Learning to be You

By Benjamin Inks

You grow up believing in your God-given destiny to (1) seek adventure, (2) slay the beauty, and (3) rescue the dragon. So when the war presents itself as an opportunity to check-mark all three, finally your life begins. You’ve spent eighteen years evading trouble in an opioid-addled town, you’ve got a 2.2 GPA, but now your life is brimming with possibility. Your country has issued you a time-honored identity, allowed you to subsume a warrior archetype. You’ve dreamt of this moment since middle school. It’s as if your temperament is finally able to express itself through meaningful action. The dormant cells of your body awaken! For years you’ve been testing combinations on the Da Vinci-Code cryptex housing your soul: Fitness Trainer, Construction Worker, Student; turns out it was Soldier all along. 
Before you can become this perfect ideal, this ultimate version of yourself, first they must unmake you. Shout and scream and tear into you. Rip away all those pesky aspects of your personality which are not conducive to their grand designs. Luckily, their goals and your goals align, and you rise like a phoenix from basic training, earning accolades along the way. You relish the suffering but secretly question what it all adds up to: you barely qualified at shooting, your fitness is worse than when you arrived, and the week-long hospitalization for pneumonia nearly had you recycled to week 1. Mainly the training gave you the ability to eat shit and smile. Not to question your role in the scheme of things. To let others—who haven’t the slightest clue what it means to be you—make decisions on your behalf. 
Special Forces commandos, you’re told, are inundated from such tyranny, so the idea of joining their elite ranks spreads through your psyche like fungi; soon enough, you’re possessed by the hope of ascending to an even narrower hierarchy. One day, you say, you’ll get your chance. Until then your contract lists you as 11-Bravo, plain old blister-footed Infantry. Part of the 20%, not the 2%. Fall in line and obey the same type of petty orders that kept the Old Testament tribes alive.

—You! Drink water . . .
—Do pushups . . .
—Stop picking that scab . . .
—Cut your hair . . .
—Stay away from junk food . . .
—Don’t piss off your battle-buddies . . . and wash your hands, goddamn it.

You were sworn in in March and by October you’re already in Afghanistan. They tell you being an MRAP driver for the platoon sergeant is an important task. So important, learning to operate the fourteen-ton dump truck takes half an hour. A pot-bellied plainclothes contractor shows you how the tan behemoth works. He probably makes more in a year than you’ll make your entire enlistment. You do as he instructs. The cargo ramp activates with the flip of a switch. He offers high praise for your ability to weave between traffic cones.
“Try backing it up ass-left. Okay, ass-right. Good. You’re ready for war.”
Welcome to war. Here kids swarm you on patrol, asking for simple things like pens and candy. Despite the obvious tension carried by each local, it’s easy to see a culture of warmth and hospitality exists in your Area of Operations, coming from many individuals who seem sadly uneducated and vastly ill-informed. One villager confuses your platoon for the Soviet Army that invaded the country in the 1980s, and nothing your interpreter says convinces him otherwise. Another empire is trying this, you imagine this man thinking. Preposterous.
There is constant talk of “countering the insurgency,” turning color-coded villages on the operations map from hostile-red to smile-and-wave green. Reluctant-amber at the very least. “We’re building a nation, and if we pitch our vision to enough people, we can all go home.” You wouldn’t think a village’s atmosphere was something to stake your life on, but senior guys tell you they can feel it in the air when something’s about to go haywire. And sure enough, one village pegged as “bad juju” is where you see your first IED. At a bend in the road, they blow your lead truck sideways. A volcanic boom. Like planet Earth is sentient and has decided to knock you off its belly. Trucks are spaced in such a way that you see the blast before its oom-like report reaches your place in the convoy. This one-second delay feels like a slip in the veil of consciousness; us humans acting too crazy for the gods knitting our reality to keep up. Of course, in the heat of it, you’re not pontificating the speed of sound or drawing metaphors—you’re just scared shitless.
