As I finish writing this, let me come back to the beginning and say that this is very long. My feelings are very strong, and I don't want anyone to feel obligated to read this. It is not an easy read, much like it was not an easy write. You might learn things you didn't want to know, so please keep scrolling. I'm not even kidding.
If, however, you want a view into the mind of a broken soldier, how we become who we are, and why we can never turn back. Here you are.
As a soldier, this hits pretty close to home for me. Especially on a post where most married soldiers are separated from their wives and tensions just run high in general. A shooting here would be improbable because of the difficulty of tracking down a firearm and ammunition, since Korea is gun-free, but soldiers snapping is a serious concern.
I haven't actually looked into the details of this shooting. I vehemently avoid main stream news, and in this case it hasn't hurt me at all. This shooting is just like all of the other in-house military shootings and halted shootings (and bombs) that have gone down over the years, and when you ask for thoughts I think we're all thinking the same thing.
I've ****ing had enough.
So the question isn't what do we think about the shooting, because it's terrible in every respect, but instead what can we do to stop this. What is making soldiers (almost exclusively veterans of war) turn on their own?
Well, as someone who has been and is still suffering from PTSD, and am at a point where I am so entirely done with the bull**** I see every day in the military, I might have a special insight, and I'll try to explain. To do that, though, I have to explain mindsets, war, and unbearable peace.
I used to be a 13F attached to the infantry. This is an Artillery Scout. Formerly a Forward Observer, and informally, a "FSTer" (Fire Support Team member). Unfortunately for me, there's no organized enemy. There is no force to oppose in Iraq and my specialized skills were mostly wasted, and I was kicking in doors with the rest of the grunts for 15 months. My ERB (electronic records brief) actually has my duty MOS as 11b Infantry for my deployment, which is absurd. I mention this, because I want you to know where I'm coming from when I say war is something greater that a mind can comprehend, at least, when you're in it.
We spent a year before going, prepping ourselves physically to endure the elements and the rigors of combat, and mentally, spiritually, and emotionally to wake up every single moment convinced that today is the day you will take a human life. Someone you do not know, probably a father, husband and son, and is fighting you for the same reason you're fighting him. Because someone told him when he was too young to think for himself that picking up a gun and finding an enemy is the only honorable way to live, and to die. And because he's been promised, just like me, that if I fight, and even if I fall, my family will be better off. A slave to war, and a cause he doesn't understand and only superficially believes in. The same reason I'm standing in their country.
So I prepared to take a life, and to die to save my buddies. Think about this. Think of how absurd, how ****ed up of a place you must be to wake up every morning and say "I am going to kill someone today"
Who does that turn you into? Who else besides a killing machine?
Especially in a place where there is no enemy. There are only civilians. Every person is a potential enemy, and you must suspect each of wanting to take your life. You have to walk down the street, ready at any moment, to turn and take the life of any one of these people. Father? Wife? Son or Daughter? Who's wearing the bomb? Who's hiding the AK?
For 15 months I walked the streets, helped these people rebuild their city. Did so much good. We built a girl's school, fixed their water system, and helped them repave their roads. Literally built their city back up. But there was not a moment that I wasn't prepared to kill any particular person that I met.
Then it ends. You leave, and you come home. See your family, and put on a smile and pretend the suspicion that has kept you alive is just... gone. Pretend that you can turn your back on a door in a restaurant, or sleep through the night without hearing mortars that aren't there. The war is still there, in your head. Because you put it there. You had to, or maybe die, or loose a friend because you weren't careful enough. This war in yourself lasts longer than the war in Iraq ever did. The Quran states that the greatest Jihad is the Jihad of one's self. The battle inside your own soul, your own mind, and you take this home with you.
Now you're broken. The Army, and the Infantry, taught you to be a killing machine, but who's going to teach you to be a person again?
At least when you're deployed, there's a mission. There's a goal to accomplish, and you can feel fulfilled from it, and you come back to garrison and... sit.
Just hold the chairs down. Do some menial ****, accomplish ****ing nothing. I injured my back in Iraq, so I trained for a new job, as a network administrator, and in the last 5 years I have never accomplished a vital mission. Nothing that I have done got anything done. Everything that I do in my life has been trivial, compared to saving lives. I get people access to the network, or keep the network running. Scan it for threats or remediate when there's a problem, but what does any of that accomplish? Make sure this **** can email that ******* that there's a meeting tomorrow at 10:30?
Who the **** cares?
This is what I mean when I say unbearable peace. None of it matters, and it feels like nothing could possibly matter ever again. You make no ripples in the wading pool of our collective world. So at what point, how long can I sit here and get yelled at, literally every single day, by people less competent or intellectual than I am, about things that have no bearing on the progress of the world around us, before I snap. Before I decide that there is something. One thing. That I can do that would make ripples.
There is one thing that I can do that will change the landscape of the world, if only by a fraction.
How long before this broken man is broken down simply too far?
To be clear, I've never struggled with thoughts of suicide (at least related to the Army, there was that chapter in my adolescence, and in hindsight my learning to cope with that has done me a few favors in dealing with PTSD) or with thoughts of killing anyone who wasn't actively trying to kill me (enemy combatants)
This was only to show you who we have to become, and who we're expected to not be any longer, when war begins. My experiences are my own, and I don't claim to speak for anyone but myself. But I can look around me in the military, and look at people who choose massacre, and I can see the path that led them there. The indifference of their command team, the pride of the people around them, the empty claims of wanting to help.
I am lucky. I have a strong sense of faith. Not in God, of any one sort or another. Not particularly. But faith in myself, my family. My daughter. Faith that the good has to outweigh the bad. Faith that I can find people I want to be around, and ignore the people I don't, but the problem with that last bit is that it's cumulative. In the Army, you're trapped with the people you cannot be around. And it only gets worse with every day.
I didn't want to make this about myself, because it's not.
We lost a lot of people. Including our broken sailor. We broke him, why don't we take responsibility? He's ours, after all. Why, when he breaks too far, suddenly he isn't anymore. He's not part of the US Military. We accepted him. He was analyzed and the military said yes, this is someone we want to call ours. Our brother. And then we broke him, and didn't help him get put back together, let him kill fathers and mothers, and then said he wasn't ours anymore. Where is his first line supervisor? Where are his peers? Who saw him struggle and stood by and said it wasn't their problem? How many times did he reach out for help?
I'm sorry this is as long as it is, and I'm sorry that many of you felt the need to read it. It's an insight into a world you probably didn't need, or want.
