I meant this to be short and happy

This might be a little too long or a little too short. I'm not working off an outline, here, just being honest. At the moment, I'm thinking it likely there won't be too many more posts here.

I have never in my life, which has hardly been a gilded path, had so many bad days in a row. I don't know what's going on with all this. I keep having a string of disappointments gang up on me and beat me down. The challenges may seem minor to all of you, but I don't deal well with interpersonal drama. You need me to run three miles on a broken toe, no big deal. You need me to kill a bunch of conscripts and civilians and sleep at night, I can do it, mostly. You need me to beat the holy living fuck out of someone or have the holy living fuck beat out of me, I been there before. What I can't do is deal with ordinary people in an ordinary disappointment for more than a day at a time. I hate it.

I can blame it on a lot, this little inability of mine, but I place it mostly on the last six years. What I did for the last six years was different from a terrorist in manner and sponsorship only. I still have dreams where we're all just glowing white hot spots against cold black sand in a FLIR pod, give it a flash of what I was very fucking good at, and then we're just white blobs of moist heat, draining a stream of white into that same sand. I gave my life over to it, the job, but what I didn't realize is that I was giving over was my conscience. I hate it. I respect human life more than anything, and I want to devote my life, what's left of it, to preservation of life and keep it from mindless destruction.

Then I get drunk, usually with another pretender to humanity like myself (same haircut, anyway), and I feel the rush. The rush a person accepts and lives when they are on the number one team in the sport where you don't lose points or games. You lose lives. And I was among the star-players in the televised event. Here and there, a rifle may take a life or a grenade dismember someone, but thousands of pounds of matrix delivered by systems that just don't miss is what wins the game. What won the game.

I high-fived and cheered watching the after-action assessments and making our estimates of how many actual and collateral lives had been lost and establishing financial cost of equipment destroyed. We were out there doing Iraq before doing Iraq was cool. There was no war on terror and September 11, we were just fucking up a bunch of unwitting combatants for no Goddamn reason. Came back next year and they called it a war. CNN was watching us work. Letters poured out of the cities of America, England, Australia, Singapore telling us they were proud to get to know us.

Let's be brutally honest here, killing people is fun. The conscientious aftermath is not, but the act, the team scoring the ultimate touchdown, is invigorating and fulfilling. When I watch football and see the faces of those around me aligning themselves with some team of people they've never met, I see it all over again. If they took away the rules and gave John Elway an M4 and the Raiders AK's, and Jason Elam a carrier air wing of his own, the fields would change from friendly green to bloody red and hazy, but the faces of the spectators wouldn't change. Your team is winning.

I don't have party to the death of anyone anymore. I've been home long enough, I quit having to hear that I'm a hero. I have my old medals lined up along my desk with the ribbons growing dusty and the copper and brass getting tarnished. My old red shirt that meant everything to me not too long ago is collecting dust on a rusty nail. My old wedding ring sits in a dish I reserve for spare change, sits on top of a Dinar and some mystery coin with Asian characters. My trophies of a life that cost me my own small family, and the ability to deal with all these fucking civilians and their fucking bullshit sit about eye level from my chair in front of my computer; Armed Forces Expeditionary, with three clusters, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Good Conduct, Sea Service, three clusters, GWOT Expeditionary, GWOT, Homeland Defense, Joint Defense, one cluster, Humanitarian Service, Military Unit Commendation, Naval Unit Commendation, Expert Rifle, Expert Pistol, achievements here, commendations there, citations sitting in a tupperware bin in my closet; In the words of Paul, I have nothing.

The other day, a girl stuffed full of a margherita pizza I had made and some wine I didn't want to open, happened by my desk.

"Those are pretty."

When I get asked why I did everything I'm only proud of when no one is looking, I usually give them some bullshit answer about college money or travel. So now, being honest, the truth is more complicated. I let my innocence and respect for life, I let my ability to be optimistic about humanity's plight dwindle and die, for a bunch of reasons. I did it for you guys.

Please don't thank me. I think I was duped.