Planning Death

Howdy ya'll!! Yes, I have been away for a very long time. I did a large bit of writing (still in the works) and for sometime I was a little tired out mentally and emotionally. So tonight I will attempt to start back at things. Tonight's writing comes with a couple of warnings 1. The material is a little dark, it will involve the topic of death pretty heavily. which brings me to point 2. No, I'm not writing this as a cry for help or anything like that. I promise it is only something I have recently discovered about myself that I am simply trying to understand-I'm not going to be doing anything drastic.

For years I have wondered why I would get so fatalistic at times. One huge reason being that I'm bipolar and we tend to swing up and down, down, down often. But oftentimes it wouldn't even be that, I would be happily somewhere in the middle of moods and someone or something about my deployment would come up and suddenly I was crashing down. It confused me for a long time because while I have bad memories of Iraq I also have very good ones, and more times than not I want to go back on another deployment; so my mood swings were really weird.

Then one day I was talking with a friend about our deployment and I casually mentioned my frustration about my moods and the inability to explain the feelings to people. She asked me if I have ever told anyone about how we used to plan our deaths. I was shocked when I realized I couldn't recall ever telling anyone not even therapists about that. Now before anyone freaks out, let me clarify what I mean. We worked around hundreds and thousands of Iraqi scum who would love to get hold of an airman or soldier. Inside the compounds, we had no firearms other than some less than lethal shotguns holding anywhere from 300 to 1,000 detainees behind a cheap little fence. Most of us carried a variety of knives to cut stuff down with and I remember thinking, "This is the knife I will have to use on myself if they get free." I gradually mentally prepared myself to use this knife to make sure none of them got a hold of me, that meant dying if necessary.

There was also the common knowledge that the Navy supposedly had missiles with our bases' longitude and latitude already entered into their system. The idea was that if the detainees managed a mass escape, the missiles would be fired and hopefully stop them from escaping. Which also meant anyone in the prison was dead. Again it was just rumor but it says a lot that most of us believed the government would kill its own people in order to stop others from escaping. I remember sometimes looking into the sky and wondering if we would hear them before impact or if anyone in the prison would even be told if they were launched. I concluded that if they were shot off that meant we would probably being in the midst of fighting or already dead and thus would never feel the missile explosions.

Once I was assigned to the compounds outside of the prison proper, we were required to carry our M-9's (handguns) when entering the compounds. These compounds were built in such a way that the only way out would be where the detainees would be entering if they managed a breakout. In each of our M-9 magazines were 15 round, 14 for them and 1 for me, was the saying. Thankfully, none of these things happened and I made it back home, but the thought process left a mark. Every day, I went to work with the thought that not only might I be killed but just maybe I might have to be the one to do it. It wasn't a thought that really consumed my brain; I didn't have time to think about it much. It was just there in the back of my mind, like a small itch that I would hopefully never have to scratch but I was prepared to do if necessary.

I can never fully describe this feeling to other people probably because I don't really get it myself. I'm not suicidal, I have been that before and I know the difference, but obviously it's not a cutesy happy go lucky feeling.  Maybe it's an extreme version of reality. Whatever it is, it's probably the single most frustrating feeling because I don't know how to describe it nor do I know many people who understand it.