drfarwell@hotmail.com
Being in the military is most certainly a life changing experience. It’s fair to say that it is more so a life changing event for some more than others, and that can probably be attributed to individual experiences of each person. Though I’ve tried to not let it be, I think it’s fairly accurate to say that my time in the military and my personal experiences has been a very defining event in my life. When I got out of the Army I was ready to move on, to close that chapter of my life and go on to the next thing, but I’ve found that the more I try to forget about it, the more it sticks around. For this reason I sometimes have a difficult time relating to people from my past, or people who have never had such experiences.
I have tried over the past couple of years to be more open about my military experiences. I would say this has gone fairly well at times considering that I now write about them on a weekly basis but some things are just really hard to put into words. One of those things is death. After a few months into my deployment I accepted the fact that I was going to die, and that it was probably going to hurt a lot. I am pretty confident that the other men in my unit did the same, because we were able to see or go through a terrible experience where we were nearly killed or grievously injured, and then able to sit around and laugh about it. At this point there are a lot of instances that I only half remember and many that I’ve surely forgot about that probably could have or should have killed me but didn’t. And when you’re in that situation where you have no other choices, and you know you’ll go to that same place and do that same thing again the next day, what else can you but just look at it and laugh. One of the first times I was specifically targeted by an enemy, he shot a rocket propelled grenade at me. And it missed me by about two feet and blew up. I’m sure when it happened I let out some feminine sounding noise, but after the fight was over and we saw just how close I came to being directly hit in the chest with a rocket fired grenade, we just looked and laughed because there was nothing to say about it.
When I was blown up in my Stryker vehicle, some guy was hiding out watching with a video camera and filming the whole thing. I know this because we later found it online and watched it. Watching it wasn’t particularly disturbing to me because as bad as it looked, I knew the outcome. Nobody died, so it was easy to watch it and make light of it because we all got out of there more or less fine. But when I’ve seen my civilian friends or family watch it, it looks horrible and they can’t believe it.
It’s just a different mindset in the military. You are trained to go against your human nature, you run towards gun fire, you stand and fight when logic tells you that you should run and hide. Your personality changes and you start to see things from a different perspective. One of the changes in me that is still very present is that I would say I have a borderline apathetic personality. It’s not that I don’t care about things, but I’ve seen real loss and misery and suffering in people, and whatever happens in my life is far less devastating than I’ve seen in other people’s lives. There is an old saying that says, “There will always be greater tragedies in the world,” and I try to remember that when facing inconveniences in my own life. As long as there is a tomorrow for me, I’ll be just fine.