Doubts

It's the last week of course and I'm at a loss as to where the previous 10 weeks went. But that's how it always seems to go on course, you lose your entire life to it, and then you wake up on the other side with a bunch of stories and some new skills but no real appreciation of what just happened to that little sliver of your life. This course is no exception.

SO I threw hand grenades and I fired machine guns and I ran ranges and I lead patrols and I dug out and built a battle trench and lived in the stupid thing for 9 days taking turns sleeping in the covered protection with my fireteam partner and burned a hundred or so little tea lights for warmth and I taught classes and ran far too much and rucked a little too long and hurt myself in more places than I'm ever going to admit or seek medical attention for. And of course I was inspected and succeeded and failed and did pushups and marked time and all the other standard bullshit of courses. But I didn't care, and I never worried, and I started to feel comfortable in command and never be at a loss for what to do.

And now I'm hanging around avoiding sleeping, avoiding the start of the last week of courses. All courses wind down in the last week with administration, dotting the last Is and crossing the last Ts of paperwork, signing course reports, returning kit, etc. No one really cares anymore, the staff even less than the candidates, because for all intends and purposes its over. I've learned what I was required to learn, past all the tests, met the standards. Anything past this has no training value. They can punish us all they want, but no one cares and there's no training value. By now we've all perfected the art of shutting down. I can stand there or kneel there or mark time or do pushups till infinity, but I'm not really there. My enthusiasm for the army has waned dramatically since I began, and my anxiety has all but disappeared. I understand the rules of the game now, because for almost a year and a half now, the game has been my life.

But that's just what is distressing me now, when I should be enjoying what little opporunity I have to relax. Course ends on Friday, and we're graciously enjoying a week off before we start our next course. Recovery and recuperation are luxuries that we don't have time for, hell, we're too tough, this is the infantry, we're infantry officers, we're tough beyond physical constraints, we only know the job, we only stop when the mission is accomplished - and our mission, to become trained, useful, deployable members of the Canadian Forces, is far from achieved.

Well, fuck that. A year ago, I wanted nothing more than to learn my job and go overseas, and do my part for my country. Today? I want to have a fucking life, for once, I want a real life. Not a fantasy life measured out in 48 hour weekend leaves between 5 days of reality. No, I want the real thing. I want to wake up and go to work, not wake up there already. I want to go home at the end of the day, I want to live somewhere, have personal effects, cook for myself, hell, I want to come home to someone. I want to stop hurting people because I think I can be someone or something for them, that I can sustain the energy I can put into a weekend over a real relationship when there is no way I can. Or maybe I just don't want to wake up every morning staring into the plywood floor of the top bunk, or sleep in my PT gear, or eat anymore artifical scrambled eggs at the mess.

Or maybe I've just been a transient, untrained, useless junior officer for so long that I forget what it's like to have a place in the world, and definently, I just don't know who I am anymore. And I don't even need to know who I am. I just want to do my job, or I want out.