M.O.S.

Before he left, he was different. "I'm going to fight for our country. I'm proud to serve." A girl in our class asked him if he was scared. He shrugged. This sums up pre-deployment. He had photos on his cell phone of his recruiter and him hanging out. Before basic, he got to take apart and reassemble a grenade launcher. "That spring can take your hand off", he told me. "I'm going to be a gunner on an M2, an armored fighting vehicle."
Later, I asked him if his M2 would have air conditioning. You know, because he would be in the desert. "No" he said laughing, "it gets really fucking hot. Like, a buck fifty inside."
I thought about this for a few seconds. "150 degrees?"
"Yeah. You've never heard that before? I guess I'm getting used to this."
Then after boot camp, basic training. "I'm going to Afghanistan." I was relieved. Surely Afghanistan wasn't as bad as Iraq? It wasn't on the news as much...
Then we dropped out of communication. And he went to Afghanistan. I talked to him a couple times while he was there. "I should have gone to college" is what he told me.
Then, a second tour, longer than the first. Sometimes he would post photos online. Firefights, shot up cars. Mud brick houses and Blackhawk helicopters, dark against the rocky background. And mortars. He told me they got rocketed on a daily basis, he saved a piece of shrapnel that almost killed him. He saw dead men, Americans and Afghanis. He is different, though it is imperceptible. He told me he just wanted to survive, he didn't care about anything else. He did survive, but he's probably got another tour before he's out. This is a very difficult thing to explain, the emotions that go along with seeing him. Mostly we drink and act like assholes and this is nice. Occasionally, something devastating will be revealed. "We'd hit them with missiles while they were trying to exfil their dead and wounded." The brutal reality. We are silent momentarily, and then we drink a little more.
I try and think about this as it applies to me as I consider the military. I do not care about patriotism. I have a singular goal, a very specific idea of what I hope to obtain. My work would hopefully not involve firefights and IEDs. But I am still scared. I don't want to experience rockets and dead men and weeping Afghani women. But this isn't about me or for me.
He has seen these things, felt these things, and has been changed. And I want to connect with him on a basic level, but I am a civilian, an outsider.
I know nothing of war.