Zack and I decorated our metal living box last night. Using a variety of children's stickers and a dry erase marker we turned our plywood and metal furniture into art. Juvenile, penis themed art, but art none the less. So what if my locker now sports a shimmering glitter based Superman ass-punching some faceless Cobra operative? Who cares that I turned a stern and well defined Duke into a comically well endowed hermaphroditic chorus girl in mid can-can? This is just how we roll.
This is also not the first time we've modified our shanty existence to make spending the remainder of this deployment more palpable. When we first arrived during the hottest days of summer or primary concern was to lower the room temperature in the box from microwave to easy bake oven. Taking the (usually suspect) advice of other soldiers in similar living conditions we took wooden shipping pallets and whatever other nick-knacks we could scavenge and stacked them on the roof, the idea being that if the sun wasn't beating down directly on naked metal we might feel some indoor temperature improvement. I can't say if this actually worked or not because I recall laying on my bed half naked in a pool of my own juice both before and after the modifications were made but there is something to be said for the psychological benefits of taking control of any adverse situation. Either way it makes me laugh when ever I look up and see a mattress on my roof.
--
I suppose my biggest gripe with this job isn't that people are actively trying to kill me, it's that they are passively trying to kill me and I feel like a little more effort should go into my untimely demise. If a man (or woman) puts on a uniform, waits in ambush and attacks my truck with an RPG then sticks around to at least fire off a few rounds in my direction, I'm certain I can respect this. This is a person of conviction. A person willing to sacrifice their safety and quite possibly their life to do battle against an enemy possessing superior armament and training. It's at least noble in it's own way. But it's not like that. It's like my team is driving down a road and whether or not my truck or a van full of civilians is hit by a hidden IED on the side of the road is just coincidence. It's lazy and it makes me clench my jaw when I sleep.
I don't blame them for choosing these tactics. It's guerrilla warfare 101. I can't say I'd do anything differently if I was in their position. As it is, I've learned quite a bit about being a terrorist, insurgent, or freedom fighter or whatever you call it depending on your political beliefs. I definitely feel much more prepared now for the zombie apocalypse than I did three years ago. Ultimately it just feels like no one really gives a fuck anymore. These days anybody who's anybody knows the best place to insurge ones self against an American is in Afghanistan. Iraq is the Paris Hilton of war zones. We keep throwing money at it but no one really knows why anymore.
--
The most powerful of our senses is that of smell (I have no scientific evidence to back this up). Usually we're thankful for this. Perfume worn by a stranger can bring back memories of young love, the scent of fresh baked bread can make your mouth water and forget why you ever thought it was so important to count carbs. There are so many reasons to appreciate this gift, and then there is the Diyalla river. Meandering passively through our area of operation this liquid shit factory serves many functions for the local population. It's a bath, faucet, toilet, and highly effective garbage disposal, often simultaneously. They use it's water to grow their crops and quench the thirst of their live stock. It is the umbilicus from which this region feeds to survive and it is also completely disgusting. The color and consistency of cheap powdered chocolate milk, its waters are often choked with any number of questionable refuse coated by a distinctly pungent dark green slime. Everyone seems perfectly content to let the river, like much of the rest of this area, remain a complete dump.
The relative importance of this can be looked at a few different ways. First, the why things look here are not always the way things are. If their are violent militias roaming the streets at night threatening your family, your primary concern probably isn't whether or not an egret is going to choke on the plastic wrapper you just threw in the river. Second... well there isn't really a second, the point is that outward appearances mean shit if you can barely feed yourself.
The roads we travel are the Iraqi equivalent to highway strip malls. They are built and maintained as places of commerce with small pockets of residential areas periodically intermixed. It isn't much of a surprise that the scenery I see most often isn't beautiful. Beauty is in rare supply here even when it is actively cultivated. Also I assume this is a poorer than average district based on the other regions I've lived in but honestly it's hard to tell the difference sometimes. But regardless of the average daily income of the immediate populous, I can guarantee that the government money being spent on projects like building the giant (useless/ugly/traffic causing) brick archway over the main road heading south would be much more wisely placed in an effort to clean the waterways that, you know, keep people alive since they live in a fucking desert. Maybe I've over exaggerating and it's unfair to judge this place by the environmental standards I would back home. If the locals don't care, why should I? What do I know? All my water is bottled.
--
Getting ready to come home is giving me a man-period. One moment I'm cranky and irritable for no reason and then I'm happy. I mull over things too much. I'm always tired but it's almost impossible to nap. I have the attention span of a 4 year old. I'll watch 15 minute increments of movies (but only comedies, mind you, anything slightly dramatic sends me into an emotional tailspin) and then turn them off with out finishing. Basically I'm a fucking mess. I'd like to say I have a good reason but honestly I can't think of one. Of course I miss my family and friends but I talk to them regularly enough to not feel totally out of the loop. I eat enough and don't skip meals. I have slacked off on the exercise because my motivation has begun to wane (I also have a secret fear that my neck size no longer matches my body, and this has inexplicably ruined weight lifting for me.)
Soldiers are great companions for many things but being there to support you for baring a broken soul in not one of them, nor should it really be expected, this isn't share-share time at feelings camp. The closest thing I can get to a therapy session is a talking with the guys on my truck while we try and whittle away the hours we spend driving around God knows where doing other peoples jobs for them. These conversations are frank, heartfelt, and rude in the way you feel you can speak to your best friend or a sibling. We've spent so much time together poking at each others issues and shortcomings that there has grown the sense you know more about the person you're speaking with than they do. Not that this is entirely surprising considering one of the only things I'm sure about human nature is that we lie to ourselves far better than we are able to lie to others.
It's a not a nurturing environment in the traditional sense but it's nice to know you can cut out the bullshit that gets stacked on top of what we really mean make sure no one gets offended when we talk to one another. Soldiers don't have that problem. Men are pigs, women lie and somehow we make it work or we don't and you're only worse off if you repeat the same mistake twice. There's a good deal of relief to be found in accepting how completely imperfect you are. Sometimes you just need someone to tell you you're a shit bag to your face to center your chi.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Bombs for my Birthday
Somewhere in between sleep and conscious thought in the wee hours of the morning the sound of a cat being bludgeoned to death repeatedly echos throughout the steel walls of my living box. From a purely analytical standpoint you'd expect this to be a singular event. Bludgeoning, screams, silence. But what is happening is that every 15 minutes, or however long it takes me to just start to fall asleep, someone or something is causing a cat to scream bloody murder no more that 10 feet from my wall. I'm torn. Half of me really wants to find out what the fuck is going on so that I can make it stop. I have a gun. I have an assortment of knives. I even have an ASP, a telescoping baton, and I'm positive there isn't a single thing that I will encounter that I can't negotiate some solution to this issue. The other half is asleep and doesn't want to get up or do anything that doesn't involve dreaming about Natalie Portman making me a sandwich. This half isn't even fully convinced that what it is hearing isn't just being made up. Like my idea that the inside of the building across the street from my room labeled "Filipino DFAC" actually houses cage fights, Blood Sport style. Which, I've decided either means I'm racist or confirms my suspicion that every other culture on earth is having more fun than Americans are. Regardless sleepy half is winning and so I continue to lay unmoving creating cat based scenarios. Then as unexpectedly as it began, all external noise ceases and I'm left with silence and a lot of unnecessary questions. I settle for sleep instead.
--
It's a bit of a sport for the local kids to sit by the side of the road and wave at us as we drive by. Well I use the term "wave" loosely as it could really encompass any number of gestures from breaking in to a full sprint along side our trucks while smiling and shouting to flipping us off. Suffice to say, the youth of Iraq spend a lot of their time on and around roads doing very little with their lives. They are mostly waiting for the rare convoy with the sympathetic hearts and minds gunner who likes to throw candy as he drives by. This is never us. But either it happens more often than I imagine or the local kids are just incredibly resilient and hopeful. Or bored. Complicating this interaction further is the fact that somewhere along the history of our involvement with this country, somebody thought it would be a good PR move to toss out soccer balls for a group of eager young Iraqis and we've been paying the price ever since. The universal sign for "give me a fucking football already" is to scream at the top of one's lungs and hold one's hands out around the outline of the imaginary sphere of hoped for ball. This is a very serious affair. No kid just kind of puts his hands up absently at the off chance he may actually get what he wishes. No, you can see it in their eyes. They believe that the course of the rest of their lives hinges upon that very moment. Somehow everything will be OK if they can just... get... that... ball. I don't get it. It's not like they can't get go to the store and get a ball. This country isn't that poor. It makes me wonder if there is some kind of black market soccer ball trade, some sort of Bombs for Balls program.
--
I'm not sure if this is really worth mentioning but thinking back over these two deployments I've realized that I've had a few notable encounters with goats (to every one of your that took that the wrong way, you're the sick bastard, not me). I've had staring contests with them, watched them be blown up like a ballon with a tire pump, seen them topple ass over head down the bank of a canal into the water, and now finally I've seen what happens when you run one over with a semi-truck. And I don't mean like I saw some random days old road-kill as we drove by at 40 mph, I mean I literally stared at a goat wedged halfway under the tire of a massive flat bed as we crept by avoiding the throngs of curious pedestrian onlookers. My gunner asked over the head set, "what do you think the last thing that went through it's mind was?" And I said, "Well... judging by what I'm seeing, I'd say it was his anus." I love a good set up.
--
Since my 21st birthday every subsequent birthday has paled in comparison. That weekend at the Frog and Peach in San Louis Obispo I played my first live show, completely drunk, partied in three different cities and got my nipples covered in whipped cream (unfortunately that picture survives). It's not that I haven't enjoyed my birthdays since, it's just that they've all failed to imprint the same lasting (good) memories as that most excellent day back in 2003. This year, however, Iraq got me something special. Not surprisingly, Iraq and I aren't always on the best of terms. I say it's the worst country in the world, it tries to kill me, I say I want to see what it would look like after a nuclear strike glasses Baghdad, it tries to kill me, I see a cute puppy while on patrol, it tries to kill me. And so on. But for one beautiful day in late August we put aside our differences and Iraq gave me what every boy really wants for his birthday, dangerous explosives!
Our task that day was to head over to FOB Hammer as an escort for an EOD element. The day was shaping up to be just another dusty scorcher, which is what I'd planned on anyway so I wasn't too disappointed. Still, there were a couple bright spots. We played a game of "guess Doc's age" and everyone was at least 2 to 3 years on the young side which either means I don't look old or I'm immature. I was strangely OK with either. As we were waiting to get our gear back on and leave to go back home something strange happened. I was sitting in the truck reading when I noticed a change, slight as it was, a degrees shift in temperature. I glanced out the window and I couldn't put my finger on it but the ground looked darker somehow, like there was something blocking the sun, something that reminded me of home. I looked up and there is was. A cloud! One big, fat, juicy, gray, cloud out of no where had drifted over us. I took my sunglasses off and turned my face to the sky and began to feel tiny drops of rain splash against my skin. Guys started laughing and dancing around like they'd won something as the drops steadily increased in size to the point where they almost hurt as they hit. Just as quickly as it arrived the rain stopped and the cloud moved on and the sun returned to make everything terrible again with the added joy of increased humidity but it was worth it to have any kind of change. Really though, this story isn't about meteorological phenomenon. On to the explosion.
As we were rolling out the gate we got word that a IED had been found on the route that we were taking to get back home. Since we had EOD assets with us anyway we became the de-facto response team and so made our way over to the grid we'd been given. Before anyone gets too excited let me remind you that the Army is the worlds leader in taking things that are awesome and making them suck. Jumping out of airplanes, shooting automatic weapons, living in a big steel box, the Army has ruined them all for me. That being said nothing can ruin blowing something up... except expecting a bigger explosion.
The offending agent in question turned out to be a small anti-personel mine that had been placed on the side of the road. This couldn't have been meant for us since even the most rookie insurgent knows the armor on our trucks wouldn't have even been scratched by it. Regardless, it had to go. So EOD took out it's Johnny-5 bot and placed a small explosive charge on it's extending hook arm. J-5 is remote controlled but watching it move it kind of like watching a giant cockroach, it skitters along on it's mini tank tracks and then suddenly stops, shifts directions and it off again, then stops as if sniffing out crumbs of food. The rest of the team pulled security around the perimeter in case the mine was just a decoy for something more complex and as the minutes passed the initial excitement of knowing something was about to violently combust began to leave me along the trails of sweat rolling down my neck. After about 30 minutes we were ordered back to the trucks as J-5 retreated from the spot where it had placed the charge next to the mine. I had a clear view from my seat and I sat forward as EOD gave the order to fire. The two explosives went up in a remarkably un-Hollywood burst of dust that was as underwhelming to watch as it was to hear. When something explodes I want to feel it in my chest. I want to be knocked over. I want to have permanent brain damage. No such luck this time, but regardless it was a nice break from the monotony and as far as birthday gifts go, I figure this country could have done much worse.
--
I ran up to the top of the sandy berm on the western border of our base and instead of taking the long way around a winding dirt path like I usually do I decided to go right up the 136 stairs that reach skyward temple like a short way from my living box. I had avoided doing this since we arrived here because of all the parts of my body I feel need work, my legs aren't top on the list and because of what I feel is a justified fear of tripping and falling 100 meters down a 50 degree slope. Iraqi construction which as a general rule doesn't follow the strictest of standards fails most spectacularly in the arena of assisting locomotion to elevated positions. The effect of looking at steps as you run up them one by one is vertigo inducing under the best conditions, coupled with my decision to make my first summit attempt long after it had gotten dark out, by the halfway point I began to second guess the value of the activity in which I was currently engaged. I took my clear lensed Oakleys off to try and get a better view but it only served to bring what was making me dizzy more clearly in focus which magnified the problem. Of course I didn't just stop like an intelligent person would, no, the same ego driven logic that has landed many a fool begrudgingly into youtube stardom took me step by step closer to my goal, which I suppose was to prove that I could run up stairs at night or to become more physically fit, or something like that. About 20 steps from the top that familiar surge of adrenaline blurred out any doubt that this in fact was a fantastic idea and as I reached the top and turned around and looked down at the dull orange bulbs illuminating my temporary home I bent over panting with my hand on my knees. I scanned the horizon enjoying my small victory and wondering just how far my line of sight was from this position. I could see for miles, which meant I could be seen for miles. I felt the sudden shiver a soldier gets when he realizes he's made a tactical error. Then I remembered why I hate this country... and that I had to walk back down all those damn stairs.
--
Two reasons I'm sure that evolutionarily speaking I'm a dead end: 1. My natural initial response to being startled is to scream like a girl and fail my arms around. 2. My natural initial response to the sound of an incoming rocket is to kind shift my body weight to one side and crouch a little like I'm dodging a Nerf football that I didn't expect to be thrown at me. Genius.
--
It's a bit of a sport for the local kids to sit by the side of the road and wave at us as we drive by. Well I use the term "wave" loosely as it could really encompass any number of gestures from breaking in to a full sprint along side our trucks while smiling and shouting to flipping us off. Suffice to say, the youth of Iraq spend a lot of their time on and around roads doing very little with their lives. They are mostly waiting for the rare convoy with the sympathetic hearts and minds gunner who likes to throw candy as he drives by. This is never us. But either it happens more often than I imagine or the local kids are just incredibly resilient and hopeful. Or bored. Complicating this interaction further is the fact that somewhere along the history of our involvement with this country, somebody thought it would be a good PR move to toss out soccer balls for a group of eager young Iraqis and we've been paying the price ever since. The universal sign for "give me a fucking football already" is to scream at the top of one's lungs and hold one's hands out around the outline of the imaginary sphere of hoped for ball. This is a very serious affair. No kid just kind of puts his hands up absently at the off chance he may actually get what he wishes. No, you can see it in their eyes. They believe that the course of the rest of their lives hinges upon that very moment. Somehow everything will be OK if they can just... get... that... ball. I don't get it. It's not like they can't get go to the store and get a ball. This country isn't that poor. It makes me wonder if there is some kind of black market soccer ball trade, some sort of Bombs for Balls program.
