Hollywood does it best to lend dramatics to the undeniable event that we all are destined for. I have a wide variety of target readers here on the Public Side so it is safe to say that amongst us here…. We have all known someone, or been a part of an experience in which a person has died suddenly and unexpectedly.
I can only tell you the story of my own walk with death in the highest of hopes that we all find a type of communal identity and trust that keeps us coming back here year after year.
~Backstory (How Death Snuck Up On Me)~
I left here (Houston) and said goodbye to a post-undergrad life in which Big-Power were the powerhouses of the downtown skyscrapers. Duke, Enron, Royal-Dutch(Shell), British Petroleum (BP) and Exxon all were major players here and the burgeoning technology bubble was on the cusp of bursting. Lucent, Cisco….all the tech-heavy NASDAQ had their biggest representations east of the Grand Canyon.
I worked as a server not too far away from where I am typing these words right now. I lived with my college room-mate and life was simple. A ton of good-times as what limited money we did have flowed as effortlessly as the beer in our favorite upscale bars downtown during happy hour.
However, the way I was raised and later in the Marines, I was taught to always ALWAYS pay attention to what is going on in the environment around me….and I knew that this environment couldn’t last..and I needed a Masters.
SO…we all know the story, I lost my mind and went in The Marines as a means to have Uncle Sam pay for a majority of it. Sure enough, in the spring of the following year (2001), big energy experienced its rolling blackouts as price gouging was uncovered, de-regulation was born and Enron came crashing down, pulling Arthur Anderson along with it as it collapsed into the streets we strolled down merrily with our beers not even a year before.
I wish I could tell you that I was some hardass Texas Cowboy who joined up like Chris Kyle (my SEAL brother who protected me…we’ll get to that) of ‘American Sniper’ did. But…my story is far less romantic… I only went in because after being raised in an economically repressed, struggling mining port in the Midwest, I knew that The American Dream was elusive and would take skill and cunning to capture…..I knew that the only way to do that was with graduate education.
And so the story goes….went to tech school (29 Palms...that’s High-Desert between Palm-Springs and the San Bernardino California Basin for all you non-Cali folks out there ;) ) and then was stationed with 1st Marines at Pendleton. 1st Marines is as we call it the “Front lines” or where the actual fighting takes place. There are other divisions, 2nd & 3rd…..Camp Lejeune, North Carolina and Okinawa, Japan respectively.
Division Marines tip the spear…we are the “Fist fighter”/scrappers that are trained in close-in combat arms as well as marksmanship that allow for “dispatching” combatants at a distance. Even with our skills, and in the highest interest of preserving modesty, we still benefitted from the SEALS (like Chris Kyle) who would operate independently of us and clear our way and path ahead from dug-in insurgents who were hell bent on sending us all back in boxes. Chris Kyle’s simple response to that notion exemplifies what many Texan’s, including myself thought about the terrorist agenda as a whole, “Fuck that…” … and ‘The Devil Of Ramadi’ was born. May he rest in peace up there. We 1st Marines that he protected will never EVER stop telling his story, weather it is in the process of telling our own or on its own. Will leave that thought here.
So, the story continues that I was out with 1st Marines in 29 Palms shooting Howitzers and chasing Jakelopes on the morning of 9/11. Before that morning, I was going to school at night via computer and making good on the promise to myself and my family of getting my graduate school knocked out.
Then everything changed.
I think that I can say that on the whole 9/11 took a small part of all of us. It took part of our innocence, it took a part of our feelings of safety, it put college plans on hold, it caused common men and women to be “moved to join” and there was a general cohesiveness attached to this event that was designed with hate in its heart.
I didn’t get to continue with college…that would have to wait. From that moment on, 1st Marines sole focus was preparation for deployment…..our first…my one and only…the “Initial Invasion.”
~Deployed Death~
As a person who has personally arranged the meeting of “bad guys” with…. ‘Their God’…As a former EMT in Undergrad and now in my life away from those things; I can tell you this: When people die….it’s NOT like you see in the movies.
I remember when I was 10 or 11, my parents brought us down for the funeral of my grandparents on my dad’s side. I remember the visitation and seeing my first dead body. My grandparent seemed so peaceful….like they were sleeping. For the longest time I believed that this was the face of death.
Then, in undergrad, I saw my first vehicular homicide stemming from a drunk driving incident…and it BLEW MY MIND! I was only 24. 4 year later, when I entered the Marines, you would think that working at a Fire Department would get me ready for seeing death. ….not like this it didn’t.
