I've never written during the comfortable periods of my life. I've never really done anything during those times. I’ve continually skated along at minimum output just to get by. But there is something strangely compelling about that which pushes us, about the trials that we face. They force us to re-evaluate our principles and re-examine just what it is to be awake and alive and learning. This is what brings out something useful in me.
My writing is therapy as is my music. I’m not particularly gifted at either. I am fully aware that I may well be destined to never do anything spectacular in this life but I’m also aware that my idea of spectacular is likely selfish and convoluted and that the true meaning of being a good person lies not in the deeds that set us apart but in those that bring us closer together.
I’m leaving again soon to do what I get paid to do. It’s not really as special as all the parades and articles make it out to be. We are just normal people; we have normal shortcomings and prejudices. We fight and love and fail just like everyone but we do it in uniform and the camera turns our way because a part of being human is the hope that we can find something better in our neighbor which will in turn make us better. I hope to find something better in that person too.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Blisters for your Birthday
Everyone tells me I should write a book about being in the Army and what it's like to go to war but there's a part of me that feels that most of those stories have been told. Every story has been told, really. So if I were to do it, I'd have to make the most compelling and thrilling book ever written about the War in Iraq. I'd have to lie. But before that I'd have to start from the beginning, right? I'd need to write about basic training and how strange military customs are and why I thought it would be a good idea to join the Ranger Regiment (damn you Blackhawk Down). And I'd have to give it a catchy name worthy of the New York Times Bestseller list.
I've come up with a few different potential names for this potential book and my most recent and current favorite is "Blisters for Your Birthday" not only because it's a pleasing phonic phrase but because it simply sums up how the Army takes everything that could be fun and ruins it. Shouldn't shooting things and jumping out of airplanes and living in what amounts to a giant frat house be fun? Shouldn't I have not had to ruck march at 6:30 in the morning on my 26th birthday? It's not all bad truthfully. But soldiers love to bitch.
I've come up with a few different potential names for this potential book and my most recent and current favorite is "Blisters for Your Birthday" not only because it's a pleasing phonic phrase but because it simply sums up how the Army takes everything that could be fun and ruins it. Shouldn't shooting things and jumping out of airplanes and living in what amounts to a giant frat house be fun? Shouldn't I have not had to ruck march at 6:30 in the morning on my 26th birthday? It's not all bad truthfully. But soldiers love to bitch.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
You're a Two Time Volunteer, Son
This is always the worst part. Crammed on a tiny seat of red nylon cargo netting next to sixty other paratroopers, unable to find a comfortable way to sit that at the same time relieves the weight of the rucksack from your waist and your chute from your back. The C-130 sways and bucks in a meticulously orchestrated pattern for educing maximum levels of nausea while mechanical pings and pangs keep ever mindful that this Mac truck with wings is easily older than you are. The men around you are bathed in the cool blue light but it doesn’t help to make the mood less anxious. The knots in your stomach strongly suggest you that you should have maybe just had two of those gut-truck burgers and not three, still somehow you find a thin, fitful sleep. In your mind you recount the steps you’re going to take as you exit the aircraft, watching your body as it falls into space, imagining everything that could go wrong, the malfunctions, the broken bones, and then you remind yourself that statistically speaking, tonight you’ve got a pretty good chance of not becoming a statistic.
A short while later you open your eyes as the Jumpmaster opens the door revealing the darkness beyond. The droning roar of the four propellers slicing through the chill night air makes it impossible to communicate below shouting level. You don’t feel much like talking anyway. 1200 feet below, lights from street lamps blur in the prop-wash giving adding another layer of doubt to this already surreal situation. You signed up to do this, you actually volunteered twice! And you remember that your original orders were to Ft. Carson, Colorado. You think about snowboarding and you kick yourself… or you would if you could move your legs. 130-knot winds slide along just feet from you as you stand and check your static line that will open your chute as you exit. Again you’re painfully aware of the 150 lbs of equipment attached to you, but the adrenaline helps takes the edge off. The ritual equipment check ends with each paratrooper yelling “Ok!” letting the guy in front of him know he’s good to go. There’s also the slap on the ass… you choose the shoulder. The red light by the door flicks to green and the first man takes two steps and disappears. One-one thousand, the Jumpmaster yells “go” and you hand your line off and step into space.
Twisting and turning violently in freefall your chin tucked to your chest, hands gripping the sides of your reserve chute on your waist; you forget to count to four. It seems like you’ll know if it doesn’t feel right even if you don’t count. But it does feel right, you slow down and the world comes back into sharp focus giving you your first chance to look up to see the beauty of a fully deployed canopy catching the soft blue-gray glow of the full moon. Let’s see, chute open, check, risers untwisted, check, nuts intact, check, so far a good jump. Usually you’d expect to see other jumpers falling close around you but on this night you’re gloriously alone and enjoying one of the most thrilling experiences in life.
Gela drop zone isn’t as long as Sicily, which is the largest in North America (a subject that somehow renders a hearty and ubiquitous pride among those in Division, but really is it any surprise that it’s here at Ft. Bragg, the home of airborne and special operations?) ((EDIT) - As Cpt. Hesterman said, Gela and Sicily are actually the same drop zone, just flown in different directions, I wasn't aware of this.) More importantly Gela consists of mostly soft damp sand that is impact friendly when the winds are low. They say not to look at the ground because you’ll land sooner than you think in the dark but they say lots of stupid shit so you look and realize your about 200 feet up, release your ruck-sack and weapon so they go sliding down a 50 foot line that you hopefully won’t land on. You keep looking and see that you’re drifting to your right and backwards so you pull your front left riser to slow down but like always you do it too soon and switch direction of travel at the last second, slam into the ground with a knee grinding thud, the air rushes out of your lungs with a surprised and pathetic “huuuh” and roll over onto your back and look up at the stars. You laugh.
