more than a second or two. He was unfailingly polite and articulate, and though I knew it was difficult for him, he did his best to put words to the traumas of his experiences in Iraq, and the devastating consequences after he returned.

  During the 11 months in 2005 and 2006 that Walker spent in Iraq, he participated in roughly 250 combat missions, a high number even for trained infantry soldiers, to say nothing of a medic. Walker became so accustomed to combat, in fact, and so good at it, that the infantry soldiers from two separate platoons specifically requested his presence on their most perilous missions virtually every day for over a year. And Walker, who told me he joined the military in the first place because he wanted in the most fundamental way "to help people," obliged them — over and over again.

  "Before you go to war, you want stories, you know — that's the really tragic thing," he told me, "because this is that story, and there are no good guys, and no bad guys. And looking back, you think to yourself: What did you think was going to happen? Death or glory? And then you feel bad because this is exactly what you wanted. It's real easy to get into, and it's real hard to get out of."

  Many veterans of America's wars never do get out. A 2010 estimate found that every day as many as 22 veterans kill themselves, many of whom suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. More U.S. Army soldiers committed suicide in 2012, in fact, than all U.S. military personnel killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan in the same time frame. And yet for all that, veterans continue to face extreme challenges getting help when they return. Veterans Affairs offices across the country have been the subject of repeated and damning exposés detailing the shortcomings soldiers face upon returning home, including drastic time lags in receiving care, no follow-ups, and misdiagnoses. PTSD has been called by many the "signature wound" of America's wars.

  Despite its ubiquity, every case of PTSD is different. Nick Walker, instead of retreating quietly into a life of physical or emotional abuse, or simply killing himself, chose to cope by lashing out in a unique and mystifying way. It was a decision that baffled his family and friends, and even, eventually, Walker himself. It was no less confounding for the experts brought in to examine him afterward. Pablo Stewart, a forensic psychiatrist who testified on Walker's behalf, said his was "one of the worst cases of PTSD I've ever seen."
  Walker with mother Liliana and father Tim.

  Walker with mother Liliana and father Tim.

  Nick Walker had never experienced anything even remotely like Iraq. The younger of two sons, he was raised in a well-to-do family with two loving parents who provided everything the young boy desired. When Walker's musical talents began to emerge at an early age, his parents bought him several guitars and, later, a Steinway baby grand piano. In Atlanta, Las Vegas, and finally Cleveland, his parents always chose neighborhoods with the best schools, usually Catholic and always private. He grew up sheltered, privileged, and also, for the most part, happy.

  As a boy, he had been close to his maternal grandfather, an infantryman during World War II. In his first year of college, dissatisfied with his cloistered life in Cleveland and upset by the stories coming out of Iraq of maimed and wounded young men — men who looked just like him — Walker decided to enlist, to his parent's horror and stupefaction. Before leaving, he and his girlfriend Kara quietly eloped. Then he shipped off to basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri, in February 2005. On Nov. 28, Walker left for Kuwait, and two weeks later he arrived in Iraq. He was 19 years old.
  Walker at basic training graduation, 2005.

  Walker at basic training graduation, 2005.

  The soldiers of the 167th Armored Regiment, 4th Infantry Division, calling themselves "The Death Dealers," had driven north from a rear base in Kuwait largely without incident. By Christmas they were camped at a forward operating base right outside the town of Iskandariya, 40 miles south of Baghdad. The Death Dealers arrived in Iraq just as the Sunni insurgency was getting underway. In Baghdad, Shia militiamen from the Mehdi Army were terrorizing entire neighborhoods, running death squads and executing Sunnis with impunity. Sunnis, in turn, were blowing up buses and markets — anywhere crowds gathered. But few places in Iraq were worse than the area south of Baghdad that came to be known as the "Triangle of Death." Rich farmland cut through with irrigation ditches, the territory ran through several towns and was home to a massive power plant. It was here that the myriad forces of the war took their most malevolent expression. It would become Nick Walker's home for the next year.

  Walker arrived expecting a lot more small-arms fire, the sort of warfare his beloved grandfather had experienced during World War II. But from the start, his unit's primary mission was to discover and neutralize homemade roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Up and down the major arteries that cut through the Triangle of Death — Route Paddy, Route Martinez — bombs were going off multiple times every day. And while there were small-arms engagements from time to time, bombs accounted for the vast majority of the casualties Walker was beginning to see.

  Very often, there was nothing he could do as a medic except load what remained of his dead friends into body bags. In February another medic was wounded and sent home, leaving Walker as the sole medic for two platoons: roughly 100 men. The military was by then providing armored Humvees, but even these were no match for Iranian-made bombs, called EFPs, that were increasingly appearing in their area of operations.

  Walker was soon going on missions — "leaving the wire" — up to three times a day. Sometimes he would leave the base and stay out for up to a week at a time, conducting reconnaissance missions, kicking in doors, raiding houses. There seemed to be a never-ending supply of IEDs — hundreds of them. He started to pay attention to the different sounds each made. If a bomb exploded to the side of a vehicle, or just in front or behind, missing its target, it made a loud cracking noise, like a giant fireworks display. But when they scored a direct hit, the bombs made a very distinct, thuggish and sinister whoomp sound, as the wind and air got sucked up into the bottom of the vehicle, as metal and bodies absorbed the destruction. And the enemy was good at bombs. Sometimes a unit would clear a road only to return an hour or two later and get hit. The bombers seemed both ever-present and invisible. It was infuriating.

  On April 22, 2006, Walker was out with a unit conducting a census mission. By now he had been on more operations than he could count. Nearby, Walker heard the familiar whoomp and felt his stomach tighten. A moment later, burls of thick black smoke began curdling up over the horizon. Walker and six other men called in a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) over the radio, and then headed to the scene. They swam through a sewage canal and then commandeered a truck. By the time they arrived at the site of the bombing, the vehicle that had been hit was engulfed in flames. Fire extinguisher in hand, Walker ran toward the truck, only to find an officer named Brown, who shook his head.

  "They're all fucking dead," Brown said.

  What had started as a courageous rescue mission had suddenly morphed into a horrendous and demoralizing cleanup operation. The men tried to douse the flames. Rounds were cooking off. Walker used his helmet to scoop sewage water onto the fire. It then fell to Walker to remove the bodies of the dead. The smell of people burning permeated everything, and he struggled to breathe without vomiting. All that was left of the first body Walker recovered was a single eye and eyebrow, staring at him. The second body was still so hot that when he touched a protruding intestine with a latex glove, it melted away instantly. Faces and skin were gone. Only bone and muscle remained. The third body was slumped forward, intestines intact. The sight of it made Walker feel as if he had been hit over the head. The last body was burned almost beyond recognition. There were strips of fat glued to the seat, and he balled them up and threw them in the nearby sewage canal. All of the men's penises had been burned off. Covered in blood, soot, sewage, and human body parts, Walker turned and staggered down the road away from the wreck, a vision that had "walked straight out of hell," he said. By the end of that month there were seven casualties in Bravo company. There were 22 in the battalion between Labor Day and Thanksgiving.

  "That was about as bad as it gets," he said, looking at the floor and rubbing his temples. "You can't imagine anything so horrible, looking at a man's face without a face. I couldn't close my eyes without seeing that for a long, long time. You couldn't anticipate anything like that. It's so sudden and pointless and just meaningless. It's moral anti-gravity."

  Walker understood very quickly that he would likely die in Iraq. In June 2006, partway through his deployment, he returned home for a brief visit. His mother, Liliana, noticed the change in her son immediately. He was withdrawn and serious, and though he tried to put on a good show for his parents, she could see that six months in Iraq had already changed him profoundly. One day Walker took his father, Timothy, aside. "Listen," he said, "I might not make it back from there. It's really bad." Walker then told his father where he wanted to be buried. Unsure of exactly how to respond, Timothy Walker, a straight-talking Atlanta native who made a small fortune supplying parts to the nuclear industry, told his son what any father might. "Follow your training," he said. "You're going to be OK." Privately, he agonized. For the year of their son's absence, Timothy and Liliana kept televisions on and tuned into the news in three separate rooms of their sprawling house in Hunting Valley, a series of leafy, well-groomed estates on the outskirts of Cleveland. And they waited for Nico to come home.

  Back in the Triangle of Death, Walker and his fellow soldiers were simply trying to survive. Insurgents mortared Walker's forward operating base constantly — so often, in fact, that he would just pull the covers over his head and go back to sleep. Frustrated and angry about the constant bombs and the relentless death toll, Walker's feelings about the war itself were also changing. "We were trying to do two things," he said. "Be their friends and murder them at the same time. I just wanted to do my job and not fuck it up."
  Platoon leader Sgt. Anthony Doll with Walker in Iraq.

  Platoon leader Sgt. Anthony Doll with Walker in Iraq.

  The confusion that lay at the root of their mission came to a head one early morning in June when Walker found himself in a field. His unit had been watching and waiting all night, on the lookout for IED teams that were thought to be in the area. Just before 4 a.m., a man appeared, saw Walker's unit, and started running away. The rules of engagement at the time gave the soldiers permission to shoot anyone out after dark. So that's what they did. The man fell, brought down by a .556 round from one of their M16s.

  Walker immediately began tending to the injured Iraqi. He placed a bandage over the wound, monitored his heart rate, and examined him for other injuries. He worried the man might have a sucking chest wound. For a while it looked like the Iraqi might be OK — he was moaning, but his vitals seemed stable. Yet a moment later they weren't; the man was sucking and wheezing, and a frothy white substance flowed from his lips. Walker did what he could, but within minutes, the Iraqi was dead. And now they had a problem: They needed to transport him back to base, but the QRF team refused to come until daylight, which wasn't for another hour. So, with the dead man at their feet, they waited until dawn.

  When the light did finally hit, a woman appeared from a nearby house. The soldiers asked her if she knew the man, and she said no. When the QRF team eventually arrived and Walker began loading the body into the bag, the woman lost it. Screaming, she rushed to the body, throwing dirt on it and trying to wrestle it back from the soldiers. Then a second woman, followed by two kids, appeared. And suddenly, Walker's unit was being fired upon. AK-47 rounds rained down on them from nearby. In the melee, Walker saw a cow and let loose with a clatter of fire, slaughtering it on the spot. "I throw a smoke grenade and I'm running to the body, I have two guys with me, providing covering fire, and I'm dragging the body back, and I'm just floating," Walker told me. "I had a mental image of my wife's face and my head, and I was just waiting to get shot, but I never did."

  In the confusion, the old woman was killed. As he ran, dragging the body behind him, Walker could feel the man's head bumping along on the ground. He pulled him through a sewage canal and out again. Sewage water was running down his face and into his shirt.
  Some of the wreckage Walker encountered over 250 missions.
  courtesy of Liliana Walker

  Some of the wreckage Walker encountered over 250 missions.

  "I'm completely out of my mind at that point," Walker told me. "I got back to the Bradlee, but no one wants to ride in the back of a Bradlee with a corpse, so we draped the guy on the hood of the Bradlee, like a fucking deer or something."

  Walker was shaking as he told me this story, rubbing his hands together furiously. For so much of his deployment, Walker had seen the detritus of roadside bombs after they had occurred, and while the deaths had been gruesome and visceral, they had also been somewhat abstract. Body parts were often smeared along the roadsides — blood and intestines, maybe a hand, a foot — but the transition from life to death was sudden and brutal, almost devoid of the element of human time. But this had been different, he explained.

  "That was the most intimate thing, just watching that slow transition from life to death," Walker told me. "It was very up close and slow, vomiting and broken ribs and screaming children and the old lady shot, and it was really hard for me to deal with. The thing that really gives me a lot of trouble is that I wonder if he ran because he was scared or because he was somebody. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about him, whether or not we should have killed him, whether it was right. He was unarmed."

  courtesy of Liliana Walker

  And then in the fall of 2006, Walker returned home for good. Many fellow soldiers and friends from his time in Iraq were dead, others were wounded, maimed, and damaged. For the next four months he remained in Texas, finishing his military obligation, and then in March he returned to Ohio. He went to school, played in a rock band called Safari, and grew his hair out. He would have liked to forget many details about the war, but he remembered everything. He made few plans, and those he did make often fell flat or failed to evolve much. He and Kara divorced upon his return to Ohio in March, and Kara left to go traveling. Days turned into weeks and then years, and Nick Walker drifted along in a state of near constant paralysis. To say he survived his return might even be overstating the case; more than anything, Nick Walker simply existed. And sometimes even that was in doubt.

  The U.S military had sent the Walkers a two-page memorandum called Homecoming After Deployment: Tips for Reunion. It included such tips as, "Be prepared to make some adjustments" and "Go easy on partying." It also warned soldiers: "You may miss the excitement of the deployment for a while" and "You may have changed in your outlook and priorities in life." Liliana had read the memo and found it useless. That same night Walker returned from Texas, she bought two books on PTSD.

