Heroes
‘Hey kids! Do you wanna get near hypothermic in snow storms? Blizzards? Crawl through a tropical swamp? Climb up mountains of rubbish? Get near deafened with gunfire? Perhaps get burned in gas explosions? Fall down a cliff of sharp rocks? stabbed by some derelicts? Roll over in a boat with no life jacket or in trucks with no seatbelt? Have high explosive detonate within an unsafe distance?…. And then years later feel cold crippling nothing?’
Probably not the best recruitment poster for anything, ever. The last part was honestly the only part that killed it for me, when I actually proof read this. The rest of it could be awesome or even heroic, and definitely comical if you hear it again in an obscene 1940s radio voice.
It sounds like life as the protagonist in the coolest movie ever. The people admire you, since it’s all classic masculine behavior. Whether you’re female, male, LGBTIQ… it’s all things I think we can agree that at end of the day spell adventure. Life wouldn’t be worth living if there wasn’t any excitement or lesson to be learned with pain. Plus, we have to fall off a bike to learn how to get up again.
It’s that other type of pain, that bitter aftertaste that we don’t always think about since it’s a lot less attractive. I’ve seen plenty of examples of it throughout my life because it’s shaped who I am and what I think. I often feel like a speck of nothing compared to the universe, even though I am the universe to a speck of nothing from my perspective.
I’ll never mock the military, more than anyone else respectively does anyway, or try to dissuade anyone from ever joining, but I’ll always tell the truth. The lies we tell ourselves to conceal our fears are a veneer that can be peeled away to expose what lies beneath, and let it be real. Failure or ignorance in doing so leads to a lot of pain and poor decisions based on that underlying flaw of living a lie. Less eloquently but in simultaneous perfection described as ‘a turd rolled in glitter’.
Since I’ve been out of the army I’ve been been employed in two different places. I was working for a rural pest control company for my first year cutting down wilding pine trees and trapping animals. It was my birth back into the civilian world. I did not have a lot of contact with service people apart from when I took the time to travel and catch up with mates from the military so it certainly took me awhile to adjust back to the lingo, stories that didn’t involve Waiouru, and most unexpectedly, different expressions of emotion than I was used to.
People who get sulky and cry in front of the team, people who open up and express deep inner feelings without prompting, and people who are ready to be your friend no matter what.
A workplace where you could become a recognised leader and influencer in charge of planning and team leading in less than a year, sometimes regardless of your competence on the tools. Where you can skillfully negotiate your pay if you have the gumption. A place where every individual was different on the exterior. It’s a hell of a lot of change coming from the military. Not nearly as much camaraderie, and it certainly didn’t involve any life long dedication to the career and share a vision that intertwined with my own. It was a great job, it just lacked long term purpose for me.
My second and current job was another 45 degree turn. I’m now the youngest by at least 20 years, and it involves working along side several ex-servicemen mostly being from a fire service or medical background.
Our company teaches mostly fire fighting, safety training and emergency planning, so the instructors in the company have all come from a background of intrinsic detail or regimented leadership. It quickly felt more like home for me initially, something familiar that had a bit of the unification I was seeking.
Life in a regimented team like the military, police, fire service, medical or emergency response force that ultimately serves the people means you will more likely face certain death, see a person be killed, work to the point of exhaustion or collapse, work on a minimal salary or take on a lasting physical injury at some point. Not all of these jobs relate to each other in their nomenclature, even between age groups in some cases, but they all share the same things too. Deep and lasting memories, tales of camaraderie and heroism, experiences that haunt or uplift others, and display mark of service to the general public that is to be heralded as selfless.
The stories are what immortalise a character, and the stories I’ve been told are what makes life hold and shape definition to me. Stories from ambulance personnel who have had to clean up the body parts and sweep up the scene of a car accident. Fire fighters who have had fires engulf their position or bury them alive when a building falls around them. Police officers who have had to tell parents that their son has died in a car accident. Nurses who have been threatened and beaten by the families of the ones they’re trying to keep alive. Industrial workers and students I have taught have stories just as horrific. Watching a mans hand get pulled into a mincer. Being clouded and choked to near death by corrosive gas. Clinging to a ship capsized and sinking at sea during a storm with no hope of rescue.
