The shirts are also a reminder to those that see us.  There’s a quote in “Heartbreak Ridge” that goes something like this:

This is the new Marine Corps. The new breed. Characters like you are an anachronism. You should be sealed in a case that reads break glass only in the event of war.

A lot of people don’t appreciate the military, the sheepdogs.  They don’t want to be reminded that there is evil in the world.  Bad people out there who want to do bad things to us.  They’d like to live in a Utopia and think if they believe in it hard enough, it’ll magically happen.  And soldiers who cross their paths in their daily life are reminders that that isn’t the case.  Funny, even though we’re a country at war, there’s still talks of reducing benefits to service members and veterans to save money.  Guys who were called upon and sent into harm’s way right after 9/11 when we were terrified they’d now like to shuffle off quietly into a corner.  To tuck under glass until the next time they’re needed.

I didn’t sit down to write those last couple of paragraphs.  I was just going to throw up a quick shout-out and a link to the new shirt from the guys at RANGER UP.  But I guess I needed to say thank you to those guys over there.  Keep making the great products and I’ll keep buying them.

Anyways, here’s their new shirt.   I hope they don’t mind, but I’m cutting and pasting the description down below.

The old saying goes that a Veteran is someone who at one point signed a check to the United States for an amount “up to and including his or her life”. It’s pithy and gets the point across, but the reality of having lost a good friend is very different. It’s made even more stark when I meet soldiers now. I just didn’t realize how young I was then. I didn’t feel young. I wasn’t making “young” decisions. I knew exactly what I was doing and what was at stake. Just like they do now. Just like those close friends we have lost did.

Invariably, when a bunch of vets get together and the night is slipping away too quickly, as they often do, someone will buy a round. Usually Maker’s, Jack, or Jim. We know the toast before it comes. The odd thing about being together is that spoken or unspoken, we all know who is missing – who would have been there for this reunion, otherwise.

For most people in America, or Britain, or Australia or Canada or any of our allies, the casualties are a brief moment on the news, never again to be thought of or considered. Only the families of the fallen are left to bear the weight of the loss…and of course us. We know what they gave up. We suffered the same pains, but somehow we came out okay. And they were so damn young.

To us and those like us, we grow fewer every day.

And yes, there are damn few left.

I’m trying to organize a get together of some of the guys that I deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan with.  Even though it’s only been a couple years since we got back, the group is already smaller for various reasons.  Several guys moved away, several are deployed again.  One was arrested and dropped off the face of the earth, a couple are leaving for points unknown.  Before the circle gets any smaller, I want the opportunity to enjoy their fellowship again.  And yes, sometime during the night we’ll raise a glass with this toast.

So my sunglasses show up, and I’ve been trying to wear them around the last week or two, but I haven’t been as thrilled with them as I’d like.  This morning I put them on and then was taking them off and putting them back on looking at the sky.  They’ve got polarized lenses and they give everything a brownish/yellow tint.  I was looking at the mountains this morning and for a split sec was reminded of being overseas.  That dusty haze to everything, kind of like LA.  But of course, it’s not LA that springs to mind, it’s Iraq and Afghanistan.  Which just made me wonder how long is that going to be my frame of reference for pretty much everything in my life? 

Inner dialogue example:

-Huh.  Life Sucks.

-Yeah, it does, but at least I’m not in Iraq

or all my stories that start with:

-This one time, in Iraq….

I don’t want to be one of those guys who is 70 years old, bellied up to a VFW bar, reliving the “glory days”, but right now, at 38 years old, my 17 year military career is pretty significant.  And the 3 years of it I was deployed in combat zones were pretty signficant as well.  It’s kind of hard to be inside myself and determine when to be worried.

The main caveat to this story is that I’m a sensitive guy.  A touchy-feely-nancy boy.  My feelings are easily hurt, I”m anxious to please and seek approval.  Over the years, I’ve gotten less so, but in my childhood, teens and early adulthood I was pretty bad.  During my childhood my mom was trying to do the right thing, she made me read “Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret” as a kid so I’d be sensitive to changes female friends were going through and aware of things like menstral cycles and PMS and what not.  I received multiple lectures about how to respect a woman, the responsibilities that I accepted for a date’s safety when I asked her out and she accepted, warnings about unintentionally intimidating a girl with my size (hah!) or pressuring her/taking advantage of her sexually.  While good intentioned, all of these lectures weren’t really balanced and left me feeling like I was going to grow up to be some evil, vile person unless on constant guard.

