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There isn’t a lot to do that hasn’t been done inside the wire. You play cards. You bullshit. You eat your shitty dinners and listen to other people's bullshit. You toss a ball around and consider selling your soul for a hamburger from a restaurant back home. Then, in my case, you realize home no longer exists. So you sit down at night and play the guitar because it gives your mind something else to focus on. Then some of the other guys come along to join in, reminding you of the camaraderie in this place, and you don’t really give a fuck about home anymore. These guys are your family now.
Wyatt Adler. Kieran O’Brien. Ryan Kelly. They all play too. Before we found this thread of commonality, they were just the riflemen I worked with. The faces and voices I knew well and often depended on in life-or-death situations, but nothing more and nothing less. We made small talk, but I was the lone holdout when it came to making friends. I had convinced myself I didn’t want any after the first time I saw men from our unit drop. But somewhere along the way, they blasted through the iron curtain of my armor and convinced me to jam with them. One session turned into two, and then two turned into a hundred before we made it an-every-chance-we-got sort of thing.
O’Brien set up some makeshift drums out of cans, Kelly played bass while Adler took the lead, and I played rhythm. They all had a long way to go as vocalists, but Kelly was the best of the worst of them, so he self-promoted his position to lead vocalist or, in this case, the solo vocalist of the group. He told us how he’d only ever dreamed of being a rock god, and we let him ride that fantasy out for the better part of six months. That was until O’Brien caught me hammering out the lyrics to a song I was working on one night when I thought they were chowing down at the DFAC. I was deliriously fucking tired, and at that point, my nerves were so shot it didn’t even occur to me to be uneasy when I discovered him listening to me. I stopped for all of a second before he told me to pretend he wasn’t there and go on. So I did.
He badgered me for the next two months after that until I finally relented. It wasn’t the stage fright that got to me anymore. I’d seen these guys bleed and shit themselves when we were trapped in a hole with no way out, and I’d listened to them choking the life out of their dicks at night when they thought nobody was paying attention. That was the reality of a fucking war zone. So I figured we were all pretty even in that aspect. But it started to feel more like we were chasing a dream that could never really come to fruition and less like we were passing the time. That was the thing that made me want to quash it. But O’Brien brought Adler on board with his campaign, and Adler had a way of convincing me to do stupid shit. Probably because Adler is one of those silent types who never really speaks unless he has something important to say. So when he did, I listened. And the next thing I knew, we spent every chance we got playing those fucking guitars and singing songs in the middle of the desert. I’d be lying if I said we hadn’t gotten pretty good at it, too. But now the reality is it will all be over soon.
Our deployment is coming to an end. O’Brien and Kelly still have another year on their contracts, and I have two, but Adler is at the end of his. His situation is different, and once he’s back on US soil, he doesn’t intend to re-enlist. Six months ago, Adler was here with us when his wife went into premature labor back home. She died of complications during childbirth before he could even step foot on a plane, but the baby survived. Now he’s a single dad trying to figure out how to navigate this situation. After his bereavement leave, he made the difficult decision to continue his deployment and finish out his contract, but I know that shit’s been eating him up every day he’s here. His mom is taking care of Zoe until his boots are back on the ground at home, but it isn’t the same as him being there.
He’s spoken to me at length about the choices ahead. He wants to give his daughter stability, but he doesn’t know what to do with himself if he’s not a Marine. This is how he supports his family, and now he has to figure out a new normal. One that will give him a chance to be there for Zoe. And I know that no matter what, I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure he’s the one who goes home to take care of her.
