We’re at one of the most exposed outposts in the entire US military, and he’s crawling out of his skin because there hasn’t been a good firefight in a week. How do you bring a guy like that back into the world? Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up. War is so obviously evil and wrong that the idea there could be anything good to it almost feels like a profanity. And yet throughout history, men like (Mack), (Rice), and (O’Berne) come home to find themselves desperately missing what should have been the worst experience of their lives. To a combat vet, the civilian world can seem frivolous and dull, with very little at stake and all the wrong people in power. These men come home and quickly find themselves getting berated by a rear base major who has never seen combat, or arguing with their girlfriend about some domestic issue they don’t even understand.
When men say that they miss combat, it’s not that they actually miss getting shot at – you’d have to be deranged. It’s that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted. They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life. It’s such a pure, clean standard that men can completely remake themselves in war – you can be anything back home: shy, ugly, rich, poor, unpopular – and it won’t matter because it’s of no consequence in a firefight, and therefore of no consequence, period. The only thing that matters is your dedication to the rest of the group, and that is almost impossible to fake. That’s why the men say such impossibly vulgar things about their sisters and mothers; it’s one more way to prove nothing can break the bond between them, it’s one more way to prove they’re not alone out there.
War is a big and sprawling word that brings a lot of human suffering into the conversation. But combat is a different matter. Combat is the smaller game that young men fall in love with, and any solution to the human problem of war will have to take into account the psyches of these young men. For some reason there is a profound and mysterious gratification about the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life. Combat is virtually the only situation in which that happens regularly. These hillsides of loose shale and (holly) trees are not where the men feel most alive – that you can get skydiving – but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again – but they can’t.
So here sits Sargent (Brendan O’Berne), one month before the end of deployment, seriously contemplating signing back up. “I prayed only once in Afghanistan”, (O’Berne) wrote me, after it was all over. “It was when (Gestrapo) got shot, I prayed to God to let him live”. But God, Allah, Jehova, Zeus – or whatever a person may call God, wasn’t in that valley. Combat is the devil’s game – God wanted no part. That’s why our prayers weren’t answered – the only one listening was Satan”