Growing up I had two sisters, one older and one younger.  I heard all of the warnings to them about being safe, presenting the wrong image/impression/idea to a boy, the dangers of date rape and the general badness of the male population.  As they started dating I got to hear about all the horror stories of this jerk or the other, and generally felt like I should be apologizing on a daily basis to them as a representative of my gender. 

My first experience with sex was with a wonderful woman.  I wish I could say that I had the clearest, fondest memories of that first time, but it’s a blur, in my frenzied state I didn’t take the time to savor the moment.  I do remember it being pleasant, obviously I had a happy ending.  I was excited, well on my way to manhood!  I was expecting to be like a kid in a candy store, to finally try all the things I’d heard about.  Unfortunately it didn’t work out that way.  This wonderful woman, this girl of my dreams  had unfortunately been raped by an ex boyfriend.  I didn’t realize it, but this had happened just a few months before I met her and while our first encounter was great, subsequent ones could be hit or miss.  We’d start and something would remind her of what happened and she’d shut down.  Demons like that aren’t exorcised in just a few weeks or months.  She was awesome, and strong and dealt with it way better than could be expected, but it probably wasn’t the best introduction to sex for my personality type.  I never pressured her, and I tried like crazy to keep the disappointment off my face, out of my voice when she’d promise an encounter and then it’d fall through, when we’d start and then she’d push me away.  Like all relationships, the current interest pays for the sins of the past. 

Now, to be clear, I’m not trying to compare my minor discomfort to the seriously tragic events that occur to women who have been raped, I’m just sharing my experiences, my story, not theirs.  Their story is theirs to tell.  But where did all of this leave me?  A sexually frustrated mess, that’s where.  With the aforementioned caveat in mind, I think it was just about equal parts me being scared of being shot down and me being worried about being a jerk to someone that turned me into a nervous wreck at the thought of calling a girl and asking her out.  And if she was actually aggressive and chased me a little and we got past the first couple dates to sex?  I was just incredibly happy to be in the moment and would really go with the flow, if she was that aggressive, chances were she’d take us where she wanted to go and I followed her lead.  Not submissive, just not…  something. 

It wasn’t until the internet that I started to realize I wasn’t a sexual deviant perv for wanting what I wanted, stuff I’d never, ever admit.  That I wasn’t going to hell for what was in actuality some pretty vanilla sex acts.  And it was a complete shock to me to realize that some girls actually liked and even craved some of that stuff too!  It wasn’t offensive, it wasn’t degrading, it was just good, clean, adult fun.  There were MUCH deeper levels of depravity than where I was.

The problem was that the damage was done.  The inner voice that might’ve wanted to take charge, wanted to be aggressive, wanted to fulfill some of those urges was silenced for years and even now isn’t too loud.  I can take charge on the battlefield, I can take charge in the middle of a severe outtage in a Data Center, but I’m not the take charge man on the relationship front.

And it’s not just sexual in nature, although that’s the direction I originally took it in, because of the posts that sparked this.  Because of my need to please, my desire to avoid conflict, and the upbringing that I misconstrued to mean that in order to show love for others, you have to put your wants and needs on a shelf and live a life of service I’m left scratching my head and more than a little confused about what to do next.  And I had examples from both sides, my dad gave up tons to provide for and support the family, but I’m sure my mom’s childhood dreams weren’t to be a stay at home mother, to have a meal on the table every night by 6:00, to mop the floor on her hands and knees and to sit in the kitchen at an angle where she would the tv and work her way through ironing a small mountain of clothes every Sunday night. 