--
I'm not sure if this is really worth mentioning but thinking back over these two deployments I've realized that I've had a few notable encounters with goats (to every one of your that took that the wrong way, you're the sick bastard, not me). I've had staring contests with them, watched them be blown up like a ballon with a tire pump, seen them topple ass over head down the bank of a canal into the water, and now finally I've seen what happens when you run one over with a semi-truck. And I don't mean like I saw some random days old road-kill as we drove by at 40 mph, I mean I literally stared at a goat wedged halfway under the tire of a massive flat bed as we crept by avoiding the throngs of curious pedestrian onlookers. My gunner asked over the head set, "what do you think the last thing that went through it's mind was?" And I said, "Well... judging by what I'm seeing, I'd say it was his anus." I love a good set up.
--
Since my 21st birthday every subsequent birthday has paled in comparison. That weekend at the Frog and Peach in San Louis Obispo I played my first live show, completely drunk, partied in three different cities and got my nipples covered in whipped cream (unfortunately that picture survives). It's not that I haven't enjoyed my birthdays since, it's just that they've all failed to imprint the same lasting (good) memories as that most excellent day back in 2003. This year, however, Iraq got me something special. Not surprisingly, Iraq and I aren't always on the best of terms. I say it's the worst country in the world, it tries to kill me, I say I want to see what it would look like after a nuclear strike glasses Baghdad, it tries to kill me, I see a cute puppy while on patrol, it tries to kill me. And so on. But for one beautiful day in late August we put aside our differences and Iraq gave me what every boy really wants for his birthday, dangerous explosives!
Our task that day was to head over to FOB Hammer as an escort for an EOD element. The day was shaping up to be just another dusty scorcher, which is what I'd planned on anyway so I wasn't too disappointed. Still, there were a couple bright spots. We played a game of "guess Doc's age" and everyone was at least 2 to 3 years on the young side which either means I don't look old or I'm immature. I was strangely OK with either. As we were waiting to get our gear back on and leave to go back home something strange happened. I was sitting in the truck reading when I noticed a change, slight as it was, a degrees shift in temperature. I glanced out the window and I couldn't put my finger on it but the ground looked darker somehow, like there was something blocking the sun, something that reminded me of home. I looked up and there is was. A cloud! One big, fat, juicy, gray, cloud out of no where had drifted over us. I took my sunglasses off and turned my face to the sky and began to feel tiny drops of rain splash against my skin. Guys started laughing and dancing around like they'd won something as the drops steadily increased in size to the point where they almost hurt as they hit. Just as quickly as it arrived the rain stopped and the cloud moved on and the sun returned to make everything terrible again with the added joy of increased humidity but it was worth it to have any kind of change. Really though, this story isn't about meteorological phenomenon. On to the explosion.
As we were rolling out the gate we got word that a IED had been found on the route that we were taking to get back home. Since we had EOD assets with us anyway we became the de-facto response team and so made our way over to the grid we'd been given. Before anyone gets too excited let me remind you that the Army is the worlds leader in taking things that are awesome and making them suck. Jumping out of airplanes, shooting automatic weapons, living in a big steel box, the Army has ruined them all for me. That being said nothing can ruin blowing something up... except expecting a bigger explosion.
The offending agent in question turned out to be a small anti-personel mine that had been placed on the side of the road. This couldn't have been meant for us since even the most rookie insurgent knows the armor on our trucks wouldn't have even been scratched by it. Regardless, it had to go. So EOD took out it's Johnny-5 bot and placed a small explosive charge on it's extending hook arm. J-5 is remote controlled but watching it move it kind of like watching a giant cockroach, it skitters along on it's mini tank tracks and then suddenly stops, shifts directions and it off again, then stops as if sniffing out crumbs of food. The rest of the team pulled security around the perimeter in case the mine was just a decoy for something more complex and as the minutes passed the initial excitement of knowing something was about to violently combust began to leave me along the trails of sweat rolling down my neck. After about 30 minutes we were ordered back to the trucks as J-5 retreated from the spot where it had placed the charge next to the mine. I had a clear view from my seat and I sat forward as EOD gave the order to fire. The two explosives went up in a remarkably un-Hollywood burst of dust that was as underwhelming to watch as it was to hear. When something explodes I want to feel it in my chest. I want to be knocked over. I want to have permanent brain damage. No such luck this time, but regardless it was a nice break from the monotony and as far as birthday gifts go, I figure this country could have done much worse.
--
I ran up to the top of the sandy berm on the western border of our base and instead of taking the long way around a winding dirt path like I usually do I decided to go right up the 136 stairs that reach skyward temple like a short way from my living box. I had avoided doing this since we arrived here because of all the parts of my body I feel need work, my legs aren't top on the list and because of what I feel is a justified fear of tripping and falling 100 meters down a 50 degree slope. Iraqi construction which as a general rule doesn't follow the strictest of standards fails most spectacularly in the arena of assisting locomotion to elevated positions. The effect of looking at steps as you run up them one by one is vertigo inducing under the best conditions, coupled with my decision to make my first summit attempt long after it had gotten dark out, by the halfway point I began to second guess the value of the activity in which I was currently engaged. I took my clear lensed Oakleys off to try and get a better view but it only served to bring what was making me dizzy more clearly in focus which magnified the problem. Of course I didn't just stop like an intelligent person would, no, the same ego driven logic that has landed many a fool begrudgingly into youtube stardom took me step by step closer to my goal, which I suppose was to prove that I could run up stairs at night or to become more physically fit, or something like that. About 20 steps from the top that familiar surge of adrenaline blurred out any doubt that this in fact was a fantastic idea and as I reached the top and turned around and looked down at the dull orange bulbs illuminating my temporary home I bent over panting with my hand on my knees. I scanned the horizon enjoying my small victory and wondering just how far my line of sight was from this position. I could see for miles, which meant I could be seen for miles. I felt the sudden shiver a soldier gets when he realizes he's made a tactical error. Then I remembered why I hate this country... and that I had to walk back down all those damn stairs.
--
Two reasons I'm sure that evolutionarily speaking I'm a dead end: 1. My natural initial response to being startled is to scream like a girl and fail my arms around. 2. My natural initial response to the sound of an incoming rocket is to kind shift my body weight to one side and crouch a little like I'm dodging a Nerf football that I didn't expect to be thrown at me. Genius.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
It's quite these days. This isn't the Iraq I remember. I mean it is still miserably hot and filled with people who don't like me, but the passion is gone. Now when a local flips me off he doesn't even fear for his life, where's the fun in that? Tom finally caught Jerry but he spent so much time on the chase that he forgot why he wanted him in the first place. Yeah I got it. It's time for the Iraqis to flex a little national pride. It's officially their country now. We are but guests now and believe me in most places that's exactly how we are treated. But there's a undercurrent of distain flowing through these city streets. It's as if society here is at once on the brink of sudden collapse as well as eternally unchangeable, like we came and ruined everything while doing absolutely nothing these last six years.
--
With barely any real danger to be concerned by, I've become jumpy at little things. Ok, a M109 Paladin isn't exactly a little thing. But it's friendly enough when it's not pointed at you. The problem is, for what ever reason, they have been firing them off at odd hours of the night over the last week. These artillery tanks fire a 155mm round that produces a testicle retracting kaboom accompanied by a hollow organ rattling shock wave that is especially exciting if you aren't expecting it as you come out of your door at 10:30 at night. At least I didn't need to walk all the way to the bathroom anymore.
--
There is something biting me. Not right now but at night occasionally there is something that bites my hands and toes and legs and feet and leaves red itchy little bumps that I scratch in my sleep and wake myself up. I hate these things. I have no idea what they are. Some people call them sand fleas, but apparently those don't exist, at least according to the internet. So there is this mystery bug that bites me in my bed and when I stand for more than a few minutes in one place outside and I have no idea what it looks like or how to destroy it and it's entire family. This must be what it feels like to become schizophrenic.
--
With 10 months left in the service I spend a lot of time looking forward to what's next and looking back on what I've experienced and how it's shaped the person I am today. To say that this job has been an eye opening experience would be the grossest of understatements. I grew up in a world where parents stayed together, kids graduated high school and went to college, and arguments were solved with words not fists. That's not to say things always happened that way but when they didn't it was the exception to the rule and I could always turn back to my family, stare normal in the eye and let the worries of other peoples lives fade away. It was a great place to become an adult but like too much of any good thing, while enjoyable, it persuaded me to turn a blind eye to reality. Now my family is a volatile mixture of delinquents, thieves, liars, immigrants who gained their citizenship through the service, farm boys from Kansas, runaways, and more than a couple sociopaths. It's not always easy but dealing with that diversity teaches you that there are not good or evil people. We are all just people, capable of incredible kindness and terrible hate. And someone who you think you hate can turn out to be your best friend.
One of my favorite memories from my training days was sitting in this terrible mexican joint on Fort Benning that was within walking distance from the airborne school barracks. I would head up there every few days and order a beer and something that tried to pass for carnitas and just sit by myself and watch what ever was on the television hanging above the bar. I'd hit on the waitress who as I recall was neither particularly good looking nor interesting but conversation of any kind was good to have. My only friend that I'd come from AIT to airborne with had failed the PT test to get in... or rather her had been failed because he pissed off the instructor and they counted his push ups to 42 and then stayed there regardless of how correct his form was. You need 43 minimum to get in. This is called joining the 42 club.
My ritual continued this way for weeks. Beer, quasi-carnitas, and the wooing of the shrew. On our last week of training, sitting there at the bar I noticed another guy from my company come in and sit at a booth over against the wall to my left. I didn't know him personally but he had the reputation of being a bit of a country bumpkin and not very friendly. I went back to my food until about five minutes later when another figure came storming in the room and came to a halt directly in front of country's booth. I looked at and recognized the figure of a girl who I also knew by reputation, the kind you get by indiscriminately sleeping with anything that walks, and immediately my interest was peaked. Let me clarify first that I really do not care what other people do with their bodies. I'd heard about this girls exploits and the various names she was called and I remember thinking how typical it was that she did exactly what guys wanted but then they would turn around and look down on her... I'll save my feelings about sex rolls and the poor state of American sexual intelligence for another time though.
Standing with her hand on her cocked hip, with out a word she presented a home pregnancy test stick from her pocket and slammed it down on the table. Thinking back on that later I realized how those tests are taken and though "eew". But in the moment I was rapt which curiosity. Country took a bite of his taco looked at the stick and without even looking up said through a mouth full of food, "That shit ain't mine." Oh man, this was going to be some Jerry Springer type shit. I wasn't even trying to hide the fact that I was watching now. I had completely turned on my bar stool to watch the scene unfold while I sipped on my beer. What I expected to happen, having her explode in to some kind of white trash tirade, didn't. She angrily shot her hand out and grabbed the stick and was gone. Country looked up at me and I raised my eye brows signaling that unspoken male understanding that woman are generally completely incomprehensible. The end of his mouth curled into a half grin and shrugged as he went back to the business of consuming.
I later found out that he was not the first or the last of the guys she pulled this move on that day. I found this at once tragic and hilarious, and that is the Army to me. A place so ordered and regimented that you get to a point where you really have to just expect the unexpected. The undercurrent of human needs and wants covered by the gloss and shine of medals and uniforms, its a universe rife with extremes. I'll miss it I'm sure, but at the same time I'll probably spend the rest of my life getting as far away from it as I can.
--
With barely any real danger to be concerned by, I've become jumpy at little things. Ok, a M109 Paladin isn't exactly a little thing. But it's friendly enough when it's not pointed at you. The problem is, for what ever reason, they have been firing them off at odd hours of the night over the last week. These artillery tanks fire a 155mm round that produces a testicle retracting kaboom accompanied by a hollow organ rattling shock wave that is especially exciting if you aren't expecting it as you come out of your door at 10:30 at night. At least I didn't need to walk all the way to the bathroom anymore.
--
There is something biting me. Not right now but at night occasionally there is something that bites my hands and toes and legs and feet and leaves red itchy little bumps that I scratch in my sleep and wake myself up. I hate these things. I have no idea what they are. Some people call them sand fleas, but apparently those don't exist, at least according to the internet. So there is this mystery bug that bites me in my bed and when I stand for more than a few minutes in one place outside and I have no idea what it looks like or how to destroy it and it's entire family. This must be what it feels like to become schizophrenic.
--
With 10 months left in the service I spend a lot of time looking forward to what's next and looking back on what I've experienced and how it's shaped the person I am today. To say that this job has been an eye opening experience would be the grossest of understatements. I grew up in a world where parents stayed together, kids graduated high school and went to college, and arguments were solved with words not fists. That's not to say things always happened that way but when they didn't it was the exception to the rule and I could always turn back to my family, stare normal in the eye and let the worries of other peoples lives fade away. It was a great place to become an adult but like too much of any good thing, while enjoyable, it persuaded me to turn a blind eye to reality. Now my family is a volatile mixture of delinquents, thieves, liars, immigrants who gained their citizenship through the service, farm boys from Kansas, runaways, and more than a couple sociopaths. It's not always easy but dealing with that diversity teaches you that there are not good or evil people. We are all just people, capable of incredible kindness and terrible hate. And someone who you think you hate can turn out to be your best friend.
One of my favorite memories from my training days was sitting in this terrible mexican joint on Fort Benning that was within walking distance from the airborne school barracks. I would head up there every few days and order a beer and something that tried to pass for carnitas and just sit by myself and watch what ever was on the television hanging above the bar. I'd hit on the waitress who as I recall was neither particularly good looking nor interesting but conversation of any kind was good to have. My only friend that I'd come from AIT to airborne with had failed the PT test to get in... or rather her had been failed because he pissed off the instructor and they counted his push ups to 42 and then stayed there regardless of how correct his form was. You need 43 minimum to get in. This is called joining the 42 club.
My ritual continued this way for weeks. Beer, quasi-carnitas, and the wooing of the shrew. On our last week of training, sitting there at the bar I noticed another guy from my company come in and sit at a booth over against the wall to my left. I didn't know him personally but he had the reputation of being a bit of a country bumpkin and not very friendly. I went back to my food until about five minutes later when another figure came storming in the room and came to a halt directly in front of country's booth. I looked at and recognized the figure of a girl who I also knew by reputation, the kind you get by indiscriminately sleeping with anything that walks, and immediately my interest was peaked. Let me clarify first that I really do not care what other people do with their bodies. I'd heard about this girls exploits and the various names she was called and I remember thinking how typical it was that she did exactly what guys wanted but then they would turn around and look down on her... I'll save my feelings about sex rolls and the poor state of American sexual intelligence for another time though.
Standing with her hand on her cocked hip, with out a word she presented a home pregnancy test stick from her pocket and slammed it down on the table. Thinking back on that later I realized how those tests are taken and though "eew". But in the moment I was rapt which curiosity. Country took a bite of his taco looked at the stick and without even looking up said through a mouth full of food, "That shit ain't mine." Oh man, this was going to be some Jerry Springer type shit. I wasn't even trying to hide the fact that I was watching now. I had completely turned on my bar stool to watch the scene unfold while I sipped on my beer. What I expected to happen, having her explode in to some kind of white trash tirade, didn't. She angrily shot her hand out and grabbed the stick and was gone. Country looked up at me and I raised my eye brows signaling that unspoken male understanding that woman are generally completely incomprehensible. The end of his mouth curled into a half grin and shrugged as he went back to the business of consuming.
