Unlike Tim O'Brien, This Sh*t is Real (grade)

I've never been to war. I don't know what it's like to watch someone die. I've never had to choose between saving my own life or the one of my friends, my fellow soldiers. I didn't have to leave my family, my friends, and enter a completely new and hostile environment.

My cousin has.

He's been a Navy SEAL since 1993. He's served 7 combat deployments, all to red zones. He's been to hell and back, hell being Afghanistan.

SEAL Team 7 has been a key player in the mission to end the opium trade in Marja, Afghanistan. This mission was officially launched in February of 2010, but my cousin's team had already been in place since March of 2009. The SEALs were teamed up with Afghani troops as well as Canadian, French, and British forces. Although the team themselves didn't suffer casualties, the Afghani and foreign troops were hit heavily. Thankfully, none of my cousin's team were seriously wounded.

Joe became my cousin in June of 2008, when he married my mother's niece and became a part of our family. His past deployments, the pain of him being gone; those memories were lost upon my immediate family for most of his career. This was the first deployment he had to leave us for since he became such a huge part of my life, of our lives.

He stands at 5' 5", 5' 6" when he's wearing his uniform shoes. When he walks in a room, though, you can feel it, feel his commanding presence. There's something very comforting about having a Navy SEAL in the room; he has such a quiet power in his small stature. You can see it in the way he holds and conducts himself; he's confidence and strength boxed, packaged, and put into a body.

My cousin left to fight for his country while his wife was 7 months pregnant. He couldn't be there for his daughter's birth, and he couldn't be there to hold his wife's hand. He wasn't there when his brother graduated from his lifeguarding academy, and he wasn't there when his sister came home after being dumped by her boyfriend of 2 years. He wasn't there to see me finish my first year of high school, didn't see my brother's soccer team make it to the finals, and couldn't celebrate our nation's independence day with us, an independence he was fighting to keep and uphold.

He came home in late October after a 6 month combat-deployment, the last of his career (for now). He held his daughter for the first time, kissed his wife for the first time in a long time: Hugged his mother, my mother, his sister, his brother, his father, me for the first time in 6 months. It was the longest 6 months I've ever experienced, the longest any of us had experienced, especially for him. He's always been soft-spoken, but for the first 3 months after his return, my cousin was morose and pensive, even to us, his family.

The war in Afghanistan gave my cousin a job. It's given him a paycheck and a way to support his growing family. It's given him scars, memories he'll never forget but never tell us. I don't want to say the war has completely changed him, because it hasn't; he still plays football with my brother, still comes to our house "just to see us", and he still has his amazingly flexible sense of humor. But it's given him a new side, a darker, more thoughtful view on human nature. I can see it in him, in the way he walks and looks, almost studies people.

My cousin is a soldier. I am not.