What’s the moral of this story?  I dunno.  Probably to exercise caution when having discussions with kids.  Like all forms of communications, there’s going to be some interference and the strong possibility that the message that was sent wasn’t the message that was received.  I think raising good kids who have a healthy respect for others is probably enough, going too far down specific roads can lead to some counterproductive and undesirable results.  For me, the lesson that’s become apparent from re-reading this post while editing it, is that I have to be more accountable for my own happiness in relationships.

The purpose of our mission was threefold.  My boss wanted to see the conditions his troops were living in and familiarize himself with the territory he was responsible for covering.  He wanted to meet each of the outgoing teams in their respective areas and get a feel for the situation on the ground.  And then he needed to inspect all of the gear for accountability.  He was about to assume responsibility for it and wanted to see it with his own eyes.  If there were any problems the outgoing guys would have to fix them before they went home.  Lastly, we were being taught how to handle those long, cross country drives.  Tactics and techniques that would keep us alive.  And the first night of driving, less than an hour after leaving the base and less than 24 hrs in country we got our first lesson.  We had slowed down a little for a turn and took small-arms fire.  Nobody was hurt, nothing was damaged but it was a text-book ambush site and we could’ve been messed up bad.  The unit we were replacing wasn’t following basic, time-proven patrolling tactics and had driven right into a known danger area without proper precautions.  Because we were in the “passenger seat” we were helpless.  I was in the back seat of one of the up-armored HMMWVs and couldn’t shoot, couldn’t really see much but the muzzle flashes, couldn’t drive, couldn’t see the displays or work the radios.  All I could do was sit there and ride it out.  I don’t want to over state this.  There wasn’t a sense of panic, it wasn’t something that kept me awake at night with nightmares.  “Eh, we’re being shot at.  Welcome to Iraq.”  What there was was just an…  impatience, a minor frustration that I couldn’t be more active, that I was forced into a passive role.  The role was appropriate because of our newness in country and lack of experience, but it was symbolized by my placement in the vehicle.

Once the ride alongs were finished, I was never in that position again, by design.  I was always either the mission commander, a driver or a turret monkey.  Of all of those, I definitely enjoyed the turret time the best.  In the turret you had the ability that everyone in the vehicle wanted when you were under attack, you had the ability to return fire.  You were the eyes and ears of the vehicle.  You weren’t cooped up in a tin can, you could move and see and breath.  Sure you were a little more exposed to danger, but you didn’t think about that.  If you were doing your job right you helped protect the vehicle from those dangers.  And on the open roads, when you were doing 60 mph under clear blue skies in the wide open, you could almost forget where you were.  I spent time growing up in Arizona, and so much of the terrain and weather reminded me of “home”.  When I was in Arizona in college I bought my first Jeep Wrangler and drove it with the top off from Phoenix to Tucson whenever possible.  One of my fondest memories is of driving it out to San Diego for a weekend.  That turret time could remind me of that.

At the beginning of the summer I read this blog post about triggers, and even commented on it, but I didn’t do that much self examination to identify my own.  I didn’t even read the signs that I had some.  When I wrote  “Back In the Moment” a friend linked to it off of FaceBook and tagged it with “Everyone has their own triggers”.

When I first came home from some of the tours, I had some of the similar symptoms other vets do.  Hyper vigilance, easily startled by loud noises, etc.  NYE and 4th of July are/were a special kind of hell.  Always scanning for dangers, always thinking three steps ahead in ”what-if” scenarios.  A couple of the things were particularly funny/odd to me though.  I’d spend mornings in the driveway arguing with myself about whether or not to ride the motorcycle without a helmet.  Unless it was winter or raining, I couldn’t force myself to drive the truck, but I also couldn’t put the helmet on.  I felt much too claustrophobic.  When I did drive the truck I couldn’t put the seatbelt on.  This summer, when the transmission of my old vehicle started to slip, I finally decided to compromise.  I bought another Jeep and spent the summer with the doors and top off.  I was insanely happy.  Frequently I’d bust out laughing while driving down the interstate for no reason other than pure bliss at having my bare foot hanging out the door and the wind in my hair.  I saw more of Colorado in one summer than I had in a decade.

