I turned the key and kicked the door to my room for the last time before I left the country. The key turned the lock and the kick offered the bolt a more direct path home that wasn’t available given it’s regular trajectory. The lowest bidder had left our beautiful brand new barracks with many permanent and disabling handicaps, one of which happened to be a slightly sagging door to room 416A. It was a routine that I’d repeated so many times it had become second nature, just another quirk of what I had come to consider home, the home that I was leaving behind yet again. The rucksack on my back creaked under the weight of the next year of my life, counter-balancing that on my front was a standard issue green Army duffle, an aid bag, and an assault bag, some 200 plus pounds in all. I imagine I looked like some sort of military trade caravan that had lost its pack mule, or passive aggressive tortoise. Upon reaching the end of the hall I found that I failed to account for the maximum width requirements to gain exit of the building, so I dropped some bags, rearranged, kicked some things, alluded to the lack of propriety of somebody’s mother and slowly inched my way out in to the cool North Carolina evening.
The squadron area was buzzing with activity, families spending their last moments with their sons and husbands, busses lining up, weapons being drawn. The wind came up occasionally and it must have been bitingly cold but when you have so much else on your mind you hardly notice. Time creeps or maybe it doesn’t, all I know is that I stood there in the midst of this clump of humanity and I felt almost nothing. Well I should say I felt nothing until everyone started crying.
It killed me to watch my buddy’s 8 year old daughter cry as he hugged her goodbye. People in emotional pain make me feel awkward like I’m watching a family eat dinner though the window from the outside. I think it’s that I want to be able to fix what hurts, but they don’t make bandages for that kind of wound. I hugged his wife and told her that I’d take care of him and she cried. Everybody was crying. I may have had I had some one to say goodbye to. But I’d rather my family fly out to see my when I get back. Hellos are much easier. I called my parents and said I was leaving soon and went back to feeling nothing, least of all my toes.
With our bags hucked onto a flat bed we shuffled onto the bus and one of the wives began to run along side the bus as we drove off. We laughed. Not so she could hear, but we laughed. Soldiers are cruel amongst each other; the humor keeps the hurt away. We all miss someone but why dwell on it? And it was kind of a ridiculously over the top display but I understand her motives. Love makes a fool of each of us.
Thus began the waiting. Leaving the country with the military is a long succession of moving things from one place to another and then waiting. I thought that I’d lost the ability to sleep on command but really I’d just lost the need to while I was back in the States. It’s so easy when you have nothing but time, why not spend it dreaming? I slept on concrete, on the plane, on a metal bench in the airport terminal in Ireland, on the second plane and when we got to Kuwait I slept some more. While we were there I sometimes slept 12 hours a day. Being sick helped, but mostly I just had nothing to be awake for. Three meals a day, a couple mandatory training sessions and a long morning on the range was all that kept me from laying on my cot and reading myself into yet another coma.
When I woke I realized I was thinking about being home and missing those I love and it was unbearable. I had to read or listen to music, anything to keep the faces out of my mind, all the things I’d miss over the next year, the friends I’d grow a little farther apart from. That’s the hardest part of this job. It isn’t the weight or the distance you walk or the blood or the danger. It’s lying awake in a room of sleeping soldiers feeling like your whole life it drifting away from you and that you’ll never get this time back. All these weapons, all these tools and minds, all this training and you’re completely helpless and weak. So really it isn’t that I feel nothing like I had the day I left. I just feel privately, listening to the symphony of snoring, farting men, in a dark tent in the middle of the Kuwaiti desert, I feel the most human I have in months.
My body was so out of whack I usually woke up around 0230 and stayed awake until first formation. On a few occasions I went for a walk out around the tent to clear my mind and freeze my balls off. In the desert at that time of morning the moon has a unique and beautiful way of glowing like a raw piece of amber as it nears the horizon. It’s a nice reprieve from the wind, grey skies, and talc like dust that permeates all of existence during the day.
I’m writing this from an airfield in Iraq somewhere west of Baghdad. We’re waiting (surprise) for our final flight to FOB Loyalty which is to be home for the next year or so. I was officially pinned Sergeant yesterday and so far have made a complete shamble of the NCO corps. I’ve not only managed to lose my aid bag (which I recovered) but I’ve also left my ID card with another soldier in Kuwait. I can’t tell you have embarrassing it is to have to tell the person who put you up for early promotion that you’ve done something so mindless and stupid. I can tell you however that it is more that possible to enter a war zone without proper identification.
On the upside our Squadron Chaplin among many others have said that it feels much more natural to call me Sergeant Covell than Specialist. Which is nice to hear and I appreciate their vote of confidence but I told them that the way things are going, they shouldn’t get too used to it. On a personal note, I do enjoy having the younger soldiers address me in a more formal manor… I guess I’m allowed one guilty pleasure. I thought maybe I might get to have two, the other in the form of some totally in regulation but totally not to 82nd Airborne standard hair length that I was sporting before a local barber, who boasted 23 years in the practice gave me a haircut that bordered on negligent homicide. Imagine if it were possible for a 5’6” white kid to look like the Fresh Prince of Bel Air and you might have some idea of what this guy did to me. Now I’m bald. Bic Bald. And it looks terrible, which would be ok if it wasn’t winter. Everything sticks to my head like Velcro. I’m in the same ACU’s that I wore off Bragg. I haven’t showered in almost two days. War these days isn’t hell, it just smells like it. Who wants a date?
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