“I’m sure you’ve shot at people,” one of Michael Henderson’s classmates said. “Why don’t you tell us what death is about?”
It was a classroom debate, on a liberal American campus, about the use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Henderson was the only person in the class who’d served in the military — four years in the Marine Corps, serving in Iraq. All eyes turned to him.
His classmate’s request was a hard one. How do you explain death on the battlefield to someone who’s never been on one?
“There is this misunderstanding that civilians have,” Henderson said. “When you serve you don’t always expect to shoot someone, but you always know there’s a possibility you can shoot at someone.”
For Henderson, the hardest part of his transition was trying to relate to those around him. The structure of college gave him a good place to think through his own experiences in Iraq and to recognize that many civilians will never understand those experiences. But he notes that the transition to civilian life has been much more difficult for some of his peers who aren’t able to create a separate life from the Marine Corps.
“You get used to everything being in lockstep and then all of a sudden you have to create that routine for yourself,” he said. “I think that’s where a lot of friends that I’ve had from the Corps have fallen. They didn’t have something to rally behind — for me it was school, for others it may have been a child.”
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