I later found out that he was not the first or the last of the guys she pulled this move on that day. I found this at once tragic and hilarious, and that is the Army to me. A place so ordered and regimented that you get to a point where you really have to just expect the unexpected. The undercurrent of human needs and wants covered by the gloss and shine of medals and uniforms, its a universe rife with extremes. I'll miss it I'm sure, but at the same time I'll probably spend the rest of my life getting as far away from it as I can.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
These Endless Numbered Days
Touching down on the tarmac I looked out my window noted passivly that we hadn't crashed in a giant fire storm of jet fuel and jagged metal scraps. Having not been granted my one wish upon returning to theater I sat back in my seat and pushed the slumbering ox of a staff sergeant off my shoulder for what I hoped would be the last time before we deplaned. The sour remains of what had once been 200 happy vacationing soldiers oozed into the fading afternoon sun light to begin the long and arduous process of getting from Kuwait to Baghdad International Airport and points beyond. There's likely no fix for it. Processing that many moving bodies is a nightmare. Compounded by the fact that we are salaried and that we get paid on the 1st and 15th regardless of output and that our movement liaisons likely acquired their position by being deemed unfit to serve in any other capacity, I had prepared myself to spend at least a week trying to get back to my unit. It gave me time to think back and unravel the last two weeks I'd spent in various stages of intoxication over the northern half of California.
Leave is fascinating, like a biopsy of the tissue of my friends lives. I get a little piece to look at a couple times a year and try to paint the bigger picture of their experience since I've been away. We're all growing older, finishing school, girls I use to date are getting married and even more frighteningly, reproducing. I get asked a lot about the war and my opinion on this and that. It bothers some soldiers to have to talk about work but I figure I'm the closest thing to a military expert that most people I know have. Why wouldn't you refer to someone with first hand knowledge? It was so nice to put on clothes that were appropriately designed for the weather, eat meat that I recognized, and of course get behind the wheel of a normal car... then turn the traction control off and put it in to a four wheel drift in skyline forrest on my way to Chipotle! (that absolutely never happened)
I was surprised to find that my tolerance for alcohol had stayed pretty much the same as before I left which either means I'm just genetically pre-dispositioned to party (highly likely) or that I've just pickled myself. I was reminded however that it is a terrible Idea to bar hop with people who are friends with the bar tenders. Taco's, however, are never a bad idea, especially on Tuesdays when they are a dollar at Chivo's in San Luis Obispo. In fact the seven $1 tacos I ate may have been what saved me from blacking out and dying in a gutter on Higuera St. I spent the next day recovered and buying ridiculous amounts of clothes from my favorite surf shops. I know I wont get to wear them until November but I don't care, retail therapy is still therapy.
One of my best friends got married and I got to finally wear my kilt. It was a big hit, except with the guy with the bored looking wife at my table who asked me if it was some kind of gag. Yes, centuries of tradition in the land of my ancestors is some pretty funny shit. Not so funny when a thousand drunk men in skirts come charging at you with the blades of their claymores glinting in the hazy morning sunshine of the last day of your life! Laugh then Mr. Stocks and Bonds. Several gin and tonics later I still could not be dragged on to the dance floor by my own mother and I thought how strange it is that I want attention so bad but am still so shy about certain things. She asked me if I was sad, it must have shown in my face that I was in a way. Beneath every joy I had while home there was always this tiny nagging voice telling me how temporary it all was. That every moment I spent took me closer to being far away again. The invincibility of youth wears off slowly and you start to see your parents as people who will not always be around and sometimes it just becomes too much to handle out of no where. Sometimes I feel like I sold off some of the best days of my life that I could have spent getting to know these people who have taken the last 26 years of their life doing everything they can to make my life easier. How do you repay that if you aren't around to go fishing or to eat lunch with?
Just before leave was over I went up to Alameda with my dad to see my grandmother and while I was at her house I walked upstairs and in to my late aunt Sue's old room. I don't think I'd ever really been in there before. When she was alive I felt like she was a woman who enjoyed her personal space. She fell ill and died during my first deployment while I was searching houses for weapons in the middle of the night. I looked at the books on the shelves and aging pictures of my aunt as a young woman competing at horse shows in full English style regalia. She was a breeder of champion standard poodles and I think in a way she liked them more than people which I used to think was odd but makes more and more sense the older I get. You can learn a lot about someone by what they leave behind. Bottles of herbal supplements, a calendar with pictures of old pagan runes, books on American history, small trinkets picked up from a life time of travel. A white plastic alarm clock with time becoming more the color of an egg shell, hands stopped at 4:31 with no one there to wind it. Everyday things now artifacts, clues to a woman who I never got to know in life. As I shut the door to go back downstairs it felt like waving goodbye to a friend who had already turned to walk away.
Leave is fascinating, like a biopsy of the tissue of my friends lives. I get a little piece to look at a couple times a year and try to paint the bigger picture of their experience since I've been away. We're all growing older, finishing school, girls I use to date are getting married and even more frighteningly, reproducing. I get asked a lot about the war and my opinion on this and that. It bothers some soldiers to have to talk about work but I figure I'm the closest thing to a military expert that most people I know have. Why wouldn't you refer to someone with first hand knowledge? It was so nice to put on clothes that were appropriately designed for the weather, eat meat that I recognized, and of course get behind the wheel of a normal car... then turn the traction control off and put it in to a four wheel drift in skyline forrest on my way to Chipotle! (that absolutely never happened)
I was surprised to find that my tolerance for alcohol had stayed pretty much the same as before I left which either means I'm just genetically pre-dispositioned to party (highly likely) or that I've just pickled myself. I was reminded however that it is a terrible Idea to bar hop with people who are friends with the bar tenders. Taco's, however, are never a bad idea, especially on Tuesdays when they are a dollar at Chivo's in San Luis Obispo. In fact the seven $1 tacos I ate may have been what saved me from blacking out and dying in a gutter on Higuera St. I spent the next day recovered and buying ridiculous amounts of clothes from my favorite surf shops. I know I wont get to wear them until November but I don't care, retail therapy is still therapy.
One of my best friends got married and I got to finally wear my kilt. It was a big hit, except with the guy with the bored looking wife at my table who asked me if it was some kind of gag. Yes, centuries of tradition in the land of my ancestors is some pretty funny shit. Not so funny when a thousand drunk men in skirts come charging at you with the blades of their claymores glinting in the hazy morning sunshine of the last day of your life! Laugh then Mr. Stocks and Bonds. Several gin and tonics later I still could not be dragged on to the dance floor by my own mother and I thought how strange it is that I want attention so bad but am still so shy about certain things. She asked me if I was sad, it must have shown in my face that I was in a way. Beneath every joy I had while home there was always this tiny nagging voice telling me how temporary it all was. That every moment I spent took me closer to being far away again. The invincibility of youth wears off slowly and you start to see your parents as people who will not always be around and sometimes it just becomes too much to handle out of no where. Sometimes I feel like I sold off some of the best days of my life that I could have spent getting to know these people who have taken the last 26 years of their life doing everything they can to make my life easier. How do you repay that if you aren't around to go fishing or to eat lunch with?
Just before leave was over I went up to Alameda with my dad to see my grandmother and while I was at her house I walked upstairs and in to my late aunt Sue's old room. I don't think I'd ever really been in there before. When she was alive I felt like she was a woman who enjoyed her personal space. She fell ill and died during my first deployment while I was searching houses for weapons in the middle of the night. I looked at the books on the shelves and aging pictures of my aunt as a young woman competing at horse shows in full English style regalia. She was a breeder of champion standard poodles and I think in a way she liked them more than people which I used to think was odd but makes more and more sense the older I get. You can learn a lot about someone by what they leave behind. Bottles of herbal supplements, a calendar with pictures of old pagan runes, books on American history, small trinkets picked up from a life time of travel. A white plastic alarm clock with time becoming more the color of an egg shell, hands stopped at 4:31 with no one there to wind it. Everyday things now artifacts, clues to a woman who I never got to know in life. As I shut the door to go back downstairs it felt like waving goodbye to a friend who had already turned to walk away.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Shower of Power
The shower is a great place to let the mind wonder. No matter where you are or what you do, when you close that curtain behind you, the world collapses down in to something more manageable, a place with control over temperature and time, to wash away dirt both real and imagined. And in that space the thoughts that never really found space to merge into the mind's daily traffic slowly climb their way up with the steam off your skin. Questions about the nature of meaning, what matters. Do the things that matter to you matter universally or is relevance more compartmentalized?
I start with the assumption that things do matter. Why even ask the questions if life and consciousness are meaningless? With that settled, for the moment anyway, I wander over to doubt. Doubt in myself, my abilities in comparison to others and why I care to rate myself to begin with. Happiness weaves it's way into the maw. Is it important to be happy with what you do in your life? Is it more important that say, duty? Should we seek out pleasure or rather a code to live by? There is solace in structure but some life's most memorable moments happen by accident. One question leads to another and even the answers carry along a few questions in tow.
Occasionally a feeling like crippling fear blacks everything out. Most often it's when I feel like I've got the important stuff under control. Out of nowhere something will come along and kick over my Lego castle scattering the pieces across the carpet and under the bed. What's left to do but rebuild? I could do it like it says on the box or maybe not. Maybe a space ship this time. My castle was cool but it seemed so very average, anyone can build the castle, it comes with directions, but this space ship is unique and interesting. It flies and shoots and explores the farthest reaches of the galaxy, it's exciting but it's new and as with any new thing it isn't without flaws. It's phase drive is unreliable, some contractor skimped on the material for support welds for the wings and they need to be replaced almost every time it reenters Earths atmosphere, the cockpit has a terrible blind spot, but the hull is painted Ferrari red (first impressions being what they are) and chicks dig it. So that's where the fear creeps in, castle or space ship, old or new, I can make either but which one is more right, right now? How many times can I break the pieces apart before they start to wear out? Why is it so hard to choose!?
Why not make Lego metaphors? These are my brains computer models of the path of my life's tornado, I can try and predict the effects with out creating any real damage. Thanks to the shower, I can be completely wrong or come to a life changing epiphany and either way I've completed my initial objective of cleanliness and so have become a winner, if only for a moment.
I start with the assumption that things do matter. Why even ask the questions if life and consciousness are meaningless? With that settled, for the moment anyway, I wander over to doubt. Doubt in myself, my abilities in comparison to others and why I care to rate myself to begin with. Happiness weaves it's way into the maw. Is it important to be happy with what you do in your life? Is it more important that say, duty? Should we seek out pleasure or rather a code to live by? There is solace in structure but some life's most memorable moments happen by accident. One question leads to another and even the answers carry along a few questions in tow.
Occasionally a feeling like crippling fear blacks everything out. Most often it's when I feel like I've got the important stuff under control. Out of nowhere something will come along and kick over my Lego castle scattering the pieces across the carpet and under the bed. What's left to do but rebuild? I could do it like it says on the box or maybe not. Maybe a space ship this time. My castle was cool but it seemed so very average, anyone can build the castle, it comes with directions, but this space ship is unique and interesting. It flies and shoots and explores the farthest reaches of the galaxy, it's exciting but it's new and as with any new thing it isn't without flaws. It's phase drive is unreliable, some contractor skimped on the material for support welds for the wings and they need to be replaced almost every time it reenters Earths atmosphere, the cockpit has a terrible blind spot, but the hull is painted Ferrari red (first impressions being what they are) and chicks dig it. So that's where the fear creeps in, castle or space ship, old or new, I can make either but which one is more right, right now? How many times can I break the pieces apart before they start to wear out? Why is it so hard to choose!?
Why not make Lego metaphors? These are my brains computer models of the path of my life's tornado, I can try and predict the effects with out creating any real damage. Thanks to the shower, I can be completely wrong or come to a life changing epiphany and either way I've completed my initial objective of cleanliness and so have become a winner, if only for a moment.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Truth?! You Can't Handle the Truth!
This article ran in today's Stars and Stripes and I'd like to set the record straight on a couple points because it never fails that what I say doesn't necessarily translate into what shows up in print. My additions will be in bold.
BAGHDAD — Almost every unit has one: The guy with the guitar. Whether in the CHU or around the burn barrel, he’s the one who’s all too eager to pick up his acoustic and play a song for everyone. Sometimes even when no one wants him to. Ok, that's borderline harsh, I'm not that guy. Many of the people in my unit had no idea that I even played before we deployed, and even now I generally practice in the storage room where no one can hear me for just that reason.
Sgt. Stephen Covell is one of those guys No, I'm not. for Headquarters and Headquarters Company of the 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division’s 5th Squadron, 73rd U.S. Cavalry Regiment.
Covell has taken it beyond playing for the fellas, though. The 26-year-old medic from Pacific Grove, Calif., has recorded and toured on the strength of his music.
He also contributed a song to an album of rock songs by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans on the label To the Fallen Records.
Covell first deployed with the 5-73 in 2006 (2007) to the volatile Diyala province, even though he was supposed volunteered for, was accepted to be a part of Fort Bragg’s All-American Chorus.
"A week into it they called me and said ‘Bad news, you’re a combat-critical [military occupational specialty],’ " Covell said earlier this month at Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Loyalty. "Looking back on it, I’m glad I deployed and got the combat experience I did." That's true.
Returning home inspired Covell to write "Sand Hills to Sandals," a song about what it feels like to come back to the normal world after more than a year (just under six months) in Iraq.
"I wanted to give people a piece of what I experienced," he said. "It’s about coming home and being happy you’re back and realizing the things you took for granted when you left."
While Covell said his military experience doesn’t influence a ton of his music, some people have responded to the song about getting out of Iraq. Finally. I'm not exactly sure what this sentence means. I think what he meant to say was that I don't write songs about the military... which I don't, but I really can't salvage the second half.
"A lot of people asked me what it was like to be there," he said. "I’ve heard from family members (of other service members) who said it (my song) helped them understand what it’s like (for their loved ones to be) over here."
Covell picked up the guitar at 18, but had played piano before that. "And I had a terrible run-in with the trumpet for about a year," he added.
His influences include John Mayer, Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews. And Jason Mraz! I Said that!
"I don’t want to say adult contemporary because it sounds kind of lame," Covell said. "I guess it’s acoustic rock."Progressive indie acoustic folk pop?
For up-and-coming musicians, Covell’s advice is to learn the basics on their own but get with instructors or other players once they plateau to try to take their skills to the next level. That's just what worked for me.
Writing songs just takes persistence, he said.
"Some songs write themselves in 15 minutes, some I’ve been working on since high school," Covell said. "Keep writing. The more you write the more you define your own style."
Not exactly the hard hitting expose I was hoping for but hey no publicity is bad publicity. I was upset because it's unfair to the guys that spent the whole deployment over here last time to say I did the entire 15 months with them when I didn't even do half. And I'm not that guy!
BAGHDAD — Almost every unit has one: The guy with the guitar. Whether in the CHU or around the burn barrel, he’s the one who’s all too eager to pick up his acoustic and play a song for everyone. Sometimes even when no one wants him to. Ok, that's borderline harsh, I'm not that guy. Many of the people in my unit had no idea that I even played before we deployed, and even now I generally practice in the storage room where no one can hear me for just that reason.
Sgt. Stephen Covell is one of those guys No, I'm not. for Headquarters and Headquarters Company of the 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division’s 5th Squadron, 73rd U.S. Cavalry Regiment.
Covell has taken it beyond playing for the fellas, though. The 26-year-old medic from Pacific Grove, Calif., has recorded and toured on the strength of his music.
He also contributed a song to an album of rock songs by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans on the label To the Fallen Records.
Covell first deployed with the 5-73 in 2006 (2007) to the volatile Diyala province, even though he was supposed volunteered for, was accepted to be a part of Fort Bragg’s All-American Chorus.
"A week into it they called me and said ‘Bad news, you’re a combat-critical [military occupational specialty],’ " Covell said earlier this month at Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Loyalty. "Looking back on it, I’m glad I deployed and got the combat experience I did." That's true.
Returning home inspired Covell to write "Sand Hills to Sandals," a song about what it feels like to come back to the normal world after more than a year (just under six months) in Iraq.
"I wanted to give people a piece of what I experienced," he said. "It’s about coming home and being happy you’re back and realizing the things you took for granted when you left."
