Now intimacy, that is a beast that I've struggled with for 11 years. Growing up as I did in a Christian household, I had always been told to save myself until marriage. I had no reason not to believe it with Great-grandparents who had been married almost 70 years, and Grandparents who have been married almost 60. I even had a great example of what love was NOT: my father leaving my mother to raise me on her own and the men who came into her life afterwards.
A situation that has repeated itself in my own life, but with the mother of my son forcing me away and keeping me from my son for reasons only known to her. I am not my father. For as long as I can remember all I've wanted was a family. To have a wife and children and be good to them both. I had thought that my dealings with the military and the Drone Whistleblowing had killed that dream until I met her. Now I'm struggling with this absurd situation that makes no sense to me and the answers are hiding in the shadows avoiding the light of truth.
Since the answers are not forthcoming, and speculation will only lead to anger and hurt, I've decided to address this issue with a continuance from PART I, because if she were any other person and this was any other situation that didn't involve my child, I would have walked away and never looked back after how she treated me, manipulated and lied to me. If she were any other person...
In the end, however, I can do nothing but love and forgive her. In the end, we can only be who we are. No more. No less.
In my striving to find love, true love, I've made many mistakes. If you were to meet me two years ago, before my testifying to the German Bundestag, I could be seen carrying around a mountain of guilt. It was crushing the life out of me. I had loved my country, but it had betrayed my trust. I had loved my brothers and sisters in arms, but they had shown me to be cowards. I had loved my people, but they are blind and refuse to see. I threw my lot into the wind to see where it would carry me.
I've mentioned before the freedom of release once you believe that you're going to die. I knew my days were numbered. People have been punished for less. I've been punished for less. Through it all I never succumbed to the crushing weight. I had finished what I had believed would be impossible from the very beginning. I had struggled with my own demons, and ghosts, and shame, yet I still managed to cross the finish line.
The end is a strange place to be. I had no idea what to do with myself. Where death had seemed inevitable, with the mother of my child it became impossible. Where intimacy had hidden behind the closed doors of my heart brandishing a knife, the fear of life's consequences faded away, if only for a little bit.
I've only had a handful of other relationships, each ending mostly because I couldn't get past the intimacy roadblock. I know where it started. It started when two women decided to take my choice of who to share myself with away from me. It continued when I had told a woman in my squadron I was dating what happened and she belittled me, then accused me of rape to our superiors when I refused to shotgun marry her, then when I confronted her about it she told me she used me to get over her ex. It was four years before I had the courage to put myself out there again, the trauma was so bad my self esteem had been destroyed.
And in that case it was a woman I had been friends with that came on to me, which lifted the burden from my shoulders. We had a fun time. She opened me up to start exploring that part of me that had been secluded away like a cloistered monk. As it turns out, holiness isn't all that it's cracked out to be. In the end, I'm pretty sure that we both knew it wouldn't be forever. I couldn't be open with her emotionally. So we had our fun and parted ways as friends and I started to explore myself again. Here is where my true difficulties began.
I never really allowed myself to be open with the women that I dated, always keeping my heart superficially open. In a way that attracted them, and in a worse way it caused me to drive them away. In the year between me getting out of Active Duty Service while I awaited my fateful SERE moment, I connected with a strange and lovely crowd, many of them part of the LGBTQ community. Some of the women were crazy and manipulative, I was told that I was eye candy for gay men, and overall they got me comfortable talking and joking about unmentionable things that their military counterparts could only elegantly grunt and beat their dicks at.
But still, the issue of intimacy was a vital thing held close to my heart. I knew I was only attracted to women, so the gay men who flirted with me unabashedly only served to boost my ego. The women who took interest in me quickly fell away when I would hammer their intellect trying to find something more than just a pretty face. I learned quickly that the deeper questions in life are not ones that most pursue in their leisurely time. For me, because of my experiences, it was imperative.
Not to say that there is anything wrong with any other pursuit, it is just my needs were more than physical. Still are. And it's difficult to be attracted to somebody, even beautiful women, when they don't have much cultivated behind their pretty eyes. For me, that cultivation is essential. I only wanted somebody who pursues life with equal gusto. Who wants to find more than what is shown on the surface.
Before my SERE accident, I met somebody who pretended to be just that. She was brilliant, if not beautiful. And that was a downfall for me. For a month all I wanted to do was talk with her, dig into her brain. Two weeks before I left for SERE, she told me that if we were to pursue a relationship together, we were just friends then, then I had to tell her what I was holding back. I had known she was perceptive, and the shock on my face had to have been obvious. She told me that she could handle the darkness that I was hiding. She was the first person I ever told about my military experiences.
Once I started I couldn't stop. Once the first words started rolling off my tongue I saw her shrink away as she saw the monster that I had hidden away. I told her everything and by the end of it she had moved herself into the kitchen out of my sight while I continued to sit on the couch unable to stop the flow of words spewing forth from my mouth. I hadn't realized that I had been crying the whole time. I stared at my hands in silence once I had finished. She didn't say anything for what seemed like an eternity. Then she told me to leave. And that was the last time I could pretend that the world was all right.
Two months later I have my accident. In my desperation to hold on to myself, to not give into the physical pain that held nothing compared to the internal agony that I had felt, I nearly killed myself. In many ways I would have preferred that ending. It would have been cleaner at least. And I wouldn't admit to have seen what lay behind the curtain of OZ, knowing that we have all been played the fools that we are.
