It Didn’t Kill Me

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It Didn’t Kill Me

When I was eleven, my father sat me down and asked me a question no kid should have to answer:

“If I lay dead or dying, and the enemy kicked in our front door during World War III, and you had one gun with two bullets, what would you do?”

That was his idea of preparation. Not bedtime stories. Not How was school? But If the world burns and your mother’s life is on the line, what are you going to do about it?

That was my training ground.

By the time I joined the Navy, I was already living by that training. A year or so earlier, I’d been working a dock job, cutting angle iron with a grinder. The cut pinched, the grinder leapt, and it tore a four-inch gash across my arm. Blood everywhere, but the job wasn’t done. So I finished the cut, smoothed the edges, kept working. An hour later I showed up to lunch streaked in dried blood, and only then did someone else freak out, drag me into a bathroom, scrub and bandage me.

That was my normal: finish the job first, bleed later.

So when the knife slipped in a submarine galley and took the tip of my thumb, it wasn’t panic. I clamped it off, cursed because I didn’t have time for this, and handed the severed piece to my assistant like it was a potato peel. He gasped, I shrugged, and told the doc: “Bandage me up so I can get back to work.”

Or when the hot dog water spilled into a transformer and the stove erupted with blue flames like a rocket engine, I didn’t scream “fire.” I admired it: “Wow, cool blue flames.” Everyone else panicked, hoses came out, but I stopped them. It was electrical. Calmly, I told a petty officer to trip the breaker. Fire gone, lunch saved.

To me, it wasn’t drama. It wasn’t crisis. It was procedure. To everyone else, it was disaster.

And here’s the truth behind all of it: I don’t scream because it hurts. I scream because I don’t have time for the interruption. The thought that flashes every single time is the same one I learned at eleven:

It didn’t kill me. The damage is done. What am I going to do about it?

That’s the cracked creed. That’s the gift and curse my father left me. That’s how I’ve lived every moment since.


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