  Walker found it impossible to fall asleep naturally. Ever. When he closed his eyes, images of Iraq immediately crowded his vision. Over and over again, he saw the man who had appeared in the field, saw him falling, watched him die a slow and agonizing death, a death followed by more deaths, and the unraveling of a mission into slaughter and grotesque absurdity. He often drank himself to sleep, or at least into a stupor resembling sleep. When he did manage to sleep, he was plagued by nightmares. One involved finding himself and a friend from high school captured by insurgents. In the nightmare, both men are on one knee. The insurgents shoot and kill the friend, and then kill Walker. Most of us wake up when, or before, we die in a dream; Walker did not, and the rest of the dream featured a dead Walker crawling back to the forward operating base on his hands and knees.

  During one period, Walker recalls going without sleep for 21 days. When he did, he woke drenched in sweat, tortured by images that followed him into wakefulness and back into his dreams again. By the summer of 2007, Walker had started taking Oxycontin to help him sleep. But during the day, he began to try to piece his life together again. He enrolled in classes at Cleveland State University. And he worked on songs for Safari with his childhood friend Chris Hoke. By 2008, Kara had returned from her travels, and she and Walker had reconciled somewhat. He often thrashed around at night, hitting Kara and screaming.

  But even as he tried to leave the war behind, it intruded constantly into almost every moment of his life, awake or asleep. He was haunted, for instance, by the memory of a sweet 19-year-old kid from Wyoming who, just two months into his first deployment, came to him one morning complaining of a bloody nose. Walker, who was consumed with other tasks, told the kid to quit bothering him with such trivialities. That afternoon, the kid stepped on a 155 mortar round, losing two legs and an arm instantly, then bled out and died on the spot. "It had gotten so bad, these kids go and just die instantly," he told me, "And the last time I saw him, I was a dick."

  At the time of his return, Walker wasn't aware that he might be suffering from PTSD. He felt bad, but also felt ashamed for feeling bad, and didn't know what to do about it. "I think it was going from everyday living, breathing, being at the center of it all, and then going to Cleveland, living in an apartment, drinking, taking painkillers, and just trying to find some way to not feel bad all the time," he told me. "Every time you go into a room, you're formulating some plan to kill everybody in that room; that's the way you think. The thing I'm most proud of is that Americans went out of their way not to kill people. But eventually emotions take over, people are dying, and there's nothing you can do about it — and then you start killing people and wanting to kill people."

  Six months after he returned, Walker finally sought medical help at the Cleveland Veteran's Affairs Medical Center. There, a doctor prescribed Walker some anti-depressant medication and told him to return if things got worse. The doctor did not, it seems, suggest ongoing counseling for PTSD, nor schedule a definite follow-up appointment.

  By the fall of 2007, Walker had gone to see a doctor again and received a diagnosis of anxiety disorder, but it wasn't helping. None of the doctors urged intensive counseling for PTSD. One came close — suggesting that Walker should not return to active duty because it might trigger a "more serious illness, like PTSD." Years later, Pablo Stewart, the forensic psychiatrist, would write that this oversight was a "grave clinical error that was very damaging to Nicholas in the long run." Instead, Walker's PTSD remained untreated, and he was left to self-medicate.

  By day, he was increasingly detached from simple day-to-day functioning. He would drive to school and then sit in his car in the parking lot for up to five hours doing nothing. Sometimes, on impulse, he would grab a Winston Red from his mouth and extinguish it on his arm. He often drove deliberately down the wrong side of the road, as he so often had in Iraq, where the military disobeyed ordinary traffic rules. He sped through red lights on purpose or, if he was stopped at one and nobody was around, simply drove on through, racing down roads at 120 mph. The idea that anyone might care, that people could get hurt, felt somehow buried within Walker's consciousness, an irrelevant and inconsequential detail. That fall, Walker injected himself with heroin for the first time.

  Liliana and Tim Walker had been told to be patient, calm and loving, but it wasn't enough. In September of 2008, Liliana decided to take Nico on a road trip to Washington, D.C. It was her birthday, and she wanted to celebrate with her son. She also thought that perhaps the time together would prompt him to open up to her. As they sipped their gin and tonics at dinner one night, a Marine walked into the bar and began boasting about how he had come back recently from Iraq, how he had been wounded. "Nico was literally shaking with rage," Liliana recalled, "And I just grabbed his arm and said let's get out of here."

  Back in Cleveland, Walker would fly into rages over seemingly trivial details — a referee's bad call during a Browns game, a slow driver, a bad joke. Playing at a local bar called The Happy Dog with Safari one night, Walker became aggressive, throwing things and yelling at the manager. "He was pretty much blacked out, totally out of bounds and out of control," said Hoke. "That was definitely a warning sign." One by one, his friends from a previous life — what Walker describes as a "granola hipster, latte-drinking" crowd — began to drop away as Walker drifted further and further into his own isolation and the hardcore life of a junkie. His relationship with Kara, legally terminated, was also faltering as the two tried, and failed, to deal with their collective pain.

  By late 2008, Walker's heroin use had become chronic and his coping mechanisms more violent. Sometimes he would just haul off and punch himself in the face so he could feel something. Safari had broken up — the other members, including Hoke, thought Walker was too unstable to continue. "He was good, too good," Hoke told me recently. "I'm really happy that he's in jail and not dead. He had all the brains and talent that anyone can hope for. All these bullshit promises these Army recruiters make worked, and then they pulled the rug out from under him and he was totally fucked."

  Walker on vacation in Italy with his family in the spring of 2010.

  Walker on vacation in Italy with his family in the spring of 2010.

  In spring 2010, Liliana and Tim took their two sons on a family vacation to a remote mountainside villa in the Italian countryside. Liliana had been planning it for over a year, a dream vacation away from the tedium of home and, she hoped, a chance for Nico to perhaps emerge a little bit from his shell. What she got, instead, was a nightmare of her own. One night Liliana awoke to the sound of Nico screaming. She rushed into his room and found him sweating and delirious.

  "What's wrong?" she cried.

  "There's fucking Asians everywhere!" he shouted.

  Hallucinating and delirious, Walker had been watching in terror as hordes of Filipino pirates carrying knives advanced on him. Liliana held her terrified son, who, crying, confessed to her that he was addicted to heroin. The hallucinations, he told her, were part of his withdrawal. That night, Liliana cradled her son in the bathtub while he convulsed through waves of nausea. The idyllic Italian vacation was not to be, replaced by an impromptu rehab and family intervention session. Walker's parents and brother tended to him during long crying jags and sweat-drenched nights.

  Back home, Liliana was more determined than ever to get help for her son. A trusted Cleveland doctor referred Walker to a psychiatrist, who specialized in bipolar disorder. During their first meeting in July 2010, he noted that Walker showed signs of PTSD. He referred Walker to a psychotherapist, whom Walker saw only that day. The next month, in August, Walker went to see a substance abuse specialist at the University of Ohio, which by all accounts went very badly.

  Five months later, on Nov. 1, 2010, the psychiatrist wrote in his medical notes of "continued evidence of the mixed phase of bipolar 1 disorder accompanied by severe depression, severe generalized anxiety, continued intravenous dependence on oxycontin and alcohol abuse." Nowhere in any previous diagnosis was there any mention of bipolar disorder. Gone, it seems, was any thought of PTSD.

  A month later, on Nov. 30, his psychiatrist wrote this:

  "The entire session was spent confirming history suggestive of the above diagnoses and helping [Walker] to learn about each. Additional time was spent talking about the diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder, generalised anxity [sic] disorder, and substance use disorders. He is gradually surrendering to the notion that he has all of these disorders and that he needs treatment for each of them."

  The psychiatrist recommended that Walker begin a treatment of lithium. When I asked Walker about his encounters with this doctor, Walker said that he didn't talk to him, but instead just asked questions that he then checked off on a list. When Walker said he wanted to talk, he claims the psychiatrist told him to be quiet. When he learned of the bipolar diagnosis, Walker called his mother and broke down over the telephone, sobbing that his life "was over." He felt like a failure.

  He was spending hours watching YouTube videos about the war — memorials to dead friends, combat videos, anything that took him back. One day he sat in front of a TV with a pistol in his hand watching a reality show called Don't Forget the Lyrics, out of his mind on heroin, wanting more than anything to put a bullet in his head. He watched the news — report after report about frauds and bailouts. And then, on Dec. 10, 2010, exactly 10 days after the psychiatrist noted that Walker had "surrendered" to the bipolar diagnosis, Walker felt clarity.

  "I woke up that morning and knew that I was going to rob a bank," he told me. "It wouldn't have taken much to discourage me, but I just felt like I had been pushed into doing it. I was self-involved, bitter, and angry. I just didn't want to take any shit anymore."

  Robbing a bank, he realized, was something he was uniquely qualified to do. It was high-stress and scary, but he was used to that. He couldn't do anything else, he reasoned, but he knew he could rob a bank. "I didn't want to hurt anybody, I'm not a violent person," he said. "Was it a good outlet for my anger? Yeah, it was great. Those banks are pretty smug, aren't they? I thought, They robbed me a few times, now I'm gonna rob them."

  So he dropped Kara off at school, then drove straight to the Huntington Bank wearing a hat and a hoodie. He didn't know how he was going to do it, only that he would. He was losing his ability to control his own behavior. He waited in line for a while, and then pretended to write something on a deposit slip. Then it was his turn at the teller. He passed the note across: "This is a robbery. Put the money from the drawer on the counter. I am armed with a gun." The teller handed over $1,998.00.

  As Walker made his first getaway, he felt a rush of satisfaction.

  "It wasn't the first time I'd been happy, but it was the first time I'd been giddy," he said. "It put a smile on my face."

  Over the next four months, Walker successfully robbed nine more banks. They were mostly small, community banks where tellers and managers knew their customers and treated them with the same Midwestern friendliness they expected from their neighbors. Liliana banked at one of them. Tim conducted business with another. A few, like Chase and U.S. Bank, were national. All were nestled comfortably within strip malls, next to restaurants and hair salons, straddling busy intersections in the kind of sprawling suburban landscapes that surround most American cities.

  The first robbery had been done almost on pure impulse, impromptu self-medication, as were subsequent ones. Once, while waiting to pick up Kara from Cleveland State University, Walker told FBI investigators, he robbed a bank as a way "to kill time." In another instance, he was getting gas and made the decision to rob a nearby bank; within 30 minutes he had. But as time went on, and Walker sank deeper into the orbit of the drug dealers from whom he was getting his heroin, he began to take on accomplices. Five of the robberies Walker committed were done with various other criminals from Cleveland's underworld. They started out peacefully enough, with Walker passing notes and asking politely for cash — in one case he told a teller, "It's not personal" before leaving — but culminated in two armed robberies, during which he carried a pistol. According to court documents, during a robbery on March 2, Walker got testy with one of the tellers, saying, "Faster before I have to come back there and do it myself." The teller eventually handed over nearly $5,000 in cash. Later that month, at a Charter One Bank, Walker walked in and yelled, "Robbery, robbery, this is a robbery," but got nervous and left without any money at all.

  In Iraq, Walker had grown accustomed to using weapons on a daily basis. He had kicked in doors, invaded people's homes, shot them, and trashed their houses virtually every day. For someone who tended to see things in stark terms, this moral ambiguity was utterly confounding. "Do I appreciate the wrongfulness of brandishing a gun in front of someone?" he asked me. "I don't know… for someone who hasn't been through what I've seen, I guess. But just because the world is terrible doesn't mean you stop trying to be good."

  He gave away most of the nearly $40,000 he'd stolen — to friends, dealers and other addicts. Some of it he burned, holding it over his kitchen sink and lighting it on fire, the way he once saw it done in a movie.

  It wasn't until he was caught, and doctors had a chance to examine him, that the full measure of Walker's condition began to emerge. In a 36-page report, Pablo Stewart wrote that Walker not only had PTSD but that it was, in his view, a "particularly severe and devastating" case. Stewart argued that Walker's case was exacerbated by his heroism. "PTSD often occurs in individuals returning home from war, and war heroes are particularly vulnerable to the disorder, because the same bravery and willingness to fight that makes them heroic also frequently results in their exposure to significantly more combat and combat-related trauma than other soldiers."

  Stewart, who served as a captain in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam era, also challenged Walker's psychiatrist's bipolar disorder diagnosis. That psychiatrist "failed to rule out or even explore the possibility that Nicholas was suffering from PTSD," he wrote, "Once again, an opportunity to properly identify and treat Nick's severe, chronic PTSD was missed, and Nick's problems continued to deepen and indeed to spiral out of control." ("If I thought it'd make a difference, I'd sue the son of a bitch," Tim Walker told me one night as we sat by the pool in their backyard.)

