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jslaird-blog-blog · 5 years ago

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Expecting too much from Humanity

I’ve been accused one more than one occasion of being cocky. In my defense, that behavior was typically reserved for when I was *really* good at something. That being said, I know I’m not perfect. Far from it in fact. I’m exceedingly hard on myself for no reason sometimes. It’s made me stronger at times, and crushed my motivation in other arenas where I thought I was failing at something. I think it’s a byproduct of how I was raised; stern conservative Christian parents who expected the best, but simultaneously leaving me to figure out a lot of things on my own. Either way, I developed a fairly thick skin when it came to outward appearances. Inside though, I was just a big mess.

After a 21-year career in the military, I thought that I had a pretty good handle on things from a mental and emotional perspective, but over the last couple of years, that’s proven to be more optimism than anything else. As hard as I am on myself, and knowing what I am and am not capable of, I tend to expect the same from others. Lately though, I’ve found that experience to be profoundly disappointing and it makes me question why I bothered to serve in uniform.

You see, I never really bought in to the patriotic themes that so many people tend to associate with being in the military. I don’t wave or wear the American flag, I don’t care if people stand, kneel, or sit during the nation anthem, and I know that dying in a war zone doesn’t always mean you’re a hero, but maybe just a poor kid from a podunk town who was sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time when a stray mortar round interrupted dinner. I joined the military because I had dropped out of junior college and working 2 jobs at the local mall wasn’t going to come with a retirement plan or let me see the world. In short, I enlisted because it was personally beneficial. But somewhere in those 2 decades, even the most liberal-minded of us would still acknowledge that our service to the country meant something more than a paycheck. If nothing else, maybe we were proud of the ideals that the country was supposed to represent, even if the reality was flawed. Sure, we had our disagreements with the policies and politics of war, but we remained in service as a counter-balance to what was wrong with the system.

After each deployment, it got a little harder though. Between commanders that “drank the Kool Aid” a little too eagerly, or seeing Americans embracing a government that seemed to exist solely to reward the worst behavior while mistreating the most vulnerable, my heart wasn’t in it anymore, and I decided it was time to ‘punch out.’

Being a civilian again has been a bumpy ride. You carry around a lot of stupid shit in your head as a former military member, and you have to filter and translate all of it into something more palatable for civilized society. The job market doesn’t always know what to make of you, and sometimes the things you’ve spent decades working to perfect aren’t as marketable as you thought they’d be. Society itself has moved on too. Even if you think you’ve kept up with all the latest, life isn’t the same when you’re not wearing the uniform anymore. All those times people saw you in uniform and thanked you for your service? Gone. Now you’re just another stupid liberal who allegedly hates America because you don’t think the CIA should be allowed to torture people to death, or that the sitting US President shouldn’t openly befriend and emulate third-world dictators. It’s insulting and hypocritical. One minute, the people I swore to defend are shouting how much they support the troops. The next minute, they’re throwing the beliefs and ideals I served out the window in favor of a demagogue.

Things that we used to revere like science, reason, and the value of hard work, have been utterly abandoned in support of a personality cult that wipes its ass with a flag in one hand and beats a bible with the other. Willing ignorance and brazen stupidity have taken precedence over facts and morality. That is the world I feel like I’m forced to exist in, and it makes me furious.

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jslaird-blog-blog · 5 years ago

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Welcome Back to Bad Ghosts

If it wasn’t for Google sending me a “Happy Birthday to this account you never use!” and my therapist telling me that I should start a blog, I think this page would have been long forgotten. I dusted off my password, and ta-da, here I am. If you’re looking for something deep and meaningful, I’m not sure what I have to offer, but if an unfiltered view of my world is entertaining, read ahead. There really isn’t a start or stopping point, and I’m not OCD enough to put this in any kind of sequential order, so please excuse the mess...