While Covell said his military experience doesn’t influence a ton of his music, some people have responded to the song about getting out of Iraq. Finally. I'm not exactly sure what this sentence means. I think what he meant to say was that I don't write songs about the military... which I don't, but I really can't salvage the second half.
"A lot of people asked me what it was like to be there," he said. "I’ve heard from family members (of other service members) who said it (my song) helped them understand what it’s like (for their loved ones to be) over here."
Covell picked up the guitar at 18, but had played piano before that. "And I had a terrible run-in with the trumpet for about a year," he added.
His influences include John Mayer, Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews. And Jason Mraz! I Said that!
"I don’t want to say adult contemporary because it sounds kind of lame," Covell said. "I guess it’s acoustic rock."Progressive indie acoustic folk pop?
For up-and-coming musicians, Covell’s advice is to learn the basics on their own but get with instructors or other players once they plateau to try to take their skills to the next level. That's just what worked for me.
Writing songs just takes persistence, he said.
"Some songs write themselves in 15 minutes, some I’ve been working on since high school," Covell said. "Keep writing. The more you write the more you define your own style."
Not exactly the hard hitting expose I was hoping for but hey no publicity is bad publicity. I was upset because it's unfair to the guys that spent the whole deployment over here last time to say I did the entire 15 months with them when I didn't even do half. And I'm not that guy!
Sunday, May 10, 2009
I Had To Live Underwater for a Year To Learn This Shit, Man.
Some time ago I saw the Sergeant Major of the Army speak when he was visiting Fort Bragg. He's the top enlisted soldier in the Army and gets paid somewhere around what a Lt. Colonel makes. A man who is responsible for hundreds of thousands of soldiers makes the same as a man responsible for about five hundred, interesting. Anyway, he opened his talk with a reminder that we should all feel very special that we joined because less that 1% of America is currently serving in the military. I thought that was an odd scale from which to judge ones own worth. Less than 1% of America feels that date rape is an acceptable practice, way to go guys, you're the elite.
Another standard pep talk for a paratrooper takes in to account that we not only volunteered for the Army but also to become airborne qualified. We are two time volunteers. We answer the call. Well if that's our benchmark I would like to say that I'm a four time volunteer, once for the Army, once for airborne, once for Ranger regiment, and once for the 82nd All American Chorus, so I'm a four time volunteer, one time quitter, and a one time, hey dirt bag stop being a pussy and go to Iraq to actually do your job. Staff Sergeant promotion board here I come.
It probably isn't surprising that recruiting numbers are at record highs right now. A terrible economy, decreased in violence in Iraq, I can just hear the gears turning in the recruiting offices. "Look son, I can almost guarantee you won't end up in Iraq, just sign here... thanks." "Oh, and by the way you said you enjoyed hiking, right? Great! You'll do just fine in Afghanistan. Sucker!" If you join the Army for school or to pay off debts and you don't want to deploy, you are dumb. End of story.
Somebody once told me that the Army is really no different than most jobs, no matter where you work and you're always somebody's bitch. But I can't recall a single time where my manager at Mile Hi Valet ever told me I was a worthless sack of shit and to do push ups until couldn't hold up the weight of my body. Nope, not once. The Army also has this singularly fascinating practice of taking the people who get fired for incompetence and placing them in jobs that are better than the one they got fired from! Part of me wants to stay in for the NCO's and officers that despite the long ours and poor compensation, find the courage and perseverance within themselves to fight the daily up hill battle against the deluge of lethargic and short sighted bureaucracy that is this modern Army but they are just drops of water in a choked green river. I see no cure for the pollution, just small glimmers of hope, treading just above the surface against the tug of the current. Like little angry turtles poking their heads up between lily pads, lily pads that never went to college.
--
It's just a matter of time before the machines rebel. I'm pretty sure that my Mac is already self aware. It shows remarkable human like characteristics such as a lack of motivation to work properly and it files things away that it thinks will be useful later and then loses them. The minute it asks me if I think about the new generation of Mac books while I'm typing on it, I'm taking it out back and beating it with a shovel.
--
There are three types of people in this world, leaders, followers, and unicorns. The leaders of course are all pro-active and crap so they have taken gather up all the unicorns and keep them locked away so that no one ever gets to see them. This is of course why followers think there are only two kinds of people in the world.
Another standard pep talk for a paratrooper takes in to account that we not only volunteered for the Army but also to become airborne qualified. We are two time volunteers. We answer the call. Well if that's our benchmark I would like to say that I'm a four time volunteer, once for the Army, once for airborne, once for Ranger regiment, and once for the 82nd All American Chorus, so I'm a four time volunteer, one time quitter, and a one time, hey dirt bag stop being a pussy and go to Iraq to actually do your job. Staff Sergeant promotion board here I come.
It probably isn't surprising that recruiting numbers are at record highs right now. A terrible economy, decreased in violence in Iraq, I can just hear the gears turning in the recruiting offices. "Look son, I can almost guarantee you won't end up in Iraq, just sign here... thanks." "Oh, and by the way you said you enjoyed hiking, right? Great! You'll do just fine in Afghanistan. Sucker!" If you join the Army for school or to pay off debts and you don't want to deploy, you are dumb. End of story.
Somebody once told me that the Army is really no different than most jobs, no matter where you work and you're always somebody's bitch. But I can't recall a single time where my manager at Mile Hi Valet ever told me I was a worthless sack of shit and to do push ups until couldn't hold up the weight of my body. Nope, not once. The Army also has this singularly fascinating practice of taking the people who get fired for incompetence and placing them in jobs that are better than the one they got fired from! Part of me wants to stay in for the NCO's and officers that despite the long ours and poor compensation, find the courage and perseverance within themselves to fight the daily up hill battle against the deluge of lethargic and short sighted bureaucracy that is this modern Army but they are just drops of water in a choked green river. I see no cure for the pollution, just small glimmers of hope, treading just above the surface against the tug of the current. Like little angry turtles poking their heads up between lily pads, lily pads that never went to college.
--
It's just a matter of time before the machines rebel. I'm pretty sure that my Mac is already self aware. It shows remarkable human like characteristics such as a lack of motivation to work properly and it files things away that it thinks will be useful later and then loses them. The minute it asks me if I think about the new generation of Mac books while I'm typing on it, I'm taking it out back and beating it with a shovel.
--
There are three types of people in this world, leaders, followers, and unicorns. The leaders of course are all pro-active and crap so they have taken gather up all the unicorns and keep them locked away so that no one ever gets to see them. This is of course why followers think there are only two kinds of people in the world.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
I'll Be Pretty Surpised if I Survived Long Enough to Reproduce
On a typical day I swing from wildly optimistic to cold and withdrawn on a sort of parabolic path that probably coincides with how much sleep I got the night before and how long it's been since I ate. Part of me wants Iraq to succeed. I've met hard working, honest people who just want to regain a semblance of normalcy and are willing to put their lives at risk to meet that goal but then I see the poverty, garbage clogging the streets, the lack of adequate living, the greed, the corruption, the way those who have wrestled their way in to power now use it to a personal end and leave thousands wandering aimlessly, children who don't go to school, parents with little or no education who can't understand the importance of setting there kids up to make the next generation of Iraqis a more understanding and compassionate one. I don't want to come back here (ever really) when I'm older and still see kids begging for soccer balls and candy from passing humvees. Is this what we've taught them, have they been trained after six years that their best bet is to just sit around and wait for a possible hand out, to beg for trinkets? The Iraqis I know are proud and stubborn people, they carry a certain amount of pride, but I'm surprised how quickly they can turn into babbling idiots if they find there is something being given away. I compare it to when an American finds out a television camera is pointed at them when they are the spectator at a major sporting event or outside the window of the Today Show. The surprise, the rush of adrenaline, the uncontrollable urge to wave like and cry out greetings to loved ones wild eyed and incredulous even though most people are smart enough to realize that a camera mounted across a stadium can't pick up their voice. Maybe I get sad because I see this same trait in myself.
--
A man sat in a bus stop on a busy road in south east Baghdad. A few others stood around him waiting for a truck or a van with room to stop and pick them up. Across the road, workers in blue jump-suits tended to newly planted grass in the median as the pre-noon sun shone overhead. The heat wasn't oppressive yet. It won't be for another month or so, but a warm breeze blew through the scraggly palm trees and kicked up dust from the road. Iraqi police in their mix and match uniforms lazily manned a check point no more than 100 meters up the road resting their AK-47s on the toes of their boots. In the bus stop the man held a grenade inside his jacket. He rocked anxiously back and forth looking down the road as he fingered the safety pin and whispered softly reassuring himself.
His eyes grew wide as he saw the first truck in our convoy, a tan jagged toothed monster on the road compared to the compact and subcompact cars that clog Baghdad's byways, unmistakable. He stood up as our first truck passed and pulled the pin on the grenade. As the second truck came up he darted into the street and hurled the grenade overhand. A half a second. The driver swerved to the left as the parachute on the end of the grenade caught the wind and swung the warhead down as it ignited in a violent orange flash sending a liquid metal bullet tearing through the hinge of the passenger side front door, the TC's foot, and into the pavement. Before he had a chance to turn, shrapnel from the blast peppered the assailants face and he left a tiny trail of blood drops behind as he rushed off in to an alley to escape.
From my seat in the trail vehicle all I saw was the flash. As I heard the crack muffled by the com system on my ears I felt the over pressure of the blast and called out that we'd hit an IED to our 12 about 200 meters ahead. Reports went up on the net instantly, we thought we'd seen the man who threw the grenade run in to a small store up to our right. Everything happens so fast. You go from talking shit to scanning the roof tops all around you looking to see if you're being video taped. You're being watched, It isn't even a question really. Is there a secondary? Is this the beginning of a coordinated attack? Why are the Iraqi police so useful? You think of all these things and nothing at once. It's robotic.
We were lucky and the injuries were not severe. I'd never seen a through and through on a toe before. Then again I'd also never seen a piece of a bolt lodged in a sock. A piece of bolt that had just minutes prior been a part of a door of a humvee. If you looked at the hole the grenade made in the truck you could see a straight path to the ground beneath. An almost surgical wound in metal. This is what we fight against, men in bus stops with bombs in their hands.
--
Later that night on the way back to my room from eating dinner a loud explosion caused me to jump and assume my standard kung-foo stance I take when startled. My platoon leader and I laughed and said something about that one being pretty close. It's all relative, if you are used to hearing things explode you don't really take much notice unless it's happening within a distance that's going to effect you. Then we heard the whistle of the second and third round incoming and we started to run, of course laughing like little girls the whole way like soldiers are trained to react.
Actually I have a documented history of reacting inappropriately to danger. I took a video last deployment of an artillery barrage from my position on a roof top about 800 meters from the explosions. It's completely pitch black except for the for the purplish orange bursts in the distance and out of no where an arrant round lands a couple hundred meters to our right and as you hear the shrapnel fly past the camera you also hear me muffled sound of my idiotic laughter. What is funny about that? Natural selection may catch up with me yet.
A report came in that a civilian contractor had been injured so the aid station spun up and I hopped in the FLA to transport him back. He'd been hit just outside a fight of stairs and had dragged himself inside to take cover. When I showed up I walked down the stairs carefully avoiding the horror movie pools of dark viscus blood covering each step and walked in to the chaos of a new trauma being handled by a mixture of trained and untrained responders. Everyone wants to help, but at some point it always seems to become too many chiefs and not enough indians. Everything looked relatively under control so I went back up stairs to make sure the FLA was prepped and ready to take the casualty back to the aid station. We stabilized him, treated his wounds which were actually fairly extensive, a penetrating chest wound, a huge chunk taken out of the back of his right leg and various other puncture wounds, and drove him to the flight line to be picked up by a medevac bird. On the way to the HLZ, one of our providers was trying to keep the patient awake by asking him questions and he asked if he played sports, and I smirked and thought "not any more"... then I realized I needed a vacation.
I've heard in the days since that mortar rounds don't whistle, hence their name "the silent death". But I've never heard a mortar be called "the silent death" before and I definitely heard a damn whistle that night so whatever. I'm sticking by my story.
--
We carry around a good deal of gender bias with us no matter where we go. We are brought up that boys are blue and girls are pink and it can be difficult to overcome that ingrained prejudice. The other day a female medic asked me if I had any extra "cool guy" magazines because she was going to the firing range. I told her that I had last months Wired and Esquire and even a Pottery Barn catalogue (and no I have no idea why my mother sent me this). She laughed and said she'd be by later to pick them up.
A couple hours later she came by my room and I handed her a small stack of magazines and she gave me a funny look and said "no, dumb ass I meant like magazines for my M4, you have the P-MAG ones right?" Oh, that kind of magazine. With out giving it a second though I had just envisioned her becoming bored at the range and wanting something to read. I felt kind of stupid but I didn't have any extra to give her so I offered her the Pottery Barn instead... and she took it.
--
A man sat in a bus stop on a busy road in south east Baghdad. A few others stood around him waiting for a truck or a van with room to stop and pick them up. Across the road, workers in blue jump-suits tended to newly planted grass in the median as the pre-noon sun shone overhead. The heat wasn't oppressive yet. It won't be for another month or so, but a warm breeze blew through the scraggly palm trees and kicked up dust from the road. Iraqi police in their mix and match uniforms lazily manned a check point no more than 100 meters up the road resting their AK-47s on the toes of their boots. In the bus stop the man held a grenade inside his jacket. He rocked anxiously back and forth looking down the road as he fingered the safety pin and whispered softly reassuring himself.
His eyes grew wide as he saw the first truck in our convoy, a tan jagged toothed monster on the road compared to the compact and subcompact cars that clog Baghdad's byways, unmistakable. He stood up as our first truck passed and pulled the pin on the grenade. As the second truck came up he darted into the street and hurled the grenade overhand. A half a second. The driver swerved to the left as the parachute on the end of the grenade caught the wind and swung the warhead down as it ignited in a violent orange flash sending a liquid metal bullet tearing through the hinge of the passenger side front door, the TC's foot, and into the pavement. Before he had a chance to turn, shrapnel from the blast peppered the assailants face and he left a tiny trail of blood drops behind as he rushed off in to an alley to escape.
From my seat in the trail vehicle all I saw was the flash. As I heard the crack muffled by the com system on my ears I felt the over pressure of the blast and called out that we'd hit an IED to our 12 about 200 meters ahead. Reports went up on the net instantly, we thought we'd seen the man who threw the grenade run in to a small store up to our right. Everything happens so fast. You go from talking shit to scanning the roof tops all around you looking to see if you're being video taped. You're being watched, It isn't even a question really. Is there a secondary? Is this the beginning of a coordinated attack? Why are the Iraqi police so useful? You think of all these things and nothing at once. It's robotic.
We were lucky and the injuries were not severe. I'd never seen a through and through on a toe before. Then again I'd also never seen a piece of a bolt lodged in a sock. A piece of bolt that had just minutes prior been a part of a door of a humvee. If you looked at the hole the grenade made in the truck you could see a straight path to the ground beneath. An almost surgical wound in metal. This is what we fight against, men in bus stops with bombs in their hands.
--
Later that night on the way back to my room from eating dinner a loud explosion caused me to jump and assume my standard kung-foo stance I take when startled. My platoon leader and I laughed and said something about that one being pretty close. It's all relative, if you are used to hearing things explode you don't really take much notice unless it's happening within a distance that's going to effect you. Then we heard the whistle of the second and third round incoming and we started to run, of course laughing like little girls the whole way like soldiers are trained to react.
Actually I have a documented history of reacting inappropriately to danger. I took a video last deployment of an artillery barrage from my position on a roof top about 800 meters from the explosions. It's completely pitch black except for the for the purplish orange bursts in the distance and out of no where an arrant round lands a couple hundred meters to our right and as you hear the shrapnel fly past the camera you also hear me muffled sound of my idiotic laughter. What is funny about that? Natural selection may catch up with me yet.
