Sometimes, it almost feels like I lost something important, something I don’t remember even having, which is crazy and that’s why I’ve always kept it to myself, but it’s nonetheless real.
I might not know what it means, I might not know what’s causing it, but the ache blossoms in my chest every day, it’s indescribable, painful and sweet, like… a longing.
Only I don’t know what is it that I want.
It’s like heartburn of the soul and makes me feel like I should be having a déjà vu every time it sparks in my chest, like there’s something skirting along the edges of my consciousness, but it always disappears on me before I can make sense of it.
At first, I thought it was like a physical reminder of my grief over the loss of my best friend and my fallen comrades and I expected it to dull a bit over the years. Then I figured maybe it was just some weird leftover feeling from my TBI, something that’s just never going to go away, something like tinnitus that tricks you into believing that you’re hearing something buzzing and ringing away when in reality there’s nothing.
It feels like the ache is an emptiness, a pang, like you feel when you go hungry for too long. Only it’s not in my stomach, it’s in my heart.
It feels like a part of me is missing.
It’s five a.m. and I don’t have to be up to get ready to leave my cabin for another two hours at least, but there’s no point in lingering in bed: the ache, once it settles, never lets me fall asleep again.
I throw my legs over the side of the bed and stand up, stretching. I feel a painful tingle run up my left leg and my right shoulder and yawn as I reach my walk-in closet.
My old gun wounds have healed very nicely and I only get a slight limp when I’m especially tired after too many hours on duty in the bitter cold, but they make their presence felt every time the weather changes.
Overall I can’t complain, though: for a guy that should have spent the last five years six feet under, I’m in tiptop shape.
I throw a pair of gray sweats over my boxers and pad barefoot into my workout room.
One hour lifting weights and maybe a nice long run along the hiking trail will sure get all my aches and pains out of my head.
I get to work in my personal gym and do all my mental exercises to try and distract myself from the void I feel, but it’s no use, it never is.
Still, I could have had it much worse, better men than myself did. Jonny did.
I’m a lucky SOB.
For one thing, I’m alive and that’s always a gift, even if sometimes, I feel like my injury took far too many precious things from me that matter more than breathing.
I try not to focus on that strange feeling when it envelops me, mainly because it makes no fucking sense whatsoever for me to think along those lines, and even more so because I have to try and make the best of life, live it to the best of my abilities, that much I know I owe to the men who perished that night even if I’ve come to accept over the years that what happened was not my fault, it was nobody’s fault unless you count the bastard actually responsible for the ambush.
My friends lost their lives that night, me, I only lost two weeks of my past in the end so it doesn’t even compare.
I still don’t remember anything from the period that immediately preceded our failed raid, though the friends who thankfully survived the ordeal have been able to help me put a few things together.
My short term and anterograde memories were not impacted so I can form new memories and retain them, which is so much more than many people who suffer from post-traumatic amnesia due to a brain injury can say.
My working and motor memory was not impacted either so I remembered from the start all the skills I had learned over the years.
Basically, not counting those missing weeks and I few new personality quirks I have no lasting effects from the bullet I took to the head, aside from the hole in my mind and in my soul, though at first, I used to suffer a lot from brain fog and forget a few words here and there.
I would get confused over some things and start to blackout and my muscle tone had been weakened a lot both because of the TBI and the other bullets I took, but fifteen months, four surgeries and two-hundred hours of physical rehabilitative therapy and PTSD counseling later, I did manage to overcome those things.
Even so, I had to say goodbye to active duty. With the unpredictability of a TBI and my body still recuperating, I knew from the start there wouldn’t be another combat tour in my future.
They offered me a training position at the base and for a while, I did my job and tried to find my place there, but it just didn’t feel right.
My life felt emptier than it had ever been.
I needed a change.
I tried to go back to Arizona after I got discharged with honors and spent a few days in the small town near Phoenix I had grown up in, just to see if something sparked my interest, if something could dull the ache, but it didn’t work: there was nothing for me there or anywhere else it seemed.
I tried to find employment, not because I needed the money, but because I really needed something, anything to fill the void.
I just wanted a chance to keep myself busy and use the skills I had been taught in the military for something good.
Jonny had always been pretty good with money and liked to dabble in the market, he always said he would have been a broker if he didn’t have the Army in his blood.
We hardly ever spent much of our wages, since we lived at the base when we weren’t deployed and only stayed state-side for brief amounts of time, so the money we made was just sitting in our bank accounts, then Jonny hooked me up with some good investments opportunities and the money started to grow.
We bought shares in some big tech company that went on to become huge over the years and by the time I retired, I had enough that I could live comfortably for a couple of lives even if I didn’t work another day, but I hate being idle, that life it’s just not for me.
Jonny’s money went to me after he passed —since we had no families and were still single we were each other’s sole beneficiary.
I tried to think of what Jonny would have wanted me to do and in the end, I set up a fund for veterans with his wealth and donated a big portion of my own to help our survived friends to get a start in any trade they wanted after they left the Army behind.
But once that was done, I needed something else to focus on, something meaningful.
I latched onto the one dream I had left: go where the air was fresh and nature no longer meant cold and arid deserts, but vibrant green forests and crystal blue lakes.
Nothing sounded as good as the idea of losing myself in nature and live a quiet life far away from the hub of big city life.
I decided I would remain a ranger, albeit of a different sort, and I started to look into working for the NPS.
I found a modicum of peace in the idea that I could become the type of ranger that protects something and is of service to people as opposite to be a ranger in the middle of a war zone where innocent blood is spilled so easily and men’s humanity can get frail and sometimes it’s so effortlessly destroyed.