Trained for Fear

After getting out of bed and washing up, I headed over to the main tent where Sergeant Alan and Corporal Mann were talking about the days to-dos.

We were sent to this town in Afghanistan for one reason; to keep a watch out for insurgent movement. It’d been over month and we hadn't seen anything.

Alan called me and assigned me the job of watching the power generator. I picked up my gear, which consisted of a water bottle, a pocketknife, and a military grade blue pen. Obviously I had been prepared adequately for the dangerous task at hand. After reaching the main generator behind the storage depot, I found myself a chair, sat down, and started drawing.

I wasn't always drawing behind storage containers. Only four months before I had been in a training camp with five action packed days per week. I loved the adrenaline, the competition, the frenzy. Every day we had contests between the soldiers in three categories; speed, accuracy, and strength. I wasn't necessarily the fastest man in the camp so I tended to stray from those. Accuracy and strength on the other hand were much different. I wasn't the best, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't do good. My highest score was fourteen out of fifteen. My lowest? Twelve.

That’s what confuses me. How is it someone with scores as high as that can pass camp and be sent to do something as low as this? Surely there's something somewhere else that could use one more man. One more gun, one extra guy following orders, one more soldier.

My pen flew in the air and my wrist bent backwards far enough that it cracked so loud, someone nearby would’ve thought I had been shooting blanks. The chair beneath me gave way and I fell backwards landing next to a container. A man was on top of me. I could feel his knee digging into my ribs while he held my neck with both hands. My heart beat so fiercely I could hear it through his hands, and the longer I listened, the darker everything became. I couldn't think, I could barely move. I had been trained for months in hand-to-hand combat and its where I shined. I tried leveraging his body weight to the side and managed to push off of the container with my foot. He fell forwards and his head hit the table while I stood up. Before I was even standing, he had managed to get up. My heart was racing, my eyes were pounding, and I could barely stand.

For some reason, I began to laugh. It was out of place, but I just couldn't hold it in. I hurt so much, it was the first thing my body decided to do. My wrist had started bleeding and I quickly grasped it. The pain was excruciating. Tears streamed from my eyes, almost drowning my vision. I tried concentrating on the man in front of me. The blood from his forehead dripped down his beard and I could see his dark eyes. He was in as much fear as I was. We both just stood there, watching each other intently. I had been trained for this, but then again, so had he. You always think that when you hit that situation, you’ll know what to do. The reality is that instead of preforming with academic perfection, fear causes you to fall to your lowest level of training. All you can do is hope your lowest level is higher than theirs. Unfortunately this time, mine wasn't.