By November 2011 I understood what the electronics section at Walmart was. It was the end of a road. Not a bad road — it paid, it had structure, it required skill. But the road did not go anywhere from there. The people who had been in that section for three years would be in it for ten. I could see the decade from where I was standing.
I walked into a military recruiting office in Woodbridge, Virginia on a weekday morning.
The recruiter was a staff sergeant, Black, professional, with the specific patience of someone who has explained the same things many times and has decided the explanation is worth giving every time. He asked what I was looking for. I said I was looking for a way forward. He said that was the most honest answer he had heard all month.
By the end of November I had signed. January 2012 I was on a bus to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, to train as a combat engineer. In the Army they call combat engineers Sappers — the people who build bridges, clear mines, breach obstacles. The people who go first so others can follow.
Basic training compressed America in a way that nothing else I have experienced has matched. The barracks held men from rural Arkansas and the Bronx and the Mississippi Delta and suburban Ohio and, now, from Nairobi. We slept in the same bays, ate at the same tables, were shouted at by the same drill sergeants with the same indifference to where we had come from.
What you discover in that environment is the texture of a country stripped of the social sorting that normally operates. The cluster geometry dissolves when everyone is wearing the same uniform and has the same number of minutes to complete the same task. What remains is character, under pressure, with no performance budget left over.
I spent the next eight years as a reservist, based out of Maryland. I was never deployed. The service was the reserve kind — weekends, annual training, the particular doubling of civilian and military identity that reservists carry. The civilian me went to work in Virginia. The military me went to Maryland once a month and learned, slowly, what the oath I had taken in a Woodbridge office actually meant.
I understood it better after the military than before. That is probably the intended order.
These notes were made between June 2011 and the present.
I started writing them down in 2026.
The gap is not an absence — it is the difference between experiencing something
and understanding it well enough to put it on a page.