A report came in that a civilian contractor had been injured so the aid station spun up and I hopped in the FLA to transport him back. He'd been hit just outside a fight of stairs and had dragged himself inside to take cover. When I showed up I walked down the stairs carefully avoiding the horror movie pools of dark viscus blood covering each step and walked in to the chaos of a new trauma being handled by a mixture of trained and untrained responders. Everyone wants to help, but at some point it always seems to become too many chiefs and not enough indians. Everything looked relatively under control so I went back up stairs to make sure the FLA was prepped and ready to take the casualty back to the aid station. We stabilized him, treated his wounds which were actually fairly extensive, a penetrating chest wound, a huge chunk taken out of the back of his right leg and various other puncture wounds, and drove him to the flight line to be picked up by a medevac bird. On the way to the HLZ, one of our providers was trying to keep the patient awake by asking him questions and he asked if he played sports, and I smirked and thought "not any more"... then I realized I needed a vacation.
I've heard in the days since that mortar rounds don't whistle, hence their name "the silent death". But I've never heard a mortar be called "the silent death" before and I definitely heard a damn whistle that night so whatever. I'm sticking by my story.
--
We carry around a good deal of gender bias with us no matter where we go. We are brought up that boys are blue and girls are pink and it can be difficult to overcome that ingrained prejudice. The other day a female medic asked me if I had any extra "cool guy" magazines because she was going to the firing range. I told her that I had last months Wired and Esquire and even a Pottery Barn catalogue (and no I have no idea why my mother sent me this). She laughed and said she'd be by later to pick them up.
A couple hours later she came by my room and I handed her a small stack of magazines and she gave me a funny look and said "no, dumb ass I meant like magazines for my M4, you have the P-MAG ones right?" Oh, that kind of magazine. With out giving it a second though I had just envisioned her becoming bored at the range and wanting something to read. I felt kind of stupid but I didn't have any extra to give her so I offered her the Pottery Barn instead... and she took it.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Physics: The Hard Way
In reception at Fort Jackson before basic training a slighter younger and more cock sure Stephen Covell stands outside of his temporary barracks in loose formation waiting to be marched to the DFAC for dinner. You know what it was like to be there you have to understand that at this stage in the game of soldiering you are nothing. You are lower than dirt, you aren't even scum yet. You're just a civilian that they toss some PT's on and yell at. Our instructor/baby sitter/PTSD poster child is a ex-Ranger who has been called up from inactive reserve for all the wrong reasons. He has a very Italian last name that is constantly being miss-pronounced much to his chagrin. "It's Lange-TEE, like spaghetti, you fucking retards!"
I feel bad for this guy in a way, he is a completely ruined shell of a man. He has a government issued memory stick that he carries around on a loop of 550 cord that in the course a week he has completely destroyed the metal USB connector because he can't figure out how to make it work. Plugging something in to a USB port on a lap top is an act that goes way beyond the amount of effort he is willing to put forth to anything aside from what I assume is a smothering love triangle involving Captain Morgan and Mr. Daniels.
Either way, he is excellent at yelling and making sure you feel generally terrible about your life which is likely the two bullet points they cared about most in filling his position. I don't caring much. I am excited to begin my new life and I've made friends with a fellow Californian named Neil Romans who is college educated and hails from just outside King City and thus is familiar and reassures me that I won't be totally surrounded by complete sociopaths. I also like Neil because he showed up wearing cowboy boots assuming that he would be given shoes once he arrived. The Army, having other plans, issued him his PT's with out shoes so the first few days he walked around in shorts and brown leather boots and took any attention that I would have otherwise garnered with my still untrained mouth and placed it directly on his unique fashion situation.
Neil is a good guy, a farm boy, honest and hard working. He wants to be a helicopter pilot so after he graduated college he enrolled in the Army's Warrant Officer program. The way it works is you go to basic training as a specialist and then the day you graduate you pin sergeant and then go to warrant officer school and then flight school. I thought that maybe I should have done the same since you only need an associates degree to enter but I still want to be a Ranger and do big tough manly things so I don't dwell on it.
So here we are in formation. Neil and I and a hundred or so eager and unruly pre-privates standing in the very same place that I was about to learn a very valuable life lesson. People who know me, people I grew up with, people who are not people who are standing in that formation know that I'm a bit of a smart ass. Shocking but true. I generally say what ever half baked, community college inspired dribble drab comment that travels the very short distance from my brain to my mouth with out doing much risk mitigation. I'm a hit at parties... but this is not a party and these are not my friends, a fact that was about to become blatantly obvious in about thirty seconds.
I am being loud, possibly making some kind of obnoxious noise, perhaps drawing undue attention to myself and suddenly from a few rows back a voice urges me to "shut the fuck up." What? What was this? A person telling me to shut the fuck up? Doesn't he know who I am? I play the guitar, and I'm pretty good! After a quick mental computation, I decide his request will ignored. Soon realizing that he had been dismissed he proceeds to inform me that he is going to "come up there and kick (my) ass". Oh, I think not good sir, for we are in formation, and one does not just break ranks to go about kicking the asses of whomever he sees fit. I tell him this over my shoulder in not so many words. And then something went terribly wrong.
I turn around and plant my nose directly in the heaving chest of a brick wall of a black man who's jail house tattoos echoed that he is in fact "no punk ass bitch" which I realize he is eagerly explaining to me and anyone within the quickly expanding ring of onlookers. My first reaction, due to many years of watching action movies and posing in mirrors is to jump backwards and scream "oh fuck!" A move which I execute with both grace and skill, but having accomplished this and thus exhausting my formal street fight training I begin to calculate the amount of time it will take to curl into the fetal position before I get kicked in the face. Then like an angel or a rodeo clown or perhaps a small child trying to retrieve a stray baseball by stepping in front of a city bus, Neil and his boots suddenly take up residence in between death and I. Neil is not a big guy, no where near the size of the brute who he was rapidly imploring to show mercy on me, the obviously mentally handicapped instigator of this whole ordeal. He's talking and using urgent arm movement but I can't hear what he was saying over the deafening sound of my body rapidly expelling my last reserves of dignity and pride. What ever he said, it worked and death turned and lumbered back to his den having effectively defended his honor against the ignorant suburbanite.
I've never ever in my life felt defeated like that. Never before and never since. I'm not one to put myself in positions where I am the underdog. I'm usually a little more clever. This is why I love the Army. It has given me the opportunity to look stupid, feel stupid and act stupid so many times that I've actually learned something. To talk less and listen more, to take stock the environment around me. To read people, to bluff, and more importantly to make sure I know who the fuck I'm talking to before I say something. Sometimes you just need a really big, black, horrendously frightening reminder of who and what you are, I'm just glad Neil was there because being in a coma kind of defeats the purpose of learning a lesson.
I feel bad for this guy in a way, he is a completely ruined shell of a man. He has a government issued memory stick that he carries around on a loop of 550 cord that in the course a week he has completely destroyed the metal USB connector because he can't figure out how to make it work. Plugging something in to a USB port on a lap top is an act that goes way beyond the amount of effort he is willing to put forth to anything aside from what I assume is a smothering love triangle involving Captain Morgan and Mr. Daniels.
Either way, he is excellent at yelling and making sure you feel generally terrible about your life which is likely the two bullet points they cared about most in filling his position. I don't caring much. I am excited to begin my new life and I've made friends with a fellow Californian named Neil Romans who is college educated and hails from just outside King City and thus is familiar and reassures me that I won't be totally surrounded by complete sociopaths. I also like Neil because he showed up wearing cowboy boots assuming that he would be given shoes once he arrived. The Army, having other plans, issued him his PT's with out shoes so the first few days he walked around in shorts and brown leather boots and took any attention that I would have otherwise garnered with my still untrained mouth and placed it directly on his unique fashion situation.
Neil is a good guy, a farm boy, honest and hard working. He wants to be a helicopter pilot so after he graduated college he enrolled in the Army's Warrant Officer program. The way it works is you go to basic training as a specialist and then the day you graduate you pin sergeant and then go to warrant officer school and then flight school. I thought that maybe I should have done the same since you only need an associates degree to enter but I still want to be a Ranger and do big tough manly things so I don't dwell on it.
So here we are in formation. Neil and I and a hundred or so eager and unruly pre-privates standing in the very same place that I was about to learn a very valuable life lesson. People who know me, people I grew up with, people who are not people who are standing in that formation know that I'm a bit of a smart ass. Shocking but true. I generally say what ever half baked, community college inspired dribble drab comment that travels the very short distance from my brain to my mouth with out doing much risk mitigation. I'm a hit at parties... but this is not a party and these are not my friends, a fact that was about to become blatantly obvious in about thirty seconds.
I am being loud, possibly making some kind of obnoxious noise, perhaps drawing undue attention to myself and suddenly from a few rows back a voice urges me to "shut the fuck up." What? What was this? A person telling me to shut the fuck up? Doesn't he know who I am? I play the guitar, and I'm pretty good! After a quick mental computation, I decide his request will ignored. Soon realizing that he had been dismissed he proceeds to inform me that he is going to "come up there and kick (my) ass". Oh, I think not good sir, for we are in formation, and one does not just break ranks to go about kicking the asses of whomever he sees fit. I tell him this over my shoulder in not so many words. And then something went terribly wrong.
I turn around and plant my nose directly in the heaving chest of a brick wall of a black man who's jail house tattoos echoed that he is in fact "no punk ass bitch" which I realize he is eagerly explaining to me and anyone within the quickly expanding ring of onlookers. My first reaction, due to many years of watching action movies and posing in mirrors is to jump backwards and scream "oh fuck!" A move which I execute with both grace and skill, but having accomplished this and thus exhausting my formal street fight training I begin to calculate the amount of time it will take to curl into the fetal position before I get kicked in the face. Then like an angel or a rodeo clown or perhaps a small child trying to retrieve a stray baseball by stepping in front of a city bus, Neil and his boots suddenly take up residence in between death and I. Neil is not a big guy, no where near the size of the brute who he was rapidly imploring to show mercy on me, the obviously mentally handicapped instigator of this whole ordeal. He's talking and using urgent arm movement but I can't hear what he was saying over the deafening sound of my body rapidly expelling my last reserves of dignity and pride. What ever he said, it worked and death turned and lumbered back to his den having effectively defended his honor against the ignorant suburbanite.
I've never ever in my life felt defeated like that. Never before and never since. I'm not one to put myself in positions where I am the underdog. I'm usually a little more clever. This is why I love the Army. It has given me the opportunity to look stupid, feel stupid and act stupid so many times that I've actually learned something. To talk less and listen more, to take stock the environment around me. To read people, to bluff, and more importantly to make sure I know who the fuck I'm talking to before I say something. Sometimes you just need a really big, black, horrendously frightening reminder of who and what you are, I'm just glad Neil was there because being in a coma kind of defeats the purpose of learning a lesson.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Context free expert from the life of Stephen
Hitch: Here (hands me a small plastic basket loosely modeled after a camouflaged helmet filled with candy.)
Me: Is this supposed to be a parachute?
Hitch: No, it's a helmet.
Me: What's it for?
Hitch: Easter.
Me: Oh, is that today?
Hitch: It's Sunday, isn't it?
Me: Yeah. Is Easter the first Sunday of April?
Hitch: Fuck I dunno! Do I look like a bunny to you?
Me: Mmmm, mini snickers!
Me: Is this supposed to be a parachute?
Hitch: No, it's a helmet.
Me: What's it for?
Hitch: Easter.
Me: Oh, is that today?
Hitch: It's Sunday, isn't it?
Me: Yeah. Is Easter the first Sunday of April?
Hitch: Fuck I dunno! Do I look like a bunny to you?
Me: Mmmm, mini snickers!
Friday, April 3, 2009
Let Dreams Be Dreams
Great fiction, like great men serve as inspiration for the rest of us. It feeds us the archetypes of our inner most passions, giving voice to the sometimes crushing truths we tend to feel only exist quarantined within the boundaries of our own head. Fairy tales remind us of the joy and terror we faced as children when the world was still fresh and full of mystery. Short stories and novels give us passage into lives not lived roads not traveled. We need the novel because sometimes the best way to lead us to the truth is to lie.
The longer we live, generally the less we question; why mess with what works? But once in a while I come across a book that reminds me why I have to write. A story that cuts me loose from the bonds I've strapped myself in through experience and shoves me out of my dark little room into the harsh sunlight, the reality that there is anyways more to learn. I may never write anything of great significance, I'm not a chess player, I don't construct my paragraphs as I would move a pawn always looking to the steps ahead. I'd like to believe I'm that clever or that disciplined but I doubt I am. So I offer up what I know and what I think I know in the way a mason builds a wall, one layer at a time. Perhaps when I am finished I will sit on top and look down and be pleased with what I have created, but we all know the nursery rhyme of what happens to those of us who spend their leisure time atop walls... let me just tell you about this dream I had instead.
I'm standing on the sidewalk outside of the local library in Pacific Grove where I grew up. The sky is black and above me the grey swirling clouds form a ceiling that boils over like cheap special effects from 1980s sci-fi films. There seems to be an strangely large number of people walking around in small groups for it being the middle of the night but at the same time it doesn't feel out of the ordinary. A flock of Canadian geese comes into view out of nowhere and though they are flapping their wings at a normal rate their forward movement barely taking them anywhere and not in the way you'd expect to see birds flying against a head wind straining to conquer the opposing force, they just flap and crawl along. Around their legs are over sized rings of rotating yellow LEDs that are suspended without being held by anything physical. This, of course strikes me as completely ordinary.
As I'm turning the corner of the sidewalk to enter the library somebody calls to me and I turn around to see a man in his 60's with wispy tufts of white hair clinging for dear life to odd parts of his head. He's dressed neatly in a blue collared shirt and and a maroon sweater vest and his hands are tucked absently into the pockets of his corduroy pants.
He's calm but his face is pinched with creases of concern and he says, "Did you hear about Jim?"
Without thinking about which Jim this might be I reply, "No, I've been kind of out of the loop."
"Oh, well he passed away two days ago," he mumbles still noticeably shaken by the news.
This news is at once poignant and useless to me since I still have no idea who white wisps is or why we are speaking about Jim so I offer up a standard line of condolence hoping to placate this old mans sadness and give me an exit from this increasingly awkward exchange. As if lightening had sparked from the heavens, wisps body straightens up and his face twists with rage as his finger fires up in line with my chest marking the spot he'd surely have shot me dead if he'd been armed and he screams, "Well maybe if you weren't such a pot smoking hippie living under a rock you'd have more of an idea what was going on around you!"
How did he know I hate hippies? "I'm a mother fucking soldier in the United States Army, you asshole," I yell as my shoulders square up and my fists clench ready to do battle with this sexagenarian son of a bitch.
"I am too!" His voice clipped on the verge of tears as he turns on his heals and runs away holding his hands like Mr. Burns from the Simpsons.
And then I woke up. Can you believe I was actually angry when I thought back on it. Well first I was confused then amused and finally settled back into mild discontent. I actually cared that someone had disrespected my profession. I'm not that guy. I'm so stubbornly independent that it usually takes blunt force trauma to get through to me but I think it's finally taken me. I think after really doing my job, what I signed up to do, caring for the casualties of war, I'm proud of it now. For years I felt like a fake and like I didn't deserve anyone's praise or thanks but I think I can hold my head up high as strangers shake my hand in airports and when I open care packages from Midwestern church groups (I'm still enjoying my back issues of Family Circle). And so fiction becomes fact and the roles we play turn us into what we are but seriously, how did he know I hate hippies?
