“Not like this…..Not like this”
Switch, (The Matrix) 1999.
It was probably more luck than anything else, but I take great pride in the fact that I’ve never been shot or blown up. My grandfather was awarded two purple hearts in WW2 and when I was a child, he told me that they meant that he was smart enough to think of something to do, stupid enough to try it, and lucky enough not to get killed.
I’ve had a couple close calls, but all my disability is from injury or disease, the latter of which is almost comically difficult for guys in my former profession to come to terms with. The career field has its own risks and everyone accepts them as part of the job, even the ones who think it could never happen to them. Death and injury are understood as being par for the course and therefore acceptable while anything else is a foreign concept and difficult to comprehend. They that live by the sword…. and so forth.
I told my supervisor (S3 SGM) the day after my diagnosis. While I certainly wouldn’t call him “crusty”, this was a guy who’d been around the block, so to speak. I’d known him for quite some time and we’d even deployed together. When I told him I had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, he stood up with an odd look on his face. It occurred to me that the Sergeant Major was either going to cry, or come around the desk and hug me and I didn’t know how to handle either scenario any more than he knew how to react to something outside the norm of our profession.
Later, while I was still in the same staff job before retirement, a fellow medic (18D) had been badly wounded and I called him at Walter Reed one day to check on him and see if he needed anything. During the conversation, he told me he had heard about my MS diagnosis and how sorry for me he felt. A double amputee with multiple other serious injuries is sorry for me? I thanked him, but in my head, I was thinking, “No, you don’t get to feel sorry for me”. Is it because we volunteered for combat that combat injuries make sense while a random disease doesn’t?
In my own way, I suppose I do it too. I recently caught myself telling someone about my service and I remarked that in all this time, I’d never gotten a scratch from combat. Instead, multiple sclerosis had gotten me in the end. Maybe a tangible enemy or accident is acceptable somehow while an invisible disease is not. I never expected that I would get shot, blown up, the parachute wouldn’t open, and so on, but I wasn’t naive enough to think it wasn’t possible. Maybe that means it was expected in a round about way and since MS wasn’t, that makes it different and frightening.