INTRODUCTION
Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.
—Victor Frankl,Man’s Search for Meaning
I am a clinical psychologist at the VA in Long Beach, California, treating mostly former military men. I spend my day, by and large, sitting in a comfy chair, listening attentively to troubled souls spill their guts as they relive the traumatic events of their deployments. Some are maimed physically; all are maimed psychologically.
Being a psychotherapist contrasts sharply with my former role as a Marine major, deployed in Iraq for over fifteen years. There, my days were passed in dry, unbearable 130-degree desert heat, with sand rushing by and hot air blowing on my face like a hair dryer on full blast. Weighted down with equipment and water bottles from which I drank endlessly to quench my never-ending thirst, I was on constant alert for the danger that lurked around every war-torn corner.
Yet, I loved being there. Deployment suited me, although, at the time, I didn’t understand why. I returned home and went from wearing a gas mask and a coyote-tan, two-inch bulletproof vest in the stiflingly hot Iraqi desert while being shot at to being Mr. Mom and changing the diapers of my two-year-old baby girl. Unsurprisingly, I suffered “separation anxiety” from the military and found it hard to adjust to civilian life.
While wiping my daughter’s butt, the 2008 Oscar-winning filmThe Hurt Locker came to mind. The main character, who is part of an explosive ordinance disposal team during the Iraq War, loves the danger he experiences defusing bombs, even those wrapped around suicide bombers. When he returns home to his ex-wife and infant son, he finds the tedium of civilian life unbearable. In the last scene, he’s back in Iraq for another year-long tour of duty defusing bombs with Delta Company.
When I saw the movie in the theater, people walked out muttering, “Why did he return? Makes no sense.” Others wondered, “Was that guy nuts? Must have been a masochist.”
I had no such thoughts. To me, his return to danger in Iraq made perfect sense. That was where he felt most alive.
War energized me, too. I lived with my wonderful wife and fabulous children in a lovely two-story, three-bedroom home in Orange County, with a “California-size” backyard for my kids to play in, located in a city with magnificent beaches and green parks. But some part of me longed to return to that dangerous desert terrain and again stare death in the face. Without danger, threat, and excitement, my life felt like a lie, and I struggled to find purpose. While the uniform was stored in a closet, what was the point of it all? Who was I?
What was going on? Did other vets feel this way, or was it a quirk within me?
In my last months on active duty in 2014, I spoke with a Green Beret soldier also in the process of leaving the service. Like me, he wanted to continue to deploy, even though he had a devoted wife waiting for him at home. Leaving danger depressed him.
“I get it,” I told him. “Right now, I’m preparing for interviews for management consulting after retirement while also trying to do paramilitary operations for the CIA or the DOD.”
Later I learned this desire to return to combat was a common sentiment in those of us who served; many vets I worked with said they would return to Iraq or Afghanistan in a heartbeat. Recently, many U.S. veterans have raced to fight in Ukraine.
To the non-military, this desire seems bizarre. Even our spouses struggled to understand it. Why would any sane person wish to trade air-conditioning for sweltering in the dry desert heat; homemade meals for disgusting food inside a plastic container; comfortable clothing for filthy, sweaty cammies; relative safety for life-threatening danger?
The military experience, whether in combat or not, is, in common Marine parlance, a fucking bitch. Deployments can be long, even years, and you miss out on comfort, security, families, and breaks. I was deployed in Iraq for three years cumulatively, for six months at a time without furlough. I missed the parental joy of seeing momentous milestones. While sweating it out in the desert, my son was born. While my oldest daughter was learning to crawl and to walk, I was in the middle of the operator training course for joint special operations command (JSOC), bouncing around the U.S. on training missions. I was present for only two weeks of my second daughter’s first year and a half of life.
There’s no end to the list of difficulties of life in the military. The armed forces dictat
