Carpe Diem or Die Trying

When I was twenty-one years old, I wrote my own will. Although I had no assets and nearly no earthly possessions, I still had to divvy up what little I had in case I checked out early. The life insurance policy the Army provided for deploying soldiers was substantial. In death, I stood to make more money than anyone in my family had ever seen in one lump sum. So, I itemized that dispersal in the document just in case.

I remember designating my mom as the main benefactor because I knew she would know what to do. I allotted large chunks to my siblings and offered to pay their way through college with the imaginary blood money. My grandmother would have gotten her house repaired or rebuilt, and my girlfriend at the time would have received adequate compensation.

Seeing that document gave me a weird lump in my throat. Death was something that happened to grandparents, not people in the prime of their lives. Yet, I’d signed up for a combat arms job in the Army a week before 9/11, so it was always possible, at least in the abstract. My participation in Operation Iraqi Freedom shifted my perspective on mortality. I went from fearing death to being apathetic toward it.

My first few missions had me white-knuckling the wooden grips of my .50-caliber machine gun out of sheer terror. Every white phosphorus flare or tracer round that illuminated the sky on our nocturnal convoys made my knees quake in the turret. Each underpass offered a potential booby trap that had me dipping and ducking into the bowels of the Humvee. Every blind corner, disabled vehicle, and piece of roadside trash offered tickets to Hell. Then one day, I just stopped caring.

It’s almost as if traveling the roads of Iraq—first as a gun truck gunner and later as a passenger in an up-armored M915 tractor-trailer—made me numb to my mortality. It became easier to accept my fate. I didn’t expect to come home. Subsequently, I didn’t write a death letter. I felt that would have sealed the deal, and my Scotch-Irish heritage of superstition held. Still, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I wouldn’t survive that deployment.

Fast forward twenty years. With each milestone of aging, I’m still surprised to be breathing. I never thought I’d make it out of my twenties, much less be in my early forties. Seeing that legal document in my attic brought those feelings back. My wife hates my mindset when it comes to my impermanence. I could lie and say it’s because I’ve adopted a carpe diem outlook on life, or perhaps it’s a fatal flaw owing to poor genetics and negative voices from childhood. Either way, I hope to become an old man—but I never expected it. I should probably redo my will, just in case.

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Stan Lake is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker currently living in Bethania, North Carolina with his wife Jess and their house full of animals. He split his time growing up between chasing wildlife and screaming on stages in hardcore bands you’ve never heard of. He has been published by Dead Reckoning Collective, The Havok Journal, Reptiles Magazine, Lethal Minds Journal, and many others. He filmed and directed a documentary called “Hammer Down” about his 2005 deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in with Alpha Battery 5-113^th of the NC Army National Guard. You can find his books, collected works, and social media accounts at www.stanlakecreates.com

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.