…
This is pretty much how a Mass Tactical night jump happens. It’s not glamorous but it’s pretty cool to look back on once you’re safe and in one piece on the ground. What was even better about it was a cherry (a new paratrooper) scampered up to me as I was putting on my night vision and getting my weapon ready and offered to carry my chute off the drop zone because he didn’t have anything to carry. The guys with no jumps in Division jump Hollywood style with no equipment because they aren’t trusted to do it safely, though I don’t see how my one jump makes me that much more qualified.
Later that night as the squadron marched 12 miles back home I rode in the field ambulance behind the pre-ranger training group and ended up treated a sprained ankle and a cold weather injury that could have been fatal with we hadn’t gotten to him when we did. The weather that night wasn’t that cold by Bragg standards, maybe in the high 40’s low 50’s but it had been raining off and on since we’d been on the drop zone and the guys we picked up were soaked to the bone. At one point he stopped shivering which I took as a good sign at first until I realized it was more likely that he was going into mind hypothermia even with the space blanket I’d put over him. We rushed him to the ER and he was released the next morning. I didn’t get to sleep until about 8 am. Then had to be up at 9:30 for a briefing. I slept the rest of the day.
---
This next part was actually from the beginning of November when we had just returned home.
It’s amazing how fast the money goes when you get home. Well maybe not that amazing considering how I’ve never been too good at living within my means. But I think I deserve a LCD flat-screen TV and a Play Station 3 and a Bose speaker system for my computer. I almost bought another guitar too, but six is probably enough. They are all in California though. I’ll figure something out.
So I sit here now in the calm of the mid morning in my own room. Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds are proving that you don’t have to be able to speak coherently to play beautiful music. It’s warm in my room and it smells like apples and pears because of this bottle of dish soap that we bought that has an air freshener built into the base. Apparently while I was gone, everything had to get an air freshener built into it. I have my own shower, a little electronic stove top that I’ve already cooked Lil’ Smokey sausages on… so delicious. Each night I fall asleep watching the BBC series “Planet Earth” that I bought on high definition Blu-Ray DVD. Mexican Cave Glow Worms catching flies with long strings of mucus and silk and eating them alive can be so beautiful when viewed with the correct technology.
---
It’s not all a fairy-tale life though. Sometimes I have to actually leave my room and go into Fayetteville and interact with the unwashed masses. Wal-Mart is a particular joy. Of course by joy I mean it’s an anxiety ridden freak fest starring the most bovine undergrowth allowed to call them selves human. Before I even enter the Wal’s gaping maw I’m harassed by an African American gentleman wanting to know if A) I’m in the military and B) if I need a ride back to base. Normally I’d trust any stranger with missing teeth and a lazy eye with my life, hell just look at my day job, but when he asked if I was military my creep-o meter spiked into the red.
In towns like Fayetteville posing a question like this is actually a thinly veiled euphemism for, “how would you like me to fuck you today?” Depending on the chosen profession of the one making the proposition, this is not always an unwelcome request but as far as transportation goes it’s a potential death sentence. Also, why was he asking me if I needed a ride as I entered the store instead of focusing on the patrons on their way out? As my friend smoked a cigarette, I learned that this cabby had recently gone into business for himself because he didn’t want to pay Yellow Cab $300 a week to be contracted by them. He pointed out which cab was his and as I turned to look at the mid 90’s era primer black Crown Vic wedged awkwardly into a nearby parking spot I could see how $300 would have been a stretch.
Initial survey and decision quickly completed I look my leave, shopped for the essentials I came for and waiting in line for forty minutes which I hear is fairly standard. Back at the barracks enjoy my personal space. I’m glad that music still comes to me. There was a time when I felt like that part of me was withering up, a cracked leaf skeleton in the autumn forest of my dreams, but like everything, it comes and goes as it pleases. Perhaps then, even when life gives you questionable methods of transportation, it’s best to just sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.
A short while later you open your eyes as the Jumpmaster opens the door revealing the darkness beyond. The droning roar of the four propellers slicing through the chill night air makes it impossible to communicate below shouting level. You don’t feel much like talking anyway. 1200 feet below, lights from street lamps blur in the prop-wash giving adding another layer of doubt to this already surreal situation. You signed up to do this, you actually volunteered twice! And you remember that your original orders were to Ft. Carson, Colorado. You think about snowboarding and you kick yourself… or you would if you could move your legs. 130-knot winds slide along just feet from you as you stand and check your static line that will open your chute as you exit. Again you’re painfully aware of the 150 lbs of equipment attached to you, but the adrenaline helps takes the edge off. The ritual equipment check ends with each paratrooper yelling “Ok!” letting the guy in front of him know he’s good to go. There’s also the slap on the ass… you choose the shoulder. The red light by the door flicks to green and the first man takes two steps and disappears. One-one thousand, the Jumpmaster yells “go” and you hand your line off and step into space.
Twisting and turning violently in freefall your chin tucked to your chest, hands gripping the sides of your reserve chute on your waist; you forget to count to four. It seems like you’ll know if it doesn’t feel right even if you don’t count. But it does feel right, you slow down and the world comes back into sharp focus giving you your first chance to look up to see the beauty of a fully deployed canopy catching the soft blue-gray glow of the full moon. Let’s see, chute open, check, risers untwisted, check, nuts intact, check, so far a good jump. Usually you’d expect to see other jumpers falling close around you but on this night you’re gloriously alone and enjoying one of the most thrilling experiences in life.