  Another physician, John Matthew Fabian, who also interviewed Walker after his arrest and whose report was submitted as part of Walker's defense, gave Walker a test called the Clinician Administered PTSD Score (CAPS). Walker scored a 101, far higher than the 65 that is the clinical threshold for PTSD. In several other tests, his results indicated extreme and chronic signs of PTSD. Furthermore, Fabian posited that Walker had suffered significant damage to his "neuropsychological functioning" and "neurocircuitry," which qualified him as suffering from a "severe mental disease."

  As Walker related these stories to me, I looked around us in the prison's waiting room. Walker had tried to get help when he sensed a problem brewing within himself, but was unable to find it. The VA had twice denied him benefits, only to eventually back down, but by then the PTSD was already well-advanced. And now he was here, at Ashland, home, he told me, to a large number of child sex offenders and various low-risk white-collar criminals of various sorts. After initially being refused treatment for his injured back, he eventually was given a brace. Prison had changed him, he told me, made him more sympathetic to people whose habits in his former life would have been unthinkable. His predicament also made him question himself in new ways. When he heard about mass shootings, like in Aurora, Colorado or Newtown, Connecticut, he suddenly wondered: Am I like those killers? And with these thoughts in mind, his heroism in Iraq began to seem like an illusion and a farce.

  His fellow soldiers felt differently. In a letter to the court, Spc. David Weinthaler wrote, "I guarantee Walker went on more missions than any other person in my battalion. Which I think says a lot being that he wasn't even infantry. He's the only medic I ever knew that carried an M16 (as opposed to an M9). When he wasn't on patrol he was constantly helping other soldiers with everything from bullet holes to venereal diseases." Walker's platoon leader, Sgt. Anthony Doll, wrote in a letter to the court that Walker "pushed aside any thoughts of self-preservation and subjected himself to the mortal dangers of combat. His unhesitant self-motivation resulted in the continued lives of many young men. I was witness to this."

  Walker didn't share that generous assessment. "All those things just happened to me," he told me. "I didn't karate-chop [Abu Musab al] Zarqawi. I'm no fucking hero, I just showed up. I didn't even have a very good success rate for a medic. When I had a chance to save somebody's life, like this guy in the fields, I fucking blew it. And then when people tell you you're some fucking hero it drives you crazy because you feel like some fucking fraud."

  In Iraq, a tension would build up before and during each of those missions Walker went on. Most often, these operations would result in violence, always starting with a sudden burst — a roadside bomb, a shot fired, an ambush — the spark that lit the engagement with the enemy. And once that initial symbolic "bang" occurred, tension melted away and was replaced by a rush of calm acceptance, a sort of peace that flooded into every vein of his body. And in that moment, the fear of death and of pain, the rush of nostalgia, and the longing for one's family and friends seemed to wash away as tranquility took over and pure action kicked in. It was incredibly high-stress, but he was accustomed to it, thrived on it, felt comfortable, competent.

  I asked him what the equivalent moment was, during a robbery, of the "bang" that occurred in a war. He didn't hesitate: "Passing the note," he said. "During a robbery, passing the note is the 'bang.' Then the die is cast. After that initial contact, there's peace, and you could die then and it doesn't even matter."

  He felt, he said, a kind of kinship with the man in the field. Prior to this, I hadn't really understood why this particular event, of all the horrors Walker had seen, had been so painful. "You know, I can relate to him a little. He ran from the police — us — and we killed him. I ran from the police, and now I'm doing 11 years in a federal prison."

  Stewart and the other psychiatrists had noted repeatedly that Walker had suffered severe cognitive impairment as a result of his time in Iraq. And precisely because of the heroic nature of Walker's service, his high levels of exposure to violence, his subsequent PTSD was more pronounced and severe than other cases. Upon his return, the world simply didn't make sense in some fundamental way. In Iraq, when Walker would go to dangerous areas, he told me "the ground felt different, it's like you're standing on the ground but it's like you're on a rock wall or a ladder, or slightly above it." This was language that described dissociative behavior, as Stewart and others had pointed out. Walker's brain was still developing during the time he experienced the worst of the war. And Walker had felt that dissociation over and over again until, one day, the chemical and brain changes it engendered were stripped away and Walker was left naked, alone and without a clue as to how to make sense of the world. "It's not that I thought I was doing something wrong — only that I wasn't doing anything worse than what else I had done and seen," he told me. "It was a moral gray area. No good, no bad, or right or wrong, just degrees of shit."

  Walker and his legal and medical team considered pursuing an insanity defense. Stewart, for one, had concluded in his report that Walker was not responsible for his actions because of the severe nature of his PTSD. And while Art Hernandez had come around to the idea that Walker was indeed more damaged than he had at first believed, the prosecutor was adamant that Walker would lose if he pursued his insanity defense in court. The fact that he had used a gun during two robberies complicated things further; laws in Ohio meant that Walker faced a 32-year mandatory minimum if he were convicted. So he decided to enter a plea bargain. On June 1, 2012, a federal judge in Cleveland convened Walker for sentencing.

  Walker was given a chance to speak. "I would like to apologize to the to the bank tellers, the bank workers, the drivers, passengers that I endangered and who I intimidated and frightened," he told the court. "I also would like to apologize to my family and loved ones, who have suffered so much throughout this ordeal."

  He continued, talking about the robberies themselves: "They were not organized or thought out, they were acts of desperation. In the shape that I was in, I couldn't really imagine how I could continue living like I was, but at the same time, I was afraid of addressing the issues and exposing myself because I was ashamed of the state that I was in and just how far gone I was at the time."

  Then the judge addressed Walker: "Even in the state that you were in, what was the catalyst or the motivation to rob a bank?"

  In his somewhat rambling answer, Walker repeated, "I don't know" many times, finally saying, "I have been very desensitized to things like this, and I am not trying to be insolent at all, but at the time, it just didn't seem like that extraordinary, you know, such a terrible thing to do, which it is, and I realize that now, but at the time, for some reason, I thought it was not normal but not as insane as it looks in retrospect."

  The judge gave Walker an 11-year sentence, almost a year less than the 12–15 range that had been agreed upon between the government and Walker's attorneys, "because the defendant accepted responsibility" for his crimes.

  After the sentencing, Hernandez went to see Walker in prison. Hernandez was himself a Marine who had also served in Iraq as an aviation logistics officer, but with no combat exposure whatsoever. Hernandez declined to confirm the meeting, but according to Walker and Walker's lawyer, Angelo Lonardo, who was also present, Hernandez said he wanted to talk to Walker "soldier to soldier."

  "He gave me some real good encouraging words," Walker recalled, "He said, 'I deal with a lot of people who aren't very kind people, who don't feel remorse, and I can tell you're a good guy. I know you feel bad, your life's not over. You can go on and heal yourself.'"

  The first book Walker read when he arrived in prison was
  War and Peace

  . These days, he spends a lot of time studying Latin and listening to classical music. In Latin he finds enjoyment in the puzzle-like quality of verb conjugation and tense agreement. The classical music brings him peace and tranquility. He speaks to his parents by phone all the time, and they come for monthly visits.

  Many of Walker's fellow soldiers have also gone through rough times. One of them was court martialed. Some committed suicide. As close as he was to them during the war, Walker has no lasting desire to be in regular touch with them anymore. "I wouldn't expect anything of anyone," he told me. "A lot of people had a lot of issues."

  Tim and Liliana Walker left Ohio recently, sold their Hunting Valley home, and moved to Amelia Island, Florida, a wealthy suburb of Jacksonville on a stretch of pristine white sand beaches, golf courses, and mansions. John Grisham is rumored to have a home under construction nearby. The Walkers live in a tasteful gray new Victorian home situated between the first and ninth holes of the Amelia Island Golf Course, across the street from the Ritz Carlton. One evening recently, I sat with them on their back patio. It was a pleasant Southern evening. In the shadows of the golf course, huge live oaks stood like sentries, and from their branches hung giant clumps of Spanish moss. They both started to say something, then paused, and went quiet.

  Eventually Tim got up and retrieved a CD from inside the house and slipped it into his computer. A moment later the gravelly voice of Nico Walker — son, artist, singer, soldier, bank robber, prisoner, man — crooned on alone into the deep Florida night.

  "One, two, three, four," he started:

  Busted lip and a ball of string
  Love is a sad, inevitable thing
  You grow up, and you go down
  And you get caught in a rusted town
  Where the kids don't play and phones don't ring
  And the sky's never blue and the birds won't sing
  And the trash piles up on the kitchen floor
  And the trash piles up on the kitchen floor
  And every time it does
  You get turned around
  And every time it does
  You get turned around
  For the wasted years, the wasted years, the wasted years, the wasted years.

  Liliana looked up, crying. Tim had also teared up and was looking off into the distance, a gentle smile quivering on his face. "I'm proud of my son," Tim managed to say, and Liliana nodded. "My bank-robbing son."

  Scott Johnson's memoir about his CIA agent father The Wolf and the Watchman is out now.

  (Correction: A previous version of tis story stated that Pablo Stewart was a Marine Captain during the Vietnam War.)>

  Order An Açaí Bowl, And We'll Tell You How Much Money You'll Have In Your Checking Account Next Month
  17 Husbands Every Pregnant Woman Would Totally Clone If She Could
  18 Wrong Number Texts That Will Melt Your Cold, Dead Heart
  23 Halloween Tumblr Posts To Tide You Over Until October 31st
  Literally Just 14 Tweets From This Weekend Alone That Are Funny AF
  14 Hilariously Angry Notes People Left To Be Found, OK?
  29 Tweets From This Month That Were So Funny, They Got 50,000 RTs
  19 Teachers Who Are Serious Experts At This Whole "School" Thing
  Chris Evans Dragged Kanye West To Smithereens Over His MAGA Tweet
  16 Pictures Of People Behaving Like Animals On Planes To Completely Ruin Your Day
  31 Things About "Pretty Little Liars" That Make No Sense Now That I'm An Adult
  Ryan Reynolds Left Another Fire Comment On Blake Lively's Instagram
  21 Memes That Will Make Libras Laugh And Then Feel Attacked
  21 Amazing Things That'll Make Curling Your Hair So Much Easier
  15 Real Things That Actually Exist Even Though They Just Don't Look Right
  Pete Davidson Joked A Lot About His Relationship With Ariana Grande On “SNL”
  14 Budget-Friendly Decor Ideas That'll Make Your Home Trendy AF
  Take This Overly Random Quiz And We'll Guess A Very Specific Truth About You
  Here’s What The First Shopping Mall In America Looked Like
  People Who've Had Miscarriages Share What They Wish Others Knew
  17 Tweets About Self-Care That Are Waaaaay Too Real
  18 Tweets From This Week That Are Freaaaakin' Hysterical
  25 Trader Joe's Snacks That People Actually Can't Live Without
  28 Photos That Capture The Best And Worst Parts Of Going To A Music Festival
  How Well Can You Do On This Pop Culture Of The Week Quiz?
  Ellen DeGeneres Called Out Lady Gaga For Ignoring Her And It's Kinda Awkward
  17 Of The Best Things On Amazon Launchpad Right Now
  These Photos Show The Awful Destruction From The Indonesian Tsunami That Killed More Than 800 People
  Plan A Victorian Wedding And We'll Give You A Historical Dreamboat
  21 Of The Best Things To Buy In Bulk On Amazon

Quoted in Sidelights: “The writing is raw, coarse, and sometimes forced. … Yet it often has a brute power.”

