Go Army! No, I mean Go. Get outta here.

October 18, 2015: Go Army! No, I mean Go. Get outta here.

Either by chance or design, the kind that doesn’t consult with me beforehand, I have fallen into a situation that is often highly entertaining, sometimes scary, and altogether revealing. I took a job at the local convenience market and I am overwhelmed by the humanity buying milk, beer, and hunting licenses.

The local market is just that - a small convenience store set in the middle of a rural community. The owner provides a place where residents can get what they need and, in doing so, has helped create a commonly accepted fixture which is the germ of any community. A crossroads, really, but for me it is a place where I cannot escape the diversity and extreme peculiarities of my fellow human beings. It scares me because, as an employee, I cannot turn away from what is uncomfortable, or abhorrent, and must accept the mirror of my own peculiarities in the faces of my neighbors. Horrifically, I am faced with all the things I find unacceptable or unresolved in myself.

Someone once said that you can never go home. You can never return to the place that holds a nostalgic source of meaning for you and return to living in that nostalgia, but you can find a home for who you are now. For all of us Home is the place where we can get on with living whether it is the place you grew up in or the place you find yourself in today. What prevents us from finding our way home are all the issues we haven’t resolved yet and until we do, going home is not possible. I’ve seen the shadows of issues with my mother, my father, and my brothers in the faces of customers and neighbors handing over money for groceries. I’ve been faced with the ghosts of my past innocently buying snack foods and six-packs. Yesterday I faced a past I had previously believed was resolved long ago and, in looking into the mirror, this customer pointed out who I am right now and there is still work to do on myself if I ever truly want to go home.

In my youth, I accidentally found myself in the US Army. I say accidentally because at that age I had no idea what I was in for. I wanted to serve and, in my ignorance, I enlisted (to this day, I wish I had enlisted in the Peace Corps, or even the Coast Guard). Instead of pulling back, or hiding, or simply riding it out until it was over, I went the other way and became what some believe to be an elite soldier. I volunteered for duty in a Special Forces unit. My experience might seem tame to those veterans returning from a real war, or wars, and I apologize to them if they believe I am comparing miseries with them. I am not. Some of us saw ‘action’ as it is commonly called. Some never heard a shot fired. Still, others heard the shots but were never allowed to shoot back. Every veteran I have met falls into one of these categories in their own measure. The last of these groups suffers the most. After basic training, after the call to serve, some soldiers were never allowed to ‘be’ soldiers as they believed they were being asked to be. They carry with them the unsatisfied urge to shoot back and actualize the objective of the training and indoctrination they received.

Yesterday, I was faced with a former Army soldier of the type I believe was never able to shoot back, and he is still looking for the opportunity as a civilian.

This young man, probably in his early thirties, stepped up the counter and asked me where the local shooting range was located. He stood there with a ball cap on his head that had the current Army logo printed there, and on the brim of the hat was stitched the words “Go Army!” He wanted to know where he could shoot his AR-15 (the semi-automatic version of the M-4, or M-16). I told him I didn’t know and he might have better luck in the nearest metropolis of Livingston, MT. He said he was just as willing to find the nearest National Forest as he knew it was his right to shoot his firearm there. He served for 10 years to defend his right to do so, he went on brazenly. I told him I still didn’t know of a local firing range. No one in the store did nor did anyone in the store offer another solution. As he was leaving, he announced that we were all far too liberal as he must have sensed everyone’s unwillingness to encourage a stranger to go off shooting his weapon wherever he pleased, or wherever he believed he had the right to shoot.

You have to understand something. This occurred in Emigrant, Montana. Nearly everyone I meet here owns a gun, eats meat, nearly all of them go hunting on a regular basis, and the notion that anyone here besides myself could be called a liberal is ludicrous. As he left, I realized he would continue to hold onto the idea of being a soldier, and his weapon, forever searching for the experience he was never able to find. It would be a long time before he found his way home.

I have no idea if he went to Livingston or made his way into the nearest National Forest but I couldn’t help trying to understand why it upset me so much. Something about a former soldier, with a loaded AR-15 in his car, brought up my own experience as a former soldier. I, too, spent some time after my term of service unable to let go of the soldier’s life. Yet after six months, I sold the shotgun, the .45 calibre pistol, and the semi-automatic MP-5. I did so then not because someone was offended by the firearms but because it took me six months to realize that coming home was the end-game. All soldiers need to eventually come home and become civilians again yet, like Odysseus, the journey sometimes takes longer than planned. This customer mirrored the fact that I have not yet come home completely nor have I completely let go of myself as a Soldier.

In the thirty years since I left the Army, I have met many veterans. I have met all three types in varying degrees. I’ve met a couple of former Navy Seals who never saw action and to these men I hope they can eventually find their way home because they have the hardest task of all - resolving their role as an unactualized solider. There is no way for them to go “all the way” now that they are no longer serving. They are the unrequited. I’ve met several former Green Berets who did see action and I even met two recipients of the Medal of Honor. They, ironically, had found their way home. They had made peace with whatever they had experienced. Most of them do not own weapons of any kind, like me, now that they are no longer soldiers.

Maybe it is much simpler than I believe. Perhaps coming home is just a matter of finally letting go. For me, I have let go of much of my experience in the US Army yet the consequence of not letting go of all of it is finding a conflict that is not mine any longer yet holds the promise of one day calling myself Soldier to the degree I so ignorantly believed in once and grasp now from a sense of nostalgia. Instead of looking for that nostalgic home that I once called the US Army and being a soldier, I can finally find a home of my own making, made out of the material I have become, instead of what I believed I needed to be when I was young.

If there is one former soldier who cannot let go, then there are thousands out there, each one still fighting to be called soldier and remaining unrequited.

And I have no way to help them.

G. M. Potter

Emigrant, MT.