In The Box - 8/2/19

I positioned myself on a bridge with my 70-200mm lens pointed off into the horizon. I kept my eyes closed to protect them from the bright sun and dust. I peered through the viewfinder just in time to spot headlights of an oncoming Humvee reinforcement convoy off in the distance, blurred by the heatwave of the desert. They were headed towards us, as we waited overlooking the village marketplace. Wounded and dismembered troops lay underneath their destroyed Humvee, still on fire from the recent rocket attack. Dismembered limbs lay on the dusty ground and villagers began to swarm back into the dirt road to see what was happening.

No, I wasn’t in Kandahar.

I was at Fort Irwin, a US Army base the size of Rhode Island (over 1,000 sq miles) located somewhere near the Mojave desert. Fort Irwin is home of the National Training Center, or NTC, where all US troops spend a 21-day rotation prior to deploying overseas. The above scenario was all Hollywood pyrotechnics, fake blood and prosthetics, weapons rigged with advanced laser tag, and civilian amputees to play the part of dismembered soldiers. Fort Irwin is home to fifteen of these mock villages, complete with Middle Eastern actors and actresses fluent in their native dialects, fake villages with rubber meat and plastic bread, and fake Afghan rebels mixed in it all.

It was all a practice.

During fourteen days of this 21-day rotation, troops must go through this program, famously nicknamed “The Box” (after sandbox), which was developed after reports came back of troops freezing up in action due to unprepared sights of gore and violence during missions in the Middle East and to level-up urban warfare communications between branches post Black Hawk Down in 1993. I was visiting to do some research on a popular video game I was working on at the time and this was about as close as you could get without actually being in Afghanistan. After all, Fort Irwin was selected specifically because of its near-identical climate to the Middle East, with temperatures sometimes exceeding 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

After the mission, soldiers are brought into an After Action Review to debrief what went right and what could have gone better. I can’t personally speak to the improvements and lives saved from this program, but one can deduce that practice always leads to improvements, and when the bullets are flying, metaphorical or literal, one will always default to their training.

While most of us civilians will likely never encounter the trauma of war, we still encounter trauma. Whether in our careers, relationships, or personal lives, shit happens.

This memory was brought up recently as I read about the benefits of stress inoculation. Stress Inoculation Therapy (SIT) happens in three major phases:

Phase one is education. And by education, it really means shifting one’s mindset. Everyone is going through something. Adjusting one’s perspective through a SIT lens changes the way we view these traumatic events. What are our triggers? What are our reactions? Viewing these two aspects as a puzzle or an opportunity to overcome it changes our relationship with this trauma. We are no longer a victim of these events, but now a player in a game. I’m not diminishing the shit that happens to us, but at the end of the day, it was a “neutral” event. Not necessarily a good event or a bad event, but solely an event.

A thing that happened.

It is our lens and mindset that chooses whether it was good or bad. Your boss yelled at you? A breakup? A death? Most of us would sink deep and that’s fine. We need time to reflect. But it isn’t the end.

Phase two is practice and rehearsal. After acknowledging our reactions, we must focus on acquiring and developing these skills. Whether emotional, physical, spiritual, or psychological, there are tools at our disposal that we can use. Counting, going to your happy place, gratitude, and deep breathing are all examples of simple tools that I have used daily when encountering stress.

Phase three is consistent application and follow through. The drive for mastery and consistency of applying our solution allows us to apply these skills to any future obstacle. Once we get used to using these tools, we become masters of these tools. When we get used to daily discomfort, nothing can hurt you. Whether its outside criticism or negative self-talk, you manage the filters and voices that you listen to.

You are in control.

Life is our version of The Box. It’s all a test to see how tough we are. How we respond to adversity. It’s a test of how we can laugh in the face of it all and not only refuse to be squashed but excel at it despite it’s best efforts.

It’s all practice that will make us stronger and more resilient.

Own it.

Fuck yeah, it’s Friday!

Photo by Simon Ko