Sometimes I’m Afraid I’m Drifting by Rory Miller

I’d expected Iraq to be a new level of danger and, with it would come a new level of insight.  I learned a lot– about different cultures and working with a translator and how things look much different up close than they do on the news from the other side of the world.  But I didn’t learn more about the big mystery, about violence.  Just that you can sleep through machine gun fire after a few exposures and most people, even trained people sheep into herds when they get worried..and in that herd most will be looking towards the center and a few, a very few, will have their backs to the herd, watching the perimeter.

It’s now been almost a year since I have had to grab someone and take him down or make him leave.  About ten months since anyone has even shot in my general direction.  Nine months without carrying a firearm every day.

I’m still training, still teaching… but I feel an insecurity developing.  At some point, will the lessons from training and play start to seem more relevant than the fading memories of real life?  Will there come a point when I become afraid to say “I don’t know” and make some shit up?  Will I become the type of instructor that I despise?

Most instructors didn’t start spreading bad information.  Most, probably, didn’t know any better.  They learned by rote from their instructors and innocently passed on what seem like obvious absurdities.  Some knew the truth and with the rosy vision of distance tell the story a little better, a little cleaner than it happened.  The rosy vision becomes truth to the students who can’t know better, who have no frame of reference to judge.  A few experience violence but find their perspectives shifting and don’t want to teach the harsh realities of what they learned.  They want to teach a moral vision of the way the world should be instead.

Could I go down any of these routes?  Or another route that I can’t yet see?  People are driven towards comfort and safety and it is much more comfortable to tell students what they want to hear… and what they want to hear is almost never the truth, no matter how much they believe otherwise.

Teaching would be so much easier if I pretended to have all the answers.

It’s inevitable, as I grow older, as I drift away from the bad people and places that have shaped my perspective, that my perspective itself will shift.  Does it inevitably shift to a shallower, more romanticized view of violence?  Will it be enough to count the scars and remember the smells?  Will I even recognize it when I start to drift off into fantasy?

All questions.  No answers.

FOB Warrior Kirkuk, Iraq