Journal Entry

“It’s a strange thing when you lose your father. Even when you’ve been preparing yourself for many years like I did, you are never fully prepared. You tell yourself that when it happens, as the first-born and oldest son, you have to be the rock for your family. No matter what happens. You assign yourself that duty. So you become very stoic.

Some experiences had already made me pretty stoic; they sit back there in the deep recesses of the mind, but there’s that resonance that will always be there and might never fully dissipate. Because some things you never forget. So being stoic was the easy part.

You make it through the services and then you get back to moving as quickly as possible. After a few weeks, the initial shock wears off and reality sets in, eventually. But old ingrained habits remain; like I’ve done for many years of living away, I find myself making a mental note to visit my parents the next time I am in town, then I remember he isn’t there anymore. Things change. I’ve changed.

You have a new-found, acute sense of your own mortality. But it’s different now. Climbing aboard helicopters with no running lights, rotors going full speed in the middle of a searing-hot Mesopotamian night, feeling that beast groan and then lurch into the zero-illumination void, jerking back and forth as the pilot struggles to get airborne, and then realizing that black mass out there next to you is another helicopter flying in tight, tandem formation — again with no running lights — hoping you don’t collide, and then later seeing red tracers suddenly start slicing up at you through the inky darkness on the approach into Ramadi, for instance, these kinds of things had already made me acutely aware of my own mortality.

But it’s different now. Once more, the priorities seem to have shifted; things that were once not that important are important now, and things that used to matter don’t seem to matter anymore.”