I have been thinking again about the reasons why I join the military. The reason I would tell anyone at the time why I did it was to do my patriotic duty. Later on, I would tell people that I joined to escape my abusive father. That is true as long as you don’t get into specifics too much. My father was abusive and I did join to escape him. But the abuse wasn’t what I was escaping from with joining. Instead I was escaping from temptation and revenge.
By my teenage years, my father physically abusing me became a less of a problem. I could defend myself and my father’s lack of exercise and chain smoking caught up with him. To the point that he was breathing with the help of an oxygen bottle. Even though physically he wasn’t much anymore, his mind was still very sharp like a knife. He would wield that instead of his body to abuse me and my brother.
The oxygen bottle presented an opportunity to me. An opportunity that talk about in this post
Like a lot of things once the idea forms, it is hard to put it away. Especially considering the perfect opportunity it presented with me being alone with my father in my last year of high school. There was a window of a couple hours before my brother would come home. The urge to do it became stronger a little bit more each day. I know I had to do something otherwise I might actually kill another human being. Even if he is a monster, still a human being.
I thought about college, but how I was going to pay for it? To me the military seem like the one place that I could be sure I would be away from temptation and do something I would regret very much. So that is what I did.
It did work. I avoided the temptation to kill my father. Wasn’t the best move by any means. I am sure someone sitting outside would have come up with better choices. But at the time, it was the best choice and something I could count on.
But in the end, the temptation and the need for revenge against my father just morphed into something else. Something that would fracture the delicate hold I had on life. In the process, drive me into alcoholism and suicide as I faced what I had become when my father did die. But that is a story for a different day.
Being a veteran is not something I talk about a lot. I mention it when it comes up, but play it down. I am nothing special being a veteran. Sure I served my country, but it wasn’t for patriotic reasons at all. It was for my own selfish reasons.
In the end, joining the military gave me a reason to resist temptation and revenge. But the question then becomes what if I didn’t join the military? Would I kill my father? I think the answer is yes. I would have enjoyed watching him suffocate, payback for all those times he forced me down and had his way with me.
I think also that I would not stop there. Like other things, I would have got a taste for it. Especially doing it and getting away with it. I would want to do it again and again. To go against something I hold very dear in my heart and that is killing people. I would hate to think of the kind of person I would become if that was the case.
In the end, maybe joining the military was a means to survive as the person I am and not become like my father. A choice that I am not proud about given the reasons why I did it. But that is life sometimes isn’t it? Just trying to do the best we can with the situation we have at the time. Trying to survive and be who we are as a person the best we can in the moment.