The longer we live, generally the less we question; why mess with what works? But once in a while I come across a book that reminds me why I have to write. A story that cuts me loose from the bonds I've strapped myself in through experience and shoves me out of my dark little room into the harsh sunlight, the reality that there is anyways more to learn. I may never write anything of great significance, I'm not a chess player, I don't construct my paragraphs as I would move a pawn always looking to the steps ahead. I'd like to believe I'm that clever or that disciplined but I doubt I am. So I offer up what I know and what I think I know in the way a mason builds a wall, one layer at a time. Perhaps when I am finished I will sit on top and look down and be pleased with what I have created, but we all know the nursery rhyme of what happens to those of us who spend their leisure time atop walls... let me just tell you about this dream I had instead.
I'm standing on the sidewalk outside of the local library in Pacific Grove where I grew up. The sky is black and above me the grey swirling clouds form a ceiling that boils over like cheap special effects from 1980s sci-fi films. There seems to be an strangely large number of people walking around in small groups for it being the middle of the night but at the same time it doesn't feel out of the ordinary. A flock of Canadian geese comes into view out of nowhere and though they are flapping their wings at a normal rate their forward movement barely taking them anywhere and not in the way you'd expect to see birds flying against a head wind straining to conquer the opposing force, they just flap and crawl along. Around their legs are over sized rings of rotating yellow LEDs that are suspended without being held by anything physical. This, of course strikes me as completely ordinary.
As I'm turning the corner of the sidewalk to enter the library somebody calls to me and I turn around to see a man in his 60's with wispy tufts of white hair clinging for dear life to odd parts of his head. He's dressed neatly in a blue collared shirt and and a maroon sweater vest and his hands are tucked absently into the pockets of his corduroy pants.
He's calm but his face is pinched with creases of concern and he says, "Did you hear about Jim?"
Without thinking about which Jim this might be I reply, "No, I've been kind of out of the loop."
"Oh, well he passed away two days ago," he mumbles still noticeably shaken by the news.
This news is at once poignant and useless to me since I still have no idea who white wisps is or why we are speaking about Jim so I offer up a standard line of condolence hoping to placate this old mans sadness and give me an exit from this increasingly awkward exchange. As if lightening had sparked from the heavens, wisps body straightens up and his face twists with rage as his finger fires up in line with my chest marking the spot he'd surely have shot me dead if he'd been armed and he screams, "Well maybe if you weren't such a pot smoking hippie living under a rock you'd have more of an idea what was going on around you!"
How did he know I hate hippies? "I'm a mother fucking soldier in the United States Army, you asshole," I yell as my shoulders square up and my fists clench ready to do battle with this sexagenarian son of a bitch.
"I am too!" His voice clipped on the verge of tears as he turns on his heals and runs away holding his hands like Mr. Burns from the Simpsons.
And then I woke up. Can you believe I was actually angry when I thought back on it. Well first I was confused then amused and finally settled back into mild discontent. I actually cared that someone had disrespected my profession. I'm not that guy. I'm so stubbornly independent that it usually takes blunt force trauma to get through to me but I think it's finally taken me. I think after really doing my job, what I signed up to do, caring for the casualties of war, I'm proud of it now. For years I felt like a fake and like I didn't deserve anyone's praise or thanks but I think I can hold my head up high as strangers shake my hand in airports and when I open care packages from Midwestern church groups (I'm still enjoying my back issues of Family Circle). And so fiction becomes fact and the roles we play turn us into what we are but seriously, how did he know I hate hippies?
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
God is a Smoker and The Truth About Anger
I'm doing pretty good so far. I'll be home in May for a couple weeks then maybe as early as September for good. But more likely November. Going to be single by then?? :)
Here's my latest journal thang for you since I didn't have your named on the list. It will be on it next time.
Foreign relations is a tricky business. Foreign relations with people who speak a language with absolutely no english cognates is even trickier. Hand gestures are useful. Body language works too but when it comes down to it you're still a unwashed American trudging through sand. I try not to offend usually. There's days when the right combination of caffeine, sleep deprivation and frustration set me right on the edge of homicide but mostly I'm a passive observer watching hands and faces through the glass porthole of my cocoon in the rear of the humvee.
Some time ago while pulling security for a meeting between civil affairs and the Iraqi workers they support I was given a falafel (some falafel?) to eat since we were going get back after the DFAC closed. If you've never had it, falafel is kind of like peta bread stuffed with what I guess are little fried balls of some kind of bean mush spiced up and laid on a bed of lettuce and chopped tomatoes and onions. Depending on the vendor they are usually pretty tasty especially if the bread is fresh. There was a group of teen age Iraqi kids that had been asking me questions all morning sitting to my left and by the time the food came around I was getting pretty tired of playing "what's this?" with the stuff on my kit so I had removed myself from their semi circle and sat off alone to space out for a few minutes while I enjoyed the first thing I'd eaten that day. As I ate I noticed that they had somehow become even more interested my activities and I tried to ignore them staring at me and asking me questions in arabic that I was sure they knew I didn't speak by that time. As I finished I swept a little pile of crumbs that had fallen on the floor and one of the kids jumped up which made me jump up and start to raise my rifle. A middle-aged man in a tan leather jacket who had been following the exchange from halfway across the room walked and with a disapproving glare and looked down his nose at me as the boy who had jumped up began to speak to him in rapid spurts. The man then asked me if knew God. In the way you'd ask a child holding a baseball bat, who broke the vase.
"We believe that food is a gift from God and to disrespect food is to disrespect God," he continued. "The boy wants to pick up your crumbs for you and dispose of them properly. That is what he's been asking you to do."
Well of course, silly me how could I have misinterpreted that? There were two distinctly separate reactions going on in my mind at that moment. One was a feeling of total embarrassment and the other was the urge to put the butt of my rifle through this mans face for talking to me like I was supposed to understand the nuances of Muslim culture because my job forces me to spend time under it's watchful eye. In the second it took me to decide my course of action I went with embarrassment. I felt stupid, uneducated and disappointed which aren't three things I'm used to feeling especially at once so I apologized and looked like an idiot as I bent over the bulk of my kit to pick up pea sized falafel bits off a dirty floor. The boy came over and took them from my hand and disposed of them properly... which was to put them in the ashtray. So in the same day I learned though God isn't so hot on feet, he isn't above refrying the occasional Newport.
---
I'd like to tell you that we do wild and crazy things. I'd like to have stories that are exciting. I'd like to say that we did a chinese fire drill in the middle of a busy Baghdad street. But we've definitely never done anything like that.
---
Everything you've ever been taught about anger is a lie! The kind and gentle grease we use to lube the cogs of the social machine is a fabrication, a fiction woven to usher the meek in to their position of biblical prophecy. No really though, think about the last time you were really angry for a good reason. A righteous fury. Do you remember the feeling that swept through you entire body, the pulsing, pounding energy, the strength it gave you to fight for what you believed in, even if it was just the fact that your position at the register got swooped because you were oogling the cover of US Weekly. It's a rush and I think we rob ourselves of one of our most useful emotions by tempering our feelings. Just make sure you're right first.
I wear dark Oakley wrap around sunglasses during the day on patrol. It helps the ol' crows feet from getting any worse and it's like a shield against stares. People in this country have a staring problem. Like a real glaring into your eyes for way to long kind of problem. It's not something you get much in America even if someone doesn't like you. It's unnerving at times and I've had to teach myself not to look away. I make it a game now. Who can stare longer. Usually I win because... probably because I'm the only one who knows it's a game. But one day I was caught off guard.
In my usual seat in the back of the truck I was staring out at traffic with my body turned toward the outside resting up again the 240 ammo cans. This sometimes makes my back feel better after sitting in my gear for a long period. The cars were at a stand still waiting for our trucks to move so everyone was upset to begin with. There is no patience in driving here. Every little delay is a catastrophe in the mind of a Baghdad motorist and in this city there's always a delay. It's not unusual to watch a myriad combination of wild gesticulation accented by yelling and the ever present sound of the horn. But this was different.
A man with a scraggly black beard was staring at me from the cab of his white flatbed truck. Not staring at my truck or the machine gun mounted on top or our driver but directly at me. His face glistening with new sweat and his dark blue shirt dirty and loose around his neck he actually was leaning forward around another man to his side to look at me. I looked away. It didn't bother me at first because like I said it's not unusual to see any of this but something started burning inside me chest. A strange sensation began to build inside me and I looked back at him from behind my dark glasses and I occurred to me that I wasn't playing around with this one. I was getting mad. Really mad. I took my glasses off and stared with what I can only assume was a face I tried to configure into an internationally recognizable look of "I don't feel like being fucking stared at". But he kept glaring at me his face stuck at this infuriating point between stupidity and anger. And I exploded.
"I'm going to come out of this truck and FUCKING KILL YOU!"
The vic system on my ears went silent. The rest of the truck had been chatting back and forth before my outburst but all was quite now.
"Doc, you ok?"
Uhh. Yeah. The man was no longer looking at me. He had sunken back into his seat so far I couldn't see him behind the man at his side who was nervously avoiding everything in our general direction. My whole body was quivering. I felt like a lion inside of a tiger riding an elephant on a rocket. And for what? I don't know but it was amazing. I never get angry but for that brief moment the crystal clear vision of throwing open my door, jumping up, slamming my M4 through the window of that truck and laying waste to everything on the other end of the barrel seemed like the only sensible and correct course of action given my circumstance. Do I recommend that to anyone? No. But everyone should have that experience at least once. Or if you're our TC, once every 15 minutes.
Here's my latest journal thang for you since I didn't have your named on the list. It will be on it next time.
Foreign relations is a tricky business. Foreign relations with people who speak a language with absolutely no english cognates is even trickier. Hand gestures are useful. Body language works too but when it comes down to it you're still a unwashed American trudging through sand. I try not to offend usually. There's days when the right combination of caffeine, sleep deprivation and frustration set me right on the edge of homicide but mostly I'm a passive observer watching hands and faces through the glass porthole of my cocoon in the rear of the humvee.
Some time ago while pulling security for a meeting between civil affairs and the Iraqi workers they support I was given a falafel (some falafel?) to eat since we were going get back after the DFAC closed. If you've never had it, falafel is kind of like peta bread stuffed with what I guess are little fried balls of some kind of bean mush spiced up and laid on a bed of lettuce and chopped tomatoes and onions. Depending on the vendor they are usually pretty tasty especially if the bread is fresh. There was a group of teen age Iraqi kids that had been asking me questions all morning sitting to my left and by the time the food came around I was getting pretty tired of playing "what's this?" with the stuff on my kit so I had removed myself from their semi circle and sat off alone to space out for a few minutes while I enjoyed the first thing I'd eaten that day. As I ate I noticed that they had somehow become even more interested my activities and I tried to ignore them staring at me and asking me questions in arabic that I was sure they knew I didn't speak by that time. As I finished I swept a little pile of crumbs that had fallen on the floor and one of the kids jumped up which made me jump up and start to raise my rifle. A middle-aged man in a tan leather jacket who had been following the exchange from halfway across the room walked and with a disapproving glare and looked down his nose at me as the boy who had jumped up began to speak to him in rapid spurts. The man then asked me if knew God. In the way you'd ask a child holding a baseball bat, who broke the vase.
"We believe that food is a gift from God and to disrespect food is to disrespect God," he continued. "The boy wants to pick up your crumbs for you and dispose of them properly. That is what he's been asking you to do."
Well of course, silly me how could I have misinterpreted that? There were two distinctly separate reactions going on in my mind at that moment. One was a feeling of total embarrassment and the other was the urge to put the butt of my rifle through this mans face for talking to me like I was supposed to understand the nuances of Muslim culture because my job forces me to spend time under it's watchful eye. In the second it took me to decide my course of action I went with embarrassment. I felt stupid, uneducated and disappointed which aren't three things I'm used to feeling especially at once so I apologized and looked like an idiot as I bent over the bulk of my kit to pick up pea sized falafel bits off a dirty floor. The boy came over and took them from my hand and disposed of them properly... which was to put them in the ashtray. So in the same day I learned though God isn't so hot on feet, he isn't above refrying the occasional Newport.
---
I'd like to tell you that we do wild and crazy things. I'd like to have stories that are exciting. I'd like to say that we did a chinese fire drill in the middle of a busy Baghdad street. But we've definitely never done anything like that.
---
Everything you've ever been taught about anger is a lie! The kind and gentle grease we use to lube the cogs of the social machine is a fabrication, a fiction woven to usher the meek in to their position of biblical prophecy. No really though, think about the last time you were really angry for a good reason. A righteous fury. Do you remember the feeling that swept through you entire body, the pulsing, pounding energy, the strength it gave you to fight for what you believed in, even if it was just the fact that your position at the register got swooped because you were oogling the cover of US Weekly. It's a rush and I think we rob ourselves of one of our most useful emotions by tempering our feelings. Just make sure you're right first.
I wear dark Oakley wrap around sunglasses during the day on patrol. It helps the ol' crows feet from getting any worse and it's like a shield against stares. People in this country have a staring problem. Like a real glaring into your eyes for way to long kind of problem. It's not something you get much in America even if someone doesn't like you. It's unnerving at times and I've had to teach myself not to look away. I make it a game now. Who can stare longer. Usually I win because... probably because I'm the only one who knows it's a game. But one day I was caught off guard.
In my usual seat in the back of the truck I was staring out at traffic with my body turned toward the outside resting up again the 240 ammo cans. This sometimes makes my back feel better after sitting in my gear for a long period. The cars were at a stand still waiting for our trucks to move so everyone was upset to begin with. There is no patience in driving here. Every little delay is a catastrophe in the mind of a Baghdad motorist and in this city there's always a delay. It's not unusual to watch a myriad combination of wild gesticulation accented by yelling and the ever present sound of the horn. But this was different.
A man with a scraggly black beard was staring at me from the cab of his white flatbed truck. Not staring at my truck or the machine gun mounted on top or our driver but directly at me. His face glistening with new sweat and his dark blue shirt dirty and loose around his neck he actually was leaning forward around another man to his side to look at me. I looked away. It didn't bother me at first because like I said it's not unusual to see any of this but something started burning inside me chest. A strange sensation began to build inside me and I looked back at him from behind my dark glasses and I occurred to me that I wasn't playing around with this one. I was getting mad. Really mad. I took my glasses off and stared with what I can only assume was a face I tried to configure into an internationally recognizable look of "I don't feel like being fucking stared at". But he kept glaring at me his face stuck at this infuriating point between stupidity and anger. And I exploded.
"I'm going to come out of this truck and FUCKING KILL YOU!"
The vic system on my ears went silent. The rest of the truck had been chatting back and forth before my outburst but all was quite now.
"Doc, you ok?"
Uhh. Yeah. The man was no longer looking at me. He had sunken back into his seat so far I couldn't see him behind the man at his side who was nervously avoiding everything in our general direction. My whole body was quivering. I felt like a lion inside of a tiger riding an elephant on a rocket. And for what? I don't know but it was amazing. I never get angry but for that brief moment the crystal clear vision of throwing open my door, jumping up, slamming my M4 through the window of that truck and laying waste to everything on the other end of the barrel seemed like the only sensible and correct course of action given my circumstance. Do I recommend that to anyone? No. But everyone should have that experience at least once. Or if you're our TC, once every 15 minutes.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Sucks To Be The Carrot
Many a strange event I have seen in this life, but never would I have guessed that I would witness the act of a sheep being inflated like a ballon with a bike pump. It was a routine afternoon with Team Black meandering through the mahalos, ferrying soldiers between FOB's, JSS's, COP's and other acronyms, nothing out of the ordinary. It may or may not have been the same day we saw live Hawks for sale in the market. According to our interpreters they cost somewhere between $10 and $1500 apparently allowing some margin of error. Regardless, I was absently staring into the middle distance as we rounded a corner when I saw it. Two boys in the median flanking a freshly slaughtered goat carcass that now more resembled a pinata than it's former animal self. A good person would have quietly observed the unfamiliar customs of a foreign people with respect and patient interest. I, however, burst out laughing. Laughing so loud that the kids heard me 30 feet away through 3 inches of steel armor and looked up as we drove by. They saw me smiling and pointing and smiled and waved back as they continued to pump more air into their project.