Gela drop zone isn’t as long as Sicily, which is the largest in North America (a subject that somehow renders a hearty and ubiquitous pride among those in Division, but really is it any surprise that it’s here at Ft. Bragg, the home of airborne and special operations?) ((EDIT) - As Cpt. Hesterman said, Gela and Sicily are actually the same drop zone, just flown in different directions, I wasn't aware of this.) More importantly Gela consists of mostly soft damp sand that is impact friendly when the winds are low. They say not to look at the ground because you’ll land sooner than you think in the dark but they say lots of stupid shit so you look and realize your about 200 feet up, release your ruck-sack and weapon so they go sliding down a 50 foot line that you hopefully won’t land on. You keep looking and see that you’re drifting to your right and backwards so you pull your front left riser to slow down but like always you do it too soon and switch direction of travel at the last second, slam into the ground with a knee grinding thud, the air rushes out of your lungs with a surprised and pathetic “huuuh” and roll over onto your back and look up at the stars. You laugh.
…
This is pretty much how a Mass Tactical night jump happens. It’s not glamorous but it’s pretty cool to look back on once you’re safe and in one piece on the ground. What was even better about it was a cherry (a new paratrooper) scampered up to me as I was putting on my night vision and getting my weapon ready and offered to carry my chute off the drop zone because he didn’t have anything to carry. The guys with no jumps in Division jump Hollywood style with no equipment because they aren’t trusted to do it safely, though I don’t see how my one jump makes me that much more qualified.
Later that night as the squadron marched 12 miles back home I rode in the field ambulance behind the pre-ranger training group and ended up treated a sprained ankle and a cold weather injury that could have been fatal with we hadn’t gotten to him when we did. The weather that night wasn’t that cold by Bragg standards, maybe in the high 40’s low 50’s but it had been raining off and on since we’d been on the drop zone and the guys we picked up were soaked to the bone. At one point he stopped shivering which I took as a good sign at first until I realized it was more likely that he was going into mind hypothermia even with the space blanket I’d put over him. We rushed him to the ER and he was released the next morning. I didn’t get to sleep until about 8 am. Then had to be up at 9:30 for a briefing. I slept the rest of the day.
---
This next part was actually from the beginning of November when we had just returned home.
It’s amazing how fast the money goes when you get home. Well maybe not that amazing considering how I’ve never been too good at living within my means. But I think I deserve a LCD flat-screen TV and a Play Station 3 and a Bose speaker system for my computer. I almost bought another guitar too, but six is probably enough. They are all in California though. I’ll figure something out.
So I sit here now in the calm of the mid morning in my own room. Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds are proving that you don’t have to be able to speak coherently to play beautiful music. It’s warm in my room and it smells like apples and pears because of this bottle of dish soap that we bought that has an air freshener built into the base. Apparently while I was gone, everything had to get an air freshener built into it. I have my own shower, a little electronic stove top that I’ve already cooked Lil’ Smokey sausages on… so delicious. Each night I fall asleep watching the BBC series “Planet Earth” that I bought on high definition Blu-Ray DVD. Mexican Cave Glow Worms catching flies with long strings of mucus and silk and eating them alive can be so beautiful when viewed with the correct technology.
---
It’s not all a fairy-tale life though. Sometimes I have to actually leave my room and go into Fayetteville and interact with the unwashed masses. Wal-Mart is a particular joy. Of course by joy I mean it’s an anxiety ridden freak fest starring the most bovine undergrowth allowed to call them selves human. Before I even enter the Wal’s gaping maw I’m harassed by an African American gentleman wanting to know if A) I’m in the military and B) if I need a ride back to base. Normally I’d trust any stranger with missing teeth and a lazy eye with my life, hell just look at my day job, but when he asked if I was military my creep-o meter spiked into the red.
In towns like Fayetteville posing a question like this is actually a thinly veiled euphemism for, “how would you like me to fuck you today?” Depending on the chosen profession of the one making the proposition, this is not always an unwelcome request but as far as transportation goes it’s a potential death sentence. Also, why was he asking me if I needed a ride as I entered the store instead of focusing on the patrons on their way out? As my friend smoked a cigarette, I learned that this cabby had recently gone into business for himself because he didn’t want to pay Yellow Cab $300 a week to be contracted by them. He pointed out which cab was his and as I turned to look at the mid 90’s era primer black Crown Vic wedged awkwardly into a nearby parking spot I could see how $300 would have been a stretch.
Initial survey and decision quickly completed I look my leave, shopped for the essentials I came for and waiting in line for forty minutes which I hear is fairly standard. Back at the barracks enjoy my personal space. I’m glad that music still comes to me. There was a time when I felt like that part of me was withering up, a cracked leaf skeleton in the autumn forest of my dreams, but like everything, it comes and goes as it pleases. Perhaps then, even when life gives you questionable methods of transportation, it’s best to just sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
A Tale of Soap and Coming Home
I didn’t know it was a game at first. The first time I played was probably back at the dorms at the University of Arizona. Just participated out of laziness and opportunity. It took two years of honing my skills to realize the their full potential but now I’m quite certain I’m a pro. The game, soap swap, the premise, be retarded enough to forget your body wash in the communal showers in a densely populated area long enough to where you know it will be missing if you go back to look for it, then find a new bottle of forgotten soap before your next shower so you never actually run out and you never buy a new bottle. The rules are simple. You can’t use bar soap, because that’s fucking gross, who knows what part of what body it’s touched. Also you can’t take a bottle that belongs to a person you know is still in the bathroom. That would just be mean, and it would increase the rate of half-naked fistfights that are already too frequent an occurrence.
