Opinion |

The Dialogue of Our Demons

by Travis Switalski, Sr.

I woke up this morning with the greatest idea for a story that I’ve had yet. The characters and their plight rolled around in my head as I ascended the stairs to the living room. I dug around in my assault pack for the leather-bound notebook I use to write down my ideas and began building my outline. The thoughts and ideas flowed out easily, building up the excitement of starting a new project. Then, all of a sudden, it hit me. The story line was much like a story I’d read before and even seen on the big screen. It was just Fight Club without the underground fighting, so it’s okay to talk about.

It’s funny to think about. A good friend of mine and I had a good laugh about it over text message. My disappointment over the fact that I won’t be writing a literary masterpiece is even humorous in its own right. The incident got me thinking, though. It got me wondering about what triggers my creativity, what makes me feel compelled to write, and what brought me to come up with a plot that is based on the duality of human nature and the fragmentation of psyche. Most creative works are born of experience in some way, shape or form, so I suppose my idea was my inner “Tyler Durden” coming out.

I had a psych appointment this week, a reevaluation for my VA rating. I dread the psychologist’s office and have, by and large, avoided going since my untimely departure from the US Army. To me, talking about the things I have been through to a stranger is a significant emotional event. Speaking the words is much more difficult than writing them down. Somehow, talking about it out loud invokes that rottenness and evil in me to bubble to the surface like the Ouija Board calls spirits into your kitchen. Writing it out doesn’t make my experiences any less true, it just doesn’t bring out those deep dark feelings and memories that I keep buried way down in the recesses of my mind the way that talking does. Talking about it reminds me that there is another person sharing little pockets of my brain. It’s like having a split personality for a short time. Talking about it is like having a conversation with a guy you were cellmates with in prison. You no longer live together, but you’ll always be cellmates. You’ll always have shared horrors and memories. A part of you will always be in prison with him. Writing about him is like telling a fiction story, but talking about him makes it real. Writing is liberating to me. Talking about it feels like being in a prison.

That’s it though isn’t it? The trigger is the stress involved in having to express all of the horrible things I’ve seen and done to another human being. The stress of talking about it is what compels me to write it out. It’s a safer alternative. Thousands of people have read the articles I’ve written. A vast majority of them are strangers that I will most assuredly never meet in person, though a small fraction are people I know. Even fewer are individuals that I know well. One could argue that I habitually express myself and how I feel about my experiences through the articles that I write, and that it’s the same thing as talking about it. I agree with that to an extent. The difference is that I can say what I want on my own terms and in my own words without being asked a series of standardized questions designed to help someone analyze my problem. In writing and posting what I write, I am afforded the luxury of distance from those that read my words. It’s that distance from the reader that makes my method of dealing with the trauma of war effective for me.

Maybe I should write the story anyway. J.D. Salinger once said “I like to write. I live to write. But I write for myself and my own pleasure.” I should write it for nothing else but for my own sanity and to let go of the things that my cellmate subjected me to. The more I write, the less my time in the mental prison is painful, the less room my cellmate takes up, the better I feel. Maybe I should talk out loud about it more though? If that’s what gets the creativity flowing and gets all of this out of my head, then maybe I should subject myself to the talking aspect more often in order to get it out more effectively through writing.

Maybe the dialogue of my demons can exist in both places.

Living With Killing: Lifting the Weight of Moral Injury

by David P. Ervin

In “What’s It Like to Kill Someone?” Travis Switalski delved into the depths of an important question. He answered it adeptly, employing the kind of candidness that makes that conversation enlightening and worthwhile. It’s a dialogue that we are afraid to have with ourselves, much less with the vast majority of the society in which we live. It is a necessary one. And, of course, like any provocative piece of writing, he also raised another important question.

What’s it like to live with killing in war?

We live with it by going through a crucible of sorts, navigating our way through some dark psychological terrain. As Switalski wrote, calculated indoctrination and reflexes enable us to cross the threshold initially. Then the abstract justifies it for a time. For in doing this deed we have followed the rules of war. We have preserved the safety of our fellow soldiers. We’ve fulfilled our duty. Overall, we’ve participated in an act of violence that’s morally sanctioned by the state, something done to advance an endeavor intended to liberate others and protect our country. For a while, those metrics apply – long enough, at least, drive on and finish the mission.

But after a while those aren’t the means by which we measure ourselves and our conduct. We don’t look to them in the middle of the night to comfort ourselves.

In order to kill we tapped into something in ourselves that is frightening and grotesque. When the context of training, duty, and politics is stripped away, we feel we’ve perpetrated something that is terribly wrong. We deprived people of something far more precious than any number of abstract ideals. We deprived them of their life. We know that despite the goal of providing people with freedom we showered them with violence, misery, and bloodshed. It’s enough to shatter our beliefs about the world and our place in it, and it does. Killing can create a phenomenon known as ‘moral injury.’ It’s defined as the psychological impact of transgressing core human values and beliefs.