The dust settles and thankfully it’s not a complex ambush. There’s no ridgeline of fighters aiming rifles and rockets. There’s no enemy to confront because whoever did this beat feet right after. Friends climbing out of the disabled truck massage their necks and blink away head trauma. Later they tell you the impact felt like falling in a dream, getting tipped out of a chair while napping and landing with a crash. The blast was big enough to topple a nearby building distraught pedestrians are calling a schoolhouse. It’s a pile now. A building turned bucket, limp walls containing rubble. Thankfully, class was not in session, but still, the amassing villagers stare at you like this is all your fault—and not the direct action of the enemy, who could very well be standing amongst the gawkers.
“They could have placed this bomb anywhere,” your platoon sergeant says, “hit us in the middle of nowhere. The fact they buried it next to a schoolhouse is very telling.”
In attempts to ameliorate the mob, your platoon sergeant orders you to fill the blast crater, undo some of the damage caused by the people trying to kill you. You don’t understand what difference this could make, and the task is excruciating in thirty pounds of equipment, bending for each scoop with a collapsible shovel that’s about two feet long. For a brief second, though, you see stern faces begin to shift. Maybe the Americans are helpful after all?
This overt display of kindness might be worth it if you can soften their hearts while steeling your own.
Later that night, at the approximate time one of your battle-buddies is applying Tiger Balm to your spasming back, one of your high-school buddies back home is in a college dormitory with a naked nursing student bouncing on top of him. Later when this friend emails extensive notes of his exploits, a jealous part of you rues his hedonistic freedom. There’s a parallel universe where he’s in your place and you’re in his, the crippling student loans a worthy tradeoff for spending your best years uninhibited. But it’s also the case that hard times create strong men—and that’s still what you aim to be.
Your friend post-scripts his escapade by promising to send a picture next time. You reply:
Cool story, bro. I saw an elementary school get blown up today. . .
You don’t bother telling him the school was empty—because fuck him.
Your platoon sergeant is smart for a grunt; also a bit of a weirdo. He reads scripture from several religious traditions and spends his mornings perched in a lawn chair by the noisy generators, starring off at nothing in particular. This sergeant, let’s call him Lerner, offers an alternative narrative about Afghanistan than what’s being peddled back home.
“Many Taliban fighters are former war orphans,” he tells you. “Kids whose only means of education was austere doctrine.”
Maybe this is why Lerner seems distracted following the schoolhouse bombing, solemn and more withdrawn than usual. While everyone else cheers that no children were harmed, he seems to mourn the loss of something more poetic. Something grander and harder to name than tiny dead bodies pinned under debris.
You don’t fully grasp the context behind his orphan remark—and how could you, you’re only eighteen. Your expertise lies in beating The Legend of Zelda. But through the natural osmosis that comes with immersion, small fragments of a larger mosaic are making themselves known. An interconnected saga that seems to stretch back endless generations beyond recorded history.
The platoon stumbles upon a burnt-out Russian tank, for instance, and although you’re well aware of events in the eighties, seeing a live artifact feels anachronistic. Macabre even. This decaying machine dumped in a bright prairie of wildflowers connotes something only Lerner seems to pick up on. An omen intimating a rift in the space-time continuum. Like how you saw the IED before hearing it. You see the hull of a tank, and it’s only later that your brain registers its full significance.
Driving away from the tank is also when you witness your second IED. This one even closer, louder, the sound delay less noticeable, like a dubbed film instead of warped physics. Four friends sustain injuries bad enough for CASEVAC. Broken ankles and dislocated knees. You wait around for the whop-whop-whop of a Black Hawk, and after the injured take to the skies your platoon feels even more vulnerable. Everyone will have to pull more weight.
Some of the boys from second platoon are circled up around a burn barrel debating Big Bang hypothesis. You say you’re unconvinced, and they look at you like you’ve been spending too much time with Lerner. You counter by saying you’ve never known an explosion to create, only to destroy, and with friends so recently injured the statement halts conversation.
“Did you know the theorist behind Big Bang was a Catholic priest?” says Lerner out of nowhere. He joins the circle, and no one knows how to respond to a high-ranking NCO shooting the breeze with lowly privates. All eyes divert respectfully toward the fire.
