In War, You Choose Not to Die. In Peace, You Must Choose to Live
And adjusting the course of What then?
I mentioned last week I would begin tying a few threads together.
In this piece I describe the what-it-is of combat, my transition from war to peace, how the problems of ease are not only a veteran problem but a human problem, and then through a process of elimination I dig down to what I believe the root cause of this pain truly is—and how we may pave a path forward.
One of my last missions stands out to me, not because of its difficulty, but because of the difficulty that followed—my transition into the world of ease.
We walked in a column beneath a crescent moon with low illumination. I heard the gentle compression of dirt and pebbles as we slowly stalked along a mud wall of an enemy compound and stood in a line. I felt the weight of my armor, radios, rifle, pistol, ammunition, grenades, knives, and helmet. I smelled sweat and dirt. As I spoke low and slow through my radio to a stack of jets flying thousands of feet over my head, the world was a green arc of stars, the feint lights of the aircraft, the black horizon, rows of mud-walled compounds, and the shapes of warriors. I knew each member of my team by a bow-legged stance, a slightly stooped right shoulder, or a flamboyantly cut goatee, but all with the slow, calm, contemplative body language of those whose every cell and neuron are in absolute harmony with the world. I sensed the risk of ambush, bullet, IED, and RPG. My mind envisioned the other side of the door we were about to rush through: Were the gunmen standing in the corner of the room with their AK-47s pointed at the opening? Were they sleeping? Were they not home?
I had never felt so alive.
Thirty days later I was living in New York City. It was heavenly at first. I would see panicked or apathetic faces streaming down the sidewalk and wondered why they were not grateful their legs were not at risk of disintegrating above a plastic bomb filled with metal forks and spoons. But then the honeymoon came to an end.
I was safe and had never felt so empty. I could do whatever I wanted and yet I felt useless. I was surrounded by nine-million people and yet alone. During my runs I found myself hoping an enemy lay in wait for me behind the great stones of Central Park and felt not stress but relief. During class I found myself wishing for an amphibious invasion of Manhattan and felt not terror but a surge of life.
I was not the first to feel this way.
Two-Leggings, a Crow warrior, wove a tale of ecstasy: fire dances, midnight raids, and buffalo hunts. But when the steamroller of civilization wiped his way of life off the earth, his tale changed tone: “Nothing happened after that. We just lived… There is nothing more to tell.”1
The transition (which my friend Ben Davis writes about extensively) and my lessons learned were what kicked off What then? and what this passion project is leading towards.
The crucial point is the trial of those in transition is not only a veteran problem but a human problem. It is the trial of us all writ large—the search for belonging, usefulness, and meaning.
What, then, did I learn? How might it apply to our culture of ease? I believe the lesson is universal. I believe the solution is not to hide in war and hardship, but to fight in peace and ease. So what does this look like?
At first, I thought the pain of transition was due to the loss of my tribe. No matter where I went while I was in the military, I carried my tribe within me: identity, vocabulary, origin stories, and body language. It was within me while I sat with my family prior to deploying and while I stood alone on watch as my team slept behind me. And suddenly it was gone. I was plagued by questions: “Who am I, alone, without my tribe? Without our mission? Our fight? Our enemy?”
And then Two-Leggings’ tale of woe deepened the rabbit hole. He still had his tribe and he still suffered. He, too, missed the mission and the fight, so was it the loss of our way of life that mattered? But what gives a “way” to a life?
I suspected it had to do with hardship. So what is it about hardship that sparks fire dances, creates war parties, and inspires stories worth telling? What is it about hardship that, when removed, makes us feel as though we merely exist rather than violently live?
Let us place it before our mind’s eye. Our environment was hard: trip-wire, AK-47, and spear. Our physical response was hard: lifting, throwing, and stalking. Our cultures were hard: fatalistic, ritualistic, and tribalistic. And in the end, the outcome was a ruthlessly beautiful binary:
Belonging or death.
Meaning or death.
Usefulness or death.
I believe the heart of the matter is this: hardship forces a confrontation with death—the exact line between our existence and our non-existence. We learn our lives are entirely up to us from the moment we open our eyes to the moment we close them. We either define why we will live and how we will live when our lives are at stake or we will not live at all. It is a brutal—and divine—awakening.
Isolation, meaninglessness, and uselessness have only one home: ease. Nothing forces us to define our why and how. The focus I built for war to soak up every detail in a deadly environment—a trip-wire in the roots or a sniper in a tree that may harm my team—made me just as intensely aware of a world that demanded nothing of me. Where hardship once lived I found a void. I felt the loss of usefulness, meaning, and tribe as powerfully as I once felt their presence.
What, then, is the solution for all who feel this way in ease? To wish we can go back in time to buffalo swarming the plains? To seek a stalk beneath branches of pomegranate and almond? In other words, to escape?
But are we truly masters of ourselves if we rely on hardship to force the meaning of life on us?
No.
I believe in my bones self-mastery is not the ability to flourish in hardship, but the ability to flourish both in and out of hardship. It is not waiting for a midnight raid of tomahawk and rifle to force us to confront our own existence, but bringing back a midnight raid mode of mind and forcing the confrontation on ourselves.
What does Max Scheler say? “To love the higher is to be willing to suffer for it.” And Irvin D. Yalom? “Though the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us.” And Sartre? “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” And Heidegger? “Being-toward-death is the key to authenticity.” And Epictetus? “Keep before your eyes, day by day, death and exile, and everything that seems terrible.”
Whether these thinkers knew the transition from hardship to ease or not does not matter; what matters is they were trying to figure out how to live a life of meaning in the void of ease.
Ease is both the greatest curse and blessing of all time. It is the absence of struggle, yes, but it is merely the absence of externally imposed struggle. My point is we no longer need hardship to force us into confronting our existence because we can do so voluntarily. When we do, we no longer need an enemy to remind us we are alive when we might not be; which means we choose to live; which means we choose how we will live. We can make a discipline of every second we have been given. A perpetual act of awe as if each moment is our last—or first.
The truth is this: in war, we must choose not to die; in peace, we must choose to live. This is the foundation on which everything worth fighting for—the mission, the meaning, the tribe—may be built and built to last.
This is a transition to a higher mode of living.
And it is the subject of essays to come.
What then? is a passion project.
To support my mission, please share this essay, leave a comment, or simply add a like.
See you for the next essay on Tuesday.
Two Leggings. Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior. Edited by Peter Nabokov, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1967.
Inspirational thoughts of the highest order. Your writing is great to wake to. Thank you.
Thank you Sam, this is such a potent piece to start the day, and for life more generally. I love the closing focus on affirmatively choosing to live. It brings home the sense of purpose that we read in the self-authored eulogy of J. Alex Hotell. He was killed in the Vietnam War in 1970. He left an obituary he had composed about a year prior. Part of it reads:
"We all have but one death to spend, and insofar as it can have any meaning, it finds it in the service of comrades-in-arms.
And yet, I deny that I died FOR anything—not my Country, not my Army, not my fellow man, none of these things. I LIVED for these things, and the manner in which I chose to do it involved the very real chance that I would die in the execution of my duties"