When I got the word that I was being released from military service this summer, it hurt.  But after the initial shock and anger wore off I realized how much stress I was letting go.  I hadn’t realized that I hadn’t completely allowed myself to relax.  That’s probably not true, I talked about it, the uncertainty of whether or not to be a paranoid freak at home so that if I did deploy again it wouldn’t take so long to remember all the things to watch out for, or to let it all go and have to relearn/remember it all again the next time I went out the door.  But talking about it, and really analyzing the effect it had on me, or consciously making the decision between the two are totally different things.  I acknowledged the quandry but didn’t dwell on it.  Then all of a sudden I was out, and slowly, over the course of several weeks and months I relaxed more and more.  And it wasn’t until I relaxed that I realized how bad off I’d been.  Nor did I realize how much I was sticking my head in the sand and ignoring it, refusing to connect dots between events in my past and my current behaviors and fears.  I think it’s almost like a superstition, that if you think about it too much, dwell on it, you’ll laugh at yourself or start second guessing your instincts and reactions and it will all come apart.

I’ve been able to start wearing a seatbelt again, and sometimes a helmet.  It’s not a full faced helmet like I used to, but it’s a start.  And it’s still weird to me.  I used to religiously wear a helmet, used to be more than a little scared to get on the interstate without one.  Although I quasi understand some of the…  almost claustraphobia about wearing one, I still can’t believe how sudden the switch was.  It’s not like I all of a sudden thought I looked cooler without one, and it’s not like it was a fear of wearing one.  I couldn’t.  It’s like in the sci-fi movies where someone has been programmed or hypnotized not to shoot someone else.  And no matter how hard they want to, no matter how hard they try, they just can’t.  It was the same thing with me for the helmet.  I’d make fun of myself, I’d try to bribe myself.  Friends would nag me, I’d be embarrassed to admit it if it ever came up, and yet I still couldn’t do it.

Knowing the source of the problem isn’t always an immediate fix.  In discussions with people this summer, I was able to logically explain the link between the sense of freedom I had in my doorless, topless Jeep and the sense of helplessness the average soldier feels riding in the backseat of a HMMWV when it’s under fire.  But it still didn’t make me feel any better putting the doors and top on this fall, in preparation of colder weather.  If I was never, ever carting passengers around I think I’d try to survive the winter without it as much possible, maybe just a bikini top over the front seats.  And it wasn’t until I wrote “Back In the Moment” that I connected the final, obvious dots.  It went from being a generalization about how “soldiers” who are worth their salt feel in that position to being about me, specifically.  Me feeling caged, me feeling frustrated by passivity.  I understand a little better why putting that top on the Jeep felt like closing the lid on my own coffin.  The fun part will be seeing what I do with this trigger identification.

Then this summer I got an HP TouchPad.  Same thing, came with a beta Kindle app pre-installed on it.  No Nook support yet, and with the demise of the platform, iffy at best.  But how much does it actually cost to port existing apps (or write from scratch a new app), compared to the risk of losing customers like me to Kindle?

I wanted to get really excited about the new Nook Tablet that was introduced today, but I just can’t.

Last year I wrote this post: http://soandsosaid.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/dad/.  No need to read it, the gist is that there is this great website http://www.rangerup.com that makes some cool t-shirts.  I bought one of their “Veteran” t-shirts last year for me and one for my Dad.  My Dad is typically a pretty reserved guy and I was stunned by his enthusiastic appreciation for the t-shirt and the fact that he told me he was planning on wearing it to work last Veterans’ Day.  He’s typically not the type to draw attention to himself but over the last couple of years he’s started to open up more about his military experiences and has shown more pride about his service.

With that in mind I went to my boss last month and asked if he’d mind if I bought some of those shirts for my coworkers who have military experience on their resume.  There’s a group of them who served during the cold war, never got deployed into a combat theater of operations and never really got thanked for their service.  He thought it was a great idea, and told me to talk to the HR people.  He wanted the company to buy the shirts for all honorably discharged veterans.  I talked to HR, and while they thought it was a good idea, disclosure of military service is voluntary, not mandatory and so it’s something that hasn’t been tracked well.  Instead the CEO is going to issue a “thank you” email to the company on the 11th, but I was given permission to go ahead and buy the shirts for the original group and for them to wear them (the shirts fall in a gray area of the company dress code policy).