Spring is in the air, and the warming weather is putting everyone at greater risk. Fighting season is yet another feature of the conflict you’ve been forewarned about. It was slightly amusing at first: the enemy’s warfighting capacity grinds to a halt for . . . snow.
“But why not?” says Lerner. “They’re in it for the long haul. We’re in it for the we-don’t-know-yet haul.”
Now the snow is melting, and the uptick in violence has everyone on edge. Last week you helped Lerner treat a sucking chest wound on an Afghan soldier. One more element of war rigorously prepared for. You know what to do, in theory. Seal the wound and stab an airway between the victim’s third and fourth intercostal space. What they don’t tell you is the hissing sound or the blueness to the face suggesting death has already occurred and it will take a cosmic act, such as bending space-time, to adjust course.
You try and bend space time. Why the fuck not. A man’s life is at stake.
You’d think the rib bones of foot soldier from a third world country would be easy to demarcate, but after cutting away his fatigues you’re met with a healthy slab of pectoral obscured by pink bubbles pooling at the entry wound. Fortunately, Lerner ignores radio commands long enough to do the hard part for you, as swift and effortlessly as someone punching a straw through a big gulp lid.
The man is spared at the cost of your shrinking confidence.
A week later, a nervous breakdown sends your favorite gaming buddy away for psychiatric care. That’s an option? you wonder, and Lerner pulls you aside for a pep talk. Instead of calling your friend a coward—bidding good riddance to an eighteen-year-old PFC who couldn’t stomach fighting season—instead of this, Lerner tries a different tact.
“Imagine an army unburdened by the psychological toll of war,” he says. “How would they know when to stop?”
He offers another parable on his laptop, footage of a recent drone strike. A bird’s-eye view pixelated, our world filtered through a digital lens. You see an enemy truck engulfed in black shroud, and when the smoke pulls away—like a magician’s trick—the truck is gone.
“And what do you feel?” asks Lerner.
Nothing.
“Me neither.”
Not so, you both agree, when you were treating the soldier with the sucking chest wound. That’s why what we’re doing here matters.
You tell him how you can’t stop thinking about the two IED’s. The first one bad, the second one worse. It’s like the path you’re on is destined to end with a third and final bang, and you’re trying to calculate if the looming risk is worth the final vision you have for yourself: someone tough, someone tested, someone damaged enough to understand the nature of reality—the good-versus-evil tug-of-war inside every beating heart.
Lerner nods. He too has spent a great deal of time pontificating the burdens and benefits of fighting terrorism; he’s on the same path as you only further down the road. The attention he’s paid his life has instilled much wisdom. He talks; you listen. Should you be taking notes?
“An IED is every soldier’s dread,” he starts. “The same with being shot by a sniper: suddenly dropping on patrol like God is playing Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. The truth is you don’t really know what to be afraid of until you see it in real time. And the things you can’t see, can only expect, gnaw at you the most.
“Maybe this never-ending saga was fraught from day one. Who cares if this country is ruled by fanatics—can’t we just boost our defenses at home and call it good? Even if we find some modicum of success here, we can’t do one hundred percent good one hundred percent of the time. Maybe the only reasonable thing to do—when challenged by the insurmountable—is to tap out. Call it quits. Hey man—at least we tried, right? We’d only be the latest empire to stumble at the foot of these mountains.
“That’s a valid reality we can choose to live in. But there also exists another story. About a school being bombed. About village leaders working with us to identify those responsible, providing actionable intel. About a night raid being organized as we speak. What I mean is, right now—sandwiched between shades of right and wrong, failure and doubt—we can solve this one problem. Go after a bonafide bad guy. Forget what history has to say decades later. In this moment—can you think of anything more important?”
His soliloquy pumps you up; you remember why you joined the Army in the first place. To become the ultimate you. There’s just one lingering question. One final reluctance you can’t seem to shake. Something you’ve been losing sleep over.
Is it very loud, you ask, getting blown up?