That’s pretty much it. It’s not really stealing because it’s just accepted that if you forget your body wash in the shower it’s going to become part of the game. It’s really the same as anything that is left unattended in community housing, if you don’t love it enough to keep a constant eye on it, it was never really yours to begin with. So far this has been the fate of my pair of $130 Smith sunglasses and countless unmarked tan undershirts. Why do people take other peoples intimate clothing? Who knows, but I remember that even the issue tighty-tanny panties weren’t beyond the realm of possible targets in basic. They say the Army hates a thief but they certainly don’t mind employing them. I’ve learned a multitude of handy less than legal tricks from my fellow soldiers over the last year and a half. You’d be surprised how easy it is to steal a car and probably less surprised at how easy it is to get caught. Every time an aspiring thief falls short of his goals, a new private is born.
--
Kuwait blows. The end.
--
I’ll never fly again with out the aid of modern medicine. As we taxied to take off from Kuwait heading for our half-way point in Frankfurt, Germany I took a couple muscle relaxers and passed out before the wheels left the tarmac. I awoke to a small dish of strangely delicious meat chunks with rice and veggies in front of me and ate mindlessly until my plate was clean and promptly passed out before the stewardess took my tray. I woke up again to the sudden jarring of our plane touching ground and passed our two-hour lay over eating a bratwurst and chatting with my friends about how much we enjoyed walking outside and actually feeling cold.
As we were getting seated again I took an Ambien and racked out before we were in the air. Somewhere over the Atlantic I woke up and ate a cheeseburger and the next thing I remember we were 45 minutes out of Newark, New Jersey. I can’t think of a better way to spend almost an entire day inside a plane. I was rested, relaxed, and in generally good spirits even while sitting waiting for hundreds of soldiers to get off the plane before me. As we disembarked for our second and last layover we were told to under no circumstances take our weapons off the plane. After the seven layers of Customs that we went through just to get on the damn thing we were all pretty happy to just leave our shit on the plane so we could go shave and brush our teeth. Being one of the last ones off I ended up getting left to brush my pearlies using the water fountain. Apparently some soldiers found this taboo, the same men who spent weeks wearing the same clothes out at the patrol bases. Go figure.
From New Jersey to North Carolina I tried to sleep some more but I guess my body’s limit is somewhere around 18 hours so I watched an episode of House and fiddled with my beret picking little pieces of white fuzz of and trying to smooth out the wrinkles. Outside my little window we floated above lush juicy white clouds. It was like standing upside down and looking at Heaven below you. Every so often a break in the clover would reveal green fields and trees, well-maintained roads, and a tiny shiny cars moving all the busy people to and fro. It was like peering through the shifting mist of the wishing glass, six months in a place like Iraq can make even the most mundane American countryside seem unimaginable.
I got butterflies as we landed at Pope AFB and taxied around to an ecstatic crowd of waiting family and friends. No one was there to see me in particular but just being around all that happiness finds a way to get to you. Fathers seeing their baby for the first time, lovers reunited, mothers getting to hold their son that they’ve worried about endlessly over the last year, it seemed like all way right again in the little world of Stephen. People I’ve never met before hugged me like I was kin. Women cried on my shoulder. I was thanked countless times for my service and I found it was impossible to erase the smile I’d had since we were released from formation. And now I’m home. Hopefully my stories from here on will ones of joy and music, more chances to get all I’ve yet to do accomplished.
That’s pretty much it. It’s not really stealing because it’s just accepted that if you forget your body wash in the shower it’s going to become part of the game. It’s really the same as anything that is left unattended in community housing, if you don’t love it enough to keep a constant eye on it, it was never really yours to begin with. So far this has been the fate of my pair of $130 Smith sunglasses and countless unmarked tan undershirts. Why do people take other peoples intimate clothing? Who knows, but I remember that even the issue tighty-tanny panties weren’t beyond the realm of possible targets in basic. They say the Army hates a thief but they certainly don’t mind employing them. I’ve learned a multitude of handy less than legal tricks from my fellow soldiers over the last year and a half. You’d be surprised how easy it is to steal a car and probably less surprised at how easy it is to get caught. Every time an aspiring thief falls short of his goals, a new private is born.
--
Kuwait blows. The end.
--
I’ll never fly again with out the aid of modern medicine. As we taxied to take off from Kuwait heading for our half-way point in Frankfurt, Germany I took a couple muscle relaxers and passed out before the wheels left the tarmac. I awoke to a small dish of strangely delicious meat chunks with rice and veggies in front of me and ate mindlessly until my plate was clean and promptly passed out before the stewardess took my tray. I woke up again to the sudden jarring of our plane touching ground and passed our two-hour lay over eating a bratwurst and chatting with my friends about how much we enjoyed walking outside and actually feeling cold.
As we were getting seated again I took an Ambien and racked out before we were in the air. Somewhere over the Atlantic I woke up and ate a cheeseburger and the next thing I remember we were 45 minutes out of Newark, New Jersey. I can’t think of a better way to spend almost an entire day inside a plane. I was rested, relaxed, and in generally good spirits even while sitting waiting for hundreds of soldiers to get off the plane before me. As we disembarked for our second and last layover we were told to under no circumstances take our weapons off the plane. After the seven layers of Customs that we went through just to get on the damn thing we were all pretty happy to just leave our shit on the plane so we could go shave and brush our teeth. Being one of the last ones off I ended up getting left to brush my pearlies using the water fountain. Apparently some soldiers found this taboo, the same men who spent weeks wearing the same clothes out at the patrol bases. Go figure.
From New Jersey to North Carolina I tried to sleep some more but I guess my body’s limit is somewhere around 18 hours so I watched an episode of House and fiddled with my beret picking little pieces of white fuzz of and trying to smooth out the wrinkles. Outside my little window we floated above lush juicy white clouds. It was like standing upside down and looking at Heaven below you. Every so often a break in the clover would reveal green fields and trees, well-maintained roads, and a tiny shiny cars moving all the busy people to and fro. It was like peering through the shifting mist of the wishing glass, six months in a place like Iraq can make even the most mundane American countryside seem unimaginable.
