The Unspeakable Bond

They ask about my work overseas, as if it were a business trip. "How was Afghanistan?" they say over coffee, expecting stories about scenery and local customs. I've learned to stick with safe answers.

"The mountains were beautiful," I tell them. True, but empty.

I don't mention how those peaks witnessed bonds forged in terror and tenderness. I don't explain that Jimmy's nervous laugh became sacred music, or that sharing water in the desert felt like communion.

I've tried to open up. Went to therapy. Worked on improving my ability to talk to people. But even when I push myself to share more, the words feel hollow. How do you explain what James Hillman understood when he wrote:

They nod politely when I mention "the work"…signals intelligence, data analysis, technical operations. Clean words for dirty realities. They can't know that between the briefings and equipment checks, we discovered what brotherhood means when stripped of pretense and safety nets. When every breath might be your last, every gesture becomes prayer.

"It must have been hard," they offer, reaching for empathy they can't quite grasp. Hard? Yes, it was hard. But not in the way they think. The hardest part isn't the trauma. The hardest part is the beauty that trauma revealed.

How do I tell them about Mac stepping between death and me? Not as heroism...though he was heroic...but as brotherhood so pure it redefined what connection means. His eyes held something in that final moment that made every civilian friendship seem like practice.

Hillman understood this sublime terror.

I discovered that humans can connect so completely that death becomes secondary. Mac didn't die for a flag or a mission. Duty demanded it. In that split second, choosing me over himself was as natural as breathing.

This is why my conversations often remain shallow, even when I try. The brotherhood forged in those mountains redefined every relationship that came after. I have great friends, but it isn't the same. How do I bridge the gap between the world of ordinary concerns and my memories of extraordinary sacrifice?

The terrible irony is that those who knew me most completely are gone and blown to pieces, as Hillman says, often as bodies, unrecoverable. The witnesses to that sublime brotherhood lie beneath foreign soil or are scattered in mountain winds. Who's left to understand? Who's left to remember?

The world wants war stories filled with action and heroism. But the real story centers on connection. Bonds so profound they transcend death, so complete they require no explanation among those who've felt them, so sublime they can only be honored in silence by those who remain.

This is why I say "Till Valhalla" like a prayer. This is why I have “Till Valhalla” tattooed on my arm. Not from morbid obsession, but from desperate gratitude for having experienced brotherhood so pure it makes everything else seem incomplete.

How do you return from such sublimity? Hillman asks the right question. You don't return. You spend the rest of your life trying to live a life worthy of what you witnessed, carrying that terrible, beautiful brotherhood like a sacred flame, hoping to kindle even a spark of it in the ordinary world below.

Even therapy can't fully bridge this gap. Some experiences transcend the reach of words, existing in the space between heartbeats where everything sacred unfolds, where Mac made his choice, where Jimmy took his last breath, where I learned that some bonds transcend death itself.

So I keep trying to talk, to connect, to explain. But mostly I honor them in silence, carrying their memory forward, hoping that somehow, I can translate their sacrifice into something the world might understand.