Was I Relevant?

Click.

The door closed, leaving silence in the room as everyone prepared for the ceremony. For most, it was just another retirement, one in a dozen that they had all seen. For me, it was the end of a career, the end of a journey. The silence of the empty hall, one that was festooned with decorations and seats marked ‘reserved’ for family members, was nearly stifling. I groaned as I sat in a chair, my mind drifting back across time as I waited for everyone to neatly file in, briefly flipping through my military career as one would peruse the pages of a book in a store.

Twenty-six years ago, I boarded a plane, for the first time in my memory, to fly to basic training. I was your average over-eager military kid. A bit soft and a bit chubby, I had no idea what the military was actually like, I only had seen it from the eyes of a child. I remembered the “shark attack” of drill instructors setting upon us, screaming only inches from our face. That surge of panic as I dumped my duffle bags out, trying and failing to be fast enough. The friends I made in basic training that would be my introduction to the transient nature of life always brings me back to the movie ‘Fight Club’ where Brad Pitt talks about the temporary people in your life. People like Sheets and Weans seemed like they would be friends for life only to never talk to them again after those 16 weeks flew by. We suffered together and then forgot each other beyond just the conceptual idea and a few funny anecdotes.

My first duty station was Alaska and shortly after I met my first team leader, Lee. He taught me how to be a Soldier and how to be an adult, serving as my guide to adulthood. Lee stood as one of my best friends and even he was temporary. I married and he got out and I lost touch with him, finding out he passed from someone on Facebook. By that time, it was years after we had grown apart, but it hurt. Not the grief of losing someone close to you, but the sorrow of losing someone who had meant so much and feeling like you should have done more to be there for them.

I thought of my first combat deployment in Afghanistan 2003. A friend described modern combat as ‘weeks of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.’ It was a year of many firsts. The first dead body I had ever seen and the first time I fired my weapon, though lord knows if I hit anything. The first time I had been on a helicopter or felt the deep bass of exploding artillery fire. It was the first time another human had sought to end my life and that changes a person.

But the end of that time brought about me finally dating and marrying my wife, who would stand beside me today. We were friends before we dated and when I came home, I finally had the chance to be with her. Our courting was short and marriage rapidly followed. She followed me to Alaska, and we had a court wedding, administered by someone in my unit. I regret that still today. We always had the intention to have a proper wedding, then a vow renewal, but those intentions went the way of any good intention.

Iraq was my second deployment; my wife’s first to sit through. It was a different animal. My first deployment, a miracle had happened, and we had lost nobody. We were not so lucky this time. Men I considered friends died. My roommate died at the same time my squad leader also passed. A member of the squad, Michael, died that same day as well. So many moments that would haunt me for literal decades. The last thing Michael's wife had said to me was ‘Bring Michael home.’ I was young and cocky, a new sergeant, and I still remember my exact response: ‘I got this.’ No explicit promise, but a statement that implied I promised to do something that nobody had the ability to promise because of a phrase that I had heard many times and never understood – the enemy gets a vote. I remember each memorial ceremony. Men I served with, men I just knew, even a bomb dog that we all loved so much. I truly shed blood, sweat, and tears in the suburbs of Baghdad and I came home a different person.

I wanted to get out; I didn’t want to go through that again. But the Army had different plans for me and I was stop-lossed for 524 days. My eventual discharge papers would say it was “for the convenience of the United States Government” but it’s because I had leaders that didn’t care to fight it. One more trip to Afghanistan, another batch of temporary friends. Guys that I’d had to my house multiple times fell out of touch in only a few years. I found myself getting out amidst a national financial crisis with no college and no actual friends.

My college years tested my marriage, a test we thankfully passed. But after four years I found myself raising my right hand to come back in. I traded stripes for bars and donned the uniform I had taken off. Had it been my first choice? No. But it was a stable income, and I had departed the Army the first-time sans a realistic plan into a market where any job was hard to come by, much less good employment.

