Difficult to Imagine

Difficult to Imagine

   Currently, I am reading a book by Dartmouth graduate, Phil Klay, titled, Redeployment.   In an interview, the author expressed his description of his time fighting in Iraq, only to find that his answer to the inevitable question of "what was it like" was vastly different from another soldier's version...and another, and another.  Life is like that for many of us, whether working in a job for 40 years (gasp!) or jumping out of a helicopter to ski down an untamed slope.  Words fail us, as they say, and even when they seem to come out correctly, the person standing next to us with almost exactly the same experience might be looking at us with a quizzical look as if to say, "it wasn't like that at all."

   Here's one quick excerpt from the book, his Humvee being hit by a IED:  In any other vehicle we'd have died.  The MRAP jumped, thrity-two thousand pounds of steel lifting and buckling in the air, moving under me as though gravity was shifting.  The world pivoted and crashed while the explosion popped my ears and shuddered through my bones.  Gravity settled.  There'd been buildings before.  Now headlights in the dust.  Somewhere beyond, Iraqi civilians startling awake.  The triggerman, if there even was one, slipping away.  My ears were ringing and my vision was a pinpoint.  I crawled my eyes up the length of the barrel of the .50-cal.  The end was warped and blasted.  The MRAP....was slumped down in the front like a wounded animal.

   Or these words from Flight 232: A story of Disaster and Survival by Lawrence Gonzales telling of the DC-10 crash in Iowa:  And then, to (flight attendant) Owen's amazement, the entire tail of the airplane broke off and departed.  As he plane rolled up, a great aperture where the tail had been now angled across an arc of intense blue sky, and then --shockingly-- it pointed directly at the high summer sun.  "And I was blinded by the sunlight," Owens said.  That shaft of pure sun streamed down the aisles, supersaturating all the colors and giving the scene a surreal cast.  The celestial light flooded the cabin, illuminating a sight that Owens would never forget, as people who were still strapped into their seats were torn free and sent tumbling out onto the runway.  Some of the banks of seats were thrown high into the air.  Then the fuselage swept past the sun, and the cabin went dim once more.  

   These examples of trauma are difficult for the everyday person to imagine, and yet often we either know someone going through a personal trauma, maybe a divorce or losing a loved one...or we enter that period ourselves.  And that world can be difficult to penetrate, if not impossible.  In Klay's book,  someone sitting at a bar, equally drunk, tries to talk to him, tries to relate, says he "respects" what he Klay did on his tour.  "I don't want you to respect what I've been through," he replies.  Then asked what he does want, Klay sips beer and thinks, "I didn't know.  He didn't say anything else, which was smart.  I waited for him to say something wrong, to ask me about the war or the Marine that died...but he didn't say another word, and neither did I.  And that was that for me telling people stories."

   Dick Cavett wrote a stirring tribute to Robin Williams in Time (Dick Cavett also suffered severe depression):  You yourself may have thought, "How could he do this to his wife and kids?"  Easy.  Because what's been called the worst agony devised for man doesn't allow you to feel any emotion for kids, spouse, lover, parents...even your beloved dog.  And least of all for yourself.  I know Robin knew this.  His death recalled a moment with him years ago in a small club.  He came off after lifting a cheering audience to its feet.  "Isn't it funny how I can bring great happiness to all these people," he said.  "But not to myself."
  

   These unreachable moments are not always negative.  A man will never know the pain and joy a woman feels on giving birth.  Or the feeling of a child (or a professional for that matter) hitting a first home run.  Or playing a solo in front of a packed arena.  As Mark Knoffler wrote in his song, The Bug,  "You gotta know happy - you gotta know glad, Because you're gonna know lonely and you're gonna know bad...Everything can change in the blink of an eye, So let the good times roll before we say goodbye, because, sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug."

   Sometimes silence is the best medicine.  Sometimes just taking it in is all that is needed, a true loss for words.  To that end, National Geographic posted some of their own awe-inspiring photos, many from views or experiences we'll never do ourselves.  They're worth looking at, worth losing your breath over...worth being silent and just taking it in.