Excerpt
Touching the Dragon
Introduction: An Emperor in My PocketCapture/kill raids often meant going to the target site on a dark helicopter, and leaving on that same dark helicopter. The benefit of a dark helicopter running no lights and flying just a few feet off the ground is that it’s hard for the bad guys to see. The downside to a dark helicopter running no lights is that it makes it hard for passengers like me to get in much quality personal reading. So, on deployments, I solved the problem by carrying small editions of Neruda, Epictetus, or Marcus Aurelius’s
Meditations in my pocket, and when I was coming back from work in the blacked-out helo at night, I’d read the books by ChemLite.
The helo would often be full of me and my buddies, and our captives. All you heard was rotor drone, and all you smelled was ripe bodies—the captives’ bodies tending to be a tad riper than ours. The loudness, the wind through the open doors, and the assembled company all made for a nice little cocktail of ambience that I found conducive to reading. I used these brief respites to gather some perspective.
Within minutes of being involved in violence, when I felt the full weight of the human ugliness I’d just seen, I reached for these writers. Their words were a balm. They helped me not lose hope in the rest of humanity. They also mitigated my self-indictment and helped me deal with my own moral flaw: I liked the violence. I liked going out to kill people who wanted to harm innocents, and I was saddened by this fact. Saddened and a bit shocked at the appetite I had for it. Reading those books made me feel less like a monster.
I started out by reading Epictetus. He said each of us is merely a tiny soul propping up a corpse. I appreciated those uplifting words. It helped me realize that I didn’t need to worry too much about the fate of my corpse, which was a relief, because it was in jeopardy a lot of the time. Aurelius followed naturally in my syllabus, as he was a fan of Epictetus. He relayed the comforting insight that death is merely part of nature, so don’t fear or fight it. All you can do is greet it with equanimity when it comes and, in the meantime, live cheerfully and with purpose. Some have paraphrased this as “death smiles on all of us, and all we can do is smile back.” I thought about that on a few occasions. I honestly didn’t believe that there was anything better or more meaningful than what I was doing. So, for me, death was never a terror. If I died in a gunfight, it would be doing something I loved. And besides, courtesy of Epictetus, I was less worried about the fate of my corpse.
For much of my adult life, my identity was almost entirely defined by being on what I call the Speeding Train—being with the crew that was essentially my family. It was intense. Fulfilling. Addictive. There was an enemy out there who wanted to hurt people, so we’d hurt them first. We were good at what we did. Surrounded by a lot of violence, we experienced clean, shining edges of time, where skill, brotherhood, trust, and purpose all melded into something that I can only describe with the word “pure.” Gunfights in the darkness, on enemy turf, were where we were happy. As guys in my unit liked to say, we were “good at playing away games.”
I guess, in some ways, being on the Speeding Train, at full throttle, was one long exercise in us smiling back.
That said, there were horrors, plenty of them, where the only one smiling was death. Horrors like the moments when innocent folks near the bad ones got caught up. Horrors like the Operation Red Wings disaster, where sixteen Special Operations personnel on their way to rescue an ambushed recon team were all killed by one rocket-propelled grenade to a helicopter. I was part of a group of Rangers and Navy guys sent into Afghanistan’s Kunar Province to find and retrieve their charred and dismembered corpses. I remember coming home a few weeks after I’d been a part of that recovery effort. All of those body bags and the nastiness of the violence were fresh in my mind, and I had to go with my wife, Kelley, to run a few errands. One of them involved a trip to a consumer electronics store, where I was overwhelmed. The folks in the store were all looking at the same thing: fifty huge TV screens featuring
American Idol. Totally engrossed. And it made me realize that a long-held suspicion of mine was true. In the normal world, I was an alien.
It’s in moments like those that I was glad for the books. Aurelius reminds us of the importance of remaining true to our nature, and to our fellow man, in spite of the extremities and alienation of war. Remembering that despite all of the negatives and violence involved, you are fortunate to be exposed to moments where you see true human greatness in your crew. I sure did. I saw valor and cunning and unsurpassed focus. I was lucky to be part of a group that was thrust into moments where we were all removed from our normal meandering human selfishness and catapulted to a higher plane. A place where your idea of failure really had nothing to do with you. Failure was not being there in the moment to take care of your crew.
Curiously, the moments in my life where I’ve felt the most peace were in gunfights. Without a word being spoken, you knew what the people with you were thinking, and you knew that they had your back. You felt a seriously clear peace.
At home, those peaceful, clear moments were rare for me. So I retreated to war. To my crew. To constant deployments. This was unkind to Kelley.
I felt so at home in the one world, and so much like an alien in the other, that I started to think that the civilian world back home would never understand me, and that it held nothing for me.
This was a dangerous psychological division, but I cultivated it, even though Aurelius had tried to warn me. He made the point that even an emperor struggles. You may think you can exist in a heightened state forever, but humility comes eventually. I don’t care who you are. At some point, you will be forced to reckon with your actions and deal with harsh realities. It’s true for emperors. It’s true for everyone. And it would turn out to be especially true for me.
When I was shot in Afghanistan during a mission to rescue Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, one war ended for me and another began. I’d served as a member of Naval Special Warfare for most of my twenty-five years and eleven months in the Navy. Because of our training and skill sets, and because of a typical psychological hard-wiring, people in my particular unit are comfortable and clear-headed in situations where panic is probably the more natural response. I’d always felt my ability to work and focus was enhanced, not diminished, by things going sideways suddenly. But when that lucky shot from the panicking enemy hit me, things went sideways in a new way, a way I was less well equipped to handle. I was forced to stop operating with my unit and reintegrate into a society that I had spent two decades defending, but in which I didn’t feel I had a place.
Stepping off the Speeding Train caused me to lose my mind. I had almost always been an asset—to my team and my country. Now, all I could think about was the fact that I was a liability. I no longer had a sense of purpose. I wrestled—poorly—with a tough question: What do you do when you’re suddenly divorced from your calling? In need of help, but unable to ask for it, I despaired, abused alcohol, and became suicidal. At one point, I even unfairly involved my wife in some pathetic gunplay.
It took a courageous, no-bullshit group of people who inserted and sometimes forced themselves into my life to get me to the point where I was equipped to receive help, and also to help myself. These people make up a chain that I credit with saving my life and my mind—a chain that starts with the friends in the firefight who risked their lives to save me on the battlefield, and runs all the way through the field hospital doctors, stateside surgeons, volunteers, fellow veterans, psychologists, and family that are still there for me today.
How they saved me—at war, and at home—is quite a story. People will rightly assume that I saw amazing things as a warfighter. But I saw equally amazing things as a recovering person.
In gunfights, what made us potent was not the gear, guns, and macho nonsense that movies and video games sensationalize. It was drive, professionalism, and love for each other—the same traits I saw in the segment of society that saved my life and repaired my spirit after I was shot. The difference is, the heroes of my second war will never get medals for the work they did.
So let this be their tribute.
