Mourning

Cassandra Manuel / CREATIVE NON-FICTION

I think every person that enters military service has a more unique relationship with death than most. Not that we are all suicidal or homicidal—it’s just that it’s a topic we’ve chewed and savored longer than normal. After all, that’s the topic that comes up in the recruitment office when provided the enlistment paperwork: “Are you willing to die for your country? It could be here, stateside, or down range in the desert. It might be an accident. It might not. Are you alright with that?” Me, I was fine with it. I was 18, fresh out of high school, with no money for college and nothing to look forward to except living with my parents, just like every other kid in Northern California in 2011. There were no friends, at least no one close enough to stick around for, no job prospects above working behind a cash register, and no promise that things would change. I needed change, even if it promised danger. So, I enlisted in the Air Force, dreams of travel, grit, and gunfire dancing through my mind like sugar plums at Christmastime.

I wanted purpose. It just so happened that the Air Force provided that, along with something else: the promise of remembrance, specifically worthy remembrance. Funnily enough, my eventual impression of the Honor Guard—the special duty that required airmen to perform the customs and courtesies while laying fallen airmen to rest during military funerals—encapsulated this sentiment. I was in active duty for a year or so when I first encountered them. They wore special uniforms while carrying the casket, standing tall and somber, with hands so precise as they folded the flag to be given to the Airman’s unfortunate family. It was a difficult, humbling practice, asking for no less than the utmost respect and care. I didn’t envy the tasks they practiced for every funeral, but it comforted me to know that if misfortune cut my time short, I would be cared for. Though awful, my death wouldn’t be purposeless or less than honorable. I’d be mourned. Macabre maybe, but more than anything at that time, I wanted to be mourned. People who are mourned were relevant. They did things that were remembered and considered. They left an impression that lasted enough for them to be thought about after their death, and in that way, they lived on.

I got my wish for travel, grit, and gunfire in some form or fashion, with the added bonus of a new family—a band of the misfit and boisterous, who constantly made me laugh and made me thank God that I enlisted for six years rather than the standard four. High school was spent in a haze of academics and repression, where I slowly bid my time until I could leave. I had promised myself back then that once I left, I would live. I’d make friends, I’d get into shenanigans and make stupid, within-reason choices that I could reminisce about when I was old and grey. I’d drink and be merry and fall in love. I did all of it in the years I was serving. Weekends ranged from trolling through the dorms with my friends, playing Cards Against Humanity while passing a bottle of Hpnotiq around the card table, starting an impromptu Nerf gun battle that spanned three floors, to gushing over my then-boyfriend, who was five states away. I think of those times with a mixture of warmth, amusement, and nostalgia. We were lucky none of us got mono from the Hpnotiq, and that we didn’t destroy anything more substantial than a stock picture frame in the hallway during our Nerf gun battles. The memory of my friend O using P as a human shield mid-game is one of my favorite memories. As for the memory of gushing over my now-ex—not so much, after realizing much later what I felt wasn’t quite love. It felt like love at the time though, and that was enough for me. The point is, my friends and I were service members. We were set to dance with death more than the normal person. Why not go all in and enjoy ourselves as much as we could? It was how I had always wanted to live my life—at its fullest, savoring the dizzyingly happy and funny—a hopeful, innocent wish that came with the assumption that the good times would never end. It was a foolish assumption. After all, all good things come to an end. 

At the beginning of 2016, I had just been promoted to the third rank in my Air Force hierarchy: Senior Airman, and I was returning from my first deployment, Kuwait. Ali Al Salim Air Base wasn’t in the middle of an active war zone, nor was it devoid of amenities such as Wi-Fi or a proper gym. Work was straightforward and busy, so the days went by fast, though lowly airmen such as myself slept in a city of tents, complete with shaky air conditioning that would break down during 120-degree heat. I worked the night shift, so I had the misfortune of experiencing these outages during my sleeping hours. However, the bright side to this was that I usually had the ten bunkbed-filled tent all to myself. All in all, by Air Force standards, it was an easy, low-key deployment. 

Deployments have a general way of playing out: you arrive and get registered at your base—the “in-process.” Then, you get your bearings and find your work and off-work niches to make time by go by faster. Next, your replacements eventually arrive by the six-month mark and then you de-register from the base—or “out-process”—and go home. Once you get home, you in-process at your home base and your leadership team/bosses usually put you in a new section so you can learn a different facet of your job. Meanwhile, you reconnect with old friends, figure out who is still at your base and who isn’t, and learn the dynamics of your new work center. If a deployment is a book, the homecoming is the epilogue.