I got butterflies as we landed at Pope AFB and taxied around to an ecstatic crowd of waiting family and friends. No one was there to see me in particular but just being around all that happiness finds a way to get to you. Fathers seeing their baby for the first time, lovers reunited, mothers getting to hold their son that they’ve worried about endlessly over the last year, it seemed like all way right again in the little world of Stephen. People I’ve never met before hugged me like I was kin. Women cried on my shoulder. I was thanked countless times for my service and I found it was impossible to erase the smile I’d had since we were released from formation. And now I’m home. Hopefully my stories from here on will ones of joy and music, more chances to get all I’ve yet to do accomplished.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Know what would be awesome sause?
....If I could sleep. But I can't so I updated my profile, messeged a few peoples and checked my gmail about 7 times to see if anyone had written me, but no one had.
...If people I write would write me back. I mean I know I'm not the center of the Universe, my mother told me so, but isn't is just common courtesy to return correspondence? Even if it's just a quick IOU-a-real-letter letter, that would be better than nothing. It just kind of makes me feel not so loved.
It's 4:22 in the morning and I'm still in Iraq. It still is sandy outside. I would enjoy a hug and one day where no one around me is a sarcastic burnt out soldier just counting the days until they go home. That would be awesome sause.
...If people I write would write me back. I mean I know I'm not the center of the Universe, my mother told me so, but isn't is just common courtesy to return correspondence? Even if it's just a quick IOU-a-real-letter letter, that would be better than nothing. It just kind of makes me feel not so loved.
It's 4:22 in the morning and I'm still in Iraq. It still is sandy outside. I would enjoy a hug and one day where no one around me is a sarcastic burnt out soldier just counting the days until they go home. That would be awesome sause.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
It's a war about nothing, get it!?
Wielding an imagination as expansive as mine has grown to be can sometimes make even the simplest task seem incredibly daunting. I can’t just sit in a humvee and stare into space. I can’t just feel a certain way about something or someone. I have to dig, I’ve got to know why I feel the way I do. I’ve been digging into death since the first time I was directly involved with taking another mans life. I couldn’t just let him be dead, which would have been the simplest if not most healthy solution. I created a world where I could see each bullet pass through his skin in the slowest motion possible and continue through his insides destroying tissue, causing chaos where there had once been beautiful order. I stood there in the dark long after my real body had jumped into the rear of a Blackhawk and flown away. I watched over him as he took his last breaths, as be became another AP statistic, or more accurately as he turned into nothing at all, the butt of a joke told by men in brand new uniforms creeping through his country in the night with glowing green eyes.
He became a son and sometimes a father. He transformed into a farmer or perhaps the owner of a small shop. He was poor, that much doesn’t take any leap of faith to believe. He was afraid of us, so much so that when he heard the sound of our helicopters heading toward his home he fled into a nearby field and hid himself in a canal thick with tall dry reeds. He knew he was guilty of something that we would arrest him for, that he would be taken away somewhere far from his family perhaps for a very long time. Maybe he was a bad person. He may have been a rapist and a thief, a murderer, or he may have just been another sucker tricked into working for a group whose ideology he cared nothing about, maybe he was hungry, maybe he had no options. He had hopes and dreams and memories built from an entire life of consciousness, and all it took after a few short moments of violent action was a few moments more for the vacuum of time to fill in the space where he had once been.
Shortly after that night I was looking through a pile of confiscated items that had been piled on the floor of our tent. In it was a Sony Handi-cam Hi8 camcorder. You don’t see a lot of consumer electronics in the smaller towns in this region so it seemed out of place among the dirty AK-47 magazines and small pamphlets of Arabic writing. I picked it up and pressed the power button. To my surprise it started up and an image came to life on the small fold out monitor. The video was poor quality in comparison to the high definition I’ve grown used to, the colors highly saturated and grainy. Still it was clear enough to show two men blind folded on there knees with their hands tied behind their backs. They had been placed outside near a thick low hanging tree, the scene looked like a hundred places I’ve been in this country, sun baked reddish soil, everything sad and wilting in the mid day heat. Through the small speaker I could hear the voices of men speaking Arabic quickly, it’s replication distant and metallic, distorted by gusts of wind that occasionally overwhelmed the cameras small microphone.
I’d seen videos like this on the Internet before. I knew these men were going to die but for some reason I had to see it for myself as if to prove that I could tell the future. The unseen men’s voices became louder and more excited but the men blindfolded kneeling did not move. Their expressions never changed. They must have known what was in store for them. I wondered what it must feel like to know you’re about to die a violent and painful death. I felt that if I had been in the same position I would have resisted but I’ve seen enough of these scenarios to know how things go, eventually one just accepts that they have no choice or that’s what they make themselves believe.
In the middle of this thought two assault rifles were thrust into the picture and a moment later two fingers pulled two triggers, fire erupted from two muzzles behind a score of invisible unthinking unfeeling machined pieces of copper and steel. It’s not like Hollywood. There’s no spray of blood, bullet wounds sometimes bleed very little even minutes after they are inflicted. The body tightens in an automatic response to the trauma and falls forward following the force of the impact, the mouth pulls back in a grimace and that’s it. I turned the camera off.
I usually don’t talk about this part of my job when people ask me what it’s like here. People just don’t understand. They ask me questions like whether or not I think I have the right to choose what lives and dies. I had to think about it for a while before I had a good answer. I think I got defensive and ended up saying something like, “well, if I brought you over here and set you loose on the street in one of these towns we don’t have a firm control on and you were captured, you’d be beaten, raped, held for ransom and eventually beheaded or shot. It’s not like I just arbitrarily fire on randoms. Mistakes happen, but we have a good system in place to decide who’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’.”
