Deadbeats
August 29, 2008

Why I Joined the Air Force: Part 1. The Man in the Light

People always ask why I joined the military. I don’t give them the cut-and-dried line about patriotism and Uncle Sam. Because it wasn’t like that for me. It wasn’t like that for most of us back then.

It was 1997. Clinton was in the White House. The Dave Matthews Band, Shawn Colvin, Smashmouth and Hanson were in the charts. And I was working a stiff job in downtown Minneapolis, which wasn’t bad as far as that goes—starched collars, jeans Fridays, donut runs, phones, paperclip infestations, coffee. Just people punching the clock to fill their houses with stuff, and their days with activity in defense against the inevitable cessation of activity.

It wasn’t all that bad, except I was feeling like the narrator of Moby Dick who explains his decision to go to sea as a feeling that comes over him when “I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

Every day resembled the next. Up at 4 a.m. to a noise brash and inharmonious, like a jolt of the electric chair; and then me, with a burst, jetting from bed to pound the last full measure from the clock. And then me sagging a little in the dark as the first drops of consciousness fell into the pit that was steadily digging down in my soul.

I once read a biography of Abraham Lincoln. On the subject of Lincoln’s melancholy, the author suggested that when a man suffers from depression, as Lincoln did, his thoughts are depressed, his meals are depressed, even his sleep plays host to depressing dreams.

In the fall of 1997, I had been dealing with depression off and on since the age of eleven. That year I turned twenty-seven, and it was one more year in a succession of years during which sleep too held no respite from the unnamed dread that seeped into every particle of life, leaving every face and building a dull gray.

I slept a lot back then. Too much. And dreamed of suffocating blizzards, of ships weltering off the coast of Spain. I dreamt I was late for work, late for school, sick, crippled, overweight, bizarrely mutated. I murdered people in dreams. People I had never met. And they murdered me. Once, I lured a scholar to a lonely desert, promising reconciliation even as I plunged the knife in his soft belly, feeling the flesh give way beneath my blade, and his hot blood wash over my hand.

That was the grisly tenor of my dreams, until the one with the man in the light.

When strangers ask why I joined the Air Force, I don’t tell them about the dream. People who talk about military enlistments and dreams in the same sentence end up wearing white and eating pills out of paper cups. For strangers, I trot out the Uncle Sam story and my collection of patriotic underpants—the latter of which must be imagined by my hearers.

In this dream, I returned to the land of my birth—Maryland—and to the age of three. Dreams, like politicians, are best served by exaggeration and untruth. So it was no surprise that at three years old I should be enrolled in elementary school and, on the day figured by the dream, embarked on a field trip to Washington, D.C.

But somehow as the day wore on, I lost sight of my group. For hours, I ran through the museums and down unfamiliar streets, skating into the Mall and then taking off again through a million bends and turns, all revealing the same dead ends. Finally as the sun moved to the horizon, I settled on the bottom step of a monument. They had gone. My group had boarded the bus and gone on without me.

“Now I’ll never get home,” I wailed.

That’s when the light appeared. One of those lights you’re supposed to see at death, disgorging your dear departed (and I’m sure a slew of folks you prayed you’d never meet again, alive or dead) and spewing the chorus of heaven. I never believed the stories of near-deathers who are always rattling on about the beautiful music and how they wished they never had to come back from the light. That if it was up to them they would have stayed dead. All right. I get the not wanting to come back to a car accident and your limbs ripped off and tossed in a ditch. But dead is dead. And no music is worth a shiny box and six feet of earth.

“Don’t worry, Britt,” said the man who stepped out of the light. He wore a blue military uniform with silver buttons that winked in the light. He curled his hand in mine and pulled me off the step. “I’ll show you how to get home.”

Writer

http://brittaamodt.wordpress.com... 

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