--
Recently a couple one liter bottles of light yellow hand soap showed up in our bathroom. Crudely written on the side in sharpie marker are the words "hand soap." These words have been X'ed out and underneath them in even more primitive script appears the word "urine." I refuse to use this soap. I know that the labels do not truthfully describe what the bottles contain but the thought that there may even be a remote chance that some percentage of what ever is in those bottles is actually the aforementioned waste liquid, won't allow me to take the chance. This either speaks to how much we allow our perception to shape our reality, or how little I trust my coworkers.
--
There are few pleasures more pure than watching your boss be mauled by a police dog. Seriously, it's hilarious, even if like me, you like your boss. It's like watching a home video of a guy taking a shot in the nuts with his kids wiffle bat. You laugh because it isn't you. And if it is you, you laugh because you can't legally murder your kid.
The medical platoon somehow coordinated a session with the MP's to act as agitators for their K9 counterparts. They dressed us up in a over sized padded green bomber jacket and gave us specific instructions on how to act around the working dogs. Unlike working girls, the standard "no eye contact", "pay first" rules don't apply. We were told to some important tips like to twist our arm if the dog grabs more than just the jacket and not to make a fist so your hand won't be crushed if it's targeted. I didn't volunteer.
MP's use a few select breeds for police work. We got the pleasure of watching a Belgian Malamute, which look like a German Shepherd mated with a harpoon, leap full speed and attach itself to one exposed appendage after another. The full take downs were the most entertaining but it was also funny to watch the dog "watch" the victim when it was ordered not to bite. |'ve never seen an animal display such unadulterated desire. It's the real world counterpart to a Bugs Bunny's eyes turning into carrots. None of the MP's had ever unleashed their dogs in a real world situation but I can tell you that you definitely don't want to be on the receiving end of those teeth.
Sucks to be the carrot.
--
Recently a couple one liter bottles of light yellow hand soap showed up in our bathroom. Crudely written on the side in sharpie marker are the words "hand soap." These words have been X'ed out and underneath them in even more primitive script appears the word "urine." I refuse to use this soap. I know that the labels do not truthfully describe what the bottles contain but the thought that there may even be a remote chance that some percentage of what ever is in those bottles is actually the aforementioned waste liquid, won't allow me to take the chance. This either speaks to how much we allow our perception to shape our reality, or how little I trust my coworkers.
--
There are few pleasures more pure than watching your boss be mauled by a police dog. Seriously, it's hilarious, even if like me, you like your boss. It's like watching a home video of a guy taking a shot in the nuts with his kids wiffle bat. You laugh because it isn't you. And if it is you, you laugh because you can't legally murder your kid.
The medical platoon somehow coordinated a session with the MP's to act as agitators for their K9 counterparts. They dressed us up in a over sized padded green bomber jacket and gave us specific instructions on how to act around the working dogs. Unlike working girls, the standard "no eye contact", "pay first" rules don't apply. We were told to some important tips like to twist our arm if the dog grabs more than just the jacket and not to make a fist so your hand won't be crushed if it's targeted. I didn't volunteer.
MP's use a few select breeds for police work. We got the pleasure of watching a Belgian Malamute, which look like a German Shepherd mated with a harpoon, leap full speed and attach itself to one exposed appendage after another. The full take downs were the most entertaining but it was also funny to watch the dog "watch" the victim when it was ordered not to bite. |'ve never seen an animal display such unadulterated desire. It's the real world counterpart to a Bugs Bunny's eyes turning into carrots. None of the MP's had ever unleashed their dogs in a real world situation but I can tell you that you definitely don't want to be on the receiving end of those teeth.
Sucks to be the carrot.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Lovely Hat!
We are pirates and lost boys, the dreamers and downtrodden; men who gave up one life for another that few truly embrace. From all over the country and the world we came together and formed a unit and a family, bound both emotionally and contractually. Here rank and ability replace skin color and privilege, regardless of where we came from we are here now, sharing both triumph and tragedy as one. That’s not to say that we don’t have our differences, it’s just pleasing in a way to watch television and see how differently soldiers process hardship. It’s empowering in a place where you have control over so little.
I get concerned for the younger guys because I know how it feels to stare across that divide. To see on the other side your old life and friends knowing there may not be a way to bridge the distance. All I can do is help them along on their journey. It’s easy to see the anger in their eyes and hear the arguments through these thin walls. They know they are missing out on a lot by being here. Relationships are hard enough when you can sit face to face but how anyone can build a new marriage from across the world is beyond me. We aren’t that patient of a culture.
--
I got to walk through one of the poorer neighborhoods in our OE (operational environment) a couple weeks ago where we were to pull security for a school opening. It’s hard to gauge how people really feel about us still being here when they seem to have day to day operations pretty well under control. To be there and see the happiness on the faces of both the children and the parents helped clear up some doubts I’d had. They understand it’s going to be a long, long journey back to normality after all the conflict but there is a strong national pride at least among the people in Baghdad. They want to see improvement and they are working toward that goal.
--
There’s a giant poofy white blimp that flies over our FOB keeping a watchful eye on the surrounding area. I’ve named it Mr. Blimp and I sort of worship it like a god. I do little dances for it and in turn it never transmits video to the TOC of me picking my nose when I walk home from the DFAC after dark. It feels like a sort of Orwellian Stay-Puff Marshmellow Man is constantly looking over my shoulder. It’s comforting and creepy all at once, like family reunions.
--
We’ve adopted a sort of unit mascot in the visage of the one they call Swamp Thing. If you haven’t seen the pictures of him I’ll try and describe just how awesome this guy is. Personally I think it’s an act. We thought that he was crazy when we first got here because he looked so incredibly dirty but after talking (and a few photo ops) with him I’ve come to the conclusion that he does this act for money. It’s bad luck not to give money to the needy here, so the homeless and mentally ill roll around with fat wads of cash in their hands as they walk down the street asking for more.
Swampy hangs out on a road that is pretty much entirely made up of automotive repair shops so it isn’t uncommon for people to be covered in dirt and grease from working on vehicles, but his get up is unique. His outfit is something of a cross between a burlap sack and a special needs Peter Pan tunic replete with pieces of fabric added in the way you would put camouflage on a guille suit. It looks tailored in a way but completely haphazard in another. His face and arms appear covered not just in filth but actual caked on chunks of mud, one particular piece protruding from under his left eye hasn’t seemed to change in either size or consistency in the weeks that I’ve been paying attention. His hair is a mess of semi-dreadlocked lumps forming a natural helmet that I would assume is solid to the touch… I will not test this theory.
Oddly enough he doesn’t smell. In a country where personal hygiene regiments are pliable, I’d say he’s pretty high on the standards scale. How he achieves this is a mystery of both nature and science but I believe that what ever the answer is it may also help us discover a cure for cancer.
--
Our truck is somewhat of an anomaly. We actually have fun when we roll outside the wire. It’s rare to find a combination of people who can sit in a confined space for 12 hours at a time and not get bored of each other. This is the first time I’ve felt like I was working with people who I consider more than just co-workers.
A few days ago we were taking a left hand turn onto a street and cut the corner a little sharp forcing a taxi to have to back up to let us through. Our TC told our gunner to stand up and give the taxi driver a “loud shukran” by which he meant say “thank you” loud enough so the taxi driver could here us. Our gunner, who we always joke with because he isn’t very intimidating despite his size and the arsenal at his disposal, stands up and yells “LOUD SHUKRAN!” causing us to almost hit a pylon because everyone in our truck including our driver were laughing so hard we couldn’t see straight.
It reminded me of that Daniel Tosh stand-up where he wonders if there has ever been a case of polite tourrette syndrome, “LOVELY HAT!”
I get concerned for the younger guys because I know how it feels to stare across that divide. To see on the other side your old life and friends knowing there may not be a way to bridge the distance. All I can do is help them along on their journey. It’s easy to see the anger in their eyes and hear the arguments through these thin walls. They know they are missing out on a lot by being here. Relationships are hard enough when you can sit face to face but how anyone can build a new marriage from across the world is beyond me. We aren’t that patient of a culture.
--
I got to walk through one of the poorer neighborhoods in our OE (operational environment) a couple weeks ago where we were to pull security for a school opening. It’s hard to gauge how people really feel about us still being here when they seem to have day to day operations pretty well under control. To be there and see the happiness on the faces of both the children and the parents helped clear up some doubts I’d had. They understand it’s going to be a long, long journey back to normality after all the conflict but there is a strong national pride at least among the people in Baghdad. They want to see improvement and they are working toward that goal.
--
There’s a giant poofy white blimp that flies over our FOB keeping a watchful eye on the surrounding area. I’ve named it Mr. Blimp and I sort of worship it like a god. I do little dances for it and in turn it never transmits video to the TOC of me picking my nose when I walk home from the DFAC after dark. It feels like a sort of Orwellian Stay-Puff Marshmellow Man is constantly looking over my shoulder. It’s comforting and creepy all at once, like family reunions.
--
We’ve adopted a sort of unit mascot in the visage of the one they call Swamp Thing. If you haven’t seen the pictures of him I’ll try and describe just how awesome this guy is. Personally I think it’s an act. We thought that he was crazy when we first got here because he looked so incredibly dirty but after talking (and a few photo ops) with him I’ve come to the conclusion that he does this act for money. It’s bad luck not to give money to the needy here, so the homeless and mentally ill roll around with fat wads of cash in their hands as they walk down the street asking for more.
Swampy hangs out on a road that is pretty much entirely made up of automotive repair shops so it isn’t uncommon for people to be covered in dirt and grease from working on vehicles, but his get up is unique. His outfit is something of a cross between a burlap sack and a special needs Peter Pan tunic replete with pieces of fabric added in the way you would put camouflage on a guille suit. It looks tailored in a way but completely haphazard in another. His face and arms appear covered not just in filth but actual caked on chunks of mud, one particular piece protruding from under his left eye hasn’t seemed to change in either size or consistency in the weeks that I’ve been paying attention. His hair is a mess of semi-dreadlocked lumps forming a natural helmet that I would assume is solid to the touch… I will not test this theory.
Oddly enough he doesn’t smell. In a country where personal hygiene regiments are pliable, I’d say he’s pretty high on the standards scale. How he achieves this is a mystery of both nature and science but I believe that what ever the answer is it may also help us discover a cure for cancer.
--
Our truck is somewhat of an anomaly. We actually have fun when we roll outside the wire. It’s rare to find a combination of people who can sit in a confined space for 12 hours at a time and not get bored of each other. This is the first time I’ve felt like I was working with people who I consider more than just co-workers.
A few days ago we were taking a left hand turn onto a street and cut the corner a little sharp forcing a taxi to have to back up to let us through. Our TC told our gunner to stand up and give the taxi driver a “loud shukran” by which he meant say “thank you” loud enough so the taxi driver could here us. Our gunner, who we always joke with because he isn’t very intimidating despite his size and the arsenal at his disposal, stands up and yells “LOUD SHUKRAN!” causing us to almost hit a pylon because everyone in our truck including our driver were laughing so hard we couldn’t see straight.
It reminded me of that Daniel Tosh stand-up where he wonders if there has ever been a case of polite tourrette syndrome, “LOVELY HAT!”
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
25 Things
1. Sometimes I really enjoy the smell of skunk but only if it's been dead for a while.
2. Being on top of a latter makes me very uncomfortable, but jumping out of airplanes is fun.
3. The only movie I have ever been able to recite verbatim is "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective"
4. I long to own a Boston Terrier named Mr. Pants.
5. My track record with keeping animals is pretty dismal. Mr. Pants will have to wait.
6. I want to be a journalist but I can't spell and have only a basic understanding of English grammar.
7. I don't believe that there's anything after death but if there is, I want to be a poltergeist.
8. I feel like getting older is inherently sad as all human experience ultimately ends with loss and death but that being said there is so much beauty to discover that I feel the scale remains balanced.
9. I love guns but I would never hunt for sport.
10. Not as much now but I used to have vivid visions of hurting myself while doing everyday activities like accidentally shutting my finger in the car door. This caries over to my current occupation but I do it on purpose to make sure I'm ready for the worst possible scenario.
11. The fastest I've ever run a 2 mile was 12:34.
12. I studied Wicca for a time but realized that it didn't feel any more real than any other religion.
13. I'm not sure I have an ultimate goal, just lots of reoccurring fantasies of things I will one day accomplish.
14. I keep wishing for another big earth quake; they are so much fun! (minus the property damage and injuries).
15. My most creative times are either late at night or when I'm avoiding doing something else.
16. No, I won't write a song about you, and if I do you probably won't know about it.
17. No, I won't forget about you when and if I become famous.
18. I've come to realize that true friendship is the rarest and most valuable commodity known to man.
19. I've learned words in four different languages since I got to Iraq.
20. There is one person who I've known who I would have no problems murdering as I believe it would be a service to mankind. (hint: that person isn't tagged on this list)
21. I'm somewhat of a RedBull fan boy. It is the one company I could be a sales rep for and feel good at the end of the day. (maybe)
22. If I ever get married all my groomsmen will be wearing kilts. And I'm getting Flogging Molly to play.
23. Places are just places. I've been all over. It's people that make a place special.
24. Austin, Tx is the one place I've found outside California that I feel I could call home.
25. It's the Catalina fuckin' Wine Mixer! POW!!
2. Being on top of a latter makes me very uncomfortable, but jumping out of airplanes is fun.
3. The only movie I have ever been able to recite verbatim is "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective"
4. I long to own a Boston Terrier named Mr. Pants.
5. My track record with keeping animals is pretty dismal. Mr. Pants will have to wait.
6. I want to be a journalist but I can't spell and have only a basic understanding of English grammar.
7. I don't believe that there's anything after death but if there is, I want to be a poltergeist.
8. I feel like getting older is inherently sad as all human experience ultimately ends with loss and death but that being said there is so much beauty to discover that I feel the scale remains balanced.
9. I love guns but I would never hunt for sport.
10. Not as much now but I used to have vivid visions of hurting myself while doing everyday activities like accidentally shutting my finger in the car door. This caries over to my current occupation but I do it on purpose to make sure I'm ready for the worst possible scenario.
11. The fastest I've ever run a 2 mile was 12:34.
12. I studied Wicca for a time but realized that it didn't feel any more real than any other religion.
13. I'm not sure I have an ultimate goal, just lots of reoccurring fantasies of things I will one day accomplish.
14. I keep wishing for another big earth quake; they are so much fun! (minus the property damage and injuries).
15. My most creative times are either late at night or when I'm avoiding doing something else.
16. No, I won't write a song about you, and if I do you probably won't know about it.
17. No, I won't forget about you when and if I become famous.
18. I've come to realize that true friendship is the rarest and most valuable commodity known to man.
19. I've learned words in four different languages since I got to Iraq.
20. There is one person who I've known who I would have no problems murdering as I believe it would be a service to mankind. (hint: that person isn't tagged on this list)
21. I'm somewhat of a RedBull fan boy. It is the one company I could be a sales rep for and feel good at the end of the day. (maybe)
22. If I ever get married all my groomsmen will be wearing kilts. And I'm getting Flogging Molly to play.
23. Places are just places. I've been all over. It's people that make a place special.
24. Austin, Tx is the one place I've found outside California that I feel I could call home.
25. It's the Catalina fuckin' Wine Mixer! POW!!
Thursday, January 22, 2009
All the Kings Horses and All the Kings Men
Baghdad reveals itself in layers, from trash filled slums and street side markets to gated communities where men and women wear western style clothing. No two parts are the same. A piece of our mission is here is to deal with the contractors who are helping to rebuild the infrastructure of the city which means we have to travel to different areas to negotiate prices and check on the status of existing projects. One thing I have determined from this is that during the invasion we must have targeted masons. There don’t seem to be many skilled ones left. Uneven brick walls grow on the sides of existing buildings like gray stone tumors and not just in the poor areas. Most of the new construction in the city is done by hand and let’s just say that Baghdad is fortunate not to be near any fault lines. I’m a contractor’s son; I can’t help but be a little critical.