If you think about the transverse who says a doctor has the right to keep someone on life support when they should naturally be dead? Doctors are given a guide to follow and based on their expertise in their field they make judgment calls using their knowledge and experience. A soldier does the same. The reason these morally ambiguous questions are still debated is because there is no black and white divide between right and wrong. Like marching in the earliest minutes of dawn we spend our days traveling through and working within continuously changing spectrum of grey.
Regardless of what the news would like to make it seem like, we are in fact professionals. Not in the sense that we’d all know how to tie a full Windsor but we are pretty damn good at what it is we do.
---
Some missions absolutely nothing happens. So what do you write about? Seinfeld made millions on a show about nothing so the trick must be to find the something within the nothing. That’s what I thought anyway as I was laying face toward the stars atop a thick and brightly patterned sleeping mat I’d “appropriated” from the inside of the house we had taken over for our last two day outing. Looking at so many stars it occurred to me that I really don’t know much of shit about anything. I know a little about everything but not a lot about anything. Like I know that the light that we see from a star was actually emitted hundreds of thousands of years ago and it’s a possibility that that star no longer even exists, but I don’t know what the speed of light is or how I’d possibly be able to calculate the distance from Earth to a star or it’s approximate age as determined by it’s size and the spectrum of light it emits. Somebody out there knows that. I know that thousands of years ago some dudes got together and started telling stories using uniquely shaped patterns of stars to create characters filling in the gaps as to how these characters interacted. I know what Orion’s Belt looks like but that’s about the only one I could pick out aside from the ladle to which there is no pot grand enough. Someone out there knows them all.
I blew through a 600-page novel by the evening of the second day and I thought that finishing a good book is like breaking up with a girlfriend you really like just because you have to move away. It’s so frustrating. You feel like there should be more but you just have to accept that it’s over and move on. There’re other books in the sea, you tell yourself, but still you can’t help but think about your old book. You want to pick your book up and hold it in your hands and relive all the memories. But you realize that story’s already been told, those pages have been turned, your book is probably captivating a new set of eyes by now, spine folded all the way back, revealing all the same secrets you once thought were only yours to see. Dejected, you look for anything to get your mind on other subjects. A few cheap, easy magazines later you finally get over the worst of the pain and start looking for other ways to entertain myself as if that old book were just another work of fiction.
Some soldiers develop a razor sharp weapons grade sense of humor after enduring the mind numbing boredom and repetition of the cycle of guard duty, patrols, and convoys. You get by, by making light of how bad it can be. We talked about the state of the region after a year of our being and how the bad guys just move from one town to another and back as we focus our attention elsewhere. One soldier said it was like watching a stupid person play ping-pong by himself. The ball just falls off the other side of the table and every time he goes on a wild goose chase through a huge cluttered room to find the ball and by the time he grabs it and switches sides he’s forgotten what the score is. It’s not all funny stories and bitching though.
Some of the guys here have fallen into a twisted and sick worldview that is all but encouraged by these circumstances we find ourselves in. Labeling something an “Iraqi-something” somehow strips it of all worth much in the way I believe the Nazi’s slowly stripped away the humanity of Germany’s Jewish citizens. I’ve watched men not just kill but torture wild and domesticated animals out of nothing more than plain boredom. I don’t see why it’s so hard to make the correlation that for the locals a chicken is more than just a cartoon on the outside of a carton of eggs among a stack of hundreds at the local mega-market, it’s a food source that has to be cultivated and cared for over time and it means a lot to them. It makes me sick. Luckily I’m not the only one who feels this way but still these things continues to happen. I’d get into the particulars of the story but I really don’t want to type it all out. What I did find odd was one of the men involved, a man several ranks and years my elder, after I voiced the obvious wrongness of his actions, came up to me and tried to assuage his (modest) feelings of guilt by explaining that it was just an “Iraqi Pigeon” and there for the dirtiest and most worthless creature on Earth capable only of spreading disease.
I replied, “Sergeant, human beings are a disease upon this planet that have so far shown an almost limitless capacity to take without giving back. That by definition is a parasite. Until today that pigeon lived within natures system of checks and balances that we have chosen to disconnect ourselves from. So really who’s more worthless?” I believe also I used the transitive form of “fuck” occasionally for emPHAsis. I didn’t look at him while I said this because I was trying to look busy reading and because I didn’t really feel like giving him that respect.
To try and make my point I retold a story of a day when I was in my early teens and my friend and I were sitting by the window of his second story bedroom. We’d been shooting birds from out translucent hide for hours; this was a regular thing for us then. You give young boys pellet guns and what do you expect they are going to do with them, at least we weren’t shooting each other… that day. By then we’d decimated the regulars and so had to wait extended periods of time for more migratory prey to enter our kill zone. Looking out across the yard I was scanning the branches of a scrubby coastal oak when my eye caught a tiny abnormality. I might have missed it had it not fluttered its wings just as I passed over its position. It was a tiny green humming bird surveying its territory with obvious pleasure as it let out inordinately loud chirps for its size. I laughed and told my friend I bet he couldn’t hit it, from that distance of maybe 40 meters it looked like a hyperactive bumblebee; I figured it was an impossible shot. He took my bet and as he took aim I smiled and got ready to gloat, as I believed his failure was eminent. His tongue was sticking slightly out the front of his mouth as it always did when he was concentrating or wrestling and he slowed his breathing down to steady the plastic stock of the rifle on the top of the windowsill. Pop! The gun recoiled slightly and he looked above the iron sight to see what had happened. For a moment the bird didn’t move and I readied my barrage of insults but a third of the way through the word, “pussy” the humming birds tiny body fell from the branch and behind the tall gate that marked the end of the back yard.