You thought your question silly and expected Lerner to laugh. He doesn’t laugh. He tells you point-blank that no, a direct IED is silent, which feels like a lie. Survivors of the first IED aren’t helpful either. They’re uncertain. They hadn’t thought about it before. “I don’t know. I don’t recall hearing a noise,” one guy says, suspicious of his own syntax.
Trying to countenance the purported silence behind an explosion is when you decide you’ll never understand how the world works, and the best you can do is try to understand yourself. Admitting this, you’re able to fall asleep that night. Fast and uninterrupted sleep. A time will come when good sleep is a precious commodity, your recent bouts of insomnia are an omen-wormhole interlinking present you to future you.
A sneak peek of your life to come.

It’s revenge time for the schoolhouse bombing, and you’re star-struck when the big dogs saunter through the ops center: elite commandos schlepping gear priced at double your own. This is what you aim to be, in the flesh. Men who glide through doorways. Men whose uniform patches say nothing about where they are from. Men who spend an ungodly amount of tax money on their trigger time. Sexy stuff. And so is their operation. Smooth and seamless violence, like an orchestrated play, ardently rehearsed and now delivered live.
Compound doors are brought down using controlled blasts. Captives are taken. One insurgent dumb enough to crouch in the corner with an AK is lit up before getting off a single round. They find damning evidence, your heroes, not just a do-it-yourself kit but an IED assembly line.
You watch all this through your MRAP’s windshield, sans popcorn, and once again remember why you joined the Army. Yeah, top-tier action, vicarious it may be, is better than casual sex in a college dorm. This shit is worth the emotional scars of deploying. The action is over before it begins, but the sense of purpose afterwards is sheer ecstasy. Shared by one and all. A contact high from surviving the dangers of a bonafide combat operation. You have actually seen the Taliban, probably. Done more within your limited means than a great number of deployed troops can claim. It’s such a climactic moment in the narrative you’re constructing about yourself, you secretly wonder if all that’s left now is the denouement, when you pack it up and go back home. Of course, the next day after the movie-esque raid is just another day reset to boring status-quo. Year-long deployments are the perfect span of time to convince someone that things are happening for a reason. If there’s a historical arc progressing, you can’t detect it. Right now, the highs, the lows, are all subjective to your point of view. And your point of view hinges on who you think you are, or who you want to become.
One day, you begin to worry that to everyone back home—to the cosmic forces of the universe—the war retracted out is just white noise. A bunch of stuff that’s happening in the background. To a disinterested third-party species, ant colonies locked in an aggressive battle would only look like bugs crawling in the dirt. But try saying that to a captured ant who’s about to lose his head to razor-sharp mandibles.
During a smoke break, you share your thoughts with Lerner. It takes a couple of tries before he fully understands your half-baked teenage philosophizing. He takes a drag of his cigarette, exhales.
“What you tell yourself about Afghanistan, now or decades later, is for your benefit and no one else’s.”
Again, his words are elusive, if not downright contradictory to his earlier speech about purpose through microcosmic action. He does cause you to wonder what your future self will say when you’re no longer so invested in the identity of Soldier. But right now, that’s not a hypothetical you can devote much energy to because a new mission has just been planned. The same elite crew from the night raid needs your help on yet another capture or kill mission.
Your task is to cordon a village, set a permitter so the bad guy doesn’t escape. If you’re the OR nurse prepping for an extraction, well now, here comes the surgeon. Seal Team [blank] riding in on dune buggies. Guns pointing in all directions. “That’s cool as shit!” your platoon agrees. “Why can’t we have dune buggies?”
Lerner rolls his eyes. It doesn’t take a lifer to know the constant visibility of conventional forces would make dune buggies too soft a target. A veritable brah-brah-brah deathtrap. One IED could probably take out three. Thankfully, the MRAP you’re driving was built to withstand such a blast.
Once again, the Captain-America clones are a pleasure to work with. Everything just seems to go right for them. This one was too easy. Bad guy caught. No violence necessary. He woke to commandos hovering over his bed, end of story.
