Brightside

Into the hall alone, my son?

Now hear your mother’s prayer.

Go back onto the battlefield

And aid your father there.

I’d far prefer your blood be spilled

Like water on the ground

Or have you in your shroud arrayed

Than as a coward found.

Go into the hall and see

The portraits of your sires.

The eyes of each and every one

Alight with raging fires.

Not mine the son who would disgrace

His family’s name and home.

“Kiss me, my mother dear,” he said,

She did, and he was gone.

He has come back unto the door,

No longer does he live.

His mother cries, “My son, my son!

Oh God, can you forgive?”

Then comes an answer from the wall,

“While rivers run through Wales

Far better is the hero’s death

Than life when courage fails…”

-from I Blas Gogerddan, attributed to Geiriog

This morning, as usual, I drove my Daughter to Daycare. It’s a short drive through the metropolis, and we cross the same bridge which bumps us over the interstate. Near the crest of the bridge I see a man standing on the shoulder, his scooter parked next to him. It’s not some shiny hipster scooter, rather one of those blocky old deals from the wrong side of retro, which is generally picked as it’s the cheapest form of motorized transportation available. The guy is dirty with long greasy hair under his beat up hat, and a handlebar mustache completes the look. He may be about my age, but the lines on his face and his nicotine tinged pallor makes him appear much older. His clothes are a mismatch of an old puffy coat and sweatpants. I’m guessing these were all that were available in his size at Goodwill. Desert combat boots peak out under the pants. It occurs to me that I probably have more in common with this man than most other people I’m soon to interact with.

You see, the man is holding a giant American flag over the highway. I know why he does this; it hits me in the gut, I fight back tears and force myself to concentrate on driving safely. Today marks 22 years since 2,977 people were killed. Like any major event, everyone’s life was affected. In comparison to the victims and their family, the effect on my life was negligible. But I’m guessing that for the flag bearer on the overpass, his life took a more drastic turn than most people’s. Something that I share with him.

A few days ago I’d planned to shore up a post about real estate, mimetic desire, and mindset. This is in expansion of a comment I wrote in response to the recent post on The Power of Thrift, and I wanted to flush it out a bit more. As usual I’d noticed 9/11 on the calendar for weeks, but yet again it’s effect snuck up on me. Then this morning happened, and it became clear that my other post would have to wait.

I’m not sure this blog has one unifying purpose, but me sharing random stuff is probably as close as it gets. For today we’ll go down another meandering road where I reflect on stuff primarily for my own well being, with the secondary hope that others like me won’t feel alone, and the tertiary purpose of sharing a perspective that people with different experiences may find helpful in understanding people like me.

Back to today.

I cross the bridge, and focus on my current mission. It is comparatively less complex, dangerous, and sexy than others from my past. But to me, it’s pretty important. I must safely navigate traffic so that I can deliver my Daughter to Daycare, and then go grocery shopping afterwards. While I normally can do this on autopilot, the emotional cocktail induced by watching some random dude hold a flag forces me to consciously focus on the task at hand.

While it is absolutely more mentally healthy to let yourself experience emotions in the moment, sometimes this isn’t the best option. Thoughts of the deaths of thousands, and the two decades of war that followed bring tears which can be a distraction. Especially when you’re piloting a few thousand pounds of steel going 40 miles per hour, while other giant pieces of steel are a few feet away going in the opposite direction. So I do what I’ve done so well in the past; time to suppress some emotions.

I split my attention. First I focus on driving, and constantly scan traffic to make sure I’m in a good position and have thought out contingencies in case another driver loses control. This doesn’t take much brainpower, as like everyone else who’s been driving for a while, this has become second nature. It’s not quite enough cognitive demand to block out the emotions, so I engage my brain with a parallel task. I use an old stand of mine-visualize the steps of reloading an M4 in the most efficient manner possible. A relatively simple task, but it requires fine motor skill and precise alignment, making it difficult under stress. Thanks to some great trainers, I’ve found that visualizing the process improves my performance in the real world, and oddly enough I’ve found that thinking it through in minute detail is a great distraction from unwanted emotions.

Off my brain goes into these two directions; hands on the steering wheel with a thumbless grip at 9 and 3. Visualize my right hand pulling the rifle stock back under shoulder/right index finger depresses magazine release/left hand inverts and moves towards mag pouch. Scan for traffic/insure vehicle is centered in road/maintain 2 second gap behind vehicle in front of me. Visualize scanning for threats over top of muzzle/left hand grabs new mag with beer bottle gip, rotates mag 180 degrees. Check mirrors, look for way out if oncoming traffic swerves towards us-that ditch would suck but we’d be better off there than in a head on collision. Visualize briefly shift gaze from down range to the bottom of the magwell, momentarily slow down left hand to guide magazine into weapon until it’s locked in place.

