A Veteran's Guide to Living Mindfully - Chapter 1

In 2019 I saw a statistic on veteran suicides that forced me to recognize those of my own friends and brothers who had taken themselves from this life. I had long since acquired the tendency to make light of death - or at least, not to be too much affected by it.

When an American soldier dies in a foreign theatre, any available communications back to the states are blacked out until the family has been notified.

As you can imagine, we all grew increasingly less empathetic when some jackass would fuck off and get himself killed. One guy shot himself in the arm, hoping to go home early. Shoved the barrel of an M-4 up into the inside of his bicep and pulled the trigger.

You know what’s neat anout these 5.56 rounds? I mean, it’s fucking scary - but seriously it is also neat just from a straight engineering perspective - anyway, these rounds follow bones. Did you know that? This fuckin’ dipshit didn’t. Was he a dipshit for not knowing? Fuck no, he taught the rest of us! When that round blew out somewhere near his fuckin wrist and the military shipped his ass home, kicked him out and made him pay for his own damn surgeries, we all learned how our 5.56 rounds follow bones.

Why hadn’t anyone told us about that???

…maybe they did. Who knows? Not me. I don’t.

But to answer the question, no, he wasn’t a dipshit for not knowing that firing his M-4 almost perpendicularly into his own bicep would result in that round coursing along his bones, splitting flesh from bone and shattering veins when it finally shattered his wrist bine and exited just below the back side of his hand (wtf???) - no, he was a dipshit for thinking there was an easy way out - but fuck it I never hated him for trying. Hell I didn’t even know him personally, but he fucked up my sat phone time for a week, I know that. Know how many times I thought about taking my chances and cruisin’ to Egypt down the Euphrates on a taped up fuckin trash raft to become a sand salesman in some desert town outside of fucking whatever? Plenty. That’s how many. If I wasnt killed by someone along the way I’d eventually be crusified by the US government and media. I’d seen the prisons over here, and knew they were no Guantanamo Bay - There’s no easy way out…if you’ve made it all the way through training and out of country without learning that, you’ve achieved density levels that make lead look like marshmallow.

Anyway, that guy…he was the first one. Remember the Captain who rode along on a raid mission, forgot to put his M-16 on safe (shoulda never been on fire in the first fuckin’ place, fuckin’ jackass dipshit JAFO); slammed the butt of his rifle on the floor of the HMMWV_[1] as he sat down, kicked off a round into his own face and left us with a night of paperwork and interviews followed by a week of no internet or calls? What’d that round do? Squirrelled around along the inside of his skull before coming back out just south of his ear…helmet was clean inside.

_{[1] Did you know thats the real name of what most folks call a HUMVEE? Yeah its actually HMMWV, and it stands for High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle. There are many varieties, including ambulances and more. I worked with M998’s and M1098’s I think…its been a while. The 998 was a plain jane satin skinned rip-away jeep type HMMWV, and the 1098 was the combat truck version…I had 16 1098s and 2 of the 998’s. Oh yeah and one configuration as a commo truck (communication headquarters)…10 sixty something maybe? Who gives a shit.}

Credit

Jesus, I’m off topic. Point is, we learned not just to not care when someone died, but truly, to blame them for it, even when it was enemy fire. None of my close friends died in combat over there. Maybe that would have been different...that would have been different. We had one lose an arm, one lose a hand, and a few lost their minds. Most came back at least physically whole, and the American deaths we saw were close units, but not close friends…the sphere of people you really care about (really allow yourself to care about) shrinks down tight under these sorts of circumstances.

…well years later, when brothers from my unit began dying by their own hands, I took the same mindset. I blamed them and wondered what the fuck they couldn’t get over they the rest of us didn’t also have to. I still have internet and phone so I’m not mad, but don’t expect me to stand in front of everyone and talk about you like some kind of fuckin’ whatever…I’m not doin’ it.

Well, it turned out I wasn't all too well adjusted myself. I had managed to meet a girl and get married after getting out, but a few short years after it had begun, my marriage was already dying. I was just so angry all the time.

I was angry at all the things she should have been doing better, or at least, different. I was a combat soldier with no conflict, so wherever I went I had to make my own...somehow that made sense to me in those days, though now it sounds foreign, like trying to describe the lessons you learned during an acid trip...yeah man, it was real, but good luck articulating it after it slides through you fingers and back into the ethereal myst.

I accepted that my relationship was doomed, my wife was a horrible person and all I needed to do was lay low and wait for her to get done with school so she could afford to live on her own and finally leave me. To bide the time, I thought, maybe I would master the art of astral projection, like AB had taught me about...at least this way I could step out at night and set my soul fly free, like he used to do.

After months of dedicated practice, still nothing. I stopped drinking and cut back on weed, hoping this would help, but still nothing. I experienced the some of the precursors, like the insane vibrations that feel like you're in a airplane going through an awful landing - but when several months' practice had shown me little to no success, I thought, maybe it would be easier to learn how to lucid dream, and then I could use my direct connection to my subconscious mind to my advantage, raising my vibrations in the dream to the point that it might trigger that soul-separation I was seeking...but escape...escaped me once more. Months and months went into this, each night with a little dream journal by my bedside, MILD, WILD, DILD, WBTB, CAT, SSILD, DEILD...man, so many methods that seriously isn't even all of them. I tried each method for 1.5-2 months, but still got nothing.