When the story is relative, it makes more sense. It’s easy to visualise the environment, the emotions, and empathise with the fear or grandeur being described. The technical detail of the story is the difference, not the underlying emotion.
It is comparison that is the ultimate death of joy. I’d always found it difficult to hold any grandeur or pain compared to what would seem a better story, especially the horrible ones. The horrible ones are stories we all somehow yearn for, to in some way glean understanding.
I never had to pick up a ticking watch on a dead friends hand after a bomb buried under the road blew him to pieces, pick up off the road the top half of a woman’s head I’d been speaking to an hour prior, or save an entire oil rig of people from burning to death in a gas explosion on the North Sea, I’m not a woman who has been raped or beaten by my family or partner, I’ve never had a child taken away from me, never sentenced to prison, I’ve never had a terminal condition and prepared for my eventual and drawn out death, and to say goodbye to loved ones in the preparation. Stories that have brought me to tears when I reflect on their experience because I feel like I don’t understand it, like perhaps I wouldn’t even have the strength to hold it together during and afterwards if I got to re-live the moment in their shoes. What binds every single person though, is the story. We all understand love and fear, life and death, peace and war. Our stories are all different, but the highlights feature the same emotions.
I take my own stories and detract the detail. To sand the shining paint away and look at the beautiful grain or the sodden rot beneath. Underneath the exterior we are all the same. To hide it beneath doesn’t make it go away just because we don’t want to see it.
When I speak to someone now, I try to empathise with them on the emotional level because that is what our rational brain is designed to do. It is what our souls energy and consciousness does to connect us to something be it an ideal, a place or a time. It’s the connection that fires and wires the brain, and produces the power to love, heal and understand.
Every person breathing is a hero with a story. We all have a fire that keeps us going, that keeps us fighting the eternal struggle that is going to eventually run out, be it on our elderly death bed when the cells in our heart finally collapse or when the rope snaps taught, ended by our own hand.
The best stories have a happy ending, or at least some kind of resolution and understanding. From rags to riches, suffering to glory, emptiness to fulfillment. Your own story is no different. It happened. You’re writing a paragraph with every thought you think, and shaping the plot with every action you take. Good or bad, they all culminate in the finale.
The guy in the photo at the top was a friend of mine, Damon MacDonald. In 2015, not long after he left the army he took his own life. I spent so much time in mourning and regret that I never reached out to him when all it would have taken was the vulnerability to show him some love and give him the time, which I have in abundance for my friends.
‘It doesn’t matter where you came from or matter what you’ve done. There is no start again because you’re only given one.
It matters where you stand, it matters where you’ll go. It matters what you think, what you plant and what you grow.
We’re all afraid of life, we’re all afraid to die. Together we’re denying truth believing in the lie that we’ll never find our meaning, or live a happy life lacking purpose, choice, love, friends, peace, health or light.
We’re all together tied, with stories that can bind. When the detail’s peeled away it is the truth that we will find.
Open up your mind, and put wind on the flames. Only you can make it grow and make it really burn again.
Freedom is a choice and only you are in your way. Take a step towards the door and make your breath hold sway.
How you reach the end will be determined by your path. You will never walk alone if you just take the time to ask.
You can make it to the end but I promise you will fall, please just go get up again and fire off your arsenal.
Together we are strong, to together we can thrive, we’ll never fear living when it makes us feel alive’
I wrote that for you, the person reading this. I write all of this rambling down, for you mate. From the bottom of my heart to the top of my corona. Go get the life you deserve, dickhead, stop stuffing around. It’s all yours for the taking. Love you long time. You’re my hero, so act like it.