"Something given has no value."
-Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
I ran into some friends from a different time today. It made me think about some of the life choices I made and the direction my life has gone. When I was trying to decide what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, someone told me that we sometimes have to put ourselves first.
It was soon afterwards I decided that I had to stay in the military. Another friend, one of my closest, spoke to me about how we can't decide what makes us feel happy or content. I personally could never feel at peace if I knew I was putting my own personal happiness first while there still remains so many others sacrificing.
That is not to say there aren't many things I would rather do with my life. I enjoy being home. I wish I didn't give up all those years with my dog. And above all, I really wish for a family, something stable to come home to. All this time away in the military has made that difficult to achieve. But if I could trade away the opportunity to deploy for the opportunity to have these other joys, I could never enjoy it. I don't feel as if I've earned that right yet.
There are so many others that have done more than I have. I have been blessed with the privilege of serving in the company of men better than me. Many walked away from families, children, loved ones, and some gave everything. What have I done? I sat in a can, played video games, watched movies. And now I've spent three whole years, just sitting at home, wasting away my life. I have not earned this. Let me go back, and send someone else home.
Maybe it's some form of survivor's guilt, though I don't know what I've survived. All I know is that I feel this disconnect with everything here.
This was a bit of a rambling post. This is something that I've always had trouble, and still have trouble, trying to form a coherent thought out of.
What about you? Do you have obligations that you feel you need to finish before you can focus on yourself?
No, don't go back please.
ReplyDeleteYou still owe me coffee :)
I don't plan on trying to augment to other units just to deploy again. I just try to go if my unit is going. It's a little compromise on my part, so I have some time set aside to put into other things besides the military, which I do feel at times I may be fixated on a bit much.
ReplyDeleteI do owe you coffee...when were you coming out to SD again? =)
There are plenty more battlefields out there than those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Xbox Live.
ReplyDeleteI feel like what you're looking for isn't necessarily deployment- probably something akin to "life meaning". A goal that is worth putting whatever finite time and energy we have in life into.
If deploying is what gives your life meaning, then by all means do it. But if deployment is just something to pass the time in between bouts of video gaming and movies, then you'll never really accomplish what you are meant to do, and you'll never feel like you earned it.
How fitting that right now I'm reading "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" by Chris Hedges.
ReplyDeleteThe enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.
...
It was the disillusionment with a sterile, futile, empty present. Peace had again exposed the void that the rush of war, of battle, had filled. Once again they were, as perhaps we all are, alone, no longer bound by that common sense of struggle, no longer given the opportunity to be noble, heroic, no longer sure what life was about or what it meant.
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Many of us, restless and unfulfilled, see no supreme worth in our lives. We want more out of life. And war, at least, gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness and divisiveness.
I can tell myself as much as I want that if I just deploy one more time or do one more thing then I'll feel I've done enough, but what is more likely the case is that unless I find something back here that makes me feel that what I do isn't just trivial junk I'll never feel content and I'll always feel as if I need to return to the military to be able to amount to anything.