The author and team before a sleepless night in Afghanistan. -Photo by Ben Dickman
L – Language MV – Mild Violence
When you know you might be killed in the morning, getting a good night’s sleep can be a bit elusive.
On the other hand, when you know that you might be killed now, or in a second from now, or tomorrow morning, or afternoon, or that you might have been killed earlier if you’d been standing a few feet to the left, then you just close your damn eyes for a second and go to sleep.
I can recall plenty of restless nights on the eve of missions which I knew were going to be bad. The times and places we went out in Afghanistan, it was almost always bad. I remember being relatively safe on base and feeling inundated with thoughts of negativity that bordered on horror. Dude, you need some fucking sleep! Staying awake all night worrying is only going to make things that much more dangerous when we go tap-dancing out the wire in a few hours. Of course, berating oneself is not on the top-ten list of The Best Ways to Relax, so you barely sleep, and you get out of bed before your alarm can go off, and by the time the mission steps-off you are already exhausted. To simply keep your eyes open takes a powerful combo of premium caffeines and sheer will. That’s right, sheer boring will. I know you thought I was going to say adrenaline, but you used that all up staying alert when you were safe and should have been sleeping. Now that you need to be alert, your mind finally wants to sleep. You force your conscience to sputter on because you love your buddies, and your pretty sure you love being alive—at least your one-hundred-percent sure you want to live through today to find out where life goes from here.
“Chug some more coffee and hope no one shoots you while you’re taking a piss…”
So there you are, patrolling in a combat zone, and you’re definitely not at your best because your freaking exhausted, and you used up all your adrenaline when you were safe, but here’s something interesting: Because you used it up, your mind isn’t doing any extra tricks—like calculating life-trajectories with various missing body parts, or wondering how the afterlife is structured, or imagining what the instant of impact from an invisible bullet really feels like. Instead, your system allocates your eyes enough power to stay open. It gives your central processor just the right amount of juice to enhance images, to analyze shadows, to discern movement, to clarify sounds and feelings. It remembers how to talk on the radio, how to flip the safety on and off—it makes flies in the eyes of roadside donkeys and little glinting fighter jets tens-of-thousands of feet above you appear clear and whimsical. Most importantly, it quiets the extra noise in your head that kept you up all damn night long. Chug some more coffee and hope no one shoots you while you’re taking a piss. Eventually, maybe you get in a fight. A series of fights scored by whining bullets and black-cloud explosions that pop up curiously like sign posts for new neighborhoods, and curiously, you stay calm. You follow some intuitive voice that comes through when the adrenaline is super low or super high, and because you follow that voice you keep on moving. You keep on making it.
“Every five minutes or so that sniper takes a shot from across the field…”
Now here’s something else interesting: The adrenaline does come back when you need it, and then it goes away when you still need it, and it comes back again to check in on you—usually when your buddies’ adrenaline has checked-out and vice versa. When you were safe on base you couldn’t sleep thinking about this. Thinking that you could die. Now it’s clear that you definitely may die, but shit you’re tired. It’s night again, and this time you’re not safe on base. You’re on your second watch atop a mud-brick compound in the middle of this town that is like an insurgent resort. Gotta keep those eyes open to guard your buddies who are trying to sleep in the courtyard. Can’t quite do that because the adrenaline is all spent from too many IED explosions, too many invisible bullets and loud-ass rocket-propelled-grenades that elbow around the battlefield with deafening whooshes and sickening crumps. You try your hardest to keep your eyelids open, but they keep sliding closed without your permission, so you settle for prying them apart for about five seconds every half-minute. The rest of the time you just soak up your senses through your skin. You feel and form a full mind-and-body image of the entire rural neighborhood around you and everything that moves in it. These three Afghan soldiers next to you—they seem like they got some sleep last night. Probably because they were already here immersed in the danger, and fuck it, they were tired. You’ve never met them before this mission, but they are good ones. They’ve proven it over this long 120 degree Fahrenheit day of rolling ambushes and edgy gunfights: Good attitudes. Solid tactics. Alert. Every five minutes or so that sniper takes a shot from across the field. At this point who gives a shit? I’m too tired to be scared, and besides, it helps me remember where I am in the dark. It’s a beautiful night under surreal blue shadows of the moon and lazy pin-prick stars, and I’ve got some good alert Afghans on watch with me this time. I’m not dead now, and that’s good enough. At least until the next time that I’m “safe” again.
