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What struck me most was the pain in his eyes. Not the kind of pain that announces itself with dramatics, but the slower variety that settles into the contours of a face and refuses to leave. A countenance of struggle, though that makes it sound more noble than I remember it. This was the look of someone who’d told this story before, probably many times, each telling an attempt to persuade someone who refused to believe.

Whether those rehearsals had been to other pilots over beers, or in his head during the long stretches between missions, or in front of a bathroom mirror in the morning trying to convince himself of a version of events he could live with, I couldn’t say. But the performance had been refined to the point where you could see the boundaries, could tell where the authentic memory ended and the protective narrative began.

It hurt him to tell it. More specifically, it hurt him to admit he hadn’t killed anyone.

He described how the bomb had hit the sloped sides of a wadi, a makeshift irrigation ditch, in most cases, one of thousands that scar the landscape like abandoned projects. He used the term with the casualness of someone who’d spent enough time in Afghanistan that the vocabulary had become natural. His story unfolded in the ungodly hours of the morning, which is military speak for a time when nothing good happens, everyone’s decision-making is compromised by exhaustion, and an easy moral flexibility creeps in.

“The guy was digging a hole,” he told me. “What good can anyone be up to at three in the morning?”

I thought about the condemnation silently. Maybe he was planting some improvised explosive. Maybe he was doing something else nefarious. Maybe he was depressed like the rest of us and couldn’t sleep, or maybe, like my own father had done, he was burying the dog in the middle of the night so his children didn’t have to see.

Regardless, he was to die.

The point isn’t whether the call was right or wrong. I wasn’t there, I don’t know what intelligence they had, and I’m not going to pretend from the comfort of hindsight that I could have made a better decision. War is full of impossible choices made with incomplete information, and sometimes killing someone is the least bad option available. Sometimes, the people who have to make those calls carry the weight of them for the rest of their lives, regardless of whether they were justified.

But that’s not this story.

This is the story of a bomb that landed on the side of the ditch and buried itself in the ground without detonating. A dud. The thing that was supposed to end a life just sat there, inert. It’s probably still sitting there now for all he knows.

“It was the angle it impacted, I think,” he said, which struck me as the kind of technical explanation you offer when you’re looking for exoneration. He was probably right about the angle, in a purely physical sense. But we weren’t really talking about physics.

“That sucks,” I said, attempting consolation. But he wasn’t having it. I doubt I was even a part of the conversation anymore. His mind was clearly back in Afghanistan, likely flipping all the switches in his cockpit and double-checking the release parameters from memory.

“I mean, I’m sure the concussion of it fucked him up, right?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably.”

Sadly, though that’s a regrettable use of the word, he’d reached minimum fuel levels shortly after and was forced to head back to the airbase before he could assess the damage. In the following days, he was unable to gather any news of the strike. He would never get his closure.

He sat down, finding the nearest chair in the ready room, and sipped his coffee. He was an admirable man. I say that wholeheartedly. I routinely looked up to him not only as a pilot, but for his dedication as a friend to me and many others, and as a father to his children. But it was sad to see him so broken by what many people would probably fail to understand. I often think about how much damage one unexploded bomb can do to two people. On the one hand, a man dropped a bomb trying to kill someone and didn’t. On the other hand, a man who someone tried to drop a bomb on but survived. It feels strange. The shape of both their lives would never be the same, forever tied to that moment, and to one another.

When I joined the military, one of my father’s final pieces of advice was, “When you’re in the military, you want to do what the military does.” I didn’t know what he meant by that. I was 21 and dead set on being in Top Gun.

What does the military do, after all? Missions range from war to humanitarian aid. I chalked it off as another one of my dad’s quotes he just liked and said whenever he thought it’d apply. But that night, a decade later, in that ready room, talking to that pilot, I started to understand it. When you’re in the military, you want to kill.

At least, that’s the easiest way to contextualize it, but it’s not the whole picture.

It’s not just killing. That’s too simple for the nuance, too clean for the reality. More accurate is seeking validation, which sounds less honorable but cuts closer to the truth. The exact internal mechanism that drives civilians to chase likes on social media or seek corner office promotions is the same hunger for external confirmation that you matter, that you’ve done something worth recognizing. Wanting those specific medals and ribbons on your chest that say: “I’ve been there, I’ve done that.” Those credentials that give you room to speak in a culture that is quick to silence those who haven’t crossed certain lines. It’s insidious precisely because it’s so ordinary, so human. Looking back, the evidence of conditioning was everywhere.

One evening, in late 2019, as the other pilots and I in the squadron posed for a harmless photo with wives, husbands, and other partners before celebrating the Marine Corps’ birthday, our commanding officer at the time stared us down. A cohort of mostly junior captains, his only comment to us as he stared at our medal-less dress blues was, “We need to get you guys to war!”