So, I joined the ranks of the “Screaming Eagles” and became an officer in the vaunted 101st Airborne. It started fine but devolved into working increasingly until I only saw my wife and kids on the weekends. I would return home, exhausted, well past my kids’ bedtime and arise long before the orange ball in the sky deigned to emerge from its slumber. I debated leaving again, with 12 years in service. I stayed in and deployed again.

My next deployment was fundamentally different. There were no calls to prayer or counter mortar fire. There were civilian vehicles and movie nights. I never touched my body armor, but the time away stung the same. I returned from that deployment, and it was different. I hadn’t built bonds that were hardened by those moments of violence, and, in those quiet moments, I realized that while the pay was better and the deployments were safer, I had lost something fundamental – brotherhood. The temporary nature of my friends was now fleeting at best. Where before I knew I would have died for the man next to me as he would have laid his life down for me, I now felt part of a corporate bureaucracy in uniform.

I toyed with leaving the military, or just making it work for the long haul, when I had the opportunity to go to a selection for special operations. I doubted my ability to succeed until my wife convinced me to go and, aside from being told I was a weirdo, I succeeded and was selected. I was rushed into the “pipeline” and learned a language – which I forgot most of – and was trained on specialized skills. I felt reinvigorated for the first time in a decade and close with people again.

Then the last of my years drained away. My detachment time and command flew past, with a short deployment to the middle east embedded in the middle. COVID and political upheaval marked my time and before I knew it, I was pinning major and taking command again. But company command, a privilege few get and even fewer get twice like I had been graced with, was bittersweet. It would be my last position of leadership in the Army.

I had pained over retirement. There was no good solution. I had found a home in the Army and, while I didn’t have a tight cadre of friends to call upon, I was comfortable. I knew how to navigate it, but I knew it was time. I had come into the Army two and a half decades prior. I had made friends and lost friends and, while my body had stood up well compared to many of my peers, my sleep was plagued with faces from my past, and my psyche was forever weighed down by the guilt of my experiences.

As I waited, I reflected on my years in uniform and fidgeted with the stack of index cards prepared for my remarks. I had a job lined up, and financially, we would be fine. Still, one question kept pressing in on me—the same question that had followed me through half my life: Was I relevant? Did I matter?

My service had mattered to a small circle of people. It mattered to me, of course. It mattered to my wife, my children, and my immediate family. But beyond them, who truly needed it to have been me and not some other random Soldier?

Only one person came to mind.

On my last mission in Iraq, a small child froze in the road during an engagement. I ran into the gunfire, grabbed him, and tucked him under my body armor as best I could. I rushed him to safety. Afterward, his parents came forward with the names of enemy fighters—information that directly improved security in the local area.

I still wonder what happened to that child. I hope he remembers me: an American Soldier who refused to let him become just another number in a newspaper article or a United Nations report.

My wife walks back in and I look up, pulled from my contemplative reverie. I wipe my misting eyes and smiled.

“Ready?” she walks up and rubs my shoulders.

“Yeah… I think so.” I stand and walk into the entryway to the building to greet people as they arrive. I shake hands of people that I have known and some people who just knew of me as they file in. I take the stage and give my comments. The people clap; they shake my hand and say congratulations. My old First Sergeant gives me a bottle of Wild Turkey, though I’m not a big drinker, and a former subordinate has had a plaque made for me.

We all talk and laugh, recirculate, and recycle the same war stories one last time. People start to leave until I am back in the room with only my wife again. “I’m thankful for you, babe.” I smile at her. “You’re the only constant thing in my life, and I’m glad to be doing life with you.” She smiles, and we hug before leaving. We hold hands and walk to the car, an officer, and his lady. I open her car door and as she sits, I caution her to watch her feet and close the door and I see my reflection. Scars and wrinkles, wearing my dress uniform, I smile at my wife through the reflection. It was a good end to our first chapter, and I cannot wait to see what our second chapter holds.