Sebastian Ferruzo

Late last year, my childhood best friend killed himself in his childhood bedroom with a cheap shotgun from the sporting goods store. When I got the phone call, I was walking in the woods behind my mothers apartment. As I listened to the details of his death, I saw a deer watching me from within a bush just five feet away. I instinctively grabbed my camera and photographed it. When I developed the film a few days later, there was no deer in the photograph.

Rusty called me a few days after and told me that his beloved dog Jake had died. He said that on Jake’s last day, while they were out walking the fields on their farm, a deer came out of the woods and approached Jake snout to snout, and teased him to give chase. He said that the deer was playful and without fear. Later that afternoon, Rusty looked out the window and saw Jake dead underneath an oak tree. He said that the dear was an angel.

I recently visited a friend from high school who I hadn’t seen in nine years. He told me that after graduating, he joined the Marine Corps, and for the first time in his life felt alive amongst the savagery of war and the brutality of that fraternity. Finally his youthful rage had an outlet and a direction. He explained how he had lost his fear of death and felt calm in gun fights and driving through IED minefields. 

He said that towards the end of his second deployment, he ordered in a missile drone strike on a Taliban member that he had been tracking for several weeks. He said that sitting behind a computer screen in a base in Afghanistan, he called in the missile and watched the man explode into dust while working on the farm behind his house. After the missile struck, his four children came running out of the house to find nothing left of their father. He said “in that moment, I knew I created four more terrorists out his children.”