Letter 05 — May 2026
Re: The Sapper
Dear Soldier,
The drill sergeant who trained you was a Sapper. This is not a small thing in the Army. Sapper is a specialty — combat engineering, the tab earned through a course that breaks a significant percentage of the people who attempt it. The tab worn on the left shoulder is a particular credential, and the people who wear it carry a particular quality of certainty about hard things.
He trained you the way a Sapper trains soldiers: with the assumption that you could do more than you thought you could, and with no patience for the gap between what you thought you could do and what he knew you could do. The gap was closed by repetition and discomfort and the specific military pedagogy of making things hard so that real hardship, when it arrives, arrives to a prepared person.
What I want to say about this is not about the military specifically. It is about the experience of being trained by someone who has already done the hardest version of what they are asking you to do. There is a quality to that instruction that is different from being trained by someone who is working from theory. He was not working from theory.
You did not always appreciate this in the moment. In the moment, you were cold and tired and far from home and doing things your body was not accustomed to. In retrospect, you were being asked to find out what you were made of by someone who had already found out what he was made of, and found it sufficient.
That is a gift. Uncomfortable, but a gift.
From the soldier who made it through,
Gabriel
mydearsoldier.com
◆ YEAR IN KENYA SERIES
This essay is part of the Year in Kenya series — twelve months in Nairobi, April 2025 to April 2026.
The analytical home for the series is gabrielmahia.com, where Gabriel writes on power, institutions, and what holds under pressure. The full reading order — 34 essays across 5 properties — is at the Year in Kenya series page.
◆ Year in Kenya — Field Series 2025–2026
Twelve months in Nairobi waiting on a CR-1 visa, watching Kenya's Gen Z protests, Tanzania's stolen election, and an American political realignment simultaneously — from the position of someone inside neither country and reading both.