A friend recently asked me what my name means. I confessed I didn’t know and so I looked it up. The name ‘Mark’ derives from the Latin ‘Mart-kos’ which means ‘consecrated to the God Mars,’ the God of war. As a boy I would have been thrilled to know this, finding it completely appropriate, and associating it with a kind of destiny I always felt was mine, to go to war.

Now having gone to Iraq and moved on with my life I am still thrilled to have discovered the meaning of my name, and find it just as appropriate, not because of its association with war of an external kind, or as Clausewitz called it, “War as the continuation of politics by other means,” but because of the way I have come to view war. This is war as something personal, internal, and actually worth fighting; it is the struggle within one’s self to know who one really is. This is war of a different kind, but it is one that I have found no less daunting and difficult. As the philosopher Thales said, “The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.”

What do I mean by internal war? To fight an internal war means to struggle with all those things that prevent a person from getting to know who they really are and why; to know one’s likes and dislikes, and why; to know one’s character traits, especially the unflattering ones; to know the origin and source of one’s anger, love, hate, joy, jealousy, motivations, and drives; why one chooses to act the way one does in any situation; it means possessing the highest amount of self honesty and self awareness. To know and practice such things means freedom in the truest sense of the word.

To fight an internal war means to struggle with all those feeling that are hard to embrace, feelings which nonetheless do one’s sense of self justice, though they may be associated with either painful memories or unrealistic expectations. How able one is to embrace and healthily express one’s feelings and emotions determines how alive and living one actually is. The failure to do this results not just in a deadened life where one feels alive only when “getting crazy,” “having fun,” or getting “fucked up,” but in an actual death where suicide seems the only answer.

A couple months ago another Marine from my former unit committed suicide. Suicide remains a huge problem for both active duty personnel and veterans alike. Some estimates put suicide among veterans as high as 20 a day. During the final years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suicide was even the leading cause of death among active serving personnel. Ironically those who have committed suicide were able to walk and patrol through war zones, and yet have lacked the ability to be more open, to speak about, and deal with their problems. It should give serious pause to know that a nation can train its citizens to run fearlessly into battle, and yet fail to make individuals capable of dealing with their inner pain. Sadly, we fight external wars, wars that don’t really matter, in order to avoid the wars we are struggling with inside. This all suggests that there is a dimension to being human that most of us chose not to deal with, a different kind of war we choose not to fight.

Not everyone will join the military and go to war, but almost everyone will find a way to avoid their inner struggles. A distant uncle of mine recently committed suicide around the same time as the Marine from my Battalion. It seems individuals everywhere are vulnerable to seeing suicide as a way out of their troubles. And although physical war may be the most convenient way for tricking one’s self into believing he or she is more strong, confident, and self possessed than they really are, there are many ways to deceive one’s self, and almost everyone will find their own.

Participating in physical war may have its merits, and may test various aspects of one’s self; becoming successful from a monetary and social point of view may bring a sense of fulfillment; constructing an identity around any kind of theme whatsoever, be it becoming a great actor, photographer, scientist, preacher, bodybuilder, etc.; all these may bring a certain degree of satisfaction, but if they do nothing to avail one of his or her inner sufferings, if they fail to bring lasting peace and self knowledge, then they merely represent dead end ways by which individuals seek to displace and avoid their inner struggles, thus preventing the attainment of a kind of interminable pleasure that can only come from embracing the full weight of existence and the freedom it comes with.