Contraband

What do you do with something you need but can't admit that you have?

I received something I didn’t earn on the open ramp of a C-130, and I couldn’t tell a soul.

I’ve spent four pieces telling you what the strong do to pain. We turn it into currency. We pay with it, we prove with it, we let it calcify into a curse we can aim but never set down.

Every one of those pieces ends at the same locked door. Receive. Take what you didn’t bleed for. I’ve walked you up to that door and not shown you through it, because the truth is it took me most of my life to find the handle.

Let me tell you about the first time I could feel my armor crack. And, well ... recognize that I was wearing armor. It would take even more time to find the door.

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This is Part 4 of a six-part series, running from familiar misery to the events that taught me how to crack my own armor and let love in. Each piece stands alone. Together they’re the on-ramp to my book, The Armored Heart, out October 1.

Part 1 - King Kong Ain’t Got Nothin’ on Me · June 11

Part 2 - I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead · June 23

Part 3 - The Battery · July 7

Part 4 - The Curse · July 11

Part 5 - Contraband · July 27

Part 6 - Help · August 11

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The ramp

No shit, there I was. Right, that’s how they all start.

C-130, open ramp, headed into Iraq before the war in 2003 had even started. The noise is total, a wall of engine and wind that makes talk pointless, so everyone goes inward. Men packed in with their kit, each one alone inside his own head.

Every man running his own private inventory of what’s coming. I should have been doing what they were doing, what I always did. Run the variables. Rehearse actions on the objective. Keep the machine warm and the fear boxed where it belonged.

Instead, something else happened, and I have spent years trying to find honest and descriptive words for it.

I looked back into the aircraft at the rows of men. Men under my command. And I was hit, with no warning and no permission, by a love so total it frightened me more than the landing did.

Not affection. Not camaraderie, not the back-slapping word we were allowed to use. Love.

The kind of love that would trade my life for theirs without a vote. The kind that a man is supposed to feel for his family. I felt it for a plane full of armed and dangerous men flying into the worst place on earth, and it filled me up past the brim.

And then, peace. An internal peace so complete I realized the absence of noise.

It took me two decades to understand it. That love wasn’t something I produced. I didn’t earn it or build it. I didn’t decide it. It arrived. It came in from somewhere and landed on me, fully formed, in the loudest, ugliest, least sentimental place imaginable.

It was given.

And for a few seconds on that ramp, I received it.

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The contraband

Then the seconds passed, and I did what I was trained to do. I shoved it back down. Compartmentalized it.

Because in that organization, in that life, the thing I had just felt was contraband. We had no shelf for it. No word that wouldn’t get you looked at sideways. We could say brotherhood. We could say a thousand things that pointed at love while carefully refusing to name it ... the whole doctrine built like a man describing the sun without once admitting what it is.

I wrote once that military doctrine describes love everywhere and won’t say the word. This was the moment I learned why. Not because the love isn’t there. It is the most present thing in that aircraft, more present than the fear, more present than the mission.

We won’t name it because naming it makes you porous, and porous gets people killed. And worse yet, the source of that love. How do you admit you know it, you felt it, it spoke to you?

You can’t in that moment. People will think you have buckled under the pressure.

So you feel the most important thing a human can feel, and you smuggle it. You run it black-market, under the floorboards, where it can’t soften your head, your heart, your hands at the wrong moment.

I became very good at smuggling. Most of us did. We carried the largest love of our lives as contraband for decades and then wondered why we came home sometimes unable to receive love from anyone else.

You cannot run love as contraband and still feel it. Or let any more in. The same wall that hides it from the institution hides it from you. Yes, it’s inside the armor, but locked in a box that only pops open at bad times and floods you, just long enough for you to get it shut again before anyone sees.

That’s just your eyeballs sweating.

The armor doesn’t know the difference between incoming fire and incoming love. Both make you vulnerable, so it stops both. And if it detects that thing already inside, it can’t push it out, so it quarantines it. The armor is your immune system against being fully human.

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The crack

What I didn’t know on that ramp. When this door opens once, it does not fully close again. Not all the way. I know that now. I did not know it then.

I thought I sealed it. I did the work, and went back to being Doom, the Soldier. But something had gotten in, and it left a hairline crack the armor could never quite weld shut.

For years I’d feel the draft through it at strange times and slam it again. At a funeral. At a speech during a military event. The emotion would overwhelm me, that same total, terrifying, unearned flood, and I didn’t have the first idea what to do with it except seal it and move.

That hairline is the whole reason the rest of my life happened. It’s why, years later, a blind man could ask me to be his eyes and I could say yes, because some cracked place in me already knew that letting another man’s trust land on you is not weakness, it’s the thing we were built for.

It’s why my wife’s love, offered before I’d done anything to deserve it, eventually got through instead of bouncing off. It’s why four kids could reinforce, day after ordinary day, that the love is real and it doesn’t have to be paid for.

The receiving started on that ramp. It just took me twenty years and a lot of help to stop treating it as a security breach.

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The threshold

I’ll be honest with you about where this piece stops, because honesty is the only currency that’s worth anything.

There’s a second half to this story. Some of it I’m not free to tell yet, and the rest belongs to a book I haven’t finished living.

So I’m going to leave us here, looking through an open door but standing on the threshold, on purpose.

What I can tell you is this. The first time you receive something you didn’t earn, it will not feel like relief. It will feel like a breach. Every alarm you own will go off. The armor will read that incoming love as a threat and move to stop it, because that’s the only job it knows.

Your work, the work of every strong and cursed and exhausted one of us, is to stand there one extra second while the alarms scream and let it land anyway.

It landed on me above the black sea, surrounded by men I would have died for and couldn’t say I loved. Not out loud anyway.

The next and last part of this series is about what happens when you finally allow the armor to open.

Lead with Love.

- Doom

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These essays come from the same place as my book, The Armored Heart, out October 1 from Shakeridge Press. The armor going on, and how I operated with it, is in the book. This is the first hint of it coming off. If these are landing, the book is the whole story.