When AJ Klausen@@http://uoregon.edu/findpeople/person/AJ*Klausen@@ signed up for the Marine Corps at 17, he wanted to be Captain America. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 had recently occurred, and Klausen, now 27 and a University of Oregon senior, felt a strong call to duty.
“I think it’s kind of ingrained into us from movies and media,” Klausen said. “It’s that sense of ‘I want to be a man, and I want to be a hero.’”
At 18, two weeks after his graduation from high school, Klausen left his home in Salem, Ore., to be stationed at Camp Pendleton in California. Over the next six years, he would serve three back-to-back deployments, two in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.
According to Klausen, his experiences during those six years were not the ones he saw portrayed in movies.
“When you watch war movies, you see an intensity that is only there 5 percent of the time,” Klausen said. “(In reality,) war is 5 percent fighting and 95 percent downtime.”
What Klausen got instead of a war movie, he said, was a sitcom.
“There’s a lot of sitting around with almost your best friends … just playing pranks on each other. You just try to lighten the mood of the situation you’re in,” he said.
However, the situation definitely needed to be lightened.
“You’re at war, so it’s pretty much the worst place you could be,” Klausen said. “But you try to make the most of it.”
Klausen compared his experience in war to everyday occurrences, such as the stress of taking a test. Either way, he said, one plays the hand they are dealt. For Klausen, this meant dealing with the stress of combat.
“There are a lot of times when you’re running across the field and you’re being shot at … and you hear the bullets whizz past you,” he said. “In that moment, you just do what you have to do … It’s only after that I would think, ‘It was only two inches away. What if it had actually hit me?’”
But Klausen said he was never afraid.
“Because I was a Marine, and I was with the best men on Earth,” he said.
Klausen believes that is what gives people courage.
“After a while of being there, you stop doing things idealistically, and you’re doing it for the guy to the left of you and the guy to the right of you,” he said.
For all the experiences Klausen gained from serving, he said his time in the military is defined by his feeling of accomplishment.
“It’s a mountain I climbed, and the feeling of surviving that mountain,” he said