In my final moments, resting in that hospital bed, I could only stare as I felt my will to live slowly fade to a dying ember. I had wanted to give up. I could see no redemption for me. No angels singing their heavenly songs and no demons wailing their horrid curses. Just the infrared ghosts of those that I had kill and helped kill waiting for me as Legion. My doctor was a beautiful Eastern European woman with dark hair and green eyes. She looked like the Angel of Death herself and the two nurses that accompanied her looked like they had been sculpted out of stone. I saw them as clear as day, and I silently cried out to the Universe, "if there was any way to redeem myself please give me the chance." My soul fled into the night and the dead waited for me in my dreams.
In the end, however, I can do nothing but love and forgive her. In the end, we can only be who we are. No more. No less.
In my striving to find love, true love, I've made many mistakes. If you were to meet me two years ago, before my testifying to the German Bundestag, I could be seen carrying around a mountain of guilt. It was crushing the life out of me. I had loved my country, but it had betrayed my trust. I had loved my brothers and sisters in arms, but they had shown me to be cowards. I had loved my people, but they are blind and refuse to see. I threw my lot into the wind to see where it would carry me.
I've mentioned before the freedom of release once you believe that you're going to die. I knew my days were numbered. People have been punished for less. I've been punished for less. Through it all I never succumbed to the crushing weight. I had finished what I had believed would be impossible from the very beginning. I had struggled with my own demons, and ghosts, and shame, yet I still managed to cross the finish line.
The end is a strange place to be. I had no idea what to do with myself. Where death had seemed inevitable, with the mother of my child it became impossible. Where intimacy had hidden behind the closed doors of my heart brandishing a knife, the fear of life's consequences faded away, if only for a little bit.
I've only had a handful of other relationships, each ending mostly because I couldn't get past the intimacy roadblock. I know where it started. It started when two women decided to take my choice of who to share myself with away from me. It continued when I had told a woman in my squadron I was dating what happened and she belittled me, then accused me of rape to our superiors when I refused to shotgun marry her, then when I confronted her about it she told me she used me to get over her ex. It was four years before I had the courage to put myself out there again, the trauma was so bad my self esteem had been destroyed.
And in that case it was a woman I had been friends with that came on to me, which lifted the burden from my shoulders. We had a fun time. She opened me up to start exploring that part of me that had been secluded away like a cloistered monk. As it turns out, holiness isn't all that it's cracked out to be. In the end, I'm pretty sure that we both knew it wouldn't be forever. I couldn't be open with her emotionally. So we had our fun and parted ways as friends and I started to explore myself again. Here is where my true difficulties began.
I never really allowed myself to be open with the women that I dated, always keeping my heart superficially open. In a way that attracted them, and in a worse way it caused me to drive them away. In the year between me getting out of Active Duty Service while I awaited my fateful SERE moment, I connected with a strange and lovely crowd, many of them part of the LGBTQ community. Some of the women were crazy and manipulative, I was told that I was eye candy for gay men, and overall they got me comfortable talking and joking about unmentionable things that their military counterparts could only elegantly grunt and beat their dicks at.
But still, the issue of intimacy was a vital thing held close to my heart. I knew I was only attracted to women, so the gay men who flirted with me unabashedly only served to boost my ego. The women who took interest in me quickly fell away when I would hammer their intellect trying to find something more than just a pretty face. I learned quickly that the deeper questions in life are not ones that most pursue in their leisurely time. For me, because of my experiences, it was imperative.
Not to say that there is anything wrong with any other pursuit, it is just my needs were more than physical. Still are. And it's difficult to be attracted to somebody, even beautiful women, when they don't have much cultivated behind their pretty eyes. For me, that cultivation is essential. I only wanted somebody who pursues life with equal gusto. Who wants to find more than what is shown on the surface.
Before my SERE accident, I met somebody who pretended to be just that. She was brilliant, if not beautiful. And that was a downfall for me. For a month all I wanted to do was talk with her, dig into her brain. Two weeks before I left for SERE, she told me that if we were to pursue a relationship together, we were just friends then, then I had to tell her what I was holding back. I had known she was perceptive, and the shock on my face had to have been obvious. She told me that she could handle the darkness that I was hiding. She was the first person I ever told about my military experiences.
Once I started I couldn't stop. Once the first words started rolling off my tongue I saw her shrink away as she saw the monster that I had hidden away. I told her everything and by the end of it she had moved herself into the kitchen out of my sight while I continued to sit on the couch unable to stop the flow of words spewing forth from my mouth. I hadn't realized that I had been crying the whole time. I stared at my hands in silence once I had finished. She didn't say anything for what seemed like an eternity. Then she told me to leave. And that was the last time I could pretend that the world was all right.
Two months later I have my accident. In my desperation to hold on to myself, to not give into the physical pain that held nothing compared to the internal agony that I had felt, I nearly killed myself. In many ways I would have preferred that ending. It would have been cleaner at least. And I wouldn't admit to have seen what lay behind the curtain of OZ, knowing that we have all been played the fools that we are.
In my final moments, resting in that hospital bed, I could only stare as I felt my will to live slowly fade to a dying ember. I had wanted to give up. I could see no redemption for me. No angels singing their heavenly songs and no demons wailing their horrid curses. Just the infrared ghosts of those that I had kill and helped kill waiting for me as Legion. My doctor was a beautiful Eastern European woman with dark hair and green eyes. She looked like the Angel of Death herself and the two nurses that accompanied her looked like they had been sculpted out of stone. I saw them as clear as day, and I silently cried out to the Universe, "if there was any way to redeem myself please give me the chance." My soul fled into the night and the dead waited for me in my dreams.
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