I decided that the factor that would push me over the edge would have to be awareness. I needed to be come so aware in my daily life, that as a carry-over I would then by hyper aware in the dream state, and THAT would cause me to access the lucid state by DILD (Dream Induced Lucid Dreaming)...so I began to study mindfulness. Mindfulness would enable me to build and sustain a higher level of awareness, which would carry through into my sleeping hours and launch me right out of this life I hated so much, into new and exciting frontiers...I was officially at the cusp of my adventures as a psychonaut.

LOL:

Anyway, mindfulness didn't help me to lucid dream, and I never had any luck with astral projection. But mindfulness did help me in ways I didn't think I needed. While I was searching for a way out, I stumbled onto the way in. Then I began to see, all this anger, hatred and resentment I had for the girl I had married - what if she wasn't the wife I had hoped for...because I wasn't being the husband she needed?

I started a gratitude journal, which I maintained for 1 year. Everyday I saved a picture of something that inspired me or stirred up a sense of being grateful for my life. At first, I just faked it. I took pictures of pretty trees and clouds or fresh snowfall, and I saved them in my little gratitude journal. ...but pretty soon, I found myself looking forward to getting up in the morning, I found that I was grateful for the beauty that surrounded me. I've often heard the expression "You gotta see it to believe it -" but in this time of my life, I learned that this is backwards...you gotta believe it, to see it. ...Once I started waking up everyday hunting for things to be grateful for, it set up the belief that I would be grateful for something, and by the end of each day, I had been grateful for something. I was learning gratitude.

Over the next 5 years I became a sponge, reading, soaking up, practicing, discarding old beliefs, reconnecting with the real me, the one that sits in the inner silence and speaks without words. Building a relationship with this part of myself has been the most fulfilling accomplishment of my life. If I could lock that in and keep it turned on all the time, I feel like even greater accomplishments await me - but to this day I am still wobbling and kerplunking my way through life...but at least I have a life line now. When the wobbling and kerplunking get to be too much, I can tap into that inner silence and find massive stores of strength and resilience and creativity; I can feel the backdrop of silent peace that underpins all chaos...the lessons I couldn't bring back from my acid trips in the past seemed to be making more sense, but I no longer needed psilocybin, DMT, LSD or any other psychoactive substance to delve into the underworld for inspiration and wisdom... I'd love to find a way to turn that on full-time, but I go into this silence only consciously...it's amazing how much of our day - how much of our lives we are unconscious.

From Eleanor Langer and Dan Siegel to Eckhart Tolle, Mooji Baba and Sadhguru, to Carlos Castaneda and Thich Nhat Hanh...I became a Thriftbooks best customer, spending hundreds of dollars buying every book on mindfulness and spirituality - and actually reading them! I read the Book of the Dead - not just the Egyptian book of the dead, but when I found out there was a Tibetan one, I read that shit too! (actually I took a lot more away from the Tibetan book of the dead than the Egyptian, but that may just be me) - I read Jon Kabat-Zinn, Vincent Norman Peale, Jesus, you name it - no literally, I even read the bible and the gospel of Thomas and the Ethiopian version of the bible with the book of Enoch - I'm telling you, this became everything to me.

I became a better man. I was no longer a lost soldier searching for a fight, I was a sentient man, living in the light. I showed love to my wife daily. At first she didn't trust it, she reacted in ways that would have made the old me angry, but new me was wide-the-fuck-awake. I knew she was hurt from all the years of my being a dickhead. She didn't trust this new "loveyness" that was coming from nowhere. Becoming angry when she rejected my love would have showed her that, beneath the surface of this "love," the same old angry bastard was wide awake and looking for conflict opportunities. So I showed her that beneath the surface of that love, there was more love waiting. The silence within me was a well-spring of love, and as long as I stayed consciously connected to it, I could patiently endure as long as I had to for her to soften up and trust/accept it...so I did.

Today we have two kids and a third on the way. We have a strong partnership and a loving connection that has stood many storms. It's not always perfect, but we do our best, and each of us is grateful for the other, and for having held on long enough to find this place together.

This all took place over about a 12 year period. After about six years, I looked back and realized there were many old lessons and practices I was no longer actively pursuing - so I decided to write a small book for myself. It would be something I could use as a quick reference to remind myself of the practices that helped build and strengthen my relationship with the loving voiceless wisdom within me - a road map back to where I had been, in case I needed to go back.

I worked on the manuscript for 3 years. I finished the book.

I thought, this could benefit other soldiers - hell, other people - so I began packaging the whole thing like an actual book. I used a website called FastPencil to manage the chapters and layouts and printing and stuff. I made 300 copies.

...then I decided it was all vanity. There are enough books like this out there, and I am not qualified to call myself some sort of spiritual guidepost - so I cancelled the project. I trashed the copies of my book when we moved. The only evidence left of the book was some of the original cover work that had been saved in Google Drive. The actual manuscript had been saved only with FastPencil, and when I tried to revisit it before making this post, I found that my material was all gone or inaccessible...and I accept that.

But I thought from time to time I might try to add to it here, and store my ideas on the blockchain where I can always come back to them...which I guess makes this post kind of like, a first, introductory chapter.

Just for kicks, this was the original cover art…

…I thought it came across as overproduced and chesy/trashy, and the title I felt had this air of somehow disqualifying soldiers who had not directly seen combat - which couldn’t have been further from my intentions.

Thanks for checking out some more of my work! As always, I hope you enjoyed witnessing as much as I enjoyed creating!

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