And on and on until we get to daycare. By then my emotions had subsided, and I make a mental note to process them later (which I guess is what I’m doing now), less they fester in the background and compound the mess that’s already in there. Still, the day is now tainted with thinking about every little thing through the lens of what this day means.

My daughter runs into her classroom, and as usual I hang out for a bit and talk to her teacher. I always feel lucky to do so, as thanks to FI, I have plenty of time to linger. Most other parents seem rushed to get in and out, fast walking in their work clothes. Me, in stark contrast, taking my time, ambling around in my flip flops. But the day still hangs over me, and I realize that my daughter’s teacher would have been the same age as my daughter is now when the towers went down. Her experience with this day must be totally different from mine. Or so I think. I don’t know. Maybe she had family that was there. Or more likely, family that served. But we don’t really talk about this kind of thing. Come to think of it, I don’t know anyone who talks about the significance of this day, except for a few friends I served with.

And like that, I’m back to that day 22 years ago. The severeness of the event means that we all share the deeply rutted memory. They are all different, and they are all the same. This is mine.

I’m 18, a freshman at college. I hear a banging on my dorm room, and it matches the banging in my head. I’d gone full in on the college party life- hungover even though it’s Tuesday. I open the door, and it’s my friend Adam from down the hall. He’s screaming something about how “we’re going to kill them all!”. I’m confused, things are taking a while to spin up in my head. These were the days before I’d discovered coffee. Adam marches to my TV and turns it on. He doesn’t have to change the channel; it’s the same thing everywhere. The second plane has hit by now, and it’s clear this shit isn’t an accident. I throw on some clothes and head down to another guy’s room, one of the rich kids with a big screen and nice couches where we tend to gather.

There were about a dozen of us all squeezed in. We’re all guys, and we’re all 18. Everyone is pissed. They’re all saying something about joining up, and wondering if there will be a draft. Everyone keeps asking me about this-I’m the only one there that’s in ROTC, so they think I know the whims of one of our largest institutions. I don’t know, but I echo back the rage and ponder the unknown. This was pretty common in my cohort, guys of fighting age with no responsibility outside ourselves. We didn’t really know what was coming next, but it sure felt like it was war. And I think we knew that our generation was going to shoulder much of it. Hell, many of us welcomed a chance to strike back after watching innocent people fall. It all seemed so much simpler back then.

After awhile I drift back to my own room, and the phone is ringing. I see I’ve missed a bunch of calls, all from my parents. It’s my Dad. He says “I know what you’re thinking. You want to join the Marines right now (he’s right). Don’t. This is going to go on for a long time, and you’ll do more good if you stick it out with ROTC and become an officer. Don’t worry, the war will still be there.” I can tell this call is actually less about me doing more as an eventual Army Officer than an immediate enlisted grunt, and more about him being afraid of me getting caught up in a meat grinder. But I also know this is coming from a former enlisted grunt, who later spent years working international terrorism investigations for the feds. So maybe he knows what he’s talking about. In retrospect, he was right. Both about the length of the conflict, and about the meatgrinder.

But I was an 18 year old kid. His words kept me in ROTC and away from enlisting. For about a month.

Thus began an odd meandering route through the giant bureaucracy that is the US military. If this were a movie, there’d be a shot of me raising my right hand, a training montage, and then me in the desert with shit blowing up everywhere. Instead, it would take almost 3 years before I’d get there. And unlike the movies, the reality of Afghanistan was so much deeper and more complex than I could have imagined. As was coming home from it, and all the third order effects of that experience.

Back to today. These thoughts drift through my head as I walk out of Daycare to my Prius. As always, I’m greeted by sharp pain in my hips, knees, and back as I bend to get in. Such is the price one pays for living a life worth living. A decade of carrying at least 65 pounds of ruck through all manner of terrain, coupled with hitting the ground hard after parachuting from a plane dozens of times, and with a heap of the following years as a SWAT cop, carrying nearly the same load in equally jarring ways.

But today I wonder-if only those towers didn’t come down, would my joints be in this condition?

I think of all the rucking, and falling with that ruck on jagged mountain trails. I think of working major events on SWAT. In the post 9/11 world, we’d be kitted up for hours, carrying M4s through large crowds at sporting events and similar on the off chance they tried to hit us again. I remember feeling my joints rub through all this, slowly grinding down to their present state.

I think back to earlier this morning, when both my kids were throwing tantrums, and I had immediately became emotionally flooded. My therapist says this is a side effect of a well trained startle response to loud noises. I backed up, feeling numb, and my wife stepped in. If only things had happened differently, would I still have PTSD today? Would I have been a better parent?

