Selfish

I don’t want to risk appearing to be too hard on other cancer survivors. Let me say, however, constantly during my cancer struggle, I have been selfish. To be fair, this is the most natural response to a drastic, life-threatening diagnosis.

Yet, I believe it to be as natural as it is morally wrong. Selfishness runs deep in our psyche and in our moral DNA as a race. All world religions rail against selfishness and self absorption, as do almost all ethical systems. A cancer diagnosis triggers the instinctive visceral fight to survive, which leads one to fortify the inner person with a “self barricade.” Spend a few weeks obsessing about every ache, pain, treatment, hope and fear, and the walls easily go up, to the exclusion of the needs and want of significant others. This self-centered tendency is too easy when your life consists of alternating bouts of physical pain and mental terror. Human beings are by nature selfish creatures. Cancer can make this tendency more pronounced as I can attest. While this selfish tendency is at work in me every day, it seems that every few years, I have to be reminded.

Two decades ago while stationed in Bavaria, a young woman asked me “what did you learn in Ranger School?” The question caught me off guard. I didn’t want to answer flippantly. It would have been too easy to answer “I know how to set up an L-shaped ambush…or I can produce a five paragraph field order in the rain while hypothermic (I was a winter Ranger!).” But I told her the most important lesson I learned:  Ranger School taught me that I am selfish. She was speechless, surprised and we changed the subject.

I had shared with her a deep secret that at that point three years after Ranger training, was still hard to verbalize. In my day, at the end of each of the three phases of Ranger training, squad mates rate each other in a confidential peer evaluation. This Darwinian process works with brutal efficiency. Sometimes, the weakest Ranger is “voted off the island” and transferred to a new squad. To be “peered” out of one’s squad was the ultimate ignominy: to have been evaluated by fellow Rangers and found sorely lacking in merit, ability and worth. I was “peered” out of my Ranger squad at the end of the Mountain phase of Army Ranger School. The Ranger Instructor told me that if I didn’t get it together, I would not graduate, and that during the next phase, I would have another chance to prove that I could earn the coveted Army Ranger tab.

During some moments of brutal self-evaluation, I recalled a defining moment from a ten day patrol mission that probably influenced the peer vote. One day, or perhaps one evening (didn’t matter, night and day during Ranger School is all the same!), our squad halted after a long movement up and down the Tennessee Divide, each carrying hundred pound rucksacks, eating two C-rations and sleeping only an hour or two per day. When a Ranger squad halts, the first priorities are to establish security and clean weapons, lest the enemy get the edge. Everyone set about doing what they had been taught. Everyone but me. I dropped my ruck sack, set my weapon down, ignored my duty, sat on my “fourth point of contact” and began to devour a C-ration. I didn’t care what I was supposed to be doing, I was hungry and I was going to eat. I can still taste that "John Wayne" bar. Selfish.

I am thankful that by God’s grace, I was able to barely graduate from Army Ranger School. I wear the tab of an Army Ranger not because I was so ‘high-speed’ back in those days, but only because for whatever reason, God blessed me to be able to endure and improve enough to graduate, and surrounded me with some good Ranger buddies to take up my slack. I don’t deserve the glory for that.

Thinking about my behavior these past few years while undergoing six surgeries, a bout of chemotherapy, and then radiation treatment, I have been selfish and self absorbed. My long-suffering wife, may she be ever praised, has with great patience and forbearance, put up with me on those days when I went straight to our room, lay on the bed and watched television for the rest of the day. Lord, bring these memories to mind when I lapse into what is natural and easy, so that I may “choose the harder right over the easier wrong.”
©2010 Ray Woolridge