I never got my epilogue. I was hospitalized a few days after arriving back at my duty station. On the day I left Kuwait, I thought I had the flu, believing my replacements had somehow given me a bug they picked up enroute to Ali Al Salim. I kept on believing this, right up to the point where I fainted a few days later in my dorm room. I remember sitting up in bed, alert, reading something on my computer, and then suddenly blacking out. Don’t get me wrong, I’d fallen asleep before without realizing it, waking up to find that hours had passed—but it was always preceded with the conscious memory of trying to go to sleep, or with my head on the pillow. In this case, the last thing I remembered was being upright, looking at the computer screen. It was my reflection in the mirror though, after regaining consciousness, that convinced me to call a friend to drive me to the emergency room. My face was swollen, like I’d been stung by bees. It was a Saturday night, so it took a couple of tries before I found someone sober. Living in the moment, right? My fears were confirmed at the ER as the nurse took my vitals, and the dullness in his eyes from the late hour quickly switched to alert. The standard questions they asked me when I first arrived noticeably shifted to more specific, scarier areas—do you know what Middle-Eastern Respiratory Syndrome is? Do you have any pain in your sides? In your chest? How long were you in Kuwait? Were you the only one sick on your flight? I didn’t learn until later that the nurses at the ER were afraid that I would stroke out on them, that the urine test they did was the first clue to my kidney failure, that the swollenness wasn’t from an allergic reaction, but something called edema. I was whisked away to a civilian hospital in Boise, Idaho within hours of entering the base ER.

The first week was spent in the infectious disease ward. They feared whatever I had was contagious, since I had returned from the Middle East. By the end of that week, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called Lupus. It was my 23rd birthday. I wasn’t prepared for any of it—the diagnosis that ended my time in the Air Force, the new medications and appointments I had to maintain, the complete alteration of my livelihood and identity, physically and psychologically. Neither was the Air Force. I’m sure they had some sort of training in airman leadership school with how to counsel younger airmen experiencing grief over losing a loved one or fellow airman, sure, but none for guiding an airman through the grief of surviving a life-changing disease, especially one that directly conflicted with the military’s unofficial ethos: to push through the pain. This ethos had been forced down my throat from the start of bootcamp. For me, it had come to mean overcoming anything that was thrown my way through sheer force of will. But what happens when exerting yourself through sheer force of will triggers your illness? What happens when what they are asking of you—to give your all—is no longer possible to give?

Indifference and gawking was what happened. By all means, there was also sympathy and pity, and in many ways that was worse, but more so, there was unwarranted staring and judgement. Before I left for Kuwait, I was preparing for the next stage in my career: testing for Staff Sergeant. Ranks 1 to 3 in the Air Force were reserved for relatively new airmen. They were like the freshmen and sophomores of the service, still learning the ropes and making mistakes. Starting at Staff Sergeant, airmen became something called “non-commissioned officers,” or NCOs. They were the ones responsible for the younger airmen and were charged with mentoring them. The responsibilities and accountability only increased as you ranked up. Starting here, you had to test to be promoted, and my leadership had wasted no time in emphasizing to study prior to my deployment. More responsibilities had been assigned, and expectations for the future were outlined.

Before I left for Kuwait, my leadership had a confidence in me that I never thought I would see. That all disappeared after my diagnosis, before my medical review even determined that I was to be medically retired from the Air Force. My entire leadership had kept things regarding my prognosis under wraps to grant me privacy and maintain a sense of professionalism in the workplace. Their plan worked, albeit too well: no one from active duty, aside from them and one or two fellow airmen they dragged along as a courtesy, came to visit me in the hospital.

I endured the plasma transfusions, the kidney biopsy, the constant agony in my joints from the inflammation all but alone. It was a confirmation of my deepest fear—that I wasn’t significant enough in most people’s lives to be remembered or missed, or even thought about. I learned later that most of my coworkers and friends had no idea what was happening to me, and the few that did either wrote me off as another sad case, or could only gawk once I returned to work, stunned by the way the Prednisone had morphed my features. 

I was returned to my old section, and shunted off to the side with busywork as my leadership got the information they needed from me to write their reports. Once they had that, nothing else was really said to me. Not surprising, considering everything I told them about my prognosis pointed towards medical separation from the Air Force. I was permanently non-deployable. An unsung belief in the Air Force is that you aren’t really serving fully unless you’ve deployed a couple of times. It’s the ultimate testament to the selfless service you swore to accomplish at the beginning of your career, intrinsic to your new identity as an airman. To be an airman and not deploy was like to be a bird that couldn’t fly. What was the point in you even being here?