The Warrior Archetype.
Authors note: One of the things that no movie or video game can capture when depicting combat is the extreme lack of sleep and the exhaustion which usually marks the experience. When you find yourself in a state where all you can do is force your mind to stay open, and your body to keep putting one foot in front of the other—well then my friend, you are experiencing the path of the Warrior more authentically than any movie can duplicate. Grip to the Warrior Archetype, keep your eyes open for that which is hidden, and keep on going. If you do, change will come one way or another.
The Warrior Wilderness Blog and The Jagged Green Edge story.
This short literary impression is an honest and sincere composite memory based on my deployments to Afghanistan as a Green Beret. My goal with this sort of writing is to examine how the human conscious is designed to cope with extreme challenge. When does it falter, and when does it give us the tools we need in expected or unexpected ways? What can every person do to prepare themselves for stress and challenge in their lives, and how much of that challenge comes from inside ourselves? Whether we are preparing to face threats to ourselves or others from outside forces, or just interested in undertaking the most difficult and rewarding challenge–which is facing ourselves–we are in for an interesting ride. These endeavors bring each of us into the realm of what I like to call the “Warrior Archetype.” An Archetype is an ideal that each of us can grasp or focus on in order to develop certain desired attributes, no matter who we are. The attributes, and thus the Archetype of the Warrior, is one of the most demanding things we can ask ourselves to be, and it doesn’t need to have anything to do with fighting or combat. When you chose to sharpen your existence the way a Warrior does, then you also chose to expose yourself to the heat of the forge and the cold tempering waters of the plunge bucket. You chose to go far out into the wild and to become aware of everything around you, and so doing you find yourself going within. You chose to accept chaos, and this leads to stress-inoculation, and ultimately the escape from unnecessary internal chaotics. Positive Warrior cultures down through time are always also storytelling cultures. Through these warrior stories, we will seek to illuminate and gain access to the Warrior Archetype for the benefit of our own minds, hearts, and souls.
The Jagged Green Edge.
In addition to short stories from the embroiled conflict-zones of our earth, and of our minds, this blog will be the home of THE JAGGED GREEN EDGE, a historic-fiction set during the French and Indian War. THE JAGGED GREEN EDGE is the current culmination of my experiences to this point walking my path a Special Operator, as a wilderness quester, and a grateful student and practitioner of Native American science and philosophy. Researched and focused heavily on all things Native American in the 1700’s Northeast, this growing book seeks to uncover the true extent of our native nations contributions to modern Special Forces, and more importantly, to the unique and still blossoming character at the heart of what America is, and what the world is evolving towards. In keeping with the subject matter discussed in other posts on this blog, excerpts from THE JAGGED GREEN EDGE will expose readers to the psychology of the true archetypal Warrior during a formative time and critical edge in history.
WARRIOR WILDERNESS MENTORING
In times past—and certainly in traditional Native American culture—individuals had the benefit of wise and experienced mentors who could help prepare and guide them to face their greatest external and internal challenges. In this day and age, even with all that we have available to us, there is a marked lack of powerful mentorship in our societies. WARRIOR WILDERNESS MENTORING is a mentorship concept utilizing traditional wilderness training and practices such as survival, navigation, and journeying in order to reestablish the mentor as a figure for applying the Warrior Archetype in our lives, no matter who we are or what we do. For information on training, speaking, or any other questions whatsoever feel free to contact me anytime.
Written by Matt Novellino, Warrior Wilderness Mentoring