That is the part we don’t live with. Dealing with a moral injury fosters a plethora of damaging behaviors and beliefs. Overall, we consciously stop believing we deserve life, especially any semblance of a good one. It can be a major catalyst of suicide. Even if not taken to that extreme, it impacts us in more subtle ways. We sabotage relationships and isolate ourselves from the world because we feel our souls are somehow poisoned. We have a peculiar tendency to believe that anything good that happens in our life is a mistake that requires correction. We think any good fortune is an anomaly because the world is an inherently malevolent place. You could say that it darkens our horizons.

But it doesn’t have to.

Someone once told me that, “You should be the best man you can be because that is the most real way that you can provide justice in an unjust world.” Those words have resonated deeply, and I think of them often. There is more truth in that statement than there is in the belief that we don’t deserve to see the brighter side of life. And there is, in fact, a way to cement that more positive mindset.

The real atonement for perpetrating and witnessing such horrors is to transcend them. They can – and probably should – define us for the rest of our lives, but how we shape that definition is up to us. We can regain our belief in the goodness in ourselves and in others by being a good person and serving selflessly. There is a multitude of ways to do so. We can be helpful to our neighbors, generous with our time, and magnanimous in our daily conduct. We can volunteer in the community or simply be a comfort to someone going through rough times. By engaging in the type of altruism that makes the world a better place we can see that it is not all so dark. We can carve out a small place in it that we know is good.

By guiding others to a brighter place we’ve helped create, maybe one day we’ll find ourselves in it. Of course, even if we don’t, we’ll know that in our time we’ve given the world something more than misery and bloodshed. Above all, we’ll know that there’s something good in ourselves to give.

Digging My Way Home

by Travis Switalksi, Sr.

I wish my family knew the pain I feel for having left them. I wish my wife knew how hard it was to leave her alone with two small children while I fought for a cause that hardly mattered. I wish my children knew that I wasn’t choosing a war over them. I wish I had a way to tell them that I’m sorry.

I’m working on my fourth year without the Army, which means I’m working on my fourth year of unadulterated time with my family. It has been a nice change from ranges, field exercises, schools, and deployments. There is nothing like waking up and seeing the people you love most, in person, every day. For them it is a dream come true. They have earned the right to have me home by living through a nightmare.

There was a time when my family came second to the Army and my soldiers. It was a matter of fact that everyone understood. Training took precedent over family functions, soldiers’ needs were met before theirs. When the commander or first sergeant called, Dad went running away from them. That meant deployments, too. I justified my absence with the abstract notion that I went because it was the patriotic thing to do, because I loved them. They always took me to the company, where we hugged and said our farewells. I never said “goodbye.” A potential “goodbye” in the physical, living sense was all too real a possibility. Instead I said, “I gotta go to work.” They still cried. I didn’t, although I wasn’t some heartless machine. I was stoic for their sake.

When I was at war, I called them when I could to assure them that things were “going good.” They weren’t, though. Without them, I became a version of myself that was unrecognizable. I took risks that even my leadership deemed insane. I did things that were morally questionable and sometimes wrong. I buried my memories of them deep to do all that, virtually numbing myself to their existence because they were my weakness. When I was there, I was not a husband and father. I was a leader of soldiers. So I replaced my care and love for them with care and love for my comrades. After all, those men would get me home one way or the other – be it on two feet or in a metal box. The men in my platoon needed me more than I believed my family did. My wife and kids were taken care of, or so I thought.

When I got home I put on my smiley face. It was time to dig them out of the deep hole in which I’d buried them. I dug and dug, but the more I shoveled out to find them, the more the dirt kept filling the hole. I could see them and they could see me, but I couldn’t grab hold of them. They couldn’t reach me, either. The hole, the abyss, was much too deep. Somewhere in all of the burying and all of the digging I had lost myself, too. I wasn’t the person that I thought I was, nor was I who they thought they knew. To them, I was a maniac who only occupied a space in their lives. To me, they were people who couldn’t understand that I’d transformed into that person because I loved them.

In the end, the Army divorced me. I wanted to tell myself that I was surprised, but I wasn’t. I knew it would come. The Army stopped loving me. I’m not sure that it ever had. (If it ever did, it certainly wasn’t as much as I loved it.) Our parting was a bittersweet one; I felt both liberated and lost, cheated and victorious. My wife and kids were ecstatic. They would finally have me “back.” No more training. No more war. And while they were happy, I was lost. I was set adrift with people whom I had forgotten about at some point, people I had buried. I felt they’d be better off without me anyway.

