I got the message in the early hours of the afternoon...while napping. It was a message beep I never ignore, one reserved for mates who are actively serving in the armed forces. Instantly awake, I grabbed the phone a feeling of dread spreading through me; the message could be anything and considering where some of these chaps are I expected bad news...and that's what I got.
Squinting into my phone, which I held at arms length to read because I couldn't find my fucken reading glasses, I read the message:
"Bro, my war is over."
My brain didn't make sense of it and it struggled to find the right words to type back, "what the fuck," is what I went with. Not the best message so I followed up with, "you good?" To us it means, are you fucked up or ok.
I had images of a ragged and bleeding stump, a leg taken off by a bullet or explosion; you know, one of those messy wounds where the white of shattered bone protrudes from chunks of torn, burned flesh, muscle and ligaments with the crimson of semi-coagulated blood dripping onto the sand...
Anyway, you can see some of the message thread below.
I knew that last bit was bravado and that he knows what may come...a desk if he's unlucky and a training role if he's lucky.
I'll not go into the rest of the long thread that followed but needless to say this guy is afraid; he fears not being able to do what he is trained for and I get it, all because of a stupid accident; he's a career soldier in what's considered a tier one unit and with a fucked knee he's almost certainly not going to get passed as fit for duty. That sucks but he's a fighter and that's what matters.
We've all had injuries, I've had my share too. I once knew a guy who, when someone was fucked up, would say, are you hurt or injured? What he was getting at was that if you were hurt you could choose to push on and if you were injured you could not - that was in respect of American Football, a sport I played for a long time where there were rules around injuries and duty of care by the team doctors. In other situations injuries and hurts are treated differently and pushing on is not debatable.
I feel sorry for my mate because at his age he is unlikely to be able to end his military career with his unit; he'll do his time though and is probably going to go on to live a full life...just not a full life of jumping out of planes and fast-roping from helicopters.
Since that chat I've been thinking about my own situations and when I've had to push on through pain, discomfort, emotional struggles and other such things that shook my confidence. I think we all go through it at times whether it's in the sporting arena, business and profession and even relationships...we get knocked down and have a choice to make; stay there or get the fuck up and keep operating.
Have you had situations that caused you to question your suitability or effectiveness for a task or question yourself as far as how you may or may not be able to push on physically or emotionally? I think it's at these times of adversity we really understand who we are and in these situations a person will rise or fall. Feel free to comment if you like.
Design and create your ideal life, tomorrow isn't promised - galenkp
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Image(s) in this post are my own