Standing Ready in a Quiet Kitchen

I recently rewatched the movie Fight Club, based on the novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk. The book is a different animal, with a decidedly more jarring plot twist at the end. That said, they both carry the same message of the slow disillusionment of a purposeless generation.

There’s a line by one of the main characters: “No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression…”

That quote hit differently two years later, after September 11th. We had our war and a clearly defined enemy. That clarity muddled when the first wounded warriors started coming home. Unlike our fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations, they didn’t stay quiet about what they saw. They were not content to quietly go insane from TBI stacked on top of PTSD on top of operational tempos that would turn even a healthy person into a psychopath. We got to watch on social media as the VA sought for reasons to deny them help.

And yet I raised my right hand and enlisted in 2010. I did my time. Yeah, I was POG and never saw combat, the same can be said for every desk jockey, wing wiper, doc, and mechanic that make up the long handle driving the spear tip. I’d planned on joining the Marines like my dad. A pair of jarheads, both officers who’d just retired, talked me into joining the Coast Guard. They said it was a “really bad time to be a ground pounder; the politicians were too involved.”

By the time Bin Laden was killed, we were ten years into a war that didn’t have an end in sight, and everyone had a smartphone in their hands to watch it in real time. Soon “22 Until None” became another awareness campaign that faded into the background noise of the veteran community. Meanwhile, suicides continued to rise.

We had our war and purpose, and yet there was no evil empire with armbands and tanks to fight. It was bored villagers that third-world terrorists used as cannon fodder. Or in my case, South American day workers the cartels could pressgang into service driving drug boats up the coast. What kind of opposition is that? We’d killed our “Hitler,” and yet the bad guys persisted. Somehow, we weren’t done.

I remember watching then-President Obama announce Bin Laden’s death and thinking, “Now what?”

Fast forward almost 15 years.

I stood at my kitchen sink four days after Christmas, caught in the interval between December 25th and New Year’s Eve. Both my sons were in bed and finally asleep after family visited. The 3-year-old was an overtired engine of chaos while the baby refused to settle for anyone, too busy watching it all happen. The dishes were clean or loaded into the washer. I wracked my brain trying to think of what to do next as I prepped and set the coffee maker. I had three hours until midnight. That was plenty of time to be DOING SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE, and all I could do was stand there fighting off the urge to be purposely volatile.

I felt like I was going crazy.

My nerves were jangling like I’d just been through a day of shoot house scenarios or fought my way through a Black Friday shopping mall. Ramped up with no one to fight and no instructor to focus on while I processed the after-action debrief. It’s all well and good to be aware of your fight-or-flight response, but what do you do when there are no obvious threats? I know how to respond to gunfire, burning buildings, a flooding compartment, and compound fractures. I go to work.

What do I do in a tidy kitchen?

A few days earlier I’d made up my mind not to re-enlist in the reserves. I wasn’t being utilized (or trained), and two years of being told to stand ready while only being allowed to check emails and qualify at the range was more than I could tolerate. Sacrifice is all well and good if there’s a point to it.

I clearly remember the weight coming off my shoulders as I told my wife I was done with the hoop jumping and “standing ready” for nothing.

You’d think deciding to step away from the privilege of service, a privilege that felt more like a burden, would bleed off some of the pressure. Maybe make the holidays a little saner. In the back of my head, I knew where some of that stress was coming from. We’d been told since July to expect orders to the border, Miami, and San Diego to support ongoing missions there. Operation River Wall started back in October and HQ had already snapped up some of our guys with less than a week’s warning. Others volunteered thinking they could snag some short timer gigs only to have their 30-day orders get extended to 45, then 120. A week earlier I turned down a solicitation for a year in San Diego. I wasn’t going to leave my wife and 3-month-old to go be a fingerprint clerk at an ICE facility. Which is exactly what happened to one of my teammates a few months earlier.

I’ll be out in March. Unless… unless they invoke “stop loss.” I am technically still government property, and we’ve been told folks are having their retirements delayed. If that’s happening, it’s no stretch of the imagination for them to extend an enlistment for another two years. Honestly, the work itself doesn’t bother me. I am not exactly risk averse, and the service seems to remember why it trained us to carry guns. All I ever asked for was to utilize my training, to take the risks no one else wanted to.

But standing in the kitchen, I could hear my son roll over in his bed in the next room. The walls of our rental are thin. I already missed the year between 1 and 2 when I was in Texas working, while he and my wife were still in western Washington. I think back to interviews with special forces veterans who quit at the peak of their careers to be dads, and the ones who didn’t and had to rebuild their families after.

I feel compelled to stand up and do the dangerous tasks that NEED to be done, the ones I took an oath to do. Then I hear the baby fuss in his sleep. He’s just started to string sounds together into babbling pseudo-words. He recognizes my voice now and smiles after he stares at me for a minute.

Being there for my family NEEDS to be done too.

I’d been thinking about getting out since July, and now that I was likely to get called up in the next three months, it suddenly felt cowardly to walk away. Another common thread I remember from those special forces interviews is that they all said being a dad was the hardest thing they’ve ever done. How is it cowardice to choose the harder, and necessary, path?

Ultimately, I know it’s up to me, and that the nature of the military is that everyone is interchangeable. They’ll find another qualified body for my slot in the time it takes to make the phone call. Knowing doesn’t resolve the feeling of obligation to service. The weight of fatherhood isn’t a direct substitution for the weight of body armor and gun belt.

_____________________________

K.C. Aud has made a career of being lucky and has managed to find something positive in nearly every poor decision he’s ever made, even if it was only a new perspective on how not to do something.

Enlisting in the U.S. Coast Guard in 2010 he became an Operations Specialist (radio and navigation) and did his first tour in Georgia guarding submarines from drunk fishermen. In 2014, tired of the heat and the bugs he transferred to a 210-foot medium endurance cutter in Washington state. The cutter then regularly deployed to the hot and buggy west coast of Central America to hunt down drug runners. Aboard USCGC Active he traveled 94,194 miles and personally handled enough cocaine to keep a small country high for a decade. Somewhere in there, he learned to write, if not spell.  

Three years later, daunted by the prospect of spending the rest of his career in a windowless command center, he separated from active duty. After 13 different jobs ranging from beer brewer to dairy farmhand, to machinist, to Navy civilian contractor, he reenlisted in 2020 as a Coast Guard reservist, changing rates to Maritime Law Enforcement Specialist. When not helping the Navy assets in the Puget Sound troubleshoot radios, he’s on drill in Seattle doing water cop stuff and or flailing away at his keyboard. Though married and now a father, he misses the mission. 

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.