veterans of foreign wars

The Day We Shrunk the World

There’s a common narrative about the meaning of what happened in Hawaii 75 years ago this past week. It sounds something like this. The forces of evil, previously growing unchecked in their pursuit to conquer the world, had finally awoken a sleeping giant. And though they dealt her a vicious blow, they sealed their doomed fates that morning. The forces of the free people of the world answered back and with a clear and decisive victory for good in an inarguable statement of the strength of moral and just authority.

It’s not a bad narrative. And it’s not entirely untrue. There has been no more clear example of the greatness of the American expression of liberty, democracy and capitalism than the conduct of our people, our industry and our government during World War II. And for a little while, those that perpetrated the injustice of pitching the globe into a war that would kill 60 million men and women did suffer harsh and near final consequence. But both our greatness and their destruction were perhaps less permanent than any of us like to admit. Germany and Japan, a within the span of two generations are now the third and fourth largest economies in the world. Their people enjoy a stability and quality of life reserved for a handful of societies in human history. And we Americans, the victors, have found ourselves tangled in near constant war and have enjoyed the spoils of victory much differently than perhaps we would have thought.

A few centuries ago, before he became a musical and then a political debate, Alexander Hamilton pointed to the true consequence of Pearl Harbor, a century and a half before it happened. As he urged the American people towards union and the acceptance of the newly created Constitution, Hamilton pointed to the poor state of Europe after centuries of war and division.

“The history of war, in that quarter of the globe, is no longer a history of nations subdued and empires overturned, but of towns taken and retaken; of battles that decide nothing; of retreats more beneficial than victories; of much effort and little acquisition.”

Hamilton dreamed of a union unlike Europe, so vast and sturdy that we would be free from threat of external incursions. And he was right. For 150 years, the only material damage ever dealt to us was by our own hand in the bloody war against ourselves to end slavery. But Hamilton could never have dreamed of a world where huge ships could travel the Pacific in a week’s time and launch things called airplanes to destroy an entire fleet of ships in an hour. And he could never in his wildest dreams imagined atomic energy and the horrors of nuclear warfare that ultimately answered them. Pearl Harbor was the moment in time when the world shrunk. And thereafter, no one was ever too big or too united to be free from threat. Pearl Harbor was the stark realization that forever more, anything worth owning was to be owned by someone with the means to defend it.

The lesson of the last 75 years, if we take the time to complete the narrative of what Pearl Harbor means, is one where we’ve realized Hamilton’s vision in painful ways. Where America has fought battles that decide nothing. Where our retreats have been more beneficial than our victories. Where we have exerted much effort with little acquisition.

The world has changed. And the threats have changed with it. Small groups of men with conviction can inflict great injury on world powers. Foreign entities can encroach through cyberspace to impact sacred instruments of democracy. These threats are real and dangerous. But they are very different. And we appear to be content to respond to them with the weapons of centuries past-generals.

Be careful when you respond to different problems with the same answer. National security in 2016 is perhaps not as dependent on military strength as it once was. I say this as someone who spent most of his adult life in the service of arms. I appreciate the notion of service and the benefits of military strength. But we should have learned over the last 75 years that fighting ideas or economic systems with armies, generally just kills our young men and women and not the ideas. And if you staff the team responsible for the security of our people in 2017 and beyond, with generals who fight kinetic wars, as the incoming administration has, then it begs the question, what, if anything have we learned?

Fighting the last war is always how the next war starts. But winning it tends to come with the realization that you’re doing it again.

Well, we’re doing it again.

The Lost Ones

Not that long ago, someplace far away where American soldiers and sailors were deployed, there were two brothers. One was good at building bombs and the other was different. And the one that built the bombs used the one that was different to put those bombs in places and on things that killed people. The one that built the bombs did it because he believed he was fighting for one side in a war. And the other one did it because his brother told him to. He didn’t really understand why. He just knew what he was supposed to do.

First bombs…then play. First bombs…then eat.