Being witness to a VIOLENT death can systematically and profoundly change a person from top to bottom; inside and out. Combat Trauma has been studied so much over the decades since its effects began to profoundly show up in Vietnam Veterans as a serious factor in society after wars.
Make no mistake, I have seen the worst of it. I have seen my fellow soldiers ripped apart in so very many ways…it was a little easier for me than most…I have seen how profoundly the human body can change at high speeds in a car…. And while in combat, how bodies could change when a supersonic projectile was introduced into it.
Very sad….and worth a moment of pause…while I have overcome the trauma and learned how to introduce feeling back into the equation (to be sad for other people’s loss), I haven’t always been this way and there are so very many vets out there who either “quit trying” to heal that part of them or they simply deny that anything is wrong…until it eats them alive.
I was blessed. I continue to be blessed. I used to tell my squad when they asked me if I was afraid to die, “I’m not going to die….cuz I’m a righteous mother-fucker!” but in all honesty (and honesty is what I want to bring to this scroll) there was fear.…fear of dark houses that someone was hiding in who wanted to kill me, dark caves, spider holes, IED’s crammed up a dead animals butt on the side of the road….
What they don’t tell you on the civilian side is that you are “Supposed to pack fear” in our deployment essentials. People’s understanding of true, raw fear has captivated mankind since the dawn of man.
If someone tells you that they aren’t afraid of anything…..keep your eye on that person because they are either: 1. Crazy or 2. Lying.
Fear is essential as it causes our bodies to become alert, poised, calculated and anticipatory. It dumps adrenaline into an animal’s bloodstream allowing for super-human feats of strength and agility in times of dynamic-chaos. It is a WELCOME friend for the well trained and adequately disciplined Marine as well as any well-adjusted person.
That being said, walking beside death and ushering insurgents into their afterlife was just a “Thing” I did as part of my job…..It was “either them or me” ….and it sure as shit wasn’t going to be me.
~Home/Garrison/Stateside Death~
That being said, after you have walked in what most Marines call “the valley of the shadow” of death and become so intimate with your humanity; that is to say embraced your vulnerable-ness as a human being, life becomes a gift that you GET to experience every day.
You feel every second of the ticking clock, you praise God for each sunset, you TAKE PICTURES and lots of them, you hug your family members just a little tighter and you genuinely enjoy the people that you choose to have in your life and the time you spend with them.
Because time is precious, life is precious. Many people here in the “safe” United States don’t get that and it’s because of the sacrifice of our veterans who fought and died to give them that sense of security.
So we choose….the people that we surround ourselves with….what they didn’t tell many of us that eventually were diagnosed with delayed-onset PTSD is that you are going to make poor choices. Because you are busy living your life for each moment, you don’t take the time that it takes to really established a person’s background. While everything is 20/20 in retrospect, the diminished judgment and the risky behavior of un-diagnosed combat veterans afflicted with PTSD often ends terribly. Terrible decisions, terrible choices, terrible outcomes.
22 Veterans a day feel like this life is too much for them to handle and “check out’ to the afterlife and I have seen FAR too many of my brothers and sisters lose the battle with their inability to walk in this plain of existence after having to say goodbye to so many human beings either through combat or through some other medium.
I have lost close friends in combat. I have lost ex’s who, regardless of my disagreements with them or our past together, I still cared for on some very basic human levels….in the end it’s not their fault(s) that we didn’t work out. Although many of you don't like me saying it, these were not the "Questionable choices" I made in the throws of my early years of PTSD... THESE ARE GOOD PEOPLE....in some form or fashion, I saw the good in them and wanted to be close to that because on some inner-level I wanted to believe that I was good too. One of my ex's moms used to say, "Everyone has something to offer the rest of us." I have spent a good part of my late 30's and early 40's trying to convince a majority of you that "it's nobody's fault" that a Combat Veterans make these choices in people or that my ex's chose me....our being together simply wasn’t meant to be and that my basic human-being caring hasn’t been “switched off” as can happen to MANY combat vets who have dealt with death on such a grand scale.
Death is still out there…. It’s why I HAMMER the gym so ferociously…. Am I lifting, boxing and running because I am trying to get away from death? Maybe….but I know that when death comes for me, there is NO PLACE I can hide. Death comes for healthy people, it comes for unhealthy people…you don’t get to choose. The trick is: live like you were dying. …..live every day as if it were your last because you don’t know and you don’t get to choose. …Live your life, take the pics, hug the necks and love-out-loud while you are here in the moment.