I think of all of the things I’ve done and seen. It wasn’t a straight line, but it’s close enough. 9/11, join army, go to Afghanistan. See stuff there. Which drove me to keep serving and become a cop. See and do even more stuff, which when all thrown together along with less than perfect coping skills back in the day has resulted in my not so wonderful mental state.

I get to Aldi, and these thoughts lingers with me. Yeah, I like Aldi for the low prices. But I like it more for another reason-it’s not a big box supermarket like Walmart where I can’t cover all the angles. Aldi is nice and small. A big corner fed room that I can visually clear before I get inside, and maintain situational awareness in each aisle. Anytime I have to get something from Walmart, my anxiety pings-so many possible angles I have to try and keep track of. Yeah, I know, this is ridiculous. The probability of an active shooter going down while I’m out grocery shopping is so low it’s basically zero. (Of course we did have a couple go down in similar shopping centers a few miles away a couple years back….) And my therapist tells me that this hypervigilance thing is not going away, so I may as well get used to it. If only things had gone differently 22 years ago, would I be cool with Walmart?

Down the “if only” rabbit hole I go…would I have become a cop? Would I instead have stuck with my biology major if I hadn’t joined up? Would I now be sleeping soundly most nights? Would I be a more well adjusted, normal person?

And finally I catch myself. Ah, the “if only” trap.

A few years after I got shot, a friend of mine on the team got shot in nearly the same situation. The team was serving a warrant, the guy opened fire, and my friend got hit. Like my gunshot, it was relatively minor, a through and through in the arm. He and others returned fire, he drove to the hospital, and went back to work a month later. The only difference was that he was there when I got shot, but I was off the day he did. The cop phone tree blew up, and I found out what happened before my friend made it to the hospital. I met him there, and stayed for hours.

This was not a rare occurrence, and as usual, since no one died, it was a pretty happy event. We all sat around the hospital room, telling jokes and laughing at how close my friends came to pushing up daises. Gallows humor and all that. Another teammate that was next to my friend when he got shot told me how it all went down, and described how a bullet went right between them at head level. If either of them had been standing six inches in the other direction, they would have caught one in the face and this would be a different kind of party. The laughing continued, somebody brought a pizza, and we clowned the doctors who gave as good as they received.

Later the teammate who was next to my friend when he got shot pulled me aside. He hadn’t been there when I got shot, and he relayed how it sucked not being there, so he thought I might be going through the same thing. He said when I got hit, he played the “if only” game for days….if only he’d been there, maybe the four of us who got hit wouldn’t have. Maybe he could have done something different. He was being a good friend, and trying to tell me that if I was feeling the same way it was ok. But I stopped him and said something like “Dude, you just told me a bullet missed your head on this warrant by inches. What if I’d been there, and I stood in a slightly different spot then my friend when the shots started, and I caught that one in the face? Or, even worse, what if I stood a few inches further away, which caused you to be a bit closer and then you ate it? Shit would have probably been the same had I been there, maybe better, but also maybe way fucking worse.”

Thus is how I stumbled upon the antidote to the “if only” game. I applied this lens to this day. Yes, would I rather nearly 3,000 people not have died 22 years ago? Abso-fucking-loutely. But it did, and I have no control over that. And all things considered, I came out of the resulting war realitively unscathed.

One of my old team leaders is a triple amputee, and I think of him often when my joints hurt. Bet he would like joints that hurt.

I had another friend who had four young kids when he went to Afghanistan, and he never came back. When our kids are losing their shit, I occasionally remind myself that I bet he would have taken a thousand of my worst days if given the chance to watch his kids grow up.

And then there’s me enlisting. Sure, maybe if things had gone different I would have taken a different path. A thousand different possibilities there; maybe I would have found a better fit which didn’t involve serving. Or served in a different way that had better outcomes.

But then I remember this. Had I not joined my specific unit at that specific time, I would never have been friends with two specific guys from said unit. They were both roommates in college a few hours from where I worked, and I went to one of their birthday parties nearly 13 years ago. There I met the other guy’s sister. Who ended up becoming my wife, who became the mother of our two kids. Erase my link to that unit, and I lose the best part of my life.

We can butterfly effect the shit out of everything, and drive ourselves nuts with “if only” scenarios. Yeah, in some perfect alternate reality maybe there’s a version of me that’s dancing with rainbows and unicorns. But I can think of plenty more ways things could have gone much worse. And to top it all off, I know that without some level of shit, I wouldn’t be the person who I am today. And I like who I am, and feel grateful for the opportunities I had to do some good when things went sideways. I like that I’m the kind of person who still tears up thinking about the senseless death of thousands, because it means that despite the monsters I’ve fought, I’m still a mostly good human.

So thanks, random guy on the side of the road holding that flag. I’m glad you’re out there, and I’m glad we still remember.