Walker, Nico: CHERRY
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Walker, Nico CHERRY Knopf (Adult Fiction) $26.95 8, 14 ISBN: 978-0-525-52013-9
In this unsettling debut, a young man raised in the middle-class comforts of America encounters war, love, and drug addiction.
After the narrator awakens on the first page, he is "looking for a shirt with no blood on it" and then for his rigs--the apparatus of heroin addiction--to get him and his partner, Emily, in shape for the day. She has to be at school by 10 a.m. to teach college students remedial writing. The two met at 18 and now they are 25, living in a Cleveland suburb. Walker opens and closes the story in the couples' present at age 25, while the bulk looks back at how the unnamed narrator found Emily and lost her and went off to war in Iraq in 2005. The writing is raw, coarse, and sometimes forced: "Your new friends would eat the eyes out of your head for a spoon." Yet it often has a brute power, tapping the unadorned, pointedly repetitive language of addiction or battle. The IED "took off both Jimenez's legs and severed one of his arms almost completely. But he was still awake and he knew what was happening. He was screaming." So many patrols deal with bombs or breaking into suspect houses: "Just IEDs. Just kicking doors. More IEDs. More doors." Soldiers look for distraction. Two of them make snuff films with mice. Some do drugs because the Army stops checking urine. On his release from the Army, the narrator reconnects with Emily and copes with PTSD. "In these years I didn't sleep and when I slept I dreamt of violence." Heroin takes over, with its own awful monotony. They are "spending over a thousand dollars on dope, every week." She keeps teaching. He robs banks.
A bleak tale told bluntly with an abundance of profanity but also of insight into two kinds of living hell.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Walker, Nico: CHERRY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723410/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&
1 of 6 9/30/18, 6:46 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
xid=f45e92a2. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723410
2 of 6 9/30/18, 6:46 PM

Quoted in Sidelights" “masterpiece” and “astonishingly good.”
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Cherry
David Pitt
Booklist.
114.22 (Aug. 1, 2018): p31. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Cherry.
By Nico Walker.
Aug. 2018. 336p. Knopf, $26.95 (9780525520139).
These days, it's not uncommon to find critics deriding that hoary piece of advice given to budding writers to "write about what you know." Sometimes, however, that approach still produces a masterpiece, and that's what we have here. Walker, a former U.S. Army medic and Iraq War veteran, became a heroin addict and went to prison for bank robbery. The narrator of his debut novel is also a former U.S. Army medic who becomes a heroin addict before turning to bank robbery to support his habit. The story of that descent, which also involves his wife, a fellow addict, is unsparingly raw and utterly gripping. This is an astonishingly good novel, written by someone who clearly has a gift for storytelling. Walker's characters, even minor players and walk-ons, are beautifully drawn. His dialogue rings achingly true. His story is powerfully told and completely without pretension. The novel, which has already generated considerable buzz, beginning with its remarkable backstory (the author wrote it on a typewriter in prison, eventually attracting the interest of an editor at Knopf), could well become one of the season's smash successes. --David Pitt
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pitt, David. "Cherry." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2018, p. 31. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A550613151/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=ca82f934. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A550613151
3 of 6 9/30/18, 6:46 PM

Quoted in Sidelights: “willing to describe the catastrophe of its narrator’s life, but not truly examine it,”
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Cherry
Publishers Weekly.
265.26 (June 25, 2018): p159. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Cherry
Nico Walker. Knopf, $26.95 (320p) ISBN 9780-525-52013-9
A man who likens himself to a "stray dog with the mange" descends into addiction in this frustrating debut. Walker's unnamed narrator begins the novel as "a soft kid" from a stable home, a vegetarian shoe store employee dating a college classmate named Emily who likes Modest Mouse and Edward Albee. But when Emily transfers, he fails out of school and enlists in the Army as a medic, reasoning "I don't have any other ideas." He wastes time in Iraq "waiting for the war to happen" and grows further apart from Emily. Upon returning home to Cleveland, the narrator starts "getting into the OxyContin pretty hard." He traipses through a parade of new women before Emily reenters the picture, having started using drugs herself. "There was nothing better than to be young and on heroin," the narrator writes. Some readers may find the innumerable descriptions of the Sisyphean life of an addict suitably trasgressive. For everyone else, the insistence on Emily's culpability for the narrator's degeneration, as well as the depiction of other women as useful only for sex, make the novel feel like it's willing to describe the catastrophe of its narrator's life, but not truly examine it. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Cherry." Publishers Weekly, 25 June 2018, p. 159. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545023377/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=f699dda4. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A545023377
4 of 6 9/30/18, 6:46 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Book World: Nico Walker is a
convicted bank robber. 'Cherry'
proves he's also a must-read author
Ron Charles
The Washington Post.
(Aug. 14, 2018): News: From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Charles, Ron. "Book World: Nico Walker is a convicted bank robber. 'Cherry' proves he's also a
must-read author." Washington Post, 14 Aug. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A550203523/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=321fe4f1. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A550203523
5 of 6 9/30/18, 6:46 PM

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Book World: Friday thoughts: How
to capture a bank robber's novel?
Ron Charles
The Washington Post.
(Aug. 17, 2018): News: From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Charles, Ron. "Book World: Friday thoughts: How to capture a bank robber's novel?" Washington
Post, 17 Aug. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A550540320/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=90a37840. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A550540320
6 of 6 9/30/18, 6:46 PM

"Walker, Nico: CHERRY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723410/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f45e92a2. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. Pitt, David. "Cherry." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2018, p. 31. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A550613151/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ca82f934. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. "Cherry." Publishers Weekly, 25 June 2018, p. 159. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545023377/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f699dda4. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. Charles, Ron. "Book World: Nico Walker is a convicted bank robber. 'Cherry' proves he's also a must-read author." Washington Post, 14 Aug. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A550203523/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=321fe4f1. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. Charles, Ron. "Book World: Friday thoughts: How to capture a bank robber's novel?" Washington Post, 17 Aug. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A550540320/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=90a37840. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

• The Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/nico-walker-is-a-convicted-bank-robber-cherry-proves-hes-also-a-must-read-author/2018/08/13/fcfff502-9b30-11e8-8d5e-c6c594024954_story.html?utm_term=.c91971769f44
  Word count: 1458

  Quoted in Sidelights: “brings a raw and casual brutality to the narrative of battle,” Ron Charles remarked in the Washington Post. The novel, Charles continued, “is written without an ounce of self-pity by an author allergic to the meretricious poetry of despair. In these propulsive pages, Walker draws us right into the mind of an ordinary young man beset by his own and his country’s demons. In the end, his only weapon against disintegration is his own devastating candor.”
  searing authenticity,” then added: “Walker demonstrates the depths of his humanity and challenges us to bridge the distance that we imagine separates us from the damned.”
  Sections

  The Washington Post
  Democracy Dies in Darkness

  Try 1 month for $1
  Sign In

  We’re glad you’re enjoying The Washington Post. You’re almost out of free articles for this month. Already a subscriber? Sign in
  Subscribe for $1
  Send me this offer
  ×

  Accessibility for screenreader

  Books Review
  Nico Walker is a convicted bank robber. ‘Cherry’ proves he’s also a must-read author.
  By Ron Charles
  Critic, Book World
  August 14

  You won’t hear Nico Walker on a book tour anytime soon because he’s serving two more years in prison for bank robbery. But don’t wait to pick up his lacerating new novel about the horrors of war and addiction. “Cherry” is a miracle of literary serendipity, a triumph born of gore and suffering that reads as if it’s been scratched out with a dirty needle across the tender skin of a man’s forearm.

  (Knopf)

  The story of how this autobiographical novel evolved is almost as remarkable as the story of how its debut author survived. In 2005 and 2006, Walker served as an Army medic in Iraq, where he was commended for valor and saw many of his buddies blown to pieces. Returning to civilian life depressed and traumatized, he became addicted to heroin, a habit he funded with extravagant success by robbing 10 banks in four months.

  In 2013, when Walker was behind bars in the Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Ky., his journey from hero to thief became the subject of a harrowing profile in BuzzFeed. One of many people struck by that story was Matthew Johnson, a publisher at the independent press Tyrant Books. Fascinated by the historical tradition of war vets taking up bank robbery, Johnson sent Walker books and encouraged him to write about his life. Eventually, through one of those wildly circuitous trajectories that make up the map of literary history, Walker’s disheveled manuscript ended up at Alfred A. Knopf, the nation’s most prestigious publishing house.

  In a gracious and unusually detailed acknowledgment at the end of “Cherry,” Walker credits Tim O’Connell, his editor at Knopf, with transforming those typewritten pages into this tour de force. But when I contacted O’Connell, he claimed he did nothing but edit Walker’s manuscript as usual. “It is the fruit of his hard work and remarkable natural talents,” O’Connell said, “especially his voice, which is unlike any other. Nico simply poured everything he had into it.”

  That sounds right — and true to the searing authenticity of this novel, which tries to answer the question, “How do you get to be a scumbag?” But in the process of laying out the road to perdition, Walker demonstrates the depths of his humanity and challenges us to bridge the distance that we imagine separates us from the damned.

  [Review: Ben Fountain’s ‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk’]

  We meet the unnamed narrator in 2003 when he’s a listless college student raised by a nice middle-class family. From the start, his tone is one of mournful candor with a trace of straight-faced wit. “I sold drugs but it wasn’t like I was bad or anything,” he says. “I wasn’t bothering anybody; I didn’t even eat meat. I had a job at the shoe store. Another mistake I made. No interest whatsoever in shoes. I was marked for failure.”

  With the same rueful smirk, he enlists in the Army “because I’d been saying I would.” The inane tests, the screaming sergeants, the empty slogans — none of it impresses him. “You just had to remember it was all make-believe,” he says. “We were pretending to be soldiers. The Army was pretending to be the Army.”

  But there’s nothing make-believe about the blood that’s soon gushing across these pages. As an Army medic, he goes on missions that are vaguely explained, often impromptu, frequently disastrous. His fellow soldiers are regularly called upon to brutalize the local people. The Iraqis, for their part, are experts at planting IEDs in the roads. “I was supposed to pretend to be some kind of great healer,” the narrator says, but his medical expertise rarely involves more than scraping up bits of his friends and zipping them in bags. “I was not a hero,” he says.

  Author Nico Walker (Nico Walker)

  Of course, we’ve heard these stories before, in superb fiction and nonfiction by other soldiers. But Walker, 33, brings a raw and casual brutality to the narrative of battle. His rambling collection of chaotic anecdotes involve drugs and porn, acts of cruelty and kindness, unending boredom pierced by spikes of terror. These juxtapositions convey the fundamental disorder of the American mission and its deleterious effect on the young people forced to implement it. His language, relentlessly profane but never angry, simmers at the level of morose disappointment, something like Holden Caulfield Goes to War: “I’m glad I missed the battle because it was probably bulls--- and the Army just murdered your dog anyway.”

  But Walker also channels an even older novelist who saw the carnage of war. His prose echoes Ernest Hemingway’s cadences to powerful effect like this: “By the time it was fall you could tell we were all a little off. In that state none of us could have passed in polite society; those of us who’d been kicking in doors and tearing houses up and shooting people, we were psychotic. And we were ready for it to end. There was nothing interesting about it anymore. There was nothing.”

  Ironically, that sense of sliding into the abyss accelerates when the narrator leaves the carnage of Iraq and returns to Ohio. Suicidally depressed, suffering flashbacks, blackouts and chronic insomnia, he grows so addicted that his entire life revolves around dope. “I was only ever afraid of one thing in my life,” he says, “that I wouldn’t be able to get heroin.” Under the pressure of that insatiable desire, the narrative becomes a swirl of buys, highs and crashes, punctuated by increasingly risky negotiations that leave him ripped off or in debt. “Life was just slow death,” he says, “regrets and forgetting everything you ever had believed in.”

  Even as I hyperventilate about this novel, I’m wary of the tendency to romanticize criminals, to treat their descriptions of degradation as unconscious art, to feel aroused by the vicarious thrill of illegality. There is, I know, the danger of reenacting some kind of ridiculous literary version of the hysteria over Jeremy Meeks, whose mug shot turned him into an Internet sensation.

  But I honestly don’t think I’ve been hypnotized just by this novel’s relentless horrors. No — it’s that unflappable voice. “Cherry” is written without an ounce of self-pity by an author allergic to the meretricious poetry of despair. In these propulsive pages, Walker draws us right into the mind of an ordinary young man beset by his own and his country’s demons. In the end, his only weapon against disintegration is his own devastating candor.

  Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.

  Read more:

  ‘The Yellow Birds,’ a novel of grit, grace and blood by an Iraq war veteran

  An unusual first novel by a veteran of the U.S. Marines
  Cherry

  By Nico Walker

  Knopf. 336 pp. $26.95

  Book Club newsletter

  Our monthly selection of book reviews and recommendations from Book World editors and critics.
  By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy
  21
  Comments
  Ron Charles
  Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post. Before moving to Washington, he edited the books section of the Christian Science Monitor in Boston.

• Rolling Stone
  https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/nico-walker-cherry-army-vet-addict-bank-robber-prison-719309/
  Word count: 2024

  Quoted in Sidelights: “I was like, ‘Man, if you sell your life story, you’ll make x-amount of money,’” Johnson told Ilana Kaplan in an interview for Rolling Stone‘s digital edition. Walker started typing out his narrative and sent pages to Johnson as he went along. Johnson eventually called in Knopt editor Tim O’Connor to work on the project, and O’Connor was so impressed that he acquired the book for his company. “Nico is a writer, not a prisoner to me,” O’Connor told Kaplan. “If I had seen this book and he was living in Brooklyn or in the Midwest somewhere and was just a guy who wrote this, I would publish it anyway.” Walker, who is expected to be released from prison in 2020, told Kaplan that writing has helped him rebuild his life even while incarcerated. “You lose almost everything when you come here and have to start over again,” he said. “In that way, it’s a great opportunity to recreate yourself from scratch or close to it.”

