Pull Your Weight

Life has brought a lot of changes for me over the last year. This time last year I was a Green Beret, deployed with my team to the Philippines, doing stuff and things. I was working out two hours a day, training in shooting, explosives, hand-to-hand combat, combat medicine, and other fun pastimes that go with the job. I was doing 125% of a full course load of online college at the same time, and still managing to blog, write short stories and poetry, and spend an hour in front of the Blessed Sacrament every day. The only thing I did not do much of was sleep.

Now I am married, out of the Army, attending a full course load of community college (I tell you, that makes me feel old!) and we now have a four week old baby girl in the house. She is very seriously watching me as I type this, to make sure I do it right.

There have been adjustments. It was inevitable. On the whole it was the right thing to do. I won’t even say that I miss our little adventures, because most of the things I did on active duty were ultimately pointless. (I miss the Tacloban mission, but that was an anomaly.) What I do miss is the culture of “pull your weight.”

Perhaps that would be more accurately described as “pull your weight… Or Else!”

Let me explain that. I went to selection for Special Forces in 2008. Selection is the gateway to the training pipeline. It is designed to stress candidates mentally, physically and emotionally. The dreaded “Downed Pilot” is a good example. In this event a team of guys has to carry a large duffel bag full of sand a few kilometers. In our case it was water logged from a hurricane that had gone through, so it weighed roughly 500-600 lbs. This “downed pilot” is carried on a contraption rigged together from steel pipes, and then laid across rucksacks which are already loaded to over 60 lbs.

All of this is meticulously watched by stone-faced cadre wearing sunglasses and hair product. They are not evaluating us for physical strength or endurance, they are looking to see who pulls their weight the whole time, and who slacks off. Who punishes himself for the entire hike, and who takes the most breaks. At the end of a whole series of these events the candidates themselves are required to evaluate one another ruthlessly on the basis of who is most valuable to the team and who is least valuable. The results of these evaluations can get you dropped from the course.

This pattern of harsh events, evaluations, and cuts continues once you get to the actual SF qualification course. I was a medic and my language was Korean, so I had the “long course:” a full six months of language training and a full year of medical training in addition to the regular schools. All of this adds up to just over two years of this highly competitive environment, where the absolute worst sin anyone could commit was not pulling their weight.

We used to joke with the cadre throughout this two year process, “So, when does selection end?” Their answer was, “Never.” They were right. Even after graduating and getting the tab and the green hat, you still have not made it. You must now go to an operational group and get assigned to a team. Once on the team, they evaluate you, often even more ruthlessly than the course did. Team Sergeants can call back to friends among the cadre and get the scoop on you before you even show up. Every training event you do, every school you go to, every deployment, your teammates are watching you until you prove to them that you are going to pull your weight in every sense of the word, physically, tactically, planning, packing, guard shifts, cleaning the latrines, everything. If you don’t meet the expectations, you can get cut from the team and sent to work a desk job. I have seen it happen.

Even once you develop a positive reputation you are still not set. You are only ever as good as your last mistake. A good reputation buys you one mistake, maybe two. If they start to add up, though, you may not get cut from the team, but when you look for your next job within the unit, you may not be able to find a good one. Reputation is everything.

I spent 6 years in that environment, but even before that I was a natural shoe in for it. I had always despised the regular army soldiers who didn’t pull their own weight, and spent a good portion of my early Army career cleaning up after them.

All this by way of explaining that the most shocking adaptation to civilian life, and especially to having a baby, is that out here people don’t think that way. At school everyone seems to be looking for how little they can get away with, and it is the same in workplaces. In personal lives people seem more focused on getting to the next day off so they can kick back and relax with video games or movies than on reading, exercising, debating, learning, growing, hiking, or challenging themselves in any other way. No one pursues self-improvement, physical and mental, as rabidly as I am used to.

But it gets worse! This may come as a shock, but babies don’t pull their weight!

Like, AT ALL!

Slice it any way you like, babies are pure deadweight. Never mind that they don’t substantially contribute to the financial, social and educational goals of the team (family), they cannot even take care of themselves. They cannot eat on their own, they cannot get to sleep on their own (at least ours can’t), they can’t even wipe their own little butts. They can’t move around, they can’t pick themselves up, they can’t even grab their own pacifiers and put them in their own mouths!

The utter vulnerability is astounding when you think about it. Of course it shouldn’t be surprising. The surprise is that they can do so much! Every day I see her making a connection she didn’t make before, learning a skill she didn’t have before. Her mind is unfolding, nerves are myelinating and muscles are becoming more coordinated. She is fearfully and wonderfully made, and she is growing and becoming more and more by the second, developing into something amazing, which I hope will ultimately be a saint.

I wonder if that is how God feels about us?

The whole experience has given me a new understanding of the word “dependence.” Just as the baby is totally dependent on her mother and I, I should be totally dependent on God. Jesus assures me that unless I see myself as just as much a freeloader as the baby is, I can have no part in the Kingdom of Heaven. I have a long way to go to embracing the fact that I have nothing to offer God, nothing to contribute to the cause that He has not already given me. I can never pull my weight, when it comes to salvation. I am always a leach, always a freeloader, always destined to be receiving what God delights to give. The only thing I can give Him is the delight of being able to give. I can never be more than a beggar, but at least I can be a cheerful one.

Evie does not feel the least bit ashamed of being a freeloader, and her dependence is precisely the gift she gives. She draws us out of ourselves, so that when I pray with St. Ignatius “Teach me Good Lord to be generous, to serve thee as thou deservest…” He replies in the words of Jesus “Whatsoever you do for the least of these,” and “If today (or tonight) you hear the voice of the Lord, harden not your heart.” When Evie wakes up and cries in the middle of the night, that is literally the voice of the Lord!

And besides, isn’t that just the cutest little freeloader you ever did see?