This was the worst decade of my life. It had started off with so much promise, but pretty much every promising thread wove itself into a noose. Had I not made some drastic changes in my life, I would most likely have used that noose for its intended purpose.
Surveying my life on January 1, 2000, I was very content with what I saw. Besides rejoicing that the pending doom from Y2K had not ended the world as I knew it, I had achieved many important milestones. I had finally finished my undergraduate degree. I had fulfilled a life long dream and was a commissioned officer in the US Army. I was married to a kind, intelligent woman. Everything was looking up.
The noose formed as those different “successes” interacted with each other and metamorphasized into today’s challenges. In retrospect, the major driver of this metamorphasis clearly was my association with the US Army. For better or for worse, the man I am now resulted from the vulcanization process that was my Army career.
In a word, Iraq…
My entire world view has been changed by my time in Iraq. I am not the same young man I used to be. The truth is I have never been as scared as I was for the twenty six months I was there. This is a humiliating admission as I was not really in any danger because I was a REMF (rear echelon mother fucker). I was a commissioned officer in the United States Army, the most powerful military force ever assembled. I commanded a company of tanks and the headquarters company of an armored brigade. Yet I almost pissed myself when I heard mortars launched even though I was safely tucked away on some bohemoth base removed from the day-to-day dangers that the front line troops faced.
I had close (and not-so-close) friends and colleagues blown to kingdom come by improvised explosive devices. One friend was, like me, a former enlisted guy who had done well and made it into the officer ranks. Unlike me, he had excelled at language studies and used his knowledge of Arabic to help reduce the tensions in the Anbar province. He was probably a linch pin in getting the Sunnis to start their awakening and begin to reduce their support of insurgent attacks. He, along with two others, was blown to bits when his humvee was utterly destroyed by a bomb burried in the street. He left behind four children. One of the other passengers was a soldier with whom I had served in Iraq on a previous tour, while the other passenger was a woman who had graduated from the Naval Academy many years before and was a reservist called up to active duty with the US Marine Corps. She ran marathons.
Another friend was shot to death when he was out on a mission which he had volunteered to go out on. He was a REMF staff officer like me who got antsy to see the world outside the confines of our “safe” base. He left behind his wife of six months. When he was burried, the Westboro Baptist Church “protested.” His family had to deal with people who held aloft signs that read “Thank God for IEDs” and “God hates Soldiers” and my personal favorite “God hates your son.”
Not that we, the Army, were innocent of our own transgressions. Collectively we have witnessed the “lord of the flies” type behavior that can happen when it comes to pure force and power settling disputes. I knew of snipers who were more concerned with compiling body count statistics than they were concerned with furthering mission objectives. (Think Ralph Fiennes as the concentration camp commander in Schindler’s List, randomly shooting at inmates from a tower.)
That is cowardly, though, to only point out the Army’s collective failures and not point out my own individual failures. Not only did I not object to the use of racist epithets about insurgents in specific and Iraqis in general, I used them without hesitation. While I know better now (like I didn’t know better then), I still hold discriminatory views about that region of the world.
My marriage was another thread woven into the noose which came precipitously close to tightening around my neck. The marriage and the army threads themselves are tightly woven together. I proposed to my ex-wife a week before I left for basic training back in the late summer of 1992. She was the first, and only, girlfriend I had ever had. I lost my virginity with her. While I thought it was love, I now realize that it was more the fact that she was the first person with whom I had ever had any type of physical relationship.
I am not sure if it was stubborn persistence, benign neglect, or outright denial, the marriage remained friendly (if not passionate) throughout the 90s. I thoroughly enjoyed playing the role of family man and all-around good guy. However, the flaws in the marriage really began to manifest themselves and ultimately destroy the relationship as the 2000s wore on.
September 11, 2001 completely transformed my life in the military. I had enlisted in the army that was drawing down with the end of the cold war. Life was regular and predictable. With 9/11, the Army became focused on warfighting. I lived most of my life away from home. The ex-wife used this time apart to examine all the different ways I failed to fulfill her visions of a dream marriage. Tensions at home rose as tensions around the world rose. She blamed me for all the set backs in her life. While I admit that more than a fair share of her complaints were justified, her greatest challenge, attempting to earn a PhD, was completely of her own “failure.” This “failure” soured her views and I felt her scorn.
Throughout the 2000s we separated and reunited several times; each time one of us moving into our own apartment. In fact, one of the many reasons I left the Army to pursue a graduate degree was an attempt to reconcile with her and save the marriage. I thought perhaps she would be happy if I wasn’t in the Army and she didn’t have to deal with the ups and (mainly) downs of being an Army wife.
While all this emotional machinery was moving in the direction of saving the marriage, it was during the next-to-last separation of the marriage that I discovered (confirmed?) my physical attraction to men. The combination of finally having, or so I thought, broken up with my ex along with surviving my first tour in Iraq led me to experiment with previously taboo ideas. Although I was nearly scared to death by what I was doing, my first physical experience with another man confirmed for me that I was gay. While I may have lost my virginity with my ex-wife way back in 1992, I only truly discovered what sex could be a decade later in the summer of 2005.
So all the threads that were initially woven in the 90s slowly began to twist and tighten as the 2000s marched on. The Army paid me well enough to live a comfortable, middle-class life. Yet I was never around to enjoy my middle-class house or drive my middle-class car. While life in the generic sense was very liveable, the daily grind of the military routine was erasing my soul. I was a commanding officer, the officer in charge, yet I sought to avoid responsibility or I would defer making the hard decisions. My Army career imploded as I struggled with denial (more than just a river in Egypt), neglect, and incompetence.
While I derived a mental benefit from supporting a family and being considered a good husband, my marriage had become a platonic fraud. I sought the ivory tower as a refuge for my marriage, yet abhored the idea of physical intimacy with my ex-spouse. At the same time I obsessed about the lack of physical intimacy.
Instead of being a refuge, climbing the ivory tower itself became an all encompassing endeavor which brought with it its own set of challenging issues. Instead of drowning out my other issues, it serves to focus and intensify everything else going wrong in my life.
Continuing the metaphor, as each string wound its own knot tighter, collectively the formed a noose which bore down on me. Finally I reached the crisis. Figuratively strangling myself was not enough, I was either going to end it all to avoid the shame and failure, or I was going to acknowledge a much needed change in my life. I opted to make the change. With that simple decision and all the actual tasks of various difficulty which implemented that decision, the noose fell away.
Getting back to the original missive which started this overly long post, I am worse off in almost every way than I was the morning of January 1, 2000. I start this new decade alone, in worse financial shape, unemployed, unsure when or even if I will ever finish my graduate degree. The optimist in me points out that things should only be able to get better. Yet the pragmatist in me worries about adopting a hopeful attitude.
However, I do start this new decade with something that I have never had previously. I know what makes me happy. The 2000s were a wasted decade of me pursuing goals that I thought would make make other people happy and would thus make me happy indirectly. I feel that if I have survived coming out to my family, then I can pretty much survive anything. In the 2000s taught me anytyhing, they taught me that I am a survivor. The challenge now is to get beyond mere survival and to thrive in the coming decade.
To those of you who have read through this rambling dose of too much information, I thank you. This has been a wonderful year that has seen many ups and downs. I feel like I am on the right trajectory now and hope that feeling will last. Thank you for joining me on this long year of discovery.
A little bit of Mischief... 