~When you have to watch~
So with this in mind, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about what happens when you “have to watch”…that is when you know death is coming and you are REQUIRED to be an active part of the process.
Recently, I had to watch the terrible fallout from death coming for a battle-buddy of mine “Bo” Greenwood who passed away on May 10th. Bo was one of the 22 Vets a day who take their own lives. We are left behind on this earth to deal with his wife and son…supporting them and crying with them as we try to help them rebuild and move on in the face of an unsurmountable setback and devastating set of circumstances that life has presented them with. I wish he would have reached out…I wish I could have been there for him in some of his darkest moments to let him know that we are all here for him and that things really will get better. In the end each person makes their own choices…and this set of choices in these circumstances lead to his untimely demise and our unfathomable sorrow.
Most everyone knows that we all lost one of my ex’s recently. During my time with her, one of our most hottest and deeply contested points of disagreement was on her taking care of her body. I knew every single moment I was a part of her life that she had untreated hypertension. I knew it, I tried to get her to go get seen about it but in the end the fighting proved to be too much…and I relented.
I can’t tell you how much I have blamed myself in the wake of her loss. I feel like I KNEW as a scientist and still was ineffective as a communicator. If I had stuck with it, if I had made sure that she got in and put her health above all the other details in her life; she might still be alive today. Because let’s face it….raising kids will fill your life up with details….and in her case they did. She was someone who always put her kids first and it was difficult to convince her that keeping herself healthy was in her kids’ best interest because it would mean more time with them…. Again, TIME is the optimal word here. The moment we take time for granted is the moment we run the risk of losing TIME with the people we love.
I will have to live with that….just like I live with the rest of my experiences with death….Maybe I could have done more in each of them…maybe not.
Two weeks ago my Brother In-Law Jeff, who has been fighting Cancer since it was discovered in his lungs in 2014, was re-admitted to the VA Hospital here in Houston. His lungs were filling up with fluid again and he had the fluid drained off and underwent some pretty severe chemotherapy that nearly killed him
We pulled Jeff out and put him in MD Anderson Cancer Centers where we were presented with the fact that he is down to just half of a useable lung left and that his days are numbered…that we should make the most of the TIME we have left with him.
It’s difficult to watch…. Jeff was a BEAST of a Marine…
At 5’10” he was the model Marine physical specimen for all of us “not tall” Marines who pride ourselves in being “stacked like a brick shit house.”
He is fun to be around and always had a positive outlook even after the cancer was discovered that we believe stems from his time in Iraq.
Again, we will have to watch death in this, some of the last moments of his life as he is down to half of a “useable” lung and won’t ever recover from it. The phrase “make him as comfortable as possible” was invoked long ago and we are doing just that as we try to make the most out of the TIME we have left with him.
When you have to watch…..it’s different… I have been there with my fallen brothers and held them in my arms when they went… that shift in the eyes where you can tell that the soul finally detaches and walks away from looking through the eyes out into the world as the soul passes into the next life.
When you have to watch…it’s not like the movies at all. There’s nothing glamorous, there’s no heroic music, there’s just that moment when you watch it happen. Or as the case was with my ex…when someone calls you on the phone and tells you that something you knew was coming…finally happened.
When you have to watch, if you haven’t seen it before, it changes you profoundly…. You realize just how precious these moments are. You expect and demand that your time is valued by everyone….you dump people out of your life who aren’t respecting your time….you hold the ones just a bit tighter who do.
In the end, watching someone die is something that many of us are faced with and many of us don’t understand or talk about. As Christians, we know that life goes on. As Marines, we know that our job is just starting ‘Guarding the streets of heaven.’
With the acrid political environment we all find ourselves in, so very many people take life for granted….they can throw around sayings like “Black Lives Matter” while missing the point that ALL LIVES MATTER. We take for granted the fact that we live in a country where you can go to prison for taking a life….because it is so very valued.
Life, in any context, is valuable. Watching the end of someone’s days should only serve to underscore the precious gift of life we have all been blessed with.
Death should make us all appreciate life more. As stated above and throughout my journey in my days that are ahead of me, I will always try to respect life and my time with all of you.
-M
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Little Housekeeping: Those stragglers e-mailing me who aren't up on your "Chats, snaps, instaberries bookspaces or whutevah..." The search function the new scroll has been disabled for public-search so we will post the direct link here https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100013102957575 for our long-lost public side peeps....it's been a while! You should lurk on by the new place! We will try to make MOST of the stuff on the new scroll as public as we can given our current positions. See you over there! -A&M
