In May I left the Marine Corps. I washed the dust of three continents off my body armor and watched the memories fade down the drain and into the earth as I tried to make sense of it all. I served as a Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer for over four years and I never did the job I was trained to do. I deployed overseas twice and didn’t step foot in a combat zone. I never fired a shot in anger, and I don’t know what it feels like to get shot at besides pulling pits at the rifle range.

I applied to become a Marine officer in 2009 because I wanted to go to war. At the time, the Marines were surging in Afghanistan, flooding into Helmand Province in the south. I watched lieutenants lead their men through wadis on television and wanted to be like them. I was 18 and I needed to prove something to myself and other people, and the Corps felt like the right way to do so. Combat service seemed like an essential part of the deal, a way to “see the elephant” and know the world. Like Nathaniel Fick wrote in his book “One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer”: “I wanted to go on a great adventure, to prove myself … to wear armor and slay dragons.” I did not understand then the great cost at which such knowledge comes.

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The combat tales of the global war on terror are well known by now. More obscure are the nonwar stories, the oft-anxious experiences of those who recently served in what increasingly feels like an interwar period. We floated across oceans on Navy ships, seeing the world from the inside of staterooms and bars. We cleaned weapons in Okinawa and looked north to the Korean Peninsula, where a new conflagration threatened to destroy us all. “It’s like training to play football for four years but never getting to play in a game,” we would say. There was a real sense of emasculation about not going to war, particularly for us young lieutenants. Our right-hand men, the salty platoon sergeants who grew up war babies with at least one Middle Eastern combat tour, had experience we desperately sought. They sometimes would hold it over us when they wanted to prove a point: “Sir, this isn’t how we did it in Afghanistan.”

During initial officer training at the Basic School, the captains who taught us usually boasted glittering ribbon stacks earned over multiple combat tours. These decorations served as a visual representation of their competence and skill. I badly wanted my own Combat Action Ribbon and campaign medals and maybe, although I was reluctant to admit it, a Purple Heart too. (After a close friend was wounded in Afghanistan, and he told me that he was going to be all right, an embarrassing and confusing emotion began to replace my concern: envy.) I craved a rite of passage into the red temple of Mars that always seemed to elude me.