I understood the continuum of death long before I understood the continuum of life.
As a teenager I had seen the aftermath of the blaze of glory that is a firefight in combat. Thinking myself prepared for all else, I had then witnessed fallen civilians after they stumbled upon a roadside bomb meant for us.
My first sight of collateral damage brought with it the somber realization that war had depths that would remain forever unfathomable no matter how many times I attended it.
It wasn’t until much later, first when my wife was pregnant and then when I held my own newborn baby, that I had any frame of understanding for the opposite end of the spectrum.
Far removed from the dusty corners of the world that I had so greatly pursued deploying to, I saw for the first time the other end of human experience in the mind-bending moments where life begins.
In truth, nothing I had ever seen during war prepared me in the slightest to the experience of assisting the delivery of my own child, from the horrors of labor to my eyes burning with tears as I heard the first wail of my daughter.
I had made this reality abundantly clear to the hospital staff, stating emphatically for all concerned:
“That was the craziest shit I’ve ever seen.”
I deployed again four months later.
In what would be my final physical war, this time leaving American soil for the first time as a father, my eyes were open to the truth: that the enemy body count we so desperately sought represented what were once squalling infants held in the arms of proud parents.
Beyond the rhetoric and political goals of the leadership of either side, beyond the chest thumping of religious differences and historical offenses against one another, being a father fostered in me an eerie sense that the men we fought were little different than us.
Nonetheless, until the end of my career I savored the opportunity to join my comrades in meeting our foreign peers amid villages and valleys to fire upon each other.
This motivation had nothing to do with political justification, a concept that had always remained alien to me at the ground level of war. I had never thought of any grand nationalistic imperatives during combat, nor did I know anyone who had.
Bluntly stated, my career began as a patriotic endeavor at age 18 and quickly evolved, or devolved, into a pursuit of thrill, the motivations behind going to war and BASE jumping intertwining into one and the same by the end of my first deployment.
On missions, we made our presence visible and hoped we would find people to fight us.
Many of our opponents, I suspected, came to fight because they liked to fight, the same as us.
And in a perverse way, the men who merge and attempt to kill one another in battlefields, foreign or local, share an unlikely and unspoken similarity that is at once more profound and haunting than their differences.
Jason Kasper is the author of the David Rivers Series. Read more and contact him at base1178.com.