I chose this. That's the part that makes it harder, not easier.
He painted a picture, sure, but I signed the papers. I said yes to the deployment. I walked onto that plane knowing something waited on the other side, even if I didn't know what. My hand was on the pen and my signature on the line.
Nobody drafted me. Nobody forced me. I made choices with incomplete information, but they were still my choices.
The government contractor offered good money, better benefits, and a chance to do something that felt important. Signals intelligence. Technical work. I could use my technology skills to make a difference.
I thought I understood what I was agreeing to.
The plane touched down in Afghanistan at dawn. Mountains rose up through the dust like broken teeth. I remember thinking they were beautiful. That thought lasted about three hours.
Training had covered the technical aspects thoroughly. How to read signals, identify patterns, and process data. What training couldn't cover was the visceral reality of working in a place where people actively tried to kill you. Where the distance between "intelligence analyst" and "guy holding a rifle" collapsed into nothing.
I learned fast. I had to. The operators took me in, taught me what I needed to survive. How to move. Where to look. What sounds meant danger, and which ones were just the wind. They didn't judge me for being unprepared. They just tried to keep me alive.
But surviving and living turned out to be different things.
The work itself was fascinating in a clinical sense. Patterns emerged from chaos. Signals told stories. Data revealed truths. I was good at it. Maybe that's what made it worse: being competent at something that required me to exist in a constant state of controlled terror.
Every mission meant hours of acute awareness, then days of processing what happened. Not just the technical data, but the human cost. The faces. The sounds. The moments when analysis stopped being abstract and became immediate, personal, and permanent.
I made another choice then, without fully realizing it. I chose to lock it all away. To compartmentalize so thoroughly that I could function during the day and only fall apart at night, quietly, where nobody could see. To become whatever version of myself could do this work without breaking.
That choice worked until it didn't.
Coming home should have been a relief. Instead, it was disorientation. I'd spent so long being one person over there that I'd forgotten how to be anyone else. The guy my family knew, the guy my friends expected; he'd been gone so long I couldn't remember how he moved through the world.
So I made another choice. I pretended. I put on the mask of normalcy and wore it until my face hurt, smiling at the right times. Laughed at appropriate jokes. Nodded through conversations about things that felt impossibly trivial and impossibly important at the same time.
Years went by like this. I built a career. Maintained relationships, at least superficially, and checked all the boxes that indicated a functioning life. But inside, I was still in those mountains, still processing those moments, still trying to reconcile who I'd been with who I'd become.
The nightmares were expected. The hypervigilance made sense. What surprised me was the numbness. The way joy felt muted, like hearing music through walls. The way the connection seemed to happen to other people while I watched from behind the glass.
I chose isolation without naming it as a choice. Pushed people away before they could get close enough to see the truth. Sabotaged relationships that might have mattered. Convinced myself it was protection…for them, for me…when really it was just fear wearing a different face.
The anger was easier to understand. Anger at the world for being so aggressively normal. Anger at myself for not adapting faster. Anger at the gap between who I'd been and who I'd become, and at the realization that I couldn't go back, couldn't undo, couldn't unlearn what those mountains had taught me.
Therapy helped, eventually. But first, I had to choose to go. I had to choose to show up each week and do the work and choose honesty over performance, vulnerability over protection. I had to choose to stop pretending the weight I carried was somehow noble or necessary or anything other than what it was; damage I'd taken on and then refused to address.
The hardest part was accepting that I'd participated in my own diminishment. Not through the initial choices, which I could justify, understand, and even defend. But through the years after. By choosing numbness over feeling, isolation over connection, and opting for a small life because living large seemed impossible.
I spent so much time in maintenance mode. Keeping things together. Managing symptoms and surviving day to day. And somewhere in all that managing, I forgot to ask what I was managing toward. I forgot that survival alone isn't sufficient. That the point of healing isn't just to stop hurting, but to start living.
The weight I carry isn't just from what happened in Afghanistan. It's from all the years after, all the choices I made in response to what happened. The relationships I didn't build. The risks I didn't take. The life I constructed around avoidance and fear, dressed up as caution and wisdom.
Who would I have become? The question feels unfair because it assumes a single path, a clear trajectory that war interrupted. But maybe there was never just one version waiting to emerge. Maybe who I might have been is less important than who I'm choosing to become now.
I'm learning to make different choices. Smaller ones, mostly. Choosing to show up fully in conversations instead of watching from a distance. Choosing to feel things even when feeling things hurts. Choosing to build something instead of just maintaining the ruins.
Some days I manage it. Other days, I fall back into old patterns, old protection, old ways of moving through the world without actually touching it. But even the falling back is different now because I can see it happening. I can name it as a choice rather than an inevitability.
The mountains changed me. But I chose how to carry that change; I decided to let it define everything, nothing, or something in between. Those choices created the last twenty-plus years as surely as that first signature created the deployment.
I can't reclaim lost time. Can't undo choices made or unmake their consequences. I can’t become who I might have been if different decisions had unfolded differently. But I can choose what happens next. I can choose to stop treating my own life like something to endure and start treating it like something to build.
The weight remains. Some of it was earned in mountains and missions. Most of it accumulated through years of choosing wrong responses to complex realities. But weight can be carried differently; it can become an anchor or a ballast. It can sink you or steady you, depending on how you hold it.
I'm still learning which way to hold mine.