Posted at Confessions of a Dangerous Mind... Iraq:


Hello all,It occurred to me the other day that I haven’t posted a blog in a while. So what did I do? Like any red blooded American, I procrastinated. Fortunately for the blog, just as I was sitting down to enjoy some of the 4th season of the Soprano’s, the power on the pad went out. In the “balmy” 120 degree summer temps that occur here daily our AC units have been demanding ever more electricity from the old-and-getting-older generators that are in a constant state of disrepair and are seemingly perpetually being adjusted. So as I sit here in the dark typing this entry, a small army of contractors are working on our generator, racing the sun as the accumulated AC in our CHUs dissipates rapidly.
As for the lack of blog entries lately I must apologize. I have meant to keep up with it better than I have, but several factors have contributed to my delinquency. First is that we have been rather busy lately. Not busy in the “a lot of enemy activity” sense mind you, but busy in the “patrols are manned by scared short timers” sense. That is to say that most of our days lately have been filled with gearing up and going out on “missions” that turn out to be small piles of trash that we drive half an hour to get to, just so that we can immediately recognize that there is no real threat and watch as EOD kicks the “suspicious” piece of garbage off the side of the road. Actually this reality has been our misfortune so often lately that EOD has taken to actually claiming the piece of trash and brining it back to the FOB with us so that we don’t end up getting called out an hour or two later to discard the same piece of trash that has blown back onto the road. Granted, we would rather go out a hundred times to pick up trash than once to pick up a soldier… but I feel there should be at least an attempt to justify calling us out. We are, after all, a limited resource. After several days now of intermittent sleep and very little “actual” work we have begun to feel like we are being subjected to undue torture.
The other reason I have been delinquent in my blogging is that of our need to protect our tenuous relationship with reality. Let me explain. Being over here, while bearing all the earmarks of life; eating, drinking, sleeping, day to day life is not really like life as we have ever known it. In fact much of our life here seems to be dictated by pure fate. Constantly being on call we never know if we will be busy or slow from one day to the next and this has bred in us a sort of reverence for things out of our control. I guess you could say that we have developed a set of superstitions along with a sort of “sixth sense” about the patterns that emerge in our lives. Many times it has been the case that the mere mention of a mission and simultaneously a “pang” will shoot up each of our spines… and sure enough half an hour later we get a call. Either that or a visitor will arrive and bring with them a tide of missions that seeks to wash through and leave only just enough time to catch quick naps between missions rather than actual sleep. I know it may sound somewhat ridiculous but this has ultimately caused us to behave like a ball player who wears the same socks at every game, by which I mean that we try to deviate as little as possible from our daily routines in order not to disturb the delicate balance that the mission gods so hate disrupted. I know that explanation doesn’t hold much water when held up to scrutiny, but suffice to say that when we are steady and get on a roll, so to speak, the days seem to wash together and time seems to pass a little more efficiently and without incident. And that, come to think of it, pretty much sums up our current situation.
So, if that is our current situation than this next observation would detail our immediate future. We spend our time now much as we have in the past… lifting weights, watching movies, reading books etc. Only there seems to be more and more something looming in the back of our heads. It hasn’t fully developed yet, but the beginnings are definitely taking root. What I am referring to is “short timers syndrome”. Our team isn’t quite there yet… but it is all around us. Several of our counterparts as well as this entire FOB are gearing up towards leaving. Each passing day soldiers are acting more and more like seniors in springtime. The changes are not drastic however, they are more discreet and gradual… so as to almost be imperceptible. Only a few things really stand out, like becoming more and more risk adverse (hence the upswing in frivolous missions). The only recent manifestation among our team is a propensity to have wild mood swings. In recent days our moods are most often upbeat and optimistic, after all we have never been closer to going home as we are right now. But then again on certain days it suddenly seems as though life is playing out a mathematical/philosophical question posed a long time ago that is:

If there is a finite distance (or time in this case) between you and an object it stands to reason that the distance could be broken into fractions. Now take that distance and halve it, you have just moved half way to your destination. In theory every time you move you do have to cross that plane which would constitute the next halfway point between you and your destination, however, each time you do so the distance between you and the next halfway point becomes ever smaller. Continuing on like this for eternity can you ever actually reach the finish line?

Now obviously we live in a world unconstrained by the limitations of this theory, so inevitably we will ultimately reach our goal. But I said all that just to impress the sort of feeling that we get when we add up the days we have left and when all’s taken into account we could have sworn that we were further along than we are. On one such melancholy day recently SGT J put it like this… he said “no matter how you slice it… it’s not tomorrow”. It’s a strange sort of feeling to get, and hard to describe too. Actually more and more it seems as though as the excitement about going home builds and builds, and the frustration and anxiety about not being home yet accumulates as well… that basically everything sort of washes out and just becomes a type of background static, emotional white noise. Perhaps that is what they mean by the “thousand yard stare”. I had always assumed that that came from being scarred by war but perhaps not. Perhaps its not the unseen enemy your looking for out there… its just some future time that isn’t now, some idealized memory projected into the future, where your loved ones are close, laughter fills the air, and a cool breeze stirs the trees.

I love and miss you all… only another couple months to the finish line, no matter how you want to cut it.

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