In December of 2010, I deployed to Balad Air Base in Iraq with 8 other younger troops from the base I was stationed at in Texas. That’s me chilling with a buddy of mine during one of the stretches of time when mortar rounds weren’t being randomly lobbed at our base. All things considered, it shouldn’t have been a ‘bad’ deployment. Major operations were drawing down, troops levels were too, and our base had fast food, a movie theater, and a pool. There is a trade-off when you’re in a war zone with no war to fight though. When people aren’t actively engaged in combat operations in a deployed location, they start to get bored, do stupid shit, or get stuck too deep inside their own heads. I wasn’t above it either. Back home, I had a marriage that wasn’t going well and our 16 month-old son had just been diagnosed with autism. Dealing with that kind of bullshit would be hard enough all by itself, but dealing with it from the other side of the globe was even more so. In short, my nerves were fried most days. But I put on my game face every day and did what needed to be done for the sake of the larger mission, because that’s what you’re expected to do. It’s what the military expects, right, wrong, or indifferent. One of the younger guys on my team wasn’t able to maintain focus though.

About a month or so into the deployment, probably 8pm or so in the evening, the Flight Superintendent started beating on the door to the little plywood trailer that I was calling home. He told me I had 30 minutes to throw on my uniform, pack a go-bag for 48 hours, and meet him in front of the base hospital. He left and I figured he’d fill me on the details when I met back up with him, so I got dressed, threw some extra uniforms in a backpack and hauled ass over to the hospital. The Sup’ was already waiting for me in the hospital parking lot when I got there and as we walked into the building, he let me know in a lowered voice that a guy from my team had intentionally lit his fucking face on fire. When we walked in to the ward, the guy was sitting on the side of a hospital bed with a shiny red face where the med techs had wiped burn salve over his nose, cheeks and forehead. The burns were superficial, but between my unit leadership and the recommendation of the medical team, it had been decided that the guy needed a mental health evaluation outside the combat zone immediately, and I was chosen to escort him to the Landstuhl medical facility in Germany.

We stayed put at the hospital until it was time to get bussed over to the flightline with a handful of other injured personnel that were being medevac’ed out of the country. Most were walking wounded, but there were a few on stretchers that I watched the Flight Medicine folks load on the C-17 Globemaster. Sometime around 2am, we were finally ‘wheels up’ and making our way to Germany. It was early February, so when we touched down at Ramstein Air Base it was maybe 30 degrees and snowing. I didn’t really need cold weather gear back in Iraq, but I was glad I thought to bring some with me. A “Blue Bird” school bus was waiting for us on on the tarmac and we loaded up for the short drive to the hospital. I wasn’t sure what I thought I would see on arrival, but as we pulled up to the entrance to hospital, there were dozens of medical personnel standing on either side of the bus, ready to move the most seriously wounded off the bus first. They moved quickly and efficiently, talking to their patients as they escorted them into the building. For the less severely injured and walking wounded, we were directed to different treatment clinics in the hospital for check-in, and any escorts were shuffled over to an old dormitory building where we could check into a temporary room, drop our bags, get a briefing on the do’s and don’ts, and then get back to the patients we were escorting. The whole process was so routine to these folks that the speed of it all kind of surprised me. They were good at what they did, and it showed.

After an hour or so, I was allowed to meet back up with the guy from my team. He’d gotten another exam of his facial burns and the docs decided that he decided he was still a risk to himself, so I was ordered not to let him out of my sight or leave him unattended unless he was being treated by the staff. The next 24 hours was a blur of dragging my guy from one appointment to the next, walking though the wintry German weather from one building to another, as the medics and mental health team decided what to do with him. As we did all this, everywhere I looked I saw dozens and dozens of injured military members in various stages of recovery and rehabilitation. Crutches, patched eyes, missing limbs, large bandages stanching wounds of indiscriminate size, shape, and origin. As weird as it sounds, a lot of the guys I bumped into were actually really upbeat about their injuries. Maybe they were just glad to be alive, but they were generally pretty positive. By the end of our second day, the docs had decided that my guy wasn’t in any kind of mental state to be in a combat zone, so they were going to house him in a separate holding facility until he could be flown back stateside. This was good news to me, because I (maybe selfishly) had felt like I was babysitting a grown adult who just pulled a stupid-ass stunt for a ticket home. Regardless of his medical and mental condition, he wasn’t my responsibility anymore and that left me with enough downtime to go back to main base Ramstein for some shopping and a proper meal before I hopped a flight back to Iraq the next day. It was still early in the afternoon when I got back though, so I thought I’d walk over to the USO and see what else they had to offer before I called it a night. They had hot coffee, cold soda, sandwiches, and every kind if snack food and toiletry item a transient troop could want. Hanging out there beat sitting in an empty dorm room, so I decided to kick back in a comfy chair and watch a movie or two before calling it a night. Every so often, I’d go top off my coffee and step outside for a cigarette, and I’d end up shooting the breeze with the other smokers.

