A soldier's fatal burden

A soldier's fatal burden
January 17, 2012 - 2:34PM

John Birmingham

When we think of soldiers, we think of the things they carry on the outside. The rifle. The bayonet. The camouflage pattern of a uniform. A helmet. Boots. Perhaps a canteen or a poncho or a hand grenade. And when we think about these things we might see them, but we don’t actually think about them, about their uses and their true meaning and how they make a soldier so very different from us that we can never really understand him or her.

What we don’t think about are the things a soldier carries on the inside. The things that make him or her exactly the same as us. Take away the rifle and bayonet, strip off that uniform, whether starched and pressed or tattered and bloody, and the soldier is merely a man or a woman.

Noble in reason, as Hamlet knew deep in his melancholia, infinite in faculties, admirable in form and movement, but like Hamlet and like you and I, prey to the anxieties and slights and failings of our common humanity.

The hard and melancholy things a soldier carries inside are the same as those we carry, but more so. They love each other as we do, they know fear, as we do, the cry sometimes and exult at others. They know boredom and frustration and resentment and rage. But sometimes, because of the extremes at which they must live and die and – lets not forget – kill, they know those things more intensely than we can ever imagine.

It destroys them. Not all of them, not all the time. But the strange, unnatural intensities of a soldier’s life and the proximity to violent death in which it is lived during war time destroys many, many more of them than the commonplace demands of life do us.

Perhaps that’s why, in the US, which has been at war for over 10 years now, a serving member of the military takes their own life every 36 hours. Perhaps it is significant that of those suicides, the heaviest numbers are to be found among infantrymen – the soldiers on whom the most grievous and intense demands are laid.

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