Sock Diaries: 3/31/2013

"You're wasting your time if you don't go to Selection."

Honduras is probably the most interesting place a regular soldier could ever go. The other night, I found myself in a hotel room with a beautiful, half-naked (the bottom half) Honduran woman who could literally only say the words "hi" and "bye" in English. Needless to say, we didn't have any very deep conversations. The unit here is amazing, and the women around town are beautiful, and very subservient and eager to please. I have fun almost every day, and there hasn't been a day where the question "What the fuck is that?" hasn't crossed my mind.
So what is there to talk about today? Well, there is one aspect of Honduras that is best kept a secret, but it really does, well, baffle me, to say the least. The thing I will allow myself to speak on isn't the weird relationships of Americans on Americans, or the more interesting, but much more understandable relationships of Americans and Hondurans, it's not all the strange flirting and eye-balling, and rumors and constant partying and drinking. It was what I was told last night at the beginning of the party that the Special Forces guys were having. I mean the real special forces. Like the guys who "were never here". One of the bosses told me, after a long speech about what I was missing and how I'd be perfect for it, that "You're wasting your time if you don't go to Selection."
Special Forces Selection. Where the best of the best are molded. It's over a year of rigorous training, and special skills building that makes you not only one of the greatest weapons that breathes, but one of the most resourceful and capable humans with an American citizenship.
Everyday that I've woken up, since I was a small boy, I've wished that I would wake up in a world where superheroes kept the streets safe. And that I was one of those heroes. There hasn't been a day that's gone by where I've woken up and not wanted to open my closet to  reveal a rubber suit (or some kevlar-titanium-cotton blend) and a suit and tie, to go out to some menial job, just to don my secret identity when the sun went down. But that's not the world I live in. The closest I'll ever come to being a superhero, is through Selection.
But have you ever read the comic where Bruce Wayne wakes up the morning after he retires, goes in to a business meeting, hashes out some financial details, comes home to Damien Wayne and Talia al (Wayne?) and they have a nice family dinner and talk about their respective days, and Bruce reads Damien a bed time story, and goes into the bedroom with his wife Talia for a their "private" time?* No, because no one wants to hear about that. Mostly, because even in a comic book world, it's not likely to happen.
In the real world, there are bullets and deployments. In the real world, there are no sexy femme fatales with whom you have a strained, love-hate sexually tense relationship. There are angry men, crazed women, homicidal, suicidal, genocidal people. At the end of the day, you come home, you hang up your cape, and you hope you don't find your wife in bed with Bob who works at a cubicle for some shitty corporation who's funding the child soldiers and genocides that just made your past couple of weeks a (barely) living hell. Reality is where your cheating wife tells you that your emotionally neglected teenage daughter is pregnant, or your role model-less son is in jail, while you were out preventing some Nameless group of murderers from skinning some little girl alive. That's the reality. Once you're in the world of the real superheroes, the chances of you coming out of it without losing more of yourself than you were prepared for, are slimmer than the chances of you coming out at all.
So is that the direction I really want to go? Once I'm in, I can kiss my chances of a normal, quiet life goodbye. It's a line you can't uncross. Is that what I really want?