One day they were both captured. First was the young man with the far off stare and the odd walk that fidgeted with his hands. He flapped his ears sometimes with his fingers. He giggled with delight when he saw people he liked and he couldn’t resist watching his favorite cartoon over and over again on the beat up television in his family’s home. He wasn’t hard to find. He wasn’t hiding. But he was confused and scared when they took him away. He didn’t understand. He just wanted his brother. And his TV.

The one who built the bombs was a little harder to find but he was captured a few hours later. Lives were saved in the community. It was a good thing that was done.

I’m not exactly sure that’s how it went down. Once, a long time ago there actually were two brothers planting roadside bombs in some far away place. And they were captured by my team. I’d forgotten about it for a long time. It was an unremarkable mission. Pretty easy, actually. I filed it away somewhere in the back of my head when I redeployed with a thousand other memories of far off places and semi-dramatic events. It wasn’t that memorable. Certainly not traumatic. It sat in a heap of things sort of like it.

One of the things that helped me calm myself in the weeks after I got back was to run. It’s a habit I’ve kept up. Long, slow runs through the southern California hills lubricate the synapsis. Endorphins remove the self conscious barriers of connection. I often find myself cycling through the long slideshow of my past. It’s a meditative experience many have. One day, a year or so after I’d taken off the uniform for good, on a particularly beautiful and challenging run a thought popped into my head from a distant corner of my conscience. It was about the two brothers and a random thing one of the locals had told one my collectors. I read it in a report.

“One of them isn’t right. Like a child.”

And then I remembered the picture of him. When you work a target deck like I did you spend a lot of time with whatever picture you have of whoever you’re hunting. They sort of burn into your brain. And I remember his even now as I write this. He looked a little off. Like he wasn’t all there. At the time, I found it unremarkable. We heard lots of things about lots of people when we did that work. Most of them weren’t true. But we knew with certainty that those two were trying to hurt people. So they had to be stopped. And we stopped them.

My life as a hunter in the desert and the one I have lived every day since crashed into each other as I climbed higher into the mountains, running harder and harder, my lungs burning, the music in my earbuds blaring. A thought that I wish I never had came to me. It was the memory of that picture and the look on that man’s face. And then I realized that it was the look my autistic and cognitively impaired son has in most pictures we’ve taken of him. My son who had been diagnosed on that deployment, after that mission. And then the hidden guilt of countless missions and operations, the times when in another environment the human part of my brain might have been more engaged, took over. I filled in the blanks with a guilty imagination. A story formed, and I could only see my son in that situation. I couldn’t shake it. And for a long time it’s something I thought about, even though I really didn’t want to. And it hurt.

First bombs…then play. He must have been so scared.

Veterans have lots of stories in different shapes and forms. Nearly all of them are not the blood and guts stories anyone makes into a movie. Mostly its boredom and weird things. Or things that just make you feel bad for no reason at all. And no one gets to hear them. Because they’re nearly impossible to share in the course of normal human interaction. You can’t. So you don’t. And the result is that vets are walking around in a world where people share their thoughts and minds in real time  and we may never again be in the same room with someone who knows what it smells like when someone vomits on the hot barrel of a .50 caliber machine gun and it starts to boil and bubble off it. Or what it feels like to hold an eight-year-old at gunpoint because he wandered into your camp looking for water. And it scared you.

They’re not remarkable stories. But we all have them. And we move around 21st century America with them in our heads and an unmet need to share a language no one but us can understand. We live, at least a little bit, apart from everyone else. No matter how close we try to get to them.

The common understanding is that veterans suffer invisible wounds because of what happened over there. And some are. But the harder truth is that the greater risk comes after. When the service member detaches and loses the thing that held everything together, the mission, the people, the shared life. The knowing that there are people that grew up in the same house as you with the same weird things. That loss is complete and sudden. And that alone is trauma enough to matter.

It’s not what the American people asked us to do that often gets us. It’s what happens to some of us when we stop. And when we lost our Tribe.

If you want to go deeper, find Sebastian Junger’s Tribe and read it. Then pass it to a vet.

Because this isn’t about pity or public guilt. It’s about helping someone find their way back. And until they do, they’re lost. And the ones who stay lost too long, stay lost forever.