The Cost of Peace, The Price of War

I want to share this because it really impacted me. One of my new friends in San Diego is a marine grunt (infantry) and The other night he was telling me about being in Afghanistan. What he told me changed the way I viewed our military, I viewed the war and viewed my friend.

He only served one full tour in Afghanistan. He counts him self among the extremely lucky in the Marines. He has PTSD, like many or most that come back. He explained it wasn't from the fighting, he was never wounded and by comparison didn't see too much crazy stuff go down. He was explaining it is the stress. Every time you take a step you don't know if it will be your last, if there is an IED, if you will randomly get shot or blown up as a car passes. Every single waking second is filled with the realization that you could die any second and it wouldn't be abnormal. You reach a point where you break and you don't fear it anymore, you actually start to hope you get to be the lucky guy who gets torn in half by the IED or taken out by a bullet. You just pray it's fatal.

He was talking about how combat is nothing like you expect. You don't see them, you just hear gun shots, you have an idea of the direction and then your entire platoon opens fire in that direction just spraying and praying. It goes "pew pew"....pause..."BOOM BOOM TAT TAT ASDSADFKSSDFNNSAFSDF" (every gun going off) and then dead silence. He emphasized this point, complete silence. Not a couple little *bangs* form a few guns, everyone stops in an instant. It goes from pure chaos to nothing in the blink of an eye. He pointed out that recent movies have done a great job of capturing modern warfare and battles, but this is the one thing he has never seen them get right, they are always just a little off, like it is something that can only be done right when it is real. In about 30 seconds they just dropped 1400+ bullets into a mountainside. One bullet hit one person they were shooting at and it didn't even kill him.

 Everyone is in a single file line for the most part and about 10-20 yards apart (in case of IEDS). He heard gunfire at him and could see the branches directly above him (under tree) getting cut down. He realized he was only feet away from tiny metal pieces of death. They could have aimed an inch lower and got him. How easy it is to die, how easy it is for another person to kill, but yet somehow he was still standing unharmed.

He was in a city and a guy turned a corner and pointed an RPG at them and fired, but he forgot to take the diamond tip off it (what prevents it from exploding on you) and they watched it bounce past them, they turn to the guy and he just drops the weapon and puts his hands up, the commanding office just looks at him and fires, guy dies. We react to that partially as "how cruel, he gave up." But not a one of them batted an eye or gave it a second thought, no one even cared. He just try to kill them, it is just simpler and legal to fire back. He said they became so desensitized to death it just doesn't even matter anymore. A lot of the time people firing at them aren't even real insurgents, just locals wanting to brag to their friends that they took shots at the American. It is pretty much a penis measuring competition at times.

He told me stories of his friends that died or got injured. When he was talking about it all he was a ghost. I have hung out with this guy multiple times, funny, light hearted, jovial, a real fun guy. But when he talked about it he changed everything. His voice, his posture and most of all his eyes. His he spoke slowly, just like how people speak when they are trying to remember and explain a dream they had the night before. His posture was slumped, he looked defeated, like he has given up on something and finally his eyes, they looked like a ghost. They were filled with only two things: the past and horrible memories. He wasn't looking at us, he couldn't see us. When he told those stories he was seeing them again like watching the TV. He was in a different world, he was returning to a nightmare that he can never fully escape. 

I want to retell a few of those stories, but I just don't think I can. I think those are his stories to tell, they were his friends, his brother-in-arms. ha, brother-in-arms. I always thought I knew what that meant. You are in the trenches together, you are close, like brothers. But I realized that, though I am not wrong, that I still didn't understand it at all. I am close to my brothers; I love them dearly and consider them two of my best friends. But a brother-in-arms can be even closer. They shared the most terrible moments of their lives together. They will always be able to understand one another in a way none of the rest of us can, not even their real brothers. They will understand and forgive them when they have PTSD, when they freak out to fireworks going off, to when they get angry over nothing, but yet are angry at everything. They won't pity them, they won't sympathize, they will do something only a brother-in-arms can do, empathize. They know when they look at each other, no matter how calm and peaceful they seem on the outside, they are sharing the same hell on the inside. Some will grow past it, some will forget or remember it as a hazy dream from a different world, some will be strong for years until they get older and, like my Grandfather who fought in WW2, will wake up screaming because the only thing they see when they sleep are the ghosts of their past, the ghosts of the ones who didn't get lucky enough to see old age and some will make it back home from these countries, from these wars but they won't see old age either. I think we sometimes forget that it isn't just bullets or bombs that kill and wound our soldiers. Sometimes the emotional wounds are just as bad and worse. Sometimes the emotional wounds are fatal too.

I just want to say thank you to every single member of the armed forces, abroad and domestic. Thank you for your sacrifice, thank you for doing what so many of us are too selfish or scared to do. I want our troops to come home now and stay home. I used to want them home for economic reasons, but now I want them home not for me, but for them. I don't want to see one more solider lose their arm or leg or life. I don't want one more Mother to bury her son or Father his daughter because we are in a country that we shouldn't have had to be in the first place. I don't want the US to be the world’s police anymore. Whether it is our job or not, it just isn't worth the cost anymore.