Instant Satori
Alan Watts has been a massive influence since I began listening to and reading his works around 2010. He mentioned a concept once in one of his lectures, this thought of ‘instant satori.’ It didn’t make sense until years later when it hit me; he talked about my experience(s) being deployed overseas with the Marines. I remember coming back from multiple deployments and just not fitting into society. I knew the common folk of this country didn’t have that constant anticipation of death that I had accepted.
First-world countries take this out of the human experience with the perception of safety by having a police and fire department, which we know helps in many situations. Still, they are no cure to the everlasting looming nature of danger. So, when veterans come back from war, they are told to forget what they learned overseas, as it has no use back home, or so I have been told. But most veterans will tell you that being deployed to war was the first time they lived. They had a community, a mission, and an experience that could never be taken away. We were fully living for the first time because we had no other option; every second could be our last.
In Iraq alone in 2008, I deployed as a machine gunner (0331) part of Echo Co. 2/25, a reserve unit. We were repurposed and made a part of the internal security forces for Al Asad Air Force Base. One of my primary purposes was to be a Backscatter Technician, scanning vehicles for drugs and explosives. Now, a few hairy things happened, but mostly walking up to a car and having to accept your death 10-50 times a day, depending on what shift you were working. You never knew what you could find. We were often inspecting KBR contractors that were local nationals, and we had to have complete faith that they didn’t rig their fuel tank to a massive IED (Improvised Explosive Device).
That fear got to me, and I was highly stressed out. I was having nightmares of dying and was constantly anxious. However, we couldn’t tell our command that out of fear of being labeled a ‘pussy’, which needs no further explanation. This could mean we were medically discharged and labeled a psych case. We all buried it as deep down as we could and pushed forward.
This one time, it stood out for me in Iraq when a large fuel truck’s brakes went on its vehicle. My Corporal and I had no combat experience at the time, so we had to escalate force by signaling them to slow down, popping a flare, and eventually pointing our weapons at the driver’s engine for not stopping. We were seconds away from pulling the trigger in trying to disable the vehicle, and the next shot after that was going to have to be to kill the driver. This is all the while trying to manage the IA’s ( Iraqi Army) detail that was with us, too, with a massive language barrier.
We stayed as calm as possible in that chaos and made the right decision not to engage because the vehicle ended up stopping, which, through further investigation, we found the issue. The driver was terrified and almost lost his life, but sadly, we would have been in the right by using our SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures). We both discussed that we would have to kill somebody that day, and it was so imminent, but we didn’t and lived to see another day. But the question is, what do you do with that knowledge? You teach others not to act in haste because your perception isn’t always accurate. I woke up that day to the realities of life. It is so impermanent, and any second could be your last. It was instant satori. Trying to carry that knowledge still lives with me to this very day, along with other traumatic events that happened overseas. Still, the truth is in war, you live, but we are told to go back to sleep to participate in society when returning home by the VA (Veteran Affairs) Therapists.
We don’t go to the VA to be told how to live; we want to be heard. Unfortunately, they want to downplay the experience and try to make it as if it can go away and you can live an entirely ‘normal’ life. Yet, any veteran knows that being in situations like this, life is never the same after that. It seems as if it can go away and you can live an entirely ‘normal’ life, yet any veteran knows that To be an expert in something, you must have lived experience; everything else is book knowledge or research, which can’t be supplemented by living the event. Creating safe spaces just to be heard is the best approach to these struggles, not trying to mold us back into ‘normalcy.’ The mind anticipates, and removing that would remove us from the human experience. We are not broken; we are in constant repair and struggle to assimilate.