I didn’t know it was a game at first. The first time I played was probably back at the dorms at the University of Arizona. Just participated out of laziness and opportunity. It took two years of honing my skills to realize the their full potential but now I’m quite certain I’m a pro. The game, soap swap, the premise, be retarded enough to forget your body wash in the communal showers in a densely populated area long enough to where you know it will be missing if you go back to look for it, then find a new bottle of forgotten soap before your next shower so you never actually run out and you never buy a new bottle. The rules are simple. You can’t use bar soap, because that’s fucking gross, who knows what part of what body it’s touched. Also you can’t take a bottle that belongs to a person you know is still in the bathroom. That would just be mean, and it would increase the rate of half-naked fistfights that are already too frequent an occurrence.
That’s pretty much it. It’s not really stealing because it’s just accepted that if you forget your body wash in the shower it’s going to become part of the game. It’s really the same as anything that is left unattended in community housing, if you don’t love it enough to keep a constant eye on it, it was never really yours to begin with. So far this has been the fate of my pair of $130 Smith sunglasses and countless unmarked tan undershirts. Why do people take other peoples intimate clothing? Who knows, but I remember that even the issue tighty-tanny panties weren’t beyond the realm of possible targets in basic. They say the Army hates a thief but they certainly don’t mind employing them. I’ve learned a multitude of handy less than legal tricks from my fellow soldiers over the last year and a half. You’d be surprised how easy it is to steal a car and probably less surprised at how easy it is to get caught. Every time an aspiring thief falls short of his goals, a new private is born.
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Kuwait blows. The end.
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I’ll never fly again with out the aid of modern medicine. As we taxied to take off from Kuwait heading for our half-way point in Frankfurt, Germany I took a couple muscle relaxers and passed out before the wheels left the tarmac. I awoke to a small dish of strangely delicious meat chunks with rice and veggies in front of me and ate mindlessly until my plate was clean and promptly passed out before the stewardess took my tray. I woke up again to the sudden jarring of our plane touching ground and passed our two-hour lay over eating a bratwurst and chatting with my friends about how much we enjoyed walking outside and actually feeling cold.
As we were getting seated again I took an Ambien and racked out before we were in the air. Somewhere over the Atlantic I woke up and ate a cheeseburger and the next thing I remember we were 45 minutes out of Newark, New Jersey. I can’t think of a better way to spend almost an entire day inside a plane. I was rested, relaxed, and in generally good spirits even while sitting waiting for hundreds of soldiers to get off the plane before me. As we disembarked for our second and last layover we were told to under no circumstances take our weapons off the plane. After the seven layers of Customs that we went through just to get on the damn thing we were all pretty happy to just leave our shit on the plane so we could go shave and brush our teeth. Being one of the last ones off I ended up getting left to brush my pearlies using the water fountain. Apparently some soldiers found this taboo, the same men who spent weeks wearing the same clothes out at the patrol bases. Go figure.
From New Jersey to North Carolina I tried to sleep some more but I guess my body’s limit is somewhere around 18 hours so I watched an episode of House and fiddled with my beret picking little pieces of white fuzz of and trying to smooth out the wrinkles. Outside my little window we floated above lush juicy white clouds. It was like standing upside down and looking at Heaven below you. Every so often a break in the clover would reveal green fields and trees, well-maintained roads, and a tiny shiny cars moving all the busy people to and fro. It was like peering through the shifting mist of the wishing glass, six months in a place like Iraq can make even the most mundane American countryside seem unimaginable.
I got butterflies as we landed at Pope AFB and taxied around to an ecstatic crowd of waiting family and friends. No one was there to see me in particular but just being around all that happiness finds a way to get to you. Fathers seeing their baby for the first time, lovers reunited, mothers getting to hold their son that they’ve worried about endlessly over the last year, it seemed like all way right again in the little world of Stephen. People I’ve never met before hugged me like I was kin. Women cried on my shoulder. I was thanked countless times for my service and I found it was impossible to erase the smile I’d had since we were released from formation. And now I’m home. Hopefully my stories from here on will ones of joy and music, more chances to get all I’ve yet to do accomplished.