Afterwards, their team leader jokes with Lerner before bidding you all adieu, slapping the MRAP’s fender like he just sold the darn thing to you. They ride outside the village where a Chinook helicopter waits to carry them, and their dune buggies, back to bed.
God that’s cool. Unfortunately, you’ll have to take the long way home.
It’s a road you’ve driven countless times before, which puts your mind on autopilot. Complacency kills, they so often say. Keep your head on a swivel. Hard to keep these things in mind on month 11 of a 12-month deployment.
So, yes, this IED is for you. The biggest of them all.
You drive on top of it and—boom.
Probably the single-most overused word for describing explosions. Not inaccurate, though, like say, when viewing a three-hundred-pound IED from an approximate distance of two hundred meters. Yeah, it makes a boom. Similar with the visuals: if there wasn’t so much dust and flame, your MRAP launching skyward—when viewed from a distance—would almost resemble a monster truck artfully flipping at a demolition rally.
This explosion, however, is not viewed from a two-hundred-meter distance. This explosion is absorbed from a zero-meter distance. From this perspective, an incalculable amount of kinetic power assaults your body at multiple resting points. Your feet, yes, but your trunk absorbs the crux of it all. In that regard, body armor is more a hindrance than help. The density of your plate carriers allowing no outlet for the upward ascending energy to escape.
Still, perhaps more interesting than inside the vehicle is what occurs inside your mind’s eye. Your immediate vision fractures into something shrouded in twilight. Like blinking and finding yourself dreaming of the last thing you saw. Taking in life with your spirit, not with your eyes.
After the dust settles, your body slumps preternaturally, only a seatbelt between you and the steering wheel. You’re dead. Welcome to death.
“[Blank] is gone,” Lerner reports to the crew, and a strange mixture of fear and murderous rage fills the smokey compartment. It’s just the emotion needed to put broken bodies into motion. Anyone in the vicinity who is not coalition forces would do well to stay out of M4 range right about now.
Wait, no, Lerner was finally wrong about something, because you return to life right around the time your friends are escaping via the gunner’s hatch. Your time on the other side was brief but euphoric. No visuals of hell or divine revelations. No anything, really. No ill-will toward anyone. No anxiety or pangs of identity. Only an envelopment, perhaps, by that love that moves the sun and other stars.
Your MRAP door pries open, and they carry you away right as the gas tank ignites. A MEDVAC bird is en route, so you don’t get to stay for the full barbecue, only long enough to look beyond the medic offering sips of water and realize that the burning MRAP reminds you of something. But what? You’re too punch-drunk and in too much pain to pair a memory with the déjà vu suffusing your sternum. Later when you realize the answer, it’ll almost make you scoff. Like a word you couldn’t think of, and only after you’ve stopped probing does the answer become painfully obvious. In front of you this whole time.
You’ll also strain yourself trying to recall if you heard a sound. The bomb went off and . . . it was silent, wasn’t it? Just like Lerner claimed. No burst eardrums to suggest otherwise.
Though when you revisit the IED in your dreams, a sound does accompany the blast. Not boom like you might expect, but Ōṁ.
Ōṁ. The sound credited in several religions with bringing life into this universe. Now a sound associated with birthing you into your ultimate self. Congratulations! You’re not the action hero you’d envisioned; you have nightmares about losing your rifle in front of the first sergeant, and the titanium rods bracing your spine cap athletic ability. The tradeoff is you’ve been scarred with an indelible sense of spirituality. Although this world may never make sense, you’ve seen—felt more apt—something existing elsewhere. And just as a wise man once said in soliloquy how it’s better to ground your identity on action you can take and not how others view you, so too will that ethereal sense of elsewhere always remain a lofty thing to consider when learning to be you.

****

A Purple Heart recipient, Benjamin served three years in the Army and has worked an odd array of jobs, from private investigator to personal trainer. His award-winning story “On a Mountain in Logar” was published in Volume 10 of Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors. Past publications include The Little Patuxent Review, The Ilanot Review, Adelaide Magazine, and O-Dark-Thirty Review.