I was stunned. Literally I couldn’t move. I couldn’t believe he hit it. Neither of us said a word, we dropped out guns and ran down stars to see if we could find the body of our felled quarry. After a few minutes of searching in a patch of ivy at the base of the oak tree I came across what looked like a winged emerald splayed out on the ground. There was a small hole between its shoulders but not much blood; I guessed a humming bird didn’t have much to lose in the first place. We both stared at the tiny bird for a period of time that I couldn’t really recall, it could have been 30 seconds or 15 minutes and it seemed that without saying a word. Silently something clicked that had never occurred to us before. We stopped shooting birds after that day and since then I haven’t had any interest in hunting. I think maybe it took killing something that we considered not only benign but also beautiful and somehow undeserving to teach us that he really weren’t gaining anything from what we were taking. Some people it seems never learn this. I didn’t think the story would change his mind but at least he knew where I stood and maybe it would change his behavior in my presence anyway.
---
The days are starting to cool off gradually. By this I mean I don’t fear for my life when I walk outside during daylight hours. It’s one of those things where you think, hey if it was like this all the time this place wouldn’t be so bad. But it’s not like this all the time, soon it will start getting cold, or rather the temperature will start fluctuating so widely that it will seem cold at night, then it really will get cold, but we should be gone by then (extend our tour again Mr. President, I dare you).
He became a son and sometimes a father. He transformed into a farmer or perhaps the owner of a small shop. He was poor, that much doesn’t take any leap of faith to believe. He was afraid of us, so much so that when he heard the sound of our helicopters heading toward his home he fled into a nearby field and hid himself in a canal thick with tall dry reeds. He knew he was guilty of something that we would arrest him for, that he would be taken away somewhere far from his family perhaps for a very long time. Maybe he was a bad person. He may have been a rapist and a thief, a murderer, or he may have just been another sucker tricked into working for a group whose ideology he cared nothing about, maybe he was hungry, maybe he had no options. He had hopes and dreams and memories built from an entire life of consciousness, and all it took after a few short moments of violent action was a few moments more for the vacuum of time to fill in the space where he had once been.
Shortly after that night I was looking through a pile of confiscated items that had been piled on the floor of our tent. In it was a Sony Handi-cam Hi8 camcorder. You don’t see a lot of consumer electronics in the smaller towns in this region so it seemed out of place among the dirty AK-47 magazines and small pamphlets of Arabic writing. I picked it up and pressed the power button. To my surprise it started up and an image came to life on the small fold out monitor. The video was poor quality in comparison to the high definition I’ve grown used to, the colors highly saturated and grainy. Still it was clear enough to show two men blind folded on there knees with their hands tied behind their backs. They had been placed outside near a thick low hanging tree, the scene looked like a hundred places I’ve been in this country, sun baked reddish soil, everything sad and wilting in the mid day heat. Through the small speaker I could hear the voices of men speaking Arabic quickly, it’s replication distant and metallic, distorted by gusts of wind that occasionally overwhelmed the cameras small microphone.
I’d seen videos like this on the Internet before. I knew these men were going to die but for some reason I had to see it for myself as if to prove that I could tell the future. The unseen men’s voices became louder and more excited but the men blindfolded kneeling did not move. Their expressions never changed. They must have known what was in store for them. I wondered what it must feel like to know you’re about to die a violent and painful death. I felt that if I had been in the same position I would have resisted but I’ve seen enough of these scenarios to know how things go, eventually one just accepts that they have no choice or that’s what they make themselves believe.
In the middle of this thought two assault rifles were thrust into the picture and a moment later two fingers pulled two triggers, fire erupted from two muzzles behind a score of invisible unthinking unfeeling machined pieces of copper and steel. It’s not like Hollywood. There’s no spray of blood, bullet wounds sometimes bleed very little even minutes after they are inflicted. The body tightens in an automatic response to the trauma and falls forward following the force of the impact, the mouth pulls back in a grimace and that’s it. I turned the camera off.
I usually don’t talk about this part of my job when people ask me what it’s like here. People just don’t understand. They ask me questions like whether or not I think I have the right to choose what lives and dies. I had to think about it for a while before I had a good answer. I think I got defensive and ended up saying something like, “well, if I brought you over here and set you loose on the street in one of these towns we don’t have a firm control on and you were captured, you’d be beaten, raped, held for ransom and eventually beheaded or shot. It’s not like I just arbitrarily fire on randoms. Mistakes happen, but we have a good system in place to decide who’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’.”
If you think about the transverse who says a doctor has the right to keep someone on life support when they should naturally be dead? Doctors are given a guide to follow and based on their expertise in their field they make judgment calls using their knowledge and experience. A soldier does the same. The reason these morally ambiguous questions are still debated is because there is no black and white divide between right and wrong. Like marching in the earliest minutes of dawn we spend our days traveling through and working within continuously changing spectrum of grey.
Regardless of what the news would like to make it seem like, we are in fact professionals. Not in the sense that we’d all know how to tie a full Windsor but we are pretty damn good at what it is we do.
---
Some missions absolutely nothing happens. So what do you write about? Seinfeld made millions on a show about nothing so the trick must be to find the something within the nothing. That’s what I thought anyway as I was laying face toward the stars atop a thick and brightly patterned sleeping mat I’d “appropriated” from the inside of the house we had taken over for our last two day outing. Looking at so many stars it occurred to me that I really don’t know much of shit about anything. I know a little about everything but not a lot about anything. Like I know that the light that we see from a star was actually emitted hundreds of thousands of years ago and it’s a possibility that that star no longer even exists, but I don’t know what the speed of light is or how I’d possibly be able to calculate the distance from Earth to a star or it’s approximate age as determined by it’s size and the spectrum of light it emits. Somebody out there knows that. I know that thousands of years ago some dudes got together and started telling stories using uniquely shaped patterns of stars to create characters filling in the gaps as to how these characters interacted. I know what Orion’s Belt looks like but that’s about the only one I could pick out aside from the ladle to which there is no pot grand enough. Someone out there knows them all.
