THIS MORNING, when one of the medics from the U.N. was digging a bullet out of my arm—most of the time they fall out by themselves, but this one was a keeper—he asked me how many times I've been shot.
"I dunno," I said. I was lying on the ground, face-up, as he worked on me. "Forty or fifty?"
"I can see forty or fifty bullet wounds right now," he said, looking up and down my body. "I meant, how many times have you been shot in total?"
I couldn't answer that. I'd stopped counting a long time ago.
I've certainly been shot hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. Maybe even tens of thousands.
A U.S. Army colonel once said to me, "Whatever doesn't kill ya makes ya stronger."
I guess it means that if you can get through all the bad stuff that life throws in your path, you come out the other side with the experience of having survived and the knowledge of how to get through it again. Or, as my dad always liked to say, "conflict builds character."
Sometimes the conflict we encounter comes from other people, and sometimes it comes from ourselves. We all have weaknesses; we all make bad decisions. We're only human.
Of course, the thing about bad decisions is that most of the time we realize they were bad only in hindsight. At the time, they seem right. I mean, only an idiot would think, "This is a bad decision but I'm going to do it anyway."
When I was sixteen, I made a decision that I knew was right. My friends didn't agree with me, we fell out—to put it mildly—and as a consequence my decision changed not only my life, but the lives of countless others.
Far too many people suffered and died because I tried to do the right thing. And even now, almost a quarter of a century later, the echoes of my decision are still being heard.
My decision was only one link in a long chain of events, but—as another old saying goes—every chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If I hadn't done what I did, the rest of the chain would have fallen apart.
Hardly a day goes by when I don't think, If I'd known then what I know now... But I was trying to do the right thing. I have to keep reminding myself of that. We can't know all the consequences of our actions before we take them. We can only act on the knowledge we have at hand.
So even though I sometimes dream about going back to visit my sixteen-year-old self and slapping him across the back of his head for what he did, I can't blame him.
We have to make our decisions, and whatever the consequences of those decisions may be, we have to accept them. Suck it up. Live with it. Life goes on.
For some of us.