Spread

'How often already you've had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-by and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below.
'I have to be gone for a season or so.
-Frost

I am consumed with a burning, brutal rage, directed at Microsoft. My XBOX is refusing to play any more. No games, no music, and most importantly, no DVDs. What the hell use is this piece of junk—and perhaps a better question would be, what the hell use is the XBOX tech help people, who have let my email remain unanswered for days.

I knew something like this would happen. I knew, if I went to the dark side, that it would bite me in the ass. I’ve always hated Microsoft, for their immoral business practices—honestly, who buys a company pioneering internet-browsing software for the blind and then kills the project? That’s, like, cartoon villain evil—but I put my disapproval aside because my friends all said “trust me.” And honestly, it is a good system. If you have the money to buy a HD television to go with it, I’m sure it’s fantastic. I have had a great time with it, probably having racked up literally thousands of hours on it in the last few years.

But isn’t it fitting that now, of all times, it decides to commit mutiny? The one situation where I can’t “bring it in” to a Best Buy or something like that. I’m basically screwed, here. I’m without a DVD player and can’t play games. I’m lugging around a useless piece of electronics now. I am so angry I can’t see straight. I’m angry at Microsoft for putting out a defective product and then being unsupportive when it breaks. I’m angry at myself for not bringing a backup DVD player. I’m angry at Bungie Software because if they hadn’t sold out to Microsoft, Halo would never have been released for XBOX and nobody would have bought the system, and I wouldn’t be in this situation.

There’s not much I can do about it, and that’s the big problem with corporations. I am a big believer in the move toward a corporate society, but we need to find a way to force corporations to abandon their “what are YOU gonna do about it?” attitude toward consumers. Frankly, until the thing started acting up, I considered myself a full convert to Microsoft. Now I realize how I’ve been seduced. There may not have been many games released for the Macintosh, but the ones that were released, dammit, they worked. I should never have left the fold. I am now going to seriously consider going back to Mac when I get home. Problems with one product are indicative of problems within the greater corporate organism.

With great difficulty, because I could go on for pages about my anger with Microsoft and my XBOX, I turn to the game today. Marcus J. called me from Kuwait two days ago and we talked about the game. We are in agreement: if the defense finds it way onto the field and are not high on cough syrup, we really have an honest-to-God good shot in this game. I’m not being crazily optimistic, here. We have always played to the level of our competitors, whether they’re number one or a high school team. Really all we have to do is keep up with them and then manage to come out on top in the last couple minutes.

Marc informed me of something that concerns me greatly. Apparently this game is undersold. As in, not sold out. As in, the Aggie-Texas game was NOT SOLD OUT on the A&M side, and we ended up having to give four thousand tickets to t.u.

This also enrages me. This is an Aggie game. We may not be having the best season ever, but for the love of God. You know what started this? The school telling us we couldn’t have bonfire any more. It was bad enough with all the liberal commie professors in a supposedly conservative school, but the bonfire thing killed us. Something needs to happen before long, or the Aggie Spirit will be dead forever. Am I being alarmist? Am I blowing this out of proportion? Or, on the other hand, did the Texas game not sell out?

It can’t all be blamed on the administration, though. These lazy, slovenly college students. Put them on a plane to Iraq for a year. That’ll make them appreciate their school. Miscreants.

To sum up, I hate Microsoft, I can’t believe the game didn’t sell out, and I can’t wait to watch it. Tonight! Beat the Hell.

Tchaika

…and Arthur woke and called,
'Who spake? A dream. O light upon the wind,
Thine, Gawain, was the voice--are these dim cries
Thine? or doth all that haunts the waste and wild
Mourn, knowing it will go along with me?'
-Tennyson

Monotony. Ubiquitous, crushing boredom and spirit-breaking work, punctuated by brief moments of terror. This is a strange life.

I finished DeLillo’s Underworld. By a strange coincidence, I picked up another book at random, and not more than ten pages into it, the author mentions DeLillo. Anyway, I know that plenty of people see it as a great modern American masterpiece, but I really think it is not. I like the way he writes dialogue, but I couldn’t tell you the story of the book even if you put a gun to my head. This is something I’ve noticed about many so-called modern classics of American literature: they have no story. Nothing exciting or enthralling happens. Maybe I am an unwashed prole, but I need conflict and struggle in my fiction. What is the point of reading a story where nothing exciting happens? The whole reason people read is to escape their own lives, where nothing exciting happens.

Perhaps the literary community is just as bad as the film community. You probably can’t even count the number of bad movies that have been released in the last few years that somehow got rave reviews despite bad story, characters you can’t relate to, bad cinematography, etc. Titanic comes to mind, or Vanilla Sky. A Beautiful Mind was really bad, too. Who honestly likes a movie where the protagonist is so unlikeable? Anyway, maybe books are the same way. A book critic gets to the end of the book, scratches his head and says “what the hell was that book about?” Then he realizes that it must be so brilliant that he can’t figure it out. But he doesn’t want to look like he’s not smart enough to figure out the plot, so he writes a review praising the book. Because if you praise something, people assume that you do understand it.

Had an Iraqi chicken colonel come through the other day. The battalion commander was with him, giving him the nickel tour, I guess. I showed them around my AO, with the interpreter trailing along behind us. I really wish I knew Arabic. I hate not being able to communicate directly with people. In Mexico and Germany, I may not be able to debate ontological empiricism, but I can at least talk to people about food or movies or where the bathroom is. I don’t even know how to say hello in Arabic. I need to change this. I assumed I’d pick it up while I was here, but we’re working such long hours that I don’t want to go talk to the Hajis when I’m done. I just want to fall into my rack. I’ve got an Arabic CD and book that I keep meaning to look at, but I’m exhausted all the time. I fall asleep if I read something boring, like a manual. I don’t know if I could concentrate enough to learn a language in this environment. I’ll try, though.

