No Direction Home

Four years in the Air Force, including stints in Iraq and Afghanistan, have prepared me for every conceivable situation. Except, that is, for my mind-numbing new civilian existence.

by David Broyles

WHEN I WAS IN IRAQ, I couldn’t wait to leave. Now, driving home to Texas, I wish I’d never left. Earlier today, I stuffed my car full of green military-issue duffel bags; the past four years of my life fit inside six of them. Then I changed out of my uniform and passed through the gates of Moody Air Force Base, in Georgia, for the last time.

The boots I threw in my trunk have desert and dirt stuck in the treads, pieces of Afghanistan and Iraq mixed with Georgia swamp. My favorite pair is stained with helicopter hydraulic fluid from flying over Baghdad with my feet hanging out the door, and next to those are my wet-suit booties, which still have mud from a canal near Fallujah, where we dived for bodies. I kept some others too. I did a lot of things wearing all those boots; I did a lot of things I never would have done before.

A few months after graduating from college, I went to sleep on September 10, 2001 not knowing what I wanted to do with my life. The next morning, I woke up and I did. I signed up for the hardest job in the military I could find: Pararescue. SEALs with stethoscopes, as they've been called, their job was to save lives, not take them. Their motto was as apolitical and unambiguous as their mission: "That Others May Live." Pararescuemen, or PJs, lived and sometimes died by those words.

The two-year PJ qualification program is famously difficult: nine out of ten don't make it through. After basic training, I was there, and I was in over my head. During a tough pool session, the guy in front of me drowned. Already hypoxic, he had to swim fifty meters underwater, recite the Pararescue Mission between gasps, and then try to swim fifty more. Halfway there, carbon dioxide built in his blood from not breathing and, before it was my turn, he spasmed and sunk. As they pulled his limp body from the water and worked to revive him, I relaxed. No way we'd keep going.

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