He was the first generation to be an American, the first generation to go to college, and the first generation to serve in the military.

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Joshua Stanley’s family came from the Samoan islands, him the “baby,” and he grew up feeling a lot of pressure to make his family proud. As he got older, it became his goal to achieve that American dream, both for his single mother and for himself.

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In high school, he heard and read about the two wars being fought—Iraq and Afghanistan—and decided that joining the army would be the path to prove himself.

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Knowing his hometown of Richmond, California, wasn’t exactly safe and had a rather gnarly reputation just added to his desire to escape from the bad situations that later, many of his high school friends found themselves trapped in.

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First Tour

Military life was different.

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Without it, Stanley doesn’t believe that he would’ve become anything more than a shy little boy with no self-confidence—to his eyes, a disappointment to his family, and the kind of kid who didn’t attend college and just wound up aimless as an adult.

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The military taught him ambition; that even though life might be tough, he could get through it; to think of more than just himself, and how to belong in a community that supported him. Now, it’s gotten him to be more civic-minded, and to believe in the power of selfless giving.

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But there he was, 2006, in the Army Infantry straight out of high school. A year later, he deployed to Ramadi, Iraq during the Surge of 2007. Two years after that, in May 2009, he spent another year-long tour in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.

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He says he can only compare his two deployments as apples and oranges.

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As I ask him about his experiences, he gets the faraway look of the soldier: the way the war never quite leaves you. It’s his glance directed over my shoulder, directed to something not quite there, to times that I’ve never experienced and things he’ll never forget.

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In the Iraq deployment, he was an eighteen-year-old boy, a private with a machine gun standing scared witless on a battlefield of a country. That time, he deployed as a replacement like the government used to do with the Vietnam War, meaning he was sent to a unit that had already been in combat together and formed close bonds.

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That was tough, but not as tough as living through the ever-present danger of Iraq. Wearing body armor was simply a necessity. Every corner could be an ambush, and the constant threat of snipers and mortars constantly existed, even if only in your mind.

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Second Tour 

Afghanistan, however, was a different story. Two years older, Stanley was a team leader this time: responsible for the lives of three other men, all 18-year-olds like he had been, once upon an Iraqi time. He calls himself a harder man this time, more experienced: but in a way, almost more scared because of the others for which he was responsible. In that case, it wasn’t as much gunfire as it was roadside bombs, or IEDs (improvised explosive devices) made by militants.

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But what shocked him both times was how incredibly nice the people he met were. They’d invite him and the other soldiers into their homes, giving them chai without expecting anything in return.

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To this day, Stanley hasn’t found as good of chai as he had in a stranger’s home in Iraq.

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The friendliness made his job and everything so much worse: kicking in doors to find the enemy was often a requirement, and more often than not, intel was incorrect. Despite that, no matter what, the people remained kind, even if he and his team had entered less-than-politely.

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They were good people, trying to take care of their kids, and happened to get caught in the crossfire, Stanley feels. He says that meant it was horrible to be a soldier sometimes.

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But it was also, oddly so, “normal.”

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During day-to-day life, if a unit nearby was being attacked, he and fellow soldiers would jump up from watching movies to put boots on: and when it was over, and the dust settled, they’d change back to flipflops and turn on the television again.

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Some of the coping mechanisms for such a schedule weren’t nearly as healthy as binge-watching TV. To seem okay, soldiers smoked copious amounts of cigarettes and did everything to not talk about their emotions.

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A lot of it, Stanley chalks up to their backgrounds and traditional male stereotypes. But in the military, there’s the added #1 fear of letting your buddies down. You let your buddies down if you appear weak, and PTSD is just a four-letter word, and the few that were brave enough to speak up were dissed and looked down upon for it, he says.

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As much as the soldiers put on such bravado, the base level of fear still existed. Yet as scary as it was just living, it was also 99 percent sheer boredom (the other 1 percent being sheer terror, naturally). Then again, that was just your life, Stanley says.

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One time, in Iraq, he and his unit were so bored that they had a contest to determine who could draw the best American penny—none of them having seen a penny for ten months at that point. A few of his less-than-bright counterparts asked him, seriously, if it was FDR’s face on the penny.

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Another time, he danced disco on a Humvee. That story, in fact, made it into an essay on his Stanford application, and won him admission to the undergraduate department.

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Sometimes the boredom was so bad he just wanted something to happen. He believes he probably spent as much time with a mop in hand as he did with a weapon.

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The Return 

But that perpetual fear remained. It made it all the harder to transition back to life at home. Richmond, California didn’t have situations where he needed to get his full kit on in one minute, jump in the trucks, and go.

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After spending 24 hours a day living and breathing Ramadi, living and breathing Kandahar, coming home and not being able to express the built-up emotions led Stanley to a life-or-death situation of a different kind.

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He could share his feelings, his pain, his experiences, or he could look for another solution. And if he was going to choose life, that meant opening up and being vulnerable.

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He tried to kill himself between the time when he went home and before he came to Stanford. He didn’t see a way out.

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A phone call from his sister saved him, and now he talks, now he’s open, because he’s been to the funerals of friends and he believes in the butterfly effect, however small it may be, and that his story might touch someone struggling with the same thing.

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Today, Stanley’s the first one in his family to graduate from a university, and Stanford University at that, completing a bachelor’s degree in English during the spring of 2017. He’s currently Program Coordinator for the Medicine and the Muse program, and plans to enter law school to work potentially with immigration law: from an immigrant family himself, it’s something close to his heart.

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That’s how he works, and thinks: pursuing life with a valuable perspective, and remembering the little moments that matter the most.

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His military background was a really practical path for him to take, he maintains. Hellish as it was, he wouldn’t change it. He wouldn’t be here otherwise.