The t-shirts showed up last Thursday and I’ve been handing them out Friday and today.  Definitely a gratifying experience.  Even though these guys weren’t called upon, they still had their bags packed and were ready to go, at a moment’s notice, into harm’s way.  That alone deserves some recognition.  Still time to buy some shirts for the Veterans in your life!  I know Megan did it last year.

This is the shirt I bought these guys: http://www.rangerup.com/freedom.html

But this is a new cool one for GWOT vets: http://www.rangerup.com/the45.html

Take a moment to read the narratives.  The shirt isn’t necessary, but please remember to take a moment to thank those guys!

About halfway through our tour we were told to pick up everything from one base and move it to another base 15 miles down the road and outside of the city limits.  We were going to turn the base, and the responsibility for patrolling that portion of the battle-space over to the locals.  This was a giant pain in the ass, but we did it.  Multiple convoys were run to cart all our stuff, contractors were brought in to move the really heavy stuff, etc.  The last convoy for us from that base included our FOB runners, or FOB queens.  These were vehicles that were deemed too unsafe to go outside the wire.  We were able to tow one and load another on a trailer but the last was a 2 seat pickup configuration that was driveable.  It was one of the original vehicles in country, so it didn’t come with armor, that was hodge-podged onto it later.  Because it never left the FOB it didn’t have a radio system in it, and it didn’t have a turret.  I volunteered to drive it.  The folks higher ranking than me needed to be in more heavily armored vehicles and on the radios to control the convoy.  Honestly, out of the group I was the only one left that I trusted to be in that vehicle.  I took an interpreter with me instead of another soldier.  We suspected him of being at best a criminal and at worst a spy, so if our truck blew up, it’d be no loss.  We took off and the vehicle was loud as can be.  No intercomm system to muffle noise.  It was the last run of the day and it was after sunset.  As we were going thru the city I heard a loud “thunk”, then several more, accompanied by bright lights across the windshield.  Not quite sparks, kinda like lightning bugs on speed.  It took a minute to process.  A flash for my brain to catch up and sort out the normal vehicle noises from this new “thunk”, a flash to realize I was being shot at, and a flash to realize that there was nothing I could do.  We weren’t an infantry company out on a movement to contact mission.  No search and destroy here.  I didn’t have a radio to warn the other vehicles and call in a quick-reaction force.  I didn’t have a gunner to have return fire.  Even if I did, we were in the middle of the city and rules of engagment probably would’ve limited our ability to protect ourselves.  The only thing I could do was to keep driving and get through the kill-zone as quickly as possible, give the pre-arranged signal that I was taking fire and from where (and hope that the vehicles in front and behind me recognized it) and watch the rear view mirror and count vehicles behind me, praying that they all made it through.  Funny part of all of this?  The fear of the moment, the feeling of helplessness was forgotten or suppressed.  What I remembered was looking at the interpreter to tell him to get little and having him scream at me “We are being shot at.  I know.  I have been shot at before and this is what it sounds like!” and just cracking up at him.  His voice and the look on his face are still one of my funnier memories of Iraq.

A couple of weeks ago I was having a movie night with a friend.  Except that everything went wrong.  DVD player didn’t want to recognize the disc, NetFlix wasn’t working, etc.  So we ended up watching “Mercy” instead.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s on HuluPlus and it’s the story of three nurses in a ICU ward in a hospital in New Jersey.  One nurse is freshly minted and naive.  One is jaded, not a nurse because she loves helping people but because it was a way out of her terrible upbringing.  The last is an Iraq vet.  In one of the early episodes there’s a loud noise and she scrambles for cover.  Everyone looks at her and she’s embarrased as hell.  My friend asked me if that had ever happened to me and I said “No, not really, just to friends”.  A good buddy of mine used to be a diesel mechanic and was sitting around in his shop, talking to co-workers.  Someone else was moving a plate of steel on a fork lift and somehow the plate fell off the forks and hit the ground.  He instantly hit the floor and rolled under a table while everyone stared, then pointed and laughed.  Fortunately the shop foreman was older, and a Vietnam vet and he told them to shut-the-fuck up and get back to work, took my buddy into his office and talked him off the ledge.