But I was wrong. We needed each other. They were the ones who’d never stopped loving me.

It took some time to realize this. The four of us were crammed into a cold, leaky, dilapidated house for three years. We had little money – sometimes we had little food – but we had each other. It taught me that I never had to dig for them because they were never really buried. They were there the whole time, waiting for me to dig myself out. They were waiting for me to see that I wasn’t damaged. I was no monster. I was more than my experiences. I was a husband and father. Eventually, we learned to live together again. We learned to accept and love one another. We found a way to assimilate to a world and a situation that was foreign to us. We did it together.

I look at the pain I feel for all of the damage and suffering I have caused them, and I hate it with every ounce of my being. Sometimes that hate makes me loathsome of myself, and I wonder how such a terrible human being could deserve something as fine as this life. That, I know, is the Grunt in me coming out to remind me that I need to count my blessings because I probably don’t deserve this. Other times I think about the pain and I wonder if it’s made me cherish what I have. I think it has.

I Think the MREs Were Really Killing Us

by Joseph Miller

In a sudden, staggering second I heard an explosion. It seemed like my company outpost was finally being mortared effectively, but I only heard soldiers laughing instead of diving for cover. I walked out of a meeting with my company commander, looked over a trash heap at my driver, Daniel Shadowens, and couldn’t help myself from laughing. What happened wasn’t really funny, but a lifetime of cartoon bombs only throwing soot on Wiley Coyote made laughing an involuntary act when a radio battery caused similar situation for Daniel. He, on the other hand, was stunned, and looked at the group of soldiers laughing at him and memorably asked us all if he had died. The Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attacks made events like this uniquely comical, because in microseconds all the observers transitioned from believing we were being bombed by mortars to seeing a scene similar to a kids’ cartoon. As Daniel’s platoon leader, my lead sergeant immediately chastised me and the other non-commissioned officer laughing at Daniel. His criticism was appropriate, and the day once served as a critical leadership lesson for a young platoon leader.

But now it reminds me of why many of us are struggling with respiratory issues, and the way the US Department of Veterans Affairs’ approach to identifying source of those problems seems woefully inadequate.

Questions from this anecdote may arise which make our conduct seem stupid: Just why in the hell were we burning radio batteries? Why not remove or recycle them? What else were we burning? Why wouldn’t trash fires be placed somewhere else? The answer to these questions couldn’t be simpler. Practicing successful tactics meant living in our areas of operation, and because of IEDs, no commander would have risked the lives of soldiers to transport trash to a proper waste disposal facility. I, like many soldiers, now suffer from respiratory illnesses like asthma. However, when I attempted to record my exposures, the small company-sized outposts aren’t listed in VA studies. Instead they emphasize the larger bases that can be tested for air quality. It felt like another example of soldiers in Forward Operating Bases getting better treatment while we in the infantry took all the risks.

10444706_335737409950548_2319854986490010305_n — Photo by Joseph Linhart

And we lived and worked in filth. The smaller outposts were all forced by necessity to burn every piece of trash —from radio batteries to soldiers’ excrement. In the middle of the cities themselves, waste flowed through the streets.

Another momentary comedy took place during my last mission as a platoon leader. We were on an IED screening mission, and there was a square shaped object in the middle of a sewage puddle. I was almost certain it was nothing because of its location in a safe area, but it resembled a shape commonly used to hide remote antennae, so I did not want to risk a unit new to the area on a potential threat. It was just a cigarette package covered in muddy waste, and I had managed to discover that with the least amount of exposure to my boots – that is, until I slipped and got the terrible sludge all the way up to me knees. My feet were red, inflamed, and sore for six months following that day.

The worst environmental causes of sickness were not on the bases. They were on the missions and in the smaller outposts. VA studies are only scratching the surface on environmental exposures that are grossly affecting the lives of veterans.

Personally, I think the chemicals that are in most of our lungs following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are none other than the packaging and heating pads of the infamous Meals Ready to Eat (MREs). The metallic packaging was almost universally burned in the small urban outposts. However, the heating packages, which aren’t supposed be used indoors or inside vehicles, are probably the biggest source.

If I were the VA, I would halt this massive study of air quality throughout Iraq and simply burn the contents of an MRE in a controlled environment. I bet you will find those materials in our lungs.

They don’t have to be. Technology is not universally better, and using the sternos and small pieces of plastic explosives used by earlier generations to heat canned food may be a better policy. Maybe we could use the type of packaging advocated by environmentally conscious outdoor food companies. Other alternatives include buying products from the region that wouldn’t require as much packaging or placing the mobile field kitchens at the company level in the military table of organization. Maybe these steps would actually save money – and lungs – in the long run.

We all used to joke that eating MREs everyday had to be killing us. We might have been right.