My friend told me a story today, about a soldier who went to a gathering of Veterans.
And he said that at this gathering was a man who had served with the Air Force and had been deployed to a nice, safe, cushy job for three months in a country where one is not subject to daily bombings, IEDs, rocket attacks, where you don’t have people shoot at you when you walk to the shitter.
The man who was in the Air Force said when he came home, he couldn’t go into a large group of people without wanting to “smoke some dudes”.
My friend told me this story, and there is a lot of humor in a man complaining about life when he had it so easy. He wasn’t bombed, or blown up. He never threw pieces of a friend in a river to keep the dogs from eating it. He never saw the hood of his truck hung in a village with graffiti about “Bush” and scrawling of RPGs on it. He never got shot, or even shot at.
But this man stood up, and he said he had some issues.
Why? Why would a soldier have an embedded core of anger and frustration?
Is he a whiner? Does the human penchant for exaggeration explain it? Probably a bit of both.
Maybe there is something else there too. Maybe the military systematically degrades and humiliates its soldiers, maybe the military never bothers to show you what you have done, what meaning there was in your actions. Maybe three months doing a meaningless, repetitive job, for low pay and little thanks leads to feelings of frustration and alienation. Maybe the military has a bit too much of sitting in the hall and waiting for orders. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Maybe in some ways I was lucky. I saw the people we were trying to help. I saw the enemy I signed up to fight, and had the opportunity to shoot at him. I got to see what we were doing, and what we were not doing, and what needed to be done. I know what I did, and what I didn’t do. Honestly, now that I have been to combat, the volume on everything else has been turned down. Little things don’t stress so much. Know what makes you want to kill people? The DMV. The guy on the bus giving you the wrong change. The guy in line in front of you who doesn’t seem to know that 20 items is more than 12, and he should be in the other aisle. And now he’s writing a check. And doesn’t have ID. And wants to argue with the teller, a poor single mom who just wants to finish her shift so she can take off her shoes and sit down and rest. Know what? Going on patrols is awesome. It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s interesting. It’s like going on vacation, walking around, taking pictures of mountains and little kids and lakes. And when you do it, you are doing a job you have practiced, that you are good at, that you enjoy. Coming home, sitting in garrison, in the hallways, staring at the fucking cement walls while guys play light saber battles with their iphones for hours, break for lunch come back, sit on the floor and watch the walls while they play with their iphones, “Look, I caught a big fish on my phone!”, staring at the walls, for hours, the boss comes out: “Go home, be back at 6:30 for pt (so we can do it again)”. Staring at the walls.
“Bring the soldiers home!” you say. Why? Why would you do that to me? Why would you take away the things that I do that have meaning, take away my job, my livelihood, make my skills pointless, make me sit and stare at walls and do nothing, when I could be deployed, I could be on patrol, I could be defusing bombs, and meeting elders, and talking to kids and living my life and doing important, exciting things?
When you say “bring the troops home” you are telling me “I want you to be fired, I want you to be unemployed, I want your life to have no meaning, no purpose. I want you to be a shell of a man, sitting on the couch, old and fat and soft, wishing I were deployed, wishing there was a purpose.” Bring me home, feed me, buy me drinks. Take me somewhere I can see water, and grass, and pretty girls. Wash me, shave me, hold me. Send me back out to do what I am good at. Send me out to do what I want to do, what I need to do, what makes me a hero, what makes me brave.
I pity that guy from the Air Force. He signed up, and in his heart, he hoped he’d get what I got: the chance. He didn’t get that chance, and he’s mad about it and he whines about it.
No man is brave from a couch. No man is a hero from home. Here, I am a hero. Here, I am brave. Here, I do something important, something meaningful.
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