Met with applause, laughter, and other sneers from senior ranking officers, we agreed, toasted, and celebrated without thinking twice. The comment landed as a joke, as motivation, as aspiration, all at once. Nobody questioned it. Because that would mark you as soft, as someone who didn’t understand what we were here for. The culture of such an organization doesn’t announce itself with policy memos. It seeps in through moments like these, small enough to seem innocent, frequent enough to rewire how you think. I felt nothing as I watched the wives laugh along. As if sending their husbands off to war was the obvious next step. Such ideas didn’t get in the way of our photos.

There’s a clear line between those who have and those who haven’t that deliberately ignores the idea of anything else. Not those who served with honor versus those who didn’t. Not those who were ready versus those who weren’t. It was either you deployed to combat or not. Killed or didn’t. So unashamed of its bias, there’s no need to hide it. It bothers me that I was more hesitant toward the idea of landing on an aircraft carrier at night than I was to the idea of taking a life.

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Some prominent essays from earlier in my career, written mostly by Marine infantry officers, circulated among us in various units and squadrons, detailing their struggles to come to terms with never having seen combat while serving. Shame, embarrassment, and guilt consumed their testimonies. To say I didn’t relate or understand would be a lie. People in those situations are treated as lesser or unequal. And after enough time marinating in that judgment, you start to internalize it; to start to believe that maybe they’re right and maybe you are somehow incomplete.

When I read those articles, the words felt hesitant. Restrained, but on the verge of finally saying what needed to be said: It wasn’t about combat, it was about killing. Even in combat, there’s a hierarchy. This pilot had deployed before, met all the other metrics you could ask for in a career, but he’d never taken a life. I watched him, sitting there, despondent over a missed opportunity to check off that necessary item. That night was supposed to be his first. The kill that would prove he belonged among those who had. Instead, the moment passed without ceremony, and he carried it like something broken.

The idea consumed me as well. Staring at people’s uniforms became a habit, judging them instantly based on what was displayed. I locked myself in the backrooms of our intelligence sections, watching recordings of other pilots dropping bombs on people overseas, wondering what it felt like. Could I do it? Would people treat me better? Would I finally feel proud of my service?

The ease with which these other pilots discussed killing inspired envy, but the bottom line was evident: Pilots who had been in combat were better than those who hadn’t. Pilots who have killed other people in combat are better than those who haven’t.

The story he was telling didn’t bother me. It was understanding his pain so completely that did. Sitting across from him that evening, watching him relive the moment his bomb failed to detonate, all I thought about was how much sense he made, how his regret was perfectly logical within our world. The same feelings would overwhelm me if our positions were reversed. I saw my own future staring back at me.

Staying in long enough, getting more deployments, finally getting the chance to prove our worthiness, it was obvious that all roads led here. Either killing someone and spending the rest of life carrying that weight, or not killing and spending the rest of life feeling like a failure. Either way, losing something that couldn’t be recovered. The culture didn’t offer a third option. Only validation or shame.

My own service ended not many years after that conversation, but not because I saw the danger in what he displayed. I left for different reasons entirely. At the time, I understood his pain not as a warning but as an aspiration. Of course, he felt that way. Of course, I would feel that way too. The thought of ending up in that ready room 20 years later, carrying regret over a bomb that didn’t explode, that seemed acceptable, even noble, because at least I would have tried. At least I would have been there. The culture had worked on me.

It’s only now, years removed, that I can see how perverted that was. How I’d internalized a value system that made me view another man’s anguish over not killing someone as perfectly reasonable. How I wore my deployments with frustration, not because of what I’d done, but because of what I hadn’t.

That pilot found another war, of course. There’s always another one if you wait long enough. This time, it’s cartels instead of insurgents, boats instead of wadis. The mission changes, but the goal remains the same. And I hope he gets the chance.

I know how that sounds. I know what you think I mean. That I hope he finally gets to complete his mission. That I hope the bomb works this time. That I hope he gets the feeling he’s been chasing since that night in Afghanistan when a bomb buried itself in the earth and spared a man digging a hole.

But that’s not what I mean.

I hope he gets the chance to realize how lucky he was. To recognize that the dud wasn’t a failure, it was a gift. Being spared from taking a life isn’t something to regret. I hope he gets the chance to see that the burden he’s been carrying isn’t the weight of what he didn’t do, but the weight of a culture that made him think not killing someone was something to be ashamed of.

Mostly, I hope he gets the chance to know relief instead of regret. That we all do.

But he won’t. That’s not allowed. If he gets his chance this time, if the bomb works, he’ll finally feel whole. He’ll finally have his validation.

Evan Slusser is a former Marine Corps pilot and current doctoral student in political geography. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Virginia Tech and the University of Arizona and has also attended the Marine Corps University. After a decade of service, he now resides in North Carolina and spends his free time gardening and birdwatching.

Image: C.R.W. Nevinson, La Mitrailleuse (Creative Commons)