A few days back, after we had been given the full tour of the inner workings of a factory that seemed to manufacture nothing but sparks like the backgrounds in 80’s hair metal music videos, we were taken to the main hospital for the entire country of Iraq. While somewhat dated in comparison to a modern American facility, the inside of the hospital was years ahead of any building I’d been in prior. We were there to inspect the elevators that we had paid to have replaced, I think. While, as far as I know, no one in our group of was a licensed elevator technician, we eventually decided everything seemed to be in order after looking at a few different specimens. You press the button and some time in the next ten minutes the door opens, bam, progress. Like their cars, Iraqis try to stuff as many bodies as is physically possible into any moving container. In a space where 8 Americans would have stood comfortably, somewhere near 20 men and women crammed together and waited for the door to close. When the door finally closed it immediately opened again and repeated this little dance three times while the faces of its passengers looked on with something between languor and boredom. I tried not to laugh but I couldn’t hold it. Those on the elevator didn’t share my enthusiasm. Occasionally I am a truly obnoxious American.
A week or so has passed since I wrote those first two paragraphs. I wish I could say it’s been all quiet on the western front but we haven’t always been lucky. I doubt it would be worth going into much detail about the work I've been a part of but suffice to say, I wake up most mornings with the image of it staring back at me. I used to think I wanted to be the exact same person when I got home that I was before I deployed but I know now that it would be a waste. I can think of nothing worse than giving a year of my life over to get back the same perspective I had before. Adulthood, or the awkward and sometimes painful opening chapter to it, has proven to be not so much and answer to the questions of adolescence, but rather a continuing dialogue with possibility and experience. It’s sad and beautiful and you begin to understand why art springs forth from our fingers and our mouths; why we have to create. Something has to make sense when it all starts falling apart.
A few days back, after we had been given the full tour of the inner workings of a factory that seemed to manufacture nothing but sparks like the backgrounds in 80’s hair metal music videos, we were taken to the main hospital for the entire country of Iraq. While somewhat dated in comparison to a modern American facility, the inside of the hospital was years ahead of any building I’d been in prior. We were there to inspect the elevators that we had paid to have replaced, I think. While, as far as I know, no one in our group of was a licensed elevator technician, we eventually decided everything seemed to be in order after looking at a few different specimens. You press the button and some time in the next ten minutes the door opens, bam, progress. Like their cars, Iraqis try to stuff as many bodies as is physically possible into any moving container. In a space where 8 Americans would have stood comfortably, somewhere near 20 men and women crammed together and waited for the door to close. When the door finally closed it immediately opened again and repeated this little dance three times while the faces of its passengers looked on with something between languor and boredom. I tried not to laugh but I couldn’t hold it. Those on the elevator didn’t share my enthusiasm. Occasionally I am a truly obnoxious American.
A week or so has passed since I wrote those first two paragraphs. I wish I could say it’s been all quiet on the western front but we haven’t always been lucky. I doubt it would be worth going into much detail about the work I've been a part of but suffice to say, I wake up most mornings with the image of it staring back at me. I used to think I wanted to be the exact same person when I got home that I was before I deployed but I know now that it would be a waste. I can think of nothing worse than giving a year of my life over to get back the same perspective I had before. Adulthood, or the awkward and sometimes painful opening chapter to it, has proven to be not so much and answer to the questions of adolescence, but rather a continuing dialogue with possibility and experience. It’s sad and beautiful and you begin to understand why art springs forth from our fingers and our mouths; why we have to create. Something has to make sense when it all starts falling apart.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
The Price We Pay
How do you prepare yourself to hold the lifeless body of another soldier in your hands as his blood soaked uniform is cut away? His face has been burned into my memory; I can see it as clearly as you remember your own family. From the neck up he seemed asleep, his face at peace, eyes shut but the violence of his injuries were so complete. To see this body, young and strong and lean torn and shredded, that is something I’ll live with for the rest of my life. He wouldn’t have been conscious long, which is a blessing of sorts. His skin was still warm to as I removed his boots and socks and tucked his feet in to the black body bag. On the table next to me lay his last ties to this world, a small silver chain, a platinum wedding band, a note book. I didn’t even know his name at the time.
I would like to give this experience to those left in this world who believe that hatred is still a useful expression of will. What has this solved? We won’t leave this country any sooner. This mans wife and family have lost something ultimately irreplaceable and what has this bought? Has it brought back the lives of those who we have killed? Is any one’s God pleased by this? I wish the feeling of holding this man on everyone and no one. It is a terrible lesson to have to touch the product of hate, to have your hands slick with blood and see the faces of those left behind. Is this the legacy we want to leave for our children? I don’t want to live in a country where the act of love is viewed as obscene but we don’t blink an eye at the tragedy of the evening news.
I don’t have anything for this. I can’t describe how it feels to drape the American flag another soldier lost in Iraq, how it looked; I can’t do anything right now. It just feels empty.
---
A few hours later I walked with a small group of medics through a cordon of a thousand soldiers waiting to pay their respects in the cold desert night. It's unnatural to see humans like this and it was unnerving to be the focus of the attention of so many eyes you can't see. They stood on the road to the flight line at parade rest and said nothing. A full moon cast a murky shadow over the faces of the figures I passed and I thought, tomorrow night we could be standing here for any one of these soldiers, they could be standing here for me.
I would like to give this experience to those left in this world who believe that hatred is still a useful expression of will. What has this solved? We won’t leave this country any sooner. This mans wife and family have lost something ultimately irreplaceable and what has this bought? Has it brought back the lives of those who we have killed? Is any one’s God pleased by this? I wish the feeling of holding this man on everyone and no one. It is a terrible lesson to have to touch the product of hate, to have your hands slick with blood and see the faces of those left behind. Is this the legacy we want to leave for our children? I don’t want to live in a country where the act of love is viewed as obscene but we don’t blink an eye at the tragedy of the evening news.
I don’t have anything for this. I can’t describe how it feels to drape the American flag another soldier lost in Iraq, how it looked; I can’t do anything right now. It just feels empty.
---
A few hours later I walked with a small group of medics through a cordon of a thousand soldiers waiting to pay their respects in the cold desert night. It's unnatural to see humans like this and it was unnerving to be the focus of the attention of so many eyes you can't see. They stood on the road to the flight line at parade rest and said nothing. A full moon cast a murky shadow over the faces of the figures I passed and I thought, tomorrow night we could be standing here for any one of these soldiers, they could be standing here for me.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
What It Looks Like in the Morning
I’ve learned in recent years to be satisfied with an increasingly smaller footprint of daily activity. Fifty steps from my room to the aid station, seventy to the bath room, a quick walk in through the night chill to the DFAC and back, then the gym. Everything else is synthesized. I’m more internalized. I share a little less. I’ve become a compulsive inbox checker. I worry about closing in on thirty and I don’t sleep much before 2 am regardless of when I wake up. I pick up my guitar but it feels like my rhythm comes and goes, some days I have it, some days I’m lost. There’s joy in small things, conversations and the quirk of the ego confronting corporal limits.
I play games with myself; I toy with the concept of freedom from behind the glass wall of my four year commitment. Is it any worse to be here than it is to live in poverty in your home town? Driving through Baghdad is a quick and dirty study is class disparity. Kids play soccer on gravel fields, women in tight jeans and fur topped boots pass women in black shawl covering their heads, a kitten steps weak and filthy off the corner and stares into nothing, a corner store advertises medical equipment. There’re so many travel agencies. How does the man steering the donkey cart find time to weekend in Morocco? There’s too much dust and not enough water. Everything is covered in a thin film of grime. A van runs into one of our trucks in the convoy and demolishes its front end. The HUMVEE is oblivious. This street could be in San Diego. I shift under the weight of my kit and look at my rifle held between my legs, I feel like I over packed.
Concrete barriers separate, c-wire cordon, check points halt, everything stops for our trucks. Men packed into minivans stare at us and wave us away with a local gesture something akin to “fuck off”, and no body spares the horn. It’s invigorating and depressing in shifts. The markets look active and healthy. I wish I could step out of my truck and take off my uniform and buy a piece of fruit and become part of the scenery. I wish I could communicate. Arabic is fascinating and frustrating. It’s backwards, complex and so ultimately foreign completely without cognates. It feels like we just don’t belong here any more. Some one wrote the schedule, put in his two week and no body took his place but we still look at the calendar and jot down our shift. It’s all relative though, there’s real danger even if it doesn’t choose to always express itself. A report comes over the net of an IED blast a few clicks north, no casualties. I hate being an outsider.
Our mission now is to fade away into obscurity, to be replaced by a sovereign Iraqi army and national security forces; a tapestry of different uniforms and prerogatives, masks and weapons. I think most of us see the writing on the wall, the gig’s up boys, hope you got your fill. Some of the newer guys still want their war the way I wanted mine when I got here a couple years back. Maybe they’ll get it still, though I hope not. It’s only something you wish for until it’s on your hands, a drunken tattoo you’ve come to realize is permanent.
Mostly though I feel like a new era is creeping in, a new President, a new vision for America where ever our hands reach. It’s good knowing you’re being replaced by something better but not without a strange feeling of nostalgia like working for the traveling carnival when Disney Land opened its doors, looking across the road with the empty passive stare of approaching obsolescence.
I play games with myself; I toy with the concept of freedom from behind the glass wall of my four year commitment. Is it any worse to be here than it is to live in poverty in your home town? Driving through Baghdad is a quick and dirty study is class disparity. Kids play soccer on gravel fields, women in tight jeans and fur topped boots pass women in black shawl covering their heads, a kitten steps weak and filthy off the corner and stares into nothing, a corner store advertises medical equipment. There’re so many travel agencies. How does the man steering the donkey cart find time to weekend in Morocco? There’s too much dust and not enough water. Everything is covered in a thin film of grime. A van runs into one of our trucks in the convoy and demolishes its front end. The HUMVEE is oblivious. This street could be in San Diego. I shift under the weight of my kit and look at my rifle held between my legs, I feel like I over packed.
Concrete barriers separate, c-wire cordon, check points halt, everything stops for our trucks. Men packed into minivans stare at us and wave us away with a local gesture something akin to “fuck off”, and no body spares the horn. It’s invigorating and depressing in shifts. The markets look active and healthy. I wish I could step out of my truck and take off my uniform and buy a piece of fruit and become part of the scenery. I wish I could communicate. Arabic is fascinating and frustrating. It’s backwards, complex and so ultimately foreign completely without cognates. It feels like we just don’t belong here any more. Some one wrote the schedule, put in his two week and no body took his place but we still look at the calendar and jot down our shift. It’s all relative though, there’s real danger even if it doesn’t choose to always express itself. A report comes over the net of an IED blast a few clicks north, no casualties. I hate being an outsider.
Our mission now is to fade away into obscurity, to be replaced by a sovereign Iraqi army and national security forces; a tapestry of different uniforms and prerogatives, masks and weapons. I think most of us see the writing on the wall, the gig’s up boys, hope you got your fill. Some of the newer guys still want their war the way I wanted mine when I got here a couple years back. Maybe they’ll get it still, though I hope not. It’s only something you wish for until it’s on your hands, a drunken tattoo you’ve come to realize is permanent.
Mostly though I feel like a new era is creeping in, a new President, a new vision for America where ever our hands reach. It’s good knowing you’re being replaced by something better but not without a strange feeling of nostalgia like working for the traveling carnival when Disney Land opened its doors, looking across the road with the empty passive stare of approaching obsolescence.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
With a Bang
I climbed up a rickety metal latter to the roof of the aid station last night a couple minutes past midnight to get a better view of the city around the FOB. I'd walked past that latter a hundred times since we've lived here and I hadn't noticed it until then. I get a sort of tunnel vision when I'm in my routine. The entire latter wobbled and it's anchors on the wall shifted under my weight in a way that reminded me of my irrational fear of heights and I thought then that flip-flops may have been a bad choice. Actually my entire ensemble was completely unsuited for anything other than curling up in bed with a book. In a tan t-shirt and ranger panties… maybe that demands a bit of explanation. The word ranger in the Army is used in such a ubiquitous manor that I find it hard to relate it to any word I used before I joined. You ranger roll your patrol cap, ranger rig a shelf with 550 chord, anything improvised is somehow associated with rangers. Ranger panties are just really just thin black running shorts, like the ultra short kind that make people uncomfortable to be around you. How they got the name? Ranger battalion uses them with their PT uniform. I wear them to sleep because they feel less like a diaper than my normal PT shorts.
So in my silky smoothes I'm shivering in the cold standing on the roof watching red tracers fly into the air listening to the sound of an entire city literally exploding in celebration. I walked over to two other soldiers, older guys who sounded like officers, watching the fire works talking about the "old days" of the war when we would have been out there shooting off our own weapons to celebrate. All the excitement is gone now, most of the FOB is asleep at midnight. The taller of the two smiled and said "look at these guys, drunk and shooting automatic weapons in the streets, they drive on whatever side of the road they feel like, marry multiple women, and own guns that I would have to get approval from congress to have in the States, and we came here to give them freedom? Seems they already have more than us. I can't even have a beer on New Years." It was hard to argue with that. You give up a lot as a soldier and when you become more of a policeman than a warrior the frustrations only multiply.
I was happy though, standing in a cool breeze feeling the joy of so many people who have lived in fear for years. The sound of gunfire pleases me. I don't know why. It's something in the way that it reminds you of uncertain life is. How random your existence is. We try so hard to mitigate risk; we wear seat belts and paint lines in the street to remind us where it's safest to cross. Our threat advisories give us colors to correspond with our fears. Medicine and vaccines keep us healthier longer but we all die eventually. And how many of our fondest memories are of doing the things we were told we shouldn't? The stupid stuff we did as kids. Sneaking out, drinking, the things you thought you're parents didn't know about when they surely did. It's the thrill of risk that burns a memory in our mind. It's the pleasure of breaking free of convention and forging a path for yourself despite better advice. And as I looked out over the lights of Baghdad I wondered about the chances of having one of those stray bullets come down from the sky and end my life and I thought what better than an AK-47 to ring in the New Year.
So in my silky smoothes I'm shivering in the cold standing on the roof watching red tracers fly into the air listening to the sound of an entire city literally exploding in celebration. I walked over to two other soldiers, older guys who sounded like officers, watching the fire works talking about the "old days" of the war when we would have been out there shooting off our own weapons to celebrate. All the excitement is gone now, most of the FOB is asleep at midnight. The taller of the two smiled and said "look at these guys, drunk and shooting automatic weapons in the streets, they drive on whatever side of the road they feel like, marry multiple women, and own guns that I would have to get approval from congress to have in the States, and we came here to give them freedom? Seems they already have more than us. I can't even have a beer on New Years." It was hard to argue with that. You give up a lot as a soldier and when you become more of a policeman than a warrior the frustrations only multiply.
I was happy though, standing in a cool breeze feeling the joy of so many people who have lived in fear for years. The sound of gunfire pleases me. I don't know why. It's something in the way that it reminds you of uncertain life is. How random your existence is. We try so hard to mitigate risk; we wear seat belts and paint lines in the street to remind us where it's safest to cross. Our threat advisories give us colors to correspond with our fears. Medicine and vaccines keep us healthier longer but we all die eventually. And how many of our fondest memories are of doing the things we were told we shouldn't? The stupid stuff we did as kids. Sneaking out, drinking, the things you thought you're parents didn't know about when they surely did. It's the thrill of risk that burns a memory in our mind. It's the pleasure of breaking free of convention and forging a path for yourself despite better advice. And as I looked out over the lights of Baghdad I wondered about the chances of having one of those stray bullets come down from the sky and end my life and I thought what better than an AK-47 to ring in the New Year.
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