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.
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