  Rolling Stone
  Send Us a Tip
  Subscribe
  Issue 1320: October 3rd, 2018

  Music
  TV
  Movies
  Politics
  Culture
  Pro

  Read Next 'SNL': 'Weekend Update' Blasts Brett Kavanaugh, Republican Party
  Send Us a Tip
  Subscribe
  Issue 1320: October 3rd, 2018

  Home
  Culture
  Culture Features
  September 5, 2018 1:38PM ET
  Army Medic, Addict, Bank Robber, Novelist: How Nico Walker Wrote New Book ‘Cherry’

  He wasn’t planning to become a writer, but a stint in prison led the Iraq veteran to turn his life into a compelling new work of fiction
  By Ilana Kaplan

  Email
  Show more sharing options

  Nico Walker

  Author Nico Walker

  Courtesy of the author.

  Before this summer, Nicholas “Nico” Walker was known as an Iraq War veteran, a bank robber and a heroin addict. Now, he can add “novelist” to his resumé, care of his debut novel Cherry, out last month. But you won’t see him on a book tour in the near future; since 2013, he’s been stationary, serving 11 years in a federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky for bank robbery.

  Cherry

  Becoming a writer wasn’t a part of Walker’s plan. Then again, neither was going to jail. During 2005 and 2006, Walker served in the Iraq War as a U.S. Army medic. When he returned to civilian life in Cleveland, he was left with seven medals for his valor, as well as PTSD. To cope with his pain, Walker turned to heroin, and by December 2010, he was funding his habit by robbing banks. Just four months later, he was arrested for bank robbery after stealing nearly $40,000 during 10 heists. In 2012, he pled guilty and was sentenced to 11 years in prison. His expected release date is November 2020.

  While Walker may have led a life colorful enough to make a compelling memoir, he didn’t want to tell his story that way. Instead, Cherry reads as a semi-autobiographical love story and war tale that weaves in the national opioid epidemic. Centered around an unnamed narrator, the book follows him as he meets and marries fellow co-ed Emily and battles the trauma of fighting in Iraq.

  “As far as the scenes that take place in Iraq, those are the most realistic parts because I wanted to give a true account about what it was like where I was,” Walker, now 33, tells Rolling Stone by phone from prison. “I didn’t want to put more drama in there to make it more interesting, glamorous or romantic.” In order to make it a novel, Walker had to depart from his own experiences, but he also found it necessary to incorporate details from his life. “The people in the book aren’t people I knew — they’re archetypes,” he adds. “I had to change so many things to have story arcs that worked.” The novel’s embedded anecdotes chronicle how the narrator and the secondary characters endure scenarios ranging from horrific and crass to romantic and fascinating. “I wanted to show the terrible things that happened in these kind of relationships. But that’s the point. “[Cherry] was a word for experience,” Walker says, referring to its connotation for newbies in the military and the idea of losing one’s virginity. “It’s what the novel is about: people being changed by their experience. So it seems fitting.”

  Following his tenure in Iraq, the narrator in Cherry becomes addicted to heroin and begins robbing banks to pay for his habit. “It’s not personal,” the narrator tells a bank teller in the books. Like the narrator, it wasn’t “personal” for Walker, either, when he spearheaded bank heists for money. “I hadn’t done it before, but in a way I had,” Walker says. “It was something that was familiar to me: going into a place, taking chances and you have to take control of something to do what you want to do. I definitely lost a lot more than I got out of it.” For Walker, he gained fleeting self-respect and temporary contentment from his crimes: “As far as the effects afterwards, maybe you get a little of euphoria after the adrenaline rush robbing a bank, but other than that there’s nothing to it.”

  Related
  NEW YORK, NY - MAY 04: Men sit passed out in a park where heroin users gather to shoot up in the Bronx on May 4, 2018 in New York City. In an attempt to reverse the number of overdose deaths, New York City could become the first city in the United States to adopt supervised injection facilities also known as safe injection sites. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has moved to open four safe injection sites which he has called Overdose Prevention Centers as part of a one-year pilot program. The Bronx was the borough with the highest number of overdose deaths in 2016 with 308 residents dying. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
  Fentanyl Changed the Opioid Epidemic. Now It’s Getting Worse
  These New Opioid PSAs Are Missing the Worst Part of Addiction

  While he’s been behind bars, Walker’s story didn’t go unnoticed. Matthew Johnson, co-founder of Fat Possum Records and part-owner of Tyrant Books, had a longtime fascination with war history. Always on the lookout for an eye-catching story, he decided one day to Google “Iraq war vet and bank robber” to see what would come up in search. It was then he discovered a lengthy feature from BuzzFeed, detailing Walker’s experiences serving in the military, battling PTSD and pulling bank heists. Fascinated by Walker’s story, Johnson decided to reach out to the man who lived such a wild ride. “I was like, ‘Man, if you sell your life story, you’ll make x-amount of money,’” Johnson tells Rolling Stone. “Not much. Like $100,000 is pushing it.” Johnson’s theory was that the story would get told one way or another. “I was like, ‘You have to try getting out in front of this or you’ll be some guy in a bar telling everyone what happened,’” he adds. “I thought if he was smart enough to do it himself then he should.”

  With the encouragement of Johnson, Walker began writing pages on a typewriter, sending them via snail mail for editing. Eventually though, Johnson realized he needed help. He was connected to Knopf editor Tim O’Connell for the project, who was subsequently so impressed by Walker’s work that he bought the book solely off of excerpts. But because Walker was incarcerated, it posed a unique challenge for O’Connell: he and Walker would have 15 minutes on the phone at a time to go through edits of his manuscript, and Walker had to tackle rewrites via typewriter. “Any other author could go back to his Microsoft Word, edit and save it,” O’Connell says. “[But] he couldn’t bring his manuscript to our phone calls. He wasn’t taking notes: He had to remember everything we discussed.” O’Connell vied to make sure that the time constraints and limited phone time wouldn’t affect their working relationship. “One thing I said to him was, ‘I know you’re in jail but every single step of the process will be same as every other author I’ve worked with,’” he says. The Knopf editor remains floored by Walker’s skills. “Nico is a writer, not a prisoner to me,” he adds. “If I had seen this book and he was living in Brooklyn or in the Midwest somewhere and was just a guy who wrote this, I would publish it anyway.”

  Cherry has given Walker a kind of purpose he never expected while he’s been behind bars. “You lose almost everything when you come here and have to start over again,” he says. “In that way, it’s a great opportunity to recreate yourself from scratch or close to it.”

  Since going to prison, he has changed, even if he only notices slight shifts. “I feel luckier than I used to be, that’s for sure,” he notes. “When I get out of jail, I will have spent a quarter of my life here. It’s where I am, and it’s what I do. Whatever impression it makes on me, it’s not a difference. I’m just living day-to-day.”

  In This Article: Books, Iraq, prison

  Want more Rolling Stone? Sign up for our newsletter.
  Show Comments
  Trending

  Matt Damon Parodies Angry, Water-Chugging Brett Kavanaugh on ‘SNL’
  Mike Campbell’s Life After Heartbreak
  Kanye West Debuts New Song ‘We Got Love’ With Teyana Taylor on ‘SNL’
  Lil Wayne’s ‘Tha Carter V’ and Kanye’s ‘Yandhi’ Mark the End of an Era
  Lil Wayne’s ‘Tha Carter V’ Took 5 Years to Make. Why It Still Hits Hard in 2018

  Editors' Picks

  The 100 Greatest Songs of the Century – So Far
  The 100 Greatest Songs of the Century – So Far
  Posted in: Music Lists
  sia
  How Sia Saved Herself
  Posted in: Music Features
  The Triumph of Stephen Colbert
  Posted in: TV Features

  Subscribe to RollingStone Magazine
  Newswire
  Powered by

  Kim Kardashian ‘Mortified’ By Kanye West’s Pro-Trump Rant On ‘SNL’ & Wishes He Would ‘Reel It In’
  Kim Kardashian ‘Mortified’ By Kanye West’s Pro-Trump Rant On ‘SNL’ & Wishes He Would ‘Reel It In’
  Posted on: HollywoodLife
  Posted 3 hours ago
  Liv Tyler, Anne Hathaway Follow Light Beam to Givenchy Show
  Liv Tyler, Anne Hathaway Follow Light Beam to Givenchy Show
  Posted on: WWD
  Posted 4 hours ago
  Kanye West Clarifies “Abolish The 13th Amendment” Tweet; Celebs And Media React
  Kanye West Clarifies “Abolish The 13th Amendment” Tweet; Celebs And Media React
  Posted on: Deadline
  Posted 3 hours ago
  The one Oscar that ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ simply has to win
  The one Oscar that ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ simply has to win
  Posted on: GoldDerby
  Posted 4 hours ago

  Rolling Stone
  Music
  TV
  Movies
  Politics
  Culture
  RS Pro
  Advertise
  Contact
  Live Media Events

  Legal
  Privacy Policy
  Terms of Use
  Your Privacy Rights
  Ad Choices
  Privacy Preferences

  Connect With Us

  Get The Magazine
  SUBSCRIBE NOW
  GIVE A GIFT

  Newsletter Signup

  Have a Tip?
  We want to hear from you! Send us a tip using our anonymous form.
  Send Us a Tip
  Issue 1320: October 3rd, 2018
  © Copyright 2018 Rolling Stone, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Business Media, LLC.
  Powered by WordPress.com VIP
  Our Brands

  Close comments
  Add a comment

  Issue 1320: October 3rd, 2018

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/books/cherry-nico-walker.html
  Word count: 2064

  Books News
  How a Young War Veteran Became a Serial Bank Robber, Then a Novelist
  Image
  Nico Walker, whose new novel draws heavily on his own experience of war and its aftermath.

  By Alexandra Alter

  Aug. 10, 2018

  A few pages into Nico Walker’s debut novel, “Cherry,” the narrator walks into a bank, pulls out a handgun and casually demands money from the teller, reassuring her that “it’s nothing personal.” Heading back to his car, he hears sirens approaching and feels oddly at peace with the inevitable outcome.

  Mr. Walker, 33, wrote the novel while serving an 11-year sentence in a federal prison in Kentucky, after pleading guilty in 2012 to robbing 11 banks around Cleveland during a four-month spree.

  His case puzzled prosecutors at the time, because he was such an unlikely criminal. He came from an affluent, supportive family, and was a war veteran who had received seven medals and citations for service in Iraq, where he went on more than 200 combat missions in 2005 and 2006.

  The strange story of how Mr. Walker — a war hero with no criminal history — became a serial bank robber who evaded police for months sounds like the plot of a heist movie or thriller. Instead, Mr. Walker wrote an unsettling literary novel.
  Please disable your ad blocker.
  Advertising helps fund Times journalism.

  “Cherry” touches on some of the darkest chapters of recent American history: the opioid epidemic, the lingering trauma of war for a generation of young Americans caught up in the endless conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the social and psychological costs of addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder. The book, which Knopf will publish this month, has drawn praise from writers like Dan Chaon, Donald Ray Pollock and Thomas McGuane. New York Magazine called it “the first great novel of the opioid epidemic.”

  Tracing the arc of Mr. Walker’s descent into addiction and crime, “Cherry” is a raw coming-of-age story in reverse — a young man drops out of college, enlists in the Army and goes to war, but rather than maturing in the crucible of combat, he comes home shattered, unable to function. He becomes addicted to opiates and starts robbing banks almost on a whim.

  “It seemed to me such a fierce book, so direct and so uncurated in giving voice to his experience,” Mr. McGuane said. “The narrative mystery as you read it is to sort of try to find hope in all this bitterness.”

  “Cherry” fits into a growing body of literature by American veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who have turned to fiction to explore the trauma of war and its aftermath. Their ranks include acclaimed writers like Elliot Ackerman, Kevin Powers, Matt Gallagher and Phil Klay, whose story collection, “Redeployment,” won the National Book Award in 2014.

  But “Cherry” adds a dark new chapter to the canon, revealing a young soldier’s transformation from hero to antihero, with no sliver of redemption.
  EDITORS’ PICKS
  How a Common Interview Question Fuels the Gender Pay Gap (and How to Stop It)
  The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America
  An Addict Dies in a School Restroom. He Was a Teacher.
  Please disable your ad blocker.
  Advertising helps fund Times journalism.