Most of us at the ‘smoke pit’ were medical escorts but we were next door to the main hospital, so we also had the occasional patient huddled with us underneath the roof of what was essentially a plexiglass bus stop. We smoked one cigarette after another in the gently falling snow, swapping stories about where we’d been, how we ended up in Germany, and where we were headed next. If there was a wounded guy in the pit with us, we’d ask him how he was doing and maybe catch a war story or two. I eventually went back inside, finished watching Big Trouble in Little China, and figured my cinematic experience had peaked so it was time to go to bed. I stopped by the smoke pit one last time and saw a kid who couldn’t have been older than 20, sitting in a wheelchair with both of his legs sticking straight out, casted up in plaster, draped with a hospital blanket, and supported by the chair. This was a little more severe than some of the other guys I’d seen out here, but he’d obviously made it outside on his own, so I thought I could offer a little friendly chat while we smoked. I started off simple, because in spite of the courteous nod we gave each other, the expression on the kid’s face didn’t look like he was in a mood to talk much.

“Where’d you come in from?” I asked.

“Afghanistan.”

“Damn, man. I was there in ‘06-’07. Guess it’s still hot over there...”

“Yeah.”

“You gonna be okay?” I asked, not really knowing what else to say at that point.

“I was the lucky one.” the kid said, tears welling up in his eyes. I was completely lost for words at this point, not sure if I should apologize or hear the kid out, or what. I was definitely going to leave the kid alone and try not to bother him any further, but he just kept talking.

“Propane tank IED took our our vehicle. I got blown out of the turret, but the door hydraulics were fucked and my Sergeant and my friend were stuck inside. They burned up and got hit when the ammo starting cooking off.”

I could see the cigarette tremble between his lips as he spoke and his eyes looked like they would overflow in a river of tears at any second, but the kid choked them all back. Not a single drop rolled down his cheek as we both sat in in the remaining silence. I finished my own cigarette and asked if he needed anything. He said “Nah” and stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets, pulling out a pair of gloves. I asked “You sure man? I can’t give you a lift someplace...?”

“I’m good.” he said as he put his gloves on and started wheeling himself back towards the side door of the main hospital building.

I cannot begin to explain to you what I felt as I walked away from the smoke pit and the kid, back to my own room that night. Seeing the pain in that kids’ eyes as he told his story ripped my fucking heart out and left it in the snow. I’d never met him before, and would never see him again. I didn’t even think to ask his name or offer some pitiful words of encouragement. His story just fucking floored me. Everything I had been dealing with in my own life up until that point just sounded pathetic and I was hit with a overwhelming emotional reaction I’d never known before. It was like someone filled the vastness of space with agony and anger, and it swallowed the kid whole as I watched in despair.

As I sit here and type this, I don’t want you to think that I could fathom what this kid was feeling, or that my own sorrow for him was greater than what he was going through. My own life is relatively tame and despite some of the shitty things I’ve seen, I keep going. Really, the only reason I’m telling this story is because my therapist said it might be good to write my experiences down. I won’t lecture you on the horrors of war, or tell you how much I loathe the powers-that-be sending our youth off to get killed in some far-flung country for some cause that means next to nothing in the grand scheme of things. If there was a point to any of this writing, I suppose it would be for me to let you know that this is what I carry around with me. Behind every smile, behind every sarcastic quip, every silly post on social media, there’s the memory of this blown-up kid with broken legs, choking back tears in the snow.

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