We had our first snowfall yesterday.  I think about 8 inches landed, probably six by the time I woke up.  I brushed as much of it off the car as I could, but I was in a hurry and didn’t do the best job getting it all off the roof.  It proceeded to soften up yesterday, then freeze into nice chunks of ice over night.  It’s a gorgeous day outside today.  Warmed up nicely and a clear blue sky.  I left the office for a bit this morning and while I was driving on the interstate one of those chunks melted loose from the roof and slid off, hit my driver’s side mirror and exploded into little chunks that hit the windshield and driver’s side window and exploded some more.  I’d been knob-dicking, playing with the radio or my cell phone or something, and all of a sudden I hear the clatter against the window and see the white flecks pepper the window and in an instant I’m back in the moment, expecting the glass to give and a round to end me at the same time I’m checking for the other vehicles in my stick ahead and behind me and swerving.  Like before, it took a moment to process, a second to realize it wasn’t incoming fire, another to remember where I was, another to get back into my lane and look around, scared that I’d driven someone off the road or into an accident, then when I knew I hadn’t I was able to be mortified that I’d looked like a fool, drawn terrible attention to myself, that I was going to see looks of scorn in fellow drivers’ faces when they passed.

like the title says, my brain just tried to force a connection between two disconnected events.

a friend (well several actually, but we’re just talking about two of them today) is going through therapy for PTSD.  she’s still on active duty, so she’s being seen in a military hospital by a civilian therapist.  at one point her therapist got really frustrated with her because she wouldn’t open up about some things, or made some comment like “you wouldn’t understand”.  apparently her therapist was having a bad day and proceeded to unload on my friend, calling soldiers narcissistic.  saying we all had a need to feel special so we created these situations and claimed nobody else could understand them if they weren’t a soldier, and how this was a false belief that was one of the root causes of all our problems, that we need to learn to accept that we aren’t that special after all.

this obviously didn’t go over well, but that’s a different story.  the fact of the matter is i see some truth to what the therapist says.  we do lump a lot of stuff together.  there are some things that no one but another soldier can understand, but there are also some things that shouldn’t be shared with non-military.  sometimes it’s a way of keeping the faith with your fellow brethren, sometimes it’s because it’s so horrific that you shouldn’t burden normal people with it, you just share it with others who’ve seen and/or done equally horrific things.  but we lump other things in with that mess, things that we probably could share or talk about except that we’ve been trained not to break ranks, not to air dirty laundry with people who aren’t “family”.  and sometimes the family bonds are stronger with fellow soldiers than families of blood or vows.  it’s a lot of emotional strain to sort out what you can and can’t/do and don’t want to share and i know many skip this strain and just share nothing.

one of the things that i’ve gotten grief for over the years is my ability to continue operating in emotionally charged situations.  the perception that i’m without emotion because i can go to work after a traumatic event like a death in the family and don’t fall to pieces.  years ago i wrote this blog post about being told that it must “hurt to be me”.  i’ve heard the commentary and questions about how i reacted (or was perceived to not react) to the lung stuff, especially when they thought it was cancer for a week, then maybe a hole in my heart.    non-military people have started to blame this on the military, saying that it’s turned me into a robot.  personally i kind of think this is the way more people should be, saving deep emotional discussions for close friends and family at home and in private places vs. sharing every nit-noid detail of their life with near strangers over the cubicle walls at work.  and tons of people DO work like this.

the second friend.  she went to take photographs of the Tough Mudder race here in colorado a couple weeks ago and accidently dropped one of her cameras and broke her wide angle lens.  it’s her favorite lens, she’s not rich and she felt bad for dropping it and started crying.  her friend, also a photographer, immediately started taking photographs of the moment.  when i saw this photo i was kind of mortified that he went into “document the moment” mode vs. consoling his friend.  she was different, she was proud that he was able to separate himself from the moment and was glad that he got the shots.