  “Some of it’s kind of ugly, but I didn’t really have a choice in the material,” Mr. Walker said in a telephone interview. “I didn’t want to romanticize it or exaggerate to make it more entertaining, I wanted to show it for what it really was.”
  Image
  The Depths of War

  Before he went to Iraq, Mr. Walker was a fairly typical teenager, a good student who was interested in music and sports. He grew up in a well-off family, the younger of two sons, and attended a private high school in Cleveland. His parents, Timothy and Liliana Walker, remember him as a bright, funny kid with a creative streak. He enrolled in a Jesuit university in Ohio but struggled to find a focus. It was a few years after 9/11, and it weighed on him that young men his age were going overseas to fight.

  “It kind of bothered me, staying in the States and hanging out with my friends and smoking pot and not really doing anything, when these other kids were getting blown up and killed,” he said.

  He dropped out of college and enlisted in the Army at age 19, and was certified as a combat medic. In December 2005, he was stationed 30 miles southwest of Baghdad in an area called the Triangle of Death. His infantry company was first tasked with guarding a police station. Later, they went on night patrols, trying to catch insurgents planting roadside bombs.

  On one mission described in “Cherry,” Mr. Walker was on a census patrol with a unit when they heard an explosion and saw smoke rising. They swam across a sewage canal and finally reached a burning Humvee. The charred corpses were almost unrecognizable. When Mr. Walker tried to pick up one of the bodies, it was still so hot his latex gloves melted. The acrid smoke made him reel. “The smell is something you already know,” he writes in “Cherry.” “It’s coded in your blood.”

  Mr. Walker was sure he would die in Iraq. When he didn’t, he suffered from survivor’s guilt over the lives he failed to save. During a home visit, Mr. Walker seemed like a different person, his parents said.

  “He said he wasn’t sure if he was going to be coming back,” Timothy Walker said. “He was dead-eyed.”
  ‘He Came Back Broken’

  When he returned home for good in 2006, Mr. Walker began drinking heavily. He tried to restart his life, enrolled in college and played in a band. But he felt isolated and paranoid. He and his wife, whom he had married shortly before deployment, separated, and over time, he drifted away from his old friends.

  Crowded places terrified him. He couldn’t sleep, and when he did, he had nightmares about killing and being killed. “He came back broken,” Liliana Walker said.

  Sometimes he was overwhelmed by anger, which he directed at himself. He hit himself in the face and stabbed out cigarettes on his arm. He started taking OxyContin and heroin.

  When he went to the Veteran Affairs office in Cleveland in the summer of 2007, he was prescribed antidepressants and was told he had an anxiety disorder. His parents later found another psychiatrist, who misdiagnosed bipolar disorder.
  Casually Turning to Crime

  In December 2010, Mr. Walker robbed his first bank. The act was so spontaneous he didn’t bother to plan a getaway, much less bring a gun. After the adrenaline rush of demanding money from the teller, he felt strangely peaceful, a sensation he likened to the sense of focus he felt in combat.

  “I never put any thought into robbing,” he said. “It didn’t seem like that big of a deal. I was used to that feeling.”

  Compared to combat, stealing money felt like “child’s play.”

  “Hundreds and hundreds of times I’d gone through people’s houses with guns, zip-tying people, screaming at people, sometimes shooting, and it’s like, what’s this compared to that?”

  He robbed nearly a dozen banks over the next four months, stealing close to $40,000.
  Image
  An excerpt from Nico Walker’s novel, “Cherry.”

  The morning of his arrest in April 2011, he wore a dark blue hoodie and sunglasses, and carried a dark green handgun, according to the criminal complaint. He showed the bank teller his gun and said, “You know what this is.” He put the money in a white plastic bag and drove away in a Ford pickup. The police followed him, and he sped away, crashing in the parking lot of a Burger King and breaking a vertebra in his back. They found $7,426 in his car.

  It wasn’t until after his arrest that a forensic psychiatrist gave him a diagnosis of acute post-traumatic stress disorder.

  “He was one of the most severely impaired trauma victims I’ve ever seen,” said the psychiatrist, Pablo Stewart. “If at any point along the way there had been a proper intervention, this wouldn’t have happened. He found his own cure, and it just happened to be robbing banks.”

  At his sentencing hearing, Mr. Walker’s lawyers argued that his crimes stemmed from the trauma he had endured. “This kid, every day, saw absolute hell,” Angelo Lonardo, one of his attorneys, said in an interview.

  When the judge asked him what drove him to rob banks, Mr. Walker struggled to explain. “I have been very, I guess, desensitized to things like this, and I am not trying to be insolent at all, but at the time, it just didn’t seem like that extraordinary, you know, such a terrible thing to do,” he said. “I thought it was, not normal, but not as insane as it looks to me now in retrospect.”
  An Unexpected Letter

  Mr. Walker never planned to write about his experience, he said. Once in a low security prison, he found ways to occupy himself: he read 19th-century Russian literature, studied Spanish, German and Latin, and tutored other inmates who were getting their G.E.D.s.

  Two and a half years into his sentence, he got a letter from Matthew Johnson, co-owner of Tyrant Books. Mr. Johnson had read an article in BuzzFeed about Mr. Walker’s crimes and his military service, and began sending him books to read. After they had corresponded for a few months, Mr. Johnson urged him to write a book.

  Mr. Walker was hesitant, but eventually started writing at night. He mailed pages to Mr. Johnson, and sometimes weeks later, would get edited pages back.

  He spent nearly four years writing and rewriting. Some of the hardest chapters were the ones that take place in Iraq. He worried that he might offend people who had served or lost loved ones in the war, and that other veterans might think he was cashing in on tragedy.

  “It was difficult to write about things that were more graphic,” he said. “At the end of the day, I thought, it’s better to do it like that than to lie about it.”

  Beyond the logistical challenges of writing and editing a book in prison, there were legal concerns. Under the Son of Sam law, convicted criminals are barred from profiting off their crimes through books, movies or other media that describes their criminal exploits, and money made from such works can be seized and given to victims or their families. But some legal experts argue that there is wide protection under the First Amendment for convicts to publish and profit from their work.

  Mr. Johnson thought the book could benefit from a bigger publisher, and eventually sold the rights to Tim O’Connell at Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House. A Knopf lawyer determined there that the novel didn’t run afoul of Son of Sam laws. Mr. Walker has used money from his publishing contract to pay off some of the roughly $30,000 in restitution he owes the banks. He expects to pay the remainder by January.

  Mr. Walker is scheduled to be released in November 2020, and plans to keep writing. He’s gotten encouragement from one of his literary heroes, Mr. McGuane, who has been sending him letters, a twist that Mr. Walker still can’t believe.

  “It’s like a kid getting a letter from Spider-Man or something,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

  Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
  A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 11, 2018, on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: War Hero Turned Bank Robber Writes the New Great American Novel. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/books/review/best-seller-cherry-nico-walker.html
  Word count: 542

  Inside the List
  First a Decorated War Vet, Then a Bank Robber, Now a Best-Selling Novelist
  Image
  Nico Walker
  Aug. 24, 2018

  Piper Kerman’s memoir about her prison stint, “Orange Is the New Black,” has been part of the cultural conversation since its 2010 publication. But writing books from prison — or mining one’s time in prison for book ideas — isn’t exactly new: Miguel de Cervantes did it. So did O. Henry, Ezra Pound, Oscar Wilde, Eldridge Cleaver, Jack Abbott, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, to name a few.

  Now there’s Nico Walker, a decorated Iraq war veteran turned serial bank robber who wrote his raw, simmering autobiographical novel, “Cherry” — which debuts this week at No. 14 — in the middle of an 11-year sentence at a federal prison in Kentucky.

  “It was something that I was doing when I was locked up,” he told NPR. “Something to pass the time.”

  His publisher, Knopf, describes the book as “‘Jesus’ Son’ meets ‘Reservoir Dogs,’” New York magazine called it “the first great novel of the opioid epidemic” and writers from Dan Chaon to Thomas McGuane have praised it. Walker told The New York Times that McGuane has even been corresponding with him: “It’s like a kid getting a letter from Spider-Man or something,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

  According to a recent article, the novel has sold in several countries, and Walker is using the cash from his foreign rights sales to repay the banks he robbed.
  Please disable your ad blocker.
  Advertising helps fund Times journalism.

  He may have even more money for them before long: Hollywood has come calling, though a recent report in Deadline noted that a possible film deal has been held up because Walker, who will not be released until 2020, has run out of his allotted phone time: “He will not be able to entertain any offers until he can again use the jailhouse phone.”

  [ How did a young war vet become a bank robber — and then a novelist? ]

  WELCOME TO THE RESISTANCE, OMAROSA That was the title of a New York Times Op-Ed published shortly after Omarosa Manigault Newman’s “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House” hit stores. “I wouldn’t take most of the claims of ‘Unhinged’ at face value,” Michelle Goldberg wrote. “But we don’t have to, because Manigault Newman has receipts” — audio recordings, which she has been dribbling out one by one to fuel interest in her book. It’s working: “Unhinged” debuts this week at No. 1.

  And yet another Trump book, Craig Unger’s “House of Trump, House of Putin” — which examines the ties between the two leaders — has joined the crush of political books on the nonfiction list, appearing at No. 5.
  EDITORS’ PICKS
  An Addict Dies in a School Restroom. He Was a Teacher.
  ‘I Have No Idea How to Tell This Horror Story’
  Tonya Harding Would Like Her Apology Now
  A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 1, 2018, on Page 20 of the Sunday Book Review. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

• Vulture
  http://www.vulture.com/2018/08/nico-walker-cherry-review-roundup.html
  Word count: 704

  Nico Walker’s Cherry Got Near-Universal Praise
  By Daniel Rathburn
  Lit Parade

  This is the first installment of Lit Parade, a Vulture guide to what the book world is writing, talking, and getting exercised about.
  Photo: Knopf

  Last week’s book news cycle had a clear winner: Nico Walker’s Cherry. Within a few days of the book’s release, pieces ran in the Washington Post, Esquire, NPR, Mother Jones, AV Club, Entertainment Weekly; the New York Times books beat reporter Alexandra Alter wrote a profile. A New Yorker feature is forthcoming.

  By now, you might have heard the story. The author joins the Army, comes home, gets addicted to heroin, robs some banks, gets caught, has — curiously — a BuzzFeed profile written about him. An editor at tiny Tyrant Books sees the profile, sends books to Walker in prison, and says, “You should write something.” Walker writes something and sends it to the editor, followed by time and drafts and conference calls from prison. Finally, after publishing giant Knopf pays Tyrant for the rights and works out the legal complications: Cherry.

  It wasn’t just Walker’s backstory that augured good press. Cherry sits in the center of a Venn diagram of Trump-era flash points, which coastal critics are dying to have artfully explained to them: opioid addiction, the plight of veterans who shouldered the burden of misbegotten wars, and the way institutions have failed the white working class. (Walker is more fallen middle class, but no matter.)

  Good press never guarantees great reviews, but the right backstory might. In their near universal praise, critics dwelled on Walker’s authentic voice. As Rien Fertel writes at the AV Club, “It’s like college, or high school, or that insidious hometown bar filled with men who never graduated beyond punching each other in the balls.” Quil Lawrence, for NPR, put it more succinctly: “Walker writes about Iraq from a grunt’s-eye level.” Lawrence also commented on the dry, straight-faced humor of Cherry, which works because its unnamed narrator lacks pretension. Vulture’s own Christian Lorentzen, in an early, tone-setting review, called it maybe “the first great novel of the opioid epidemic,” and noted Cherry’s lack of “traditional psychologizing.”

  Ron Charles’s glowing review in the Washington Post (“searing authenticity”; straight-faced wit”; “mournful candor”) redefined Walker’s hard-luck story as a rare asset: “Cherry is a miracle of literary serendipity, a triumph born of gore and suffering that reads as if it’s been scratched out with a dirty needle across the tender skin of a man’s forearm.”

  That masculine grit scratched a couple of critics the wrong way. Publishers Weekly’s largely negative pre-pub review (which didn’t stop Cherry’s momentum) chided Walker for “the depiction of women as only useful for sex,” and disliked its emotional distance: “it’s willing to describe the catastrophe of its narrator’s life, but not truly examine it.” Entertainment Weekly’s David Canfield also took issue with the girlfriend, “a figure … who lacks internal consistency.”

  But for the rest, narrative distance was part of the appeal, the next-gen Denis Johnson they were waiting for. Fertel called it “infinitely more real” than the “absurdities dreamed up” by Thomas McGuane. To Ron Charles, Walker’s juxtaposition of anecdotes about war-front porn and boredom laid bare “the fundamental disorder of the American mission and its deleterious effect on the young people forced to implement it.” Then he called it “Holden Caulfield Goes to War.”

