Letter 01 — January 2026
Re: Before the Uniform
Dear Soldier,
I am writing to you from Nairobi. From Dagoretti, specifically, which you have not seen yet. You are still in Virginia. You are still in the summer of 2011, in the paperwork limbo, waiting for the country to decide whether you exist.
I want to tell you about before — before January 20, before Fort Leonard Wood, before any of it. I want to tell you about the person who showed up at the recruiting station in the fall, because I think you have forgotten him, and I think forgetting him is one of the reasons some things went the way they went.
You had been in the country for five months. You had come from Kenya with the particular confidence of someone who does not yet know the specific texture of the obstacles ahead. You were volunteering at the library in Manassas and at the thrift shop and working at Walmart and the paperwork was slow and you needed something to do with yourself that felt like moving forward.
The uniform was the forward. The uniform was the thing that said: you are here, you belong, you have chosen something. Nobody told you that choosing something is not the same as arriving somewhere. Nobody told you that a uniform is a container that can hold very different things.
I am not writing to tell you not to go. I am writing because I think you went for reasons you did not fully understand, and understanding them now might be useful to the person you are still becoming.
There is a soldier I was. He deserves these letters.
With the knowledge I did not have then,
Gabriel
mydearsoldier.com