One more piece of introspection

For some reason I thought I'd reposted this more recently, but I guess I hadn't.  Surprisingly, since it's still a part of me in ways I wish wasn't the case.

Sometimes we have to leave people behind so that we can go on. So that we can continue to fight. Sometimes we have to do things that we never thought we were capable of, if only to show the enemy our will.

When you can be this for as long as you have to be, then you're a razor.

This war is forcing us all to become razors.  Because if we don't, we don't survive. And then we don't have the luxury of becoming simply human again.

It was something that was very much on my mind in fall 2007, when I had to be the necessary evil to get certain things done.  What I wasn't prepared for was the human cost of sending men and women out to go do the things I had told them to do.  My head is screwed on tight, mostly.  But I realized I never really gave up being a razor, as much as I needed to let it go, four years after coming back.

Reading Neil Peart's Ghost Rider was therapeutic in some ways, because Peart's road to healing really began with learning to forgive himself for his perceived failings.  I'm not sure I'm ready to do that yet.

I think the double effect of stacking a birthday at about the same time of the year as when I came back from my last combat deployment was the reason.  As a result, I don't usually associate my birthday with things I really want to remember.  I came back in a group, but I came back mostly alone.  I try not to think about that too much, because there were a lot of things going on then, but I also think what was shattered over the space of two years might not really be reparable.