  Meanwhile, Walker the person continues to generate gritty buzz without leaving his Kentucky prison. (He can’t until 2020.) Deadline reported last week that an auction for Cherry’s film rights had been suspended because the author ran out of minutes on the prison phone — allowing him more time, it seems, to “process his opportunities.” For Walker, unlike his narrator, bad luck has a way of turning good.
  Related

  Nico Walker’s Cherry Might Be the First Great Novel of the Opioid Epidemic
  Rights Sale to Hot Book Stalls Because Author Ran Out of Phone Minutes in Prison

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/08/13/638218702/an-iraq-veteran-heroin-addict-bank-robber-and-debut-novelist
  Word count: 1098

  An Iraq Veteran, Heroin Addict, Bank Robber And Debut Novelist
  5:09

  Download

  Transcript

  August 13, 20184:32 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered
  Quil Lawrence square

  Quil Lawrence

  Nico Walker wrote his semi-autobiographical novel Cherry while in federal prison for armed bank robbery.
  Courtesy of Nico Walker

  Nico Walker is in jail for robbing banks.

  He can use the pay phone for 15 minutes at a time, and then he has to wait a half-hour. It took a while to do an interview.

  That's also sort of the way he wrote his debut novel, Cherry — on a typewriter, with a hundred-or-so other guys looking over his shoulder.

  "It was something that I was doing when I was locked up," he says. "Something to pass the time. But I didn't — I wasn't planning to write a novel, you know, autobiographical or anything like that."

  But it's pretty autobiographical. The unnamed narrator of Cherry is naked and vulnerable — literally, in the first pages of the book, he's stripped and gets ice shoved down his underwear.

  Walker's writing has a similar effect. Booklist called it "a masterpiece," and Vulture's headline reads "Nico Walker's Cherry Might Be the First Great Novel of the Opioid Epidemic."

  Walker's narrator and his college girlfriend fall into what they know is love — but also know won't last. He drops out of school and joins the Army.

  It was two years since we had met. We were older now; we both had money saved and we had our jobs and we were very much on our own. She'd be 21 in a month. We were so sure that we had grown up. We would get married before I went to Iraq. She brought it up this time. She said it made practical sense. If we were married I'd get paid more and she could be on my health insurance. And I'd get to marry Emily.
  "But we're gonna get divorced," she said.
  I said that was fine.
  I said, "We'll get divorced if that's what you want."

  The humor works because Walker and his narrator have no pretensions — not about love, or about being a combat-decorated Iraq veteran. Even in boot camp and heading for Iraq, Walker's narrator still feels like an imposter, and he suspects everyone around him does too.

  Drill Sergeant Cole punched me in the penis for no reason. You'd have that though. You just had to remember it was all make-believe. The drill sergeants were just pretending to be drill sergeants. We were pretending to be soldiers. The Army was pretending to be the Army.

  Cherry
  Cherry

  by Nico Walker

  Hardcover, 317 pages
  purchase

  Walker writes about Iraq from a grunt's-eye level. The soldiers are playing video games, watching porn, huffing computer duster. They're also going on mission after mission to kick in doors.

  The narrator is a combat medic, but still feels like a fraud as he fails to save the life of an Iraqi civilian. He spends less time treating his fellow soldiers than collecting their body parts after bomb attacks.

  By the end of his deployment, he's too tired to pretend.

  The worst possible outcome was to get killed at the end, after all the b******t. If you weren't going to go home it was better to get killed early on. That was the logic. You didn't want to get killed at the end.

  He talks his lieutenant out of a last dangerous foot patrol.

  "With all due respect, sir, they got us out here with three of the most obese s***bags in the company, and those are your dismounts. Think about it. Do you think you can take those guys dismounted, off road, in the f*****g dark, through all those s*** canals for a klick? That's going to make a lot of noise. Those hajis will hear us coming all the way. We might as well drag a piano with us. I've seen those guys on dismount patrols before, sir. They're a f*****g disaster. Borges can shoot, but he can't walk for s***, and the rest of them are an out-and-out f*****g liability. No upside. You can't expect to take those guys and one medic, not one NCO, and shoot it out with four armed men who will hear you coming from a mile away. I'm sorry, sir, but it's a real bad idea."

  The only people who talk about Iraq like that are people who've been to Iraq. But Walker claims no moral authority.

  "One of the great things about being in prison for armed robbery is you don't really have a lot further down to go on the scale of reputation, you know what I mean?" Walker says.

  The narrator comes home and gets mostly back together with his wife. They do divorce but then get wedded together by addiction, first to pills and then heroin.

  The story of being a dope fiend is that people will lie to your face and you can't call them on it lest they not give you what you need when they get around to it. Saturday was no different. Emily and I woke and we shot the last of our dope and the day began. A day didn't begin until we had run out of dope and it was time to get some more.

  Without any money or dignity left — and without much going for him except a relatively cool head around guns, and a total insensitivity to lawful behavior outside a war zone — well, you can see where this is going.

  I had a theory. My theory was that I was a piece of s*** and deserved it when bad things happened to me.
  Was I bitter?
  A little, of course.
  But a loss was a loss. You didn't never get it back. Even if you recouped the money, the injury was still done. What was best was to write it off. ...

  Walker has two more years on his sentence, but things are looking up.

  At last count, the book has sold in eight languages. Nico Walker says he's already using the money to pay back some of the banks he robbed.

• Open Letters Review
  https://openlettersreview.com/open-letters-review/cherry-by-nico-walker
  Word count: 872

  Quoted in Sidelights: “is a stark story, told with a continuously disarming candor in a string of vividly-written vignettes,” he observed. “The vignettes themselves never really coalesce into a larger narrative, but that’s something of a rarity in debut novels in any case. As it is, the book is well worth attention.
  Cherry by Nico Walker
  August 27, 2018 Steve Donoghue
  Cherry
  by Nico Walker
  Knopf, 2018
  cherry.jpg

  The Acknowledgment section at the back of Nico Walker's debut novel Cherry tells a story in three pages that's in some ways as interesting and disturbing as the one told at 300 pages in the novel itself. Walker, we learn, was in his second year of incarceration for bank robbery when he was contacted by an independent publisher who'd seen an article about him: a veteran of hundreds of missions in Iraq, a drug addict, and now a federal inmate. The publisher suggested that he write a novel. Walker initially balked but eventually generated a manuscript and sent it along. Tim O'Connell from Knopf bought the rights and suggested heavy edits to make the main character more likable. “If you've read this book and you thought the main character was an asshole but you kind of liked him,” Walker writes, “that was all because of Tim O'Connell.”

  It's tough to tell if this is stoicism affecting honesty or honesty affecting stoicism, but regardless of who wrote this novel, it's a very strong debut. It's nothing recognizable in novelist Scott McClanahan's embarrassing blurb about Walker being “one of the best writers alive,” but it's very strong.

  It tells Walker's life story in the kind of barely-at-all-fictionalized way that's a hardened fashion in 21st century fiction. The unnamed main character is a petty thief and drug addict who's deeply in love with his girlfriend Emily and who joins the army and has some strong reactions to enlisted life, as when he's getting his head shaved at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri immediately after signing up:

  It wasn't enough for them that we had to pay them money for these haircuts that we were ordered to get; they talked shut to us too. They cut a kid's head so it was bleeding pretty good and he let on that he minded and they said he was a sissy. They wanted to know if he was from San Fran-sissy-co. Then they cut another kid and the blood was running down and they thought it was funny. They didn't get bored of it. They had special vacuum clippers that sucked the hair up as they cut. The suction pulled the scalp up into the blades; that was how come they drew blood so much. The fat [barber] and his women had to talk real loud so they could hear themselves over the sucking sounds. I wished death upon them.

  The book is crammed full of drug use – the economy of it, the mindlessness of it, the pettiness and sordidness of it. This is the novel's life and atmosphere, and it's all very lapel-grabbingly done. But Walker – or O'Connell, or somebody – also works in a strong element of something that, seen side-on, looks a bit like romance. “Can you look back to when you met the one you loved the most and remember exactly how it was?” the narrator asks at one point. “Not as in where you were or what she was wearing or what you ate for lunch that day, but rather as in what it was you saw in her that made you say, Yes, this is what I came here for.”

  The wearing thing about the novel – and also the main source of its dark charisma – is its steady undermining of this thready note of sweetness. Through all the misadventures of the narrator and his great love Emily, any saving prospects of their bond are always clouded by the coarseness and distrust that are the mainstays of every drug relationship:

  A funny thing happened to me once: after we got married, Emily went and had electrolysis done, and then she took a series of lovers, and then there was the day that I found out I'd been something like the hundredth one to see her electrolysis. And this devastated me. But in all fairness: I had gone to Iraq. And in all fairness: our marriage was a lie. Maybe she'd thought I'd get killed and wouldn't ever find out.

  Cherry (sporting the hideous US cover design that's seemingly required by law) is a stark story, told with a continuously disarming candor in a string of vividly-written vignettes. The vignettes themselves never really coalesce into a larger narrative, but that's something of a rarity in debut novels in any case. As it is, the book is well worth attention, somebody-or-other's very capable debut.

  Steve Donoghue was a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and the American Conservative. He writes regularly for the National, theWashington Post, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.

• Deadline
  https://deadline.com/2018/08/cherry-nico-walker-film-book-auction-bank-robber-turned-author-1202446671/
  Word count: 483

  Hot ‘Cherry’ Book Auction Handcuffed Because Imprisoned Author Has Run Short Of Phone Call Minutes
  by Mike Fleming Jr
  August 16, 2018 12:19pm

  15

  Film
  Breaking News
  Cherry
  Jason Richman
  Matthew Johnson
  Nico Walker

  Knopf; Shutterstock

  EXCLUSIVE: The most intriguing book auction is taking place right now. Several suitors, including big directors, are chasing Cherry, a new “novel” by first time author Nico Walker. The book was just published by Knopf, and is already a top seller on Amazon, and got the kind of author profile in last Sunday’s The New York Times that is usually jet fuel for a book to film deal. Trouble is, the author is in prison until 2020 for committing the bank robberies that are described in harrowing detail in the novel. And late this week, he ran out of phone minutes and will not be able to entertain any offers until he can again use the jailhouse phone on Sunday.

  Related
  Busy AGBO Sets India Kidnap Drama 'Dhaka' At Netflix: Chris Hemsworth Stars & Sam Hargrave...

  The book has been called Jesus’ Son meets Reservoir Dogs, a breakneck-paced debut novel about love, war, bank robberies, and heroin. The book takes place in Cleveland and revolves around a young man from an affluent family who marries his hometown girlfriend before joining the Army and shipping out to Iraq. An Army medic, he is unprepared for the grisly reality that awaits him, and the rough and tumble nature of his fellow soldiers who smoke, huff computer duster, take painkillers, watch porn, and get gruesomely injured all too regularly. By the time the soldier returns home, he has an un-diagnosed case of extreme PTSD and has become hooked on the opioids prescribed him. He finds an outlet that forces him to focus and makes him feel the way he did in pressure combat situations: he robs banks. According to first time author Nico Walker’s NYT profile, he robbed about a dozen banks and stole close to $40,000 over four months, before finally getting caught in 2011. Despite a clear link between his extreme PTSD and his robbery spree, Walker was sent to jail. There, he turned his experiences into the novel, which he hammered out on a typewriter. He turned out pages to Matthew Johnson, co-owner of Tyrant Books, who read Walker’s story in a Buzzfeed article and helped the prisoner find a literary voice that is drawing acclaim and Hollywood interest, with a film possible because nobody got hurt from Walker’s crime spree.

  UTA’s Jason Richman is handling the auction, which will pick up speed again once Walker receives his new allotment of phone minutes this weekend and can process his opportunities. Stay tuned.

  Subscribe to Deadline Breaking News Alerts and keep your inbox happy

• AV/AUX
  https://aux.avclub.com/nico-walker-s-tough-debut-fictionalizes-his-life-of-war-1828133646
  Word count: 928

  Quoted in Sidelights: : “Heavily indebted to the profane blood, guts, bullets, and opiate-strewn absurdities dreamed up by Thomas McGuane, Larry Brown, and Barry Hannah, Cherry tells a story that feels infinitely more real, and undeniably tougher than the rest.”
  Reviews
  Nico Walker’s tough debut fictionalizes his life of war, heroin, and bank robbery
  Rien Fertel
  8/13/18 10:00amFiled to: Book Review
  6
  Save
  Graphic: Natalie Peeples

  Nico Walker enlisted in the Army as a medic at the age of 19. Shipped off to Iraq, he participated in over 250 combat missions. He returned home 11 months later as ravaged as the IED-bombed Humvees that came to symbolize his tour of duty. Heroin helped numb the trauma, followed by robbing banks.
  Book Review
  Lead
  B
  Cherry: A Novel
  Author

  Nico Walker
  Publisher

  Knopf

  Five years after a 2013 BuzzFeed profile of Walker comes his debut novel, Cherry, a fictionalized account of his life before, during, and after wartime. Heavily indebted to the profane blood, guts, bullets, and opiate-strewn absurdities dreamed up by Thomas McGuane, Larry Brown, and Barry Hannah, Cherry tells a story that feels infinitely more real, and undeniably tougher than the rest.