With my non-deployable status in mind and my departure imminent, no new duties were assigned, no expectations to guide the new airmen were encouraged like before, and most of all, no one expected more out of me. I was basically dead weight they had to carry for a few more months before they could offload me into the civilian world. It was eerily, horrifyingly similar to how I saw my leadership treat ex-coworkers of mine who were getting out of the military due to administrative or medical discharge. These people were treated as sad, miserable failures that couldn’t hack it. They, and now me, were ghosts—there but not there, the living waiting for them to cross over. It was the worst possible outcome I could imagine for my military career—and it had come true.

I want to be clear, how I was treated wasn’t done out of any maliciousness. I think enough time has passed now for me to see that, and none of this was done by a specific person. Rather, it was a group mentality, an attitude that became the default for this sort of situation. It was something already a part of the culture. In a way, it’s the same mentality in the situation of somebody passing: mourn, and then carry on. Except here, there was no mourning and no stopping. No one understood that there was anything to mourn, thanks to my prognosis being hidden. Hell, I was getting more than fifty percent VA disability compensation for the rest of my life once I got out, and I wasn’t even missing any limbs or sporting any bullet holes. As far as anyone was concerned, my future was secure, which meant I was going to be fine.

I wasn’t fine, though. I was stuck in this strange, waking nightmare of being enveloped in a new identity that didn’t feel like mine, unrecognizable from the inside and out. In just a month, everything that I cherished about myself and my life was gone, a future I had been working towards, grit that had carried me through storm after storm, hard-won self-esteem and worth, and happiness I had previously thought unachievable. Caution and fear replaced my resolve, now seemingly left behind in Kuwait like a favorite sweater left in an airport terminal. My connection to my friends and coworkers was severed; I would never make it to Staff Sergeant or grow with them into the next level of our careers. I could no longer keep up with them physically due to my condition. We might as well have been aliens to each other now. But worst of all was the silence, the quiet acceptance of my discharge and how nonchalant people were of my departure. No one ever tried to convince me to stay, to fight back, or encourage me to question my new limitations. Instead, they took one look at my bloated, tired face and decided that yes, I was no longer of any use. Yes, I was done. There was nothing more to invest in and it was time for me to go. It was what was best for her. For the Air Force.

I’ve tried to make sense of my fate over the last five years. Why was I given a taste of freedom and joy and addicting exhilaration only to have it snatched away? I had spent years embittered with the belief that it was all some sort of cruel joke. Eventually, I concluded that there was no answer, or rather, the answer was whatever I chose for it to be. In the end, I chose for it to mean that my purpose wasn’t to die after all. I wasn’t meant to be mourned yet, and that was the hardest part to swallow. People like me, who enter a service that asks a certain amount of self-sacrifice, or in the military’s case, the ultimate sacrifice, are unsatisfied with ourselves, our current positions in life. Most of all, it’s because we’re unable to see our value. We feel in a lot of ways invisible, unappreciated, and insignificant to the people we crave affirmation from the most, and in turn we see our lives as meaningless, not worthy of being remembered. It’s what makes the call of the armed services so alluring, especially to young 18 year olds fresh out of high school, bereft of self-actualization and confidence. To enter such a service does nothing for that deep-seated insecurity. It only feeds it, by perpetuating the idea that your personal worth depends on what you can do for Uncle Sam, capping off only when you get out, either through the end of your enlistment or tragic circumstance. If you’re lucky, you have a close-knit group of people to help you pick up the pieces after you’re out, people who remind you that they don’t care about the medals or promotion, just the person underneath, people who remind you that there is a you outside of that uniform.

Every now and then, I still grieve Senior Airman Manuel. I wonder what could have been if the Lupus decided to stay genetically turned off. Would she have made Staff Sergeant on the first try? Grown more confident in her job? Decided to reenlist once her 6 year mark turned up? I don’t think I’ll ever truly be rid of those thoughts. They’re propped up by memories from before: the feel of the Kuwaiti sunrise on my face as I ran around the base after my shift. The taste of tomato juice from my first Bloody Mary in my buddy R’s dorm room. The quickening of my heartbeat as I stepped off the bus and speed-walked down the marching pad with the other trainees that first night at bootcamp.

As the world keeps spinning, Daily Supply Reports and inventory duty are replaced with Elmo’s World and chapters on indictments and preliminary hearings. I wonder who this new person is, wearing my skin. She feels like me, but she’s not Air Force. She’s been here now longer than Airman Manuel was, and in some ways that’s a comfort. In others, it’s disheartening, because it means with each passing year I’m moving farther away from that period of time where I felt like my truest self. If forces me to wonder if I will ever feel like that again.

I can only hope.