I blew through a 600-page novel by the evening of the second day and I thought that finishing a good book is like breaking up with a girlfriend you really like just because you have to move away. It’s so frustrating. You feel like there should be more but you just have to accept that it’s over and move on. There’re other books in the sea, you tell yourself, but still you can’t help but think about your old book. You want to pick your book up and hold it in your hands and relive all the memories. But you realize that story’s already been told, those pages have been turned, your book is probably captivating a new set of eyes by now, spine folded all the way back, revealing all the same secrets you once thought were only yours to see. Dejected, you look for anything to get your mind on other subjects. A few cheap, easy magazines later you finally get over the worst of the pain and start looking for other ways to entertain myself as if that old book were just another work of fiction.
Some soldiers develop a razor sharp weapons grade sense of humor after enduring the mind numbing boredom and repetition of the cycle of guard duty, patrols, and convoys. You get by, by making light of how bad it can be. We talked about the state of the region after a year of our being and how the bad guys just move from one town to another and back as we focus our attention elsewhere. One soldier said it was like watching a stupid person play ping-pong by himself. The ball just falls off the other side of the table and every time he goes on a wild goose chase through a huge cluttered room to find the ball and by the time he grabs it and switches sides he’s forgotten what the score is. It’s not all funny stories and bitching though.
Some of the guys here have fallen into a twisted and sick worldview that is all but encouraged by these circumstances we find ourselves in. Labeling something an “Iraqi-something” somehow strips it of all worth much in the way I believe the Nazi’s slowly stripped away the humanity of Germany’s Jewish citizens. I’ve watched men not just kill but torture wild and domesticated animals out of nothing more than plain boredom. I don’t see why it’s so hard to make the correlation that for the locals a chicken is more than just a cartoon on the outside of a carton of eggs among a stack of hundreds at the local mega-market, it’s a food source that has to be cultivated and cared for over time and it means a lot to them. It makes me sick. Luckily I’m not the only one who feels this way but still these things continues to happen. I’d get into the particulars of the story but I really don’t want to type it all out. What I did find odd was one of the men involved, a man several ranks and years my elder, after I voiced the obvious wrongness of his actions, came up to me and tried to assuage his (modest) feelings of guilt by explaining that it was just an “Iraqi Pigeon” and there for the dirtiest and most worthless creature on Earth capable only of spreading disease.
I replied, “Sergeant, human beings are a disease upon this planet that have so far shown an almost limitless capacity to take without giving back. That by definition is a parasite. Until today that pigeon lived within natures system of checks and balances that we have chosen to disconnect ourselves from. So really who’s more worthless?” I believe also I used the transitive form of “fuck” occasionally for emPHAsis. I didn’t look at him while I said this because I was trying to look busy reading and because I didn’t really feel like giving him that respect.
To try and make my point I retold a story of a day when I was in my early teens and my friend and I were sitting by the window of his second story bedroom. We’d been shooting birds from out translucent hide for hours; this was a regular thing for us then. You give young boys pellet guns and what do you expect they are going to do with them, at least we weren’t shooting each other… that day. By then we’d decimated the regulars and so had to wait extended periods of time for more migratory prey to enter our kill zone. Looking out across the yard I was scanning the branches of a scrubby coastal oak when my eye caught a tiny abnormality. I might have missed it had it not fluttered its wings just as I passed over its position. It was a tiny green humming bird surveying its territory with obvious pleasure as it let out inordinately loud chirps for its size. I laughed and told my friend I bet he couldn’t hit it, from that distance of maybe 40 meters it looked like a hyperactive bumblebee; I figured it was an impossible shot. He took my bet and as he took aim I smiled and got ready to gloat, as I believed his failure was eminent. His tongue was sticking slightly out the front of his mouth as it always did when he was concentrating or wrestling and he slowed his breathing down to steady the plastic stock of the rifle on the top of the windowsill. Pop! The gun recoiled slightly and he looked above the iron sight to see what had happened. For a moment the bird didn’t move and I readied my barrage of insults but a third of the way through the word, “pussy” the humming birds tiny body fell from the branch and behind the tall gate that marked the end of the back yard.
I was stunned. Literally I couldn’t move. I couldn’t believe he hit it. Neither of us said a word, we dropped out guns and ran down stars to see if we could find the body of our felled quarry. After a few minutes of searching in a patch of ivy at the base of the oak tree I came across what looked like a winged emerald splayed out on the ground. There was a small hole between its shoulders but not much blood; I guessed a humming bird didn’t have much to lose in the first place. We both stared at the tiny bird for a period of time that I couldn’t really recall, it could have been 30 seconds or 15 minutes and it seemed that without saying a word. Silently something clicked that had never occurred to us before. We stopped shooting birds after that day and since then I haven’t had any interest in hunting. I think maybe it took killing something that we considered not only benign but also beautiful and somehow undeserving to teach us that he really weren’t gaining anything from what we were taking. Some people it seems never learn this. I didn’t think the story would change his mind but at least he knew where I stood and maybe it would change his behavior in my presence anyway.
---
The days are starting to cool off gradually. By this I mean I don’t fear for my life when I walk outside during daylight hours. It’s one of those things where you think, hey if it was like this all the time this place wouldn’t be so bad. But it’s not like this all the time, soon it will start getting cold, or rather the temperature will start fluctuating so widely that it will seem cold at night, then it really will get cold, but we should be gone by then (extend our tour again Mr. President, I dare you).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)