  The first pages greet readers with what amounts to a happy scene of domestication. “‘Hey, sweetheart,’” Walker’s unnamed stand-in shouts to his on-off girlfriend/wife/trainspotter. “‘Come down and do some of this dope with me.’” The narrator’s clothes are pockmarked with blood stains and cigarette burns. He’s too doped up to take his dog out to pee. He rarely sleeps, but when he does, he dreams exclusively of war. “I’m twenty-five years old,” he says by way of introduction, “and I don’t understand what it is that people do.”

  Flashback to 2003, and he’s failing out of college, bound for the military. The narrator signs his life away to become what the Army calls a Warrior Medic, bound for Iraq at a time when “kids [are] going off and getting themselves killed and maimed.” It doesn’t take long for him to pop his eponymous cherry, that is, experience the horrorscape that is combat. He pulls friends from burning wreckage, their faces burned away. Limbs litter dirt roads. His latex gloves melt on contact with ordinance-ravaged bodies. “People kept dying,” Walker writes. “In ones and twos, no heroes, no battles. Nothing. We were just the help, glorified scarecrows; just there to look busy, up the road and down the road, expensive as fuck, dumber than shit.”

  Secure in their forward operating bases, the soldiers marinate in porn, snuff films, dick jokes, and video games. They get high on liquor, Percocet, and pot brownies shipped overseas by friends and family. When all else fails they huff cans of computer duster. They tease starving Iraqi children with MREs; shoot dogs; daydream about fragging Iraqi police forces, their supposed battle allies; and blow up anything at hand—buildings, cows, clusters of date palms—for no other reason than the irrepressible dullness of war. They eschew their Army-issue body armor because it doesn’t look cool; kill “haji”; and kick down hundreds, if not thousands, of doors apiece, never knowing what they’ll find on the other side.

  It’s like college, or high school, or that insidious hometown bar filled with men who never graduated beyond punching each other in the balls. Women fight in this Army, sure, but they’re sex objects, purely and without exception. The narrator and his infantry buddies lose their collective toxic-masculine minds when a woman, a cook no less, scores the company’s first kill—but this doesn’t stop them from trying to sleep with her. Battle patches are presented while Toby Keith’s “Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American)” plays on a boombox. “I was not a hero,” the narrator tells us, again and again. The war was a “moral anti-gravity,” Walker told BuzzFeed.

  Back in the land of the red, white, and blue, he re-enrolls in college, gets hooked on heroin, scores grams with his FAFSA money, skips classes to search out dope, grows weed in his basement to subsidize his habit, and eventually turns to robbing banks.

  You know how the story ends. Military veterans return home, traumatized and socially adrift. Many turn to opioids, others suicide. Nico Walker somehow survived, and is now serving 11 years in a federal prison, where he wrote this book. He survived to leave us—and more importantly all past, present, and future veterans—with a lesson: Don’t rob banks. Don’t shoot dope. And, as Walker’s narrator warns, “Don’t ever join the fucking Army.”
  Recent Video from The A.V. Club
  View More >
  Game Of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi loves playing the show’s score live
  9/12/18 1:30pm
  Recommended Stories
  The first trans man to box in Madison Square Garden spars with masculinity
  Bad religion and obsessive love light up The Incendiaries
  Parker Posey’s offbeat You’re On An Airplane is the rare celebrity memoir worth reading
  About the author
  Rien Fertel

  Contributor, The A.V. Club. Rien is the author, most recently, of The One True Barbecue, and is currently writing a book about southern rock.
  TwitterPosts
  Discussion

  Community (4)
  Pending

  Sort by:
  Popular

  knappsterbot
  Rien Fertel

• MotherJones
  https://www.motherjones.com/media/2018/08/nico-walker-cherry-novel-iraq-ptsd-bank-robbery/
  Word count: 1921

  Quoted in Sidelights: “There’s a lot that’s made up from whole cloth,” he told Daniel Costa-Roberts in an interview for Mother Jones magazine’s website. “You’ll have composites—maybe I meet eight people and they all get mashed together. You use that character to stand in for a type of person. Working on Cherry, changing things around, confabulating things, making composite characters, making things up—I did so much of all this that nowadays I’d have to try hard to sort out what was real and what wasn’t. It’s made my memory unreliable.”

  This Exceptional Novel Was Pecked Out on a Prison Typewriter by an Iraq Veteran Turned Bank Robber
  It’s called “Cherry.”
  Daniel Costa-RobertsAugust 11, 2018 6:00 AM

  A Medevac crew near Tikrit, Iraq, November 2005.Jacob Silberberg/AP
  Looking for news you can trust?
  Subscribe to our free newsletters.

  The author page reads simply, “Nico Walker lives in Kentucky. Cherry is his first novel.” Walker, 33, wanted it that way. What the bio doesn’t say is that his Kentucky abode is a federal prison. Or that Cherry—a harrowing, exceptional book that was pecked out on a jailhouse typewriter and hits bookstores on August 14—loosely follows his own experiences.

  Both stories—the fictional and the real—are steeped in American carnage: of youth maimed by war, Rust Belt despair, and opioid-induced oblivion. As the book opens, Cherry’s nameless 18-year-old protagonist meets love interest Emily, whom he’ll spend the rest of the story alternately raging at and pining for. He’s not much older when he ships off to an unspecified forward operating base in Iraq, where, “unless you happen to have been there, you’ve never heard of where we were, so it doesn’t matter.”

  During his yearlong Army deployment, our flawed hero bears witness to near-daily horrors, some banal, some stomach-turning. He’s a medic, but there’s little he can actually do for anyone. He wades through sewage canals to scrape bits of fellow soldiers out of bombed-out Humvees. His brothers in arms kill mice for fun and get high on keyboard cleaner. They do not win many hearts and minds. Back home, PTSD leaves him unable to function in polite society. He develops a heroin addiction that eventually drives him to rob banks.

  Walker tells the story in a biting staccato, by turns shrewd, heartfelt, and repellent. And while his young narrator is less reflective and vastly more self-absorbed than the world-weary author who created him, their tales are well-aligned.

  Before pleading guilty in a deal that gave him 11 years in federal prison, Nicholas Walker, a former Army medic, participated in more than 200 combat missions in an exceptionally deadly part of Iraq. Upon returning to the States, plagued by insomnia and flashbacks, he started drinking in an attempt to help him sleep. Increasingly dissociated and self-pitying, he took to opioids, first abusing prescription pills and eventually shooting up.

  “Therapy couldn’t help him. Heroin couldn’t help him. Pulling bank heists helped him,” BuzzFeed proclaimed in a 2013 profile that Walker dismisses as sensationalist: “That’s going way too far,” he told me.

  When it comes to his own story, Walker is humble and wary of the tendency to romanticize it, even though he knows it sells books and attracts clicks. But the author is proud of the outcome. “It takes discipline, or at least an obsessive-compulsive disorder, to do the work of writing a novel,” he says. He spent more than three years writing and revising and exchanging hard-copy drafts with editors who, at times, seemed uncertain the project would amount to anything.
  “Were the outcomes of all the wars decided by push-ups and idle talk, America might never lose.”

  Eventually, though, it all came together. Cherry‘s descriptions of Army life are as acerbic and unsparing—and often darkly hilarious—as the boot-camp scenes from Full Metal Jacket. “I did a lot of push-ups,” the narrator says. “I was good at them. Most of us could do push-ups. And were the outcomes of all the wars decided by push-ups and idle talk, America might never lose.”

  In an early scene, the narrator takes a bus cross-country to visit a woman he’s been dating since high school, now a freshman at Rutgers: “We had come to a frat house, to a basement done out in plywood, some kind of beer-pong sex dungeon, everything as dismal as murder.” Moments later, he learns she’s been cheating on him. In Army slang, Walker’s brash, self-absorbed alter ego is a cherry—“someone who hasn’t seen anything,” he explains, “with the implied yet.”

  Mother Jones: In the introduction you write, “This book is a work of fiction. These things didn’t ever happen. These people didn’t ever exist.” I took that with a grain of salt. How autobiographical is Cherry?

  Nico Walker: I lose track. There’s a lot that’s made up from whole cloth. You’ll have composites—maybe I meet eight people and they all get mashed together. You use that character to stand in for a type of person. Working on Cherry, changing things around, confabulating things, making composite characters, making things up—I did so much of all this that nowadays I’d have to try hard to sort out what was real and what wasn’t. It’s made my memory unreliable.

  MJ: Your protagonist is a sensitive kid who worries that others will size him up and conclude that he’s weak. Some guys join the Army because they think it’ll make a man out of them. Was it like that for you?

  NW: Yeah, I guess you expect some sort of magical transformation. If you live through it, it means you’ll be able to handle everything else. That’s certainly a fallacy. Probably because whether you make it through has got nothing to do with whether you’re a man; it’s pretty much based on blind luck. But yeah, for sure. I don’t know if I would say I wanted to be some sort of tough guy, but [I figured] it would definitely be challenging.

  Deploying with an infantry company to where we were at the time was fucked up in retrospect. You had maybe 140 people, mostly young, and it wasn’t a question of whether anyone would die, but rather how many and who they would be. Of course, you didn’t think of it like that then.

  It’s a serious thing to get involved in stuff like that. When you’re there you’d rather be anywhere. It isn’t till you get back that you want to be there. But something I tried to get across in the book is that war doesn’t have a monopoly on death. Among the first things the narrator finds when he gets back to the States are cancer and traffic fatalities. So it’s everywhere, this death.

  MJ: Let’s talk about your own bank robberies. You had an expensive habit to fund. But what, in the larger sense, led you to do that?
  “What I was doing for the government was probably a little worse than what I was doing that got me in prison.”

  NW: I was being very inconsiderate, obviously. I wasn’t thinking about all the potential risks, all the things that could happen. But I was kind of out of my head. Really I was thinking, “I can’t believe that there are people who are actually mad about this sort of thing.” Take all law and mores out of context—take all that away, [and] what I was doing for the government was probably a little worse than what I was doing that got me in prison.

  In Iraq, you’re kicking in doors, telling people to get down on the floor, zip-tying them, searching their house. That was probably much more traumatic to the people involved than it was to the people in my [criminal] case. Robbing banks, I didn’t put my hands on anyone. Didn’t even swear at them. I flashed a gun for all of one, maybe two seconds. That was it.

  In the Army we killed people. So it was some serious shit. Way more serious than holding up a bank. I know that the context changes things. One is officially sanctioned violence, the other is unilateral junkie fuckery. But one pales in comparison to the other. [Robbing banks] just seemed like—I hate to say it—it seemed like child’s play. It seemed easy, I guess.

  MJ: Some readers may be put off by some of your narrator’s language, words like “cunt” and “haji,” for instance. Did you worry about alienating, say, female readers?

  NW: Oh yeah. I definitely did. But I didn’t want to sugarcoat things. I wanted to say, “This is how people talk.” I never endorse anything that happens in the novel, you know? I don’t think people should use intravenous heroin either.

  About the word “cunt.” I did run it by a friend of mine. She’s a progressive and a feminist. I was kind of nervous. But she said I ought to keep it how it was, and that reassured me. I wouldn’t write a book that promoted misogyny or anything like that. I hope I got it across that the narrator holds some misguided views about women and their relationship to him.

  As far as “haji,” I really dislike that word. It was difficult for me—I have friends who are Muslim, who are Arab—and the decision that I made to use those words was: That was what we said over there. I won’t say everyone, but almost everyone said that word, and I’m trying to be true to that.

  MJ: What do you think you’ll do when you get out of prison?

  NW: I can’t say 100 percent. I’m probably going to try to write more books. It’s that or dig ditches or be a garbage man or something. It’s pretty much my [only] option. And then: not break the law—just obey all laws.
  WE DON'T KNOW

  What's going to happen next as the headlines grow crazier and more disconcerting by the day. But we do know the job of an independent, unrelenting press is more important than ever—and the ongoing commitment of MoJo readers to fight for a democracy where facts matter and all can participate is absolutely vital.

  If you feel the urgency deep in your bones like we do, please consider signing up as a monthly donor during our fall pledge drive to support Mother Jones' fair and fearless reporting for the long haul (or make a one-time gift if that works better for you). The headlines may fade, but the need to investigate the powerful never will.

  Daniel Costa-Roberts

  Daniel Costa-Roberts is a Ben Bagdikian editorial fellow in Mother Jones’ San Francisco office. You can reach Daniel at dcosta-roberts@motherjones.com and follow him on Twitter at @dcostaroberts.

Word Count