A little more than six weeks after being shot in the head, Scott Olsen boarded a BART train and rode it across San Francisco Bay to Oakland. Olsen can’t say for sure who shot him, or what with, but all evidence suggests it was probably a tear-gas canister fired by riot police as they cleared out the Occupy Oakland encampment last October. The chaotic footage of the night raid ended up all over YouTube. Billowing clouds of tear gas enveloped the streets surrounding Oakland’s City Hall and took on an eerie, sulfurous glow, at least in the videos, while flash grenades erupted disorientingly and masked, silhouetted figures – many of the protesters had bandannas tied across their faces, guerrilla-style – scrambled for cover. For weeks, Occupy protesters had been complaining about heavy-handed police tactics, but this evidence didn’t make anyone think of the Rodney King tape. It looked like a military crackdown in the West Bank.
The projectile that struck Olsen fractured his skull and left him in critical condition. More crucially for the narrative, Olsen turned out to be a 24-year-old ex-Marine who’d survived two tours of duty in Iraq. For a movement supposedly without leaders, this sort of compelling personal story was enough to make him an overnight icon, the perfect almost-martyr. Though he couldn’t even speak for days, a shaky video of other protesters carrying him to safety got endless replays. In the footage, you can hear people around him screaming, “Medic! Medic!” as if a MASH unit might be somewhere nearby, and see Olsen himself, who looks absurdly young, staring up wide-eyed, but unable to speak, as someone shouts, “What’s your name?” As the bedlam churns around him, Olsen slowly reaches up and touches his bleeding head.
“When I heard he was a Marine, I was expecting some six-foot-four guy,” the Bay Area journalist Edwin Dobb, who has been covering Occupy Oakland, told me. “But he could pass for a junior in high school.”
It’s true. On the BART train this afternoon, Olsen looks like a fourth member of Hanson, circa 1999. He’s heading to Oakland to attend his first protest since he got hurt, and so has decided to wear a sort of costume: a brown camouflage Veterans for Peace T-shirt over a loose pair of American flag pants, minus the stripes – it’s just white stars on that patriotic shade of blue – and an inside-out bandanna worn like a headband, his shoulder-length hair tied into a ponytail. Olsen has a slight frame and delicate features. He still wears one of those oversize white neck braces, the kind you’d see in a sitcom courtroom scene whenever the plaintiff had whiplash, and the padding thrusts his head forward in a birdlike manner, making it look as if he’s always leaning closer to hear exactly what you have to say. His doctors expect close to a full recovery, though his speech remains halting and flattened, calling to mind a speaker with cerebral palsy. The erratic modulation can make his voice sound loud and aggressive, which is an odd contrast with his acutely gentle demeanor. His eyes, large and almond-shaped, with unusually long lashes, seem to be doing extra work, taking everything in to compensate for the slowed speech.
We miss our stop. Olsen says, “You’re following directions. From a guy with. Brain damage.”
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