I am looking forward to this last game. We have the chance, here, to make sports history. Not just college football history, but sports history. When we play well, we can outplay anybody. It’s like the world’s greatest guitarist, but his hand keeps falling asleep during the concert. If we can keep from falling asleep, we have the opportunity to do several things. First, we can unseat the team that is generally viewed as the nation’s best. Secondly, we can reassert our rivalry—they haven’t taken us seriously since 1999, and it’s time we started making them worry about Thanksgiving more than the Red River Shootout. Also, I’m tired of Tech calling themselves our rivals. Our rival is Texas, not some overgrown junior college. Thirdly, we will get more television coverage next year if we win this game, which is great for recruiting. Fourthly, Fran will prove he wasn’t a mistake, which I am at this point convinced that he was. Lastly, it will be one of the greatest stories in sports history. A team having trouble finding itself, with young players and a desperate coaching staff, humiliates the best team in the nation. That’s the stuff they make movies about.

They should make another movie about us. That crappy Sean Astin movie did wonders for Notre Dame.

BTHO t.u. We can do this if we don’t make stupid mistakes. My solemn promise to you: if we win, I will fly my Aggie flag on the pole the next day. Gig ‘em.

Snake!!

In the middle of the winter I’m so frustrated
And I can’t wait till Summer to see you again
I think maybe my angels have been overrated
They seem more like my keepers and less like my friends
-The Weekenders, Start to Rain

We have been working nonstop. Very little sleep. The war doesn’t go to bed just because it gets dark. I am kind of impressed with everybody in my platoon; we have gone for nine straight weeks now without a day off. We’ve slept late a couple days, but those were days in Kuwait and up near Tikrit when we were in transit and didn’t really have anything to do. Nobody complains, though. That is, no more than normal. I am kind of in awe of a lot of these guys. They take extremely stressful challenges in stride. I am always thinking that civilian employers are crazy not to recruit largely from the veteran pool. So you’ve got a high-stress, eighty-hour-a-week job with lots of deadlines and late nights? No problem. Most of these guys would eat it up with a spoon. I can hear them now: “At least I’m not getting shot at.”

I have received a lot of packages. Thank you to everybody. I love them. Especially the barbecue sauce. We’ve got a grill now, but we’re building a smoker too, so we can make good Texas brisket. I’m going to the logistics base in a couple days, and I’m gonna buy charcoal and cooking implements at the PX. We had a cookout the other day, and we had to use a fork to turn the meat. They apparently also sell actual barbecue meat at the PX, so I’m gonna check that out too.

My best friend sent me the first draft of a book he and his sister wrote. It’s very good. They are still fine-tuning it, tweaking the plot a little and so forth, looking for holes, but it is already great. Very entertaining. I realized he writes like I do: the exact same way he speaks. Anyway, it got me off my ass and I wrote another synopsis last night when I had some time. I’ve got Jen sending me lots of info on Sumerian mythology, tectonic plates, natural disasters, etc. I never realized how much flavor it adds to writing to do some research first. I am very grateful to her for finding this stuff. I know she went through hell to find me an electronic version of the complete Apocrypha all in one file.

I’m planning a road trip with my friend when I get home. Not right away, but at some point, probably in the spring of 07, we’ll meet somewhere and just tool around the country for a couple of days. I always come away from intellectual discussions with him so refreshed. Inspired, too. We bounce story ideas off each other, and help each other refine them. Apparently Wilde and his buddies did this, and apparently Tim Powers and Phillip K. Dick used to always go drinking and talk about their ideas. And they’re the two finest science fiction writers ever.

Jen and I were talking about what we’re doing leave-wise when I get home, and we’re thinking we’ll go see our families for Thanksgiving (assuming I haven’t been extended) and spend Christmas at home. I like the idea of Christmas in my house. It’ll be my first one there. I love my new house; I’m kind of sad that I’ll be away from it for this first holiday season.

I got a length of black hose and spray-painted yellow stripes on it. I’ve got an NCO that is terrified of snakes. You know how, with some little girls, you can say “hey, there’s a bug!” and point at them, and they’ll shriek and start swatting at themselves, and it works every time? He is that bad, but with snakes. Anyway, I put it in the shadow by his bed. I think some of the other guys in the bunker gave away that something was up, and he didn’t seem too scared. He wasn’t sure who it was, so I tried to take the opportunity to start a prank war by putting a plastic skull left over from Halloween in another guy’s bed. You know, Pancho Villa strategy. Well, they both figured out it was me, and so now I’m kind of edgy, expecting them to pull something at any moment. I need one of those prank books.

Well, I’ve got a big boring meeting tomorrow, so I have to go to sleep. Good game this last weekend. Almost had it.

Hadda Be Playin' on the SAMS Box

“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something great.”
-last words of Pancho Villa

We have these fake surveillance cameras that the old unit left behind. I have no idea why they had them, but they look pretty real. Somebody put one up in the latrine, pointing right down at the urinal. I got a good picture of it. I love how soldiers pass time when they’re bored. Cards are a staple of life here.

Last night we were playing spades around the table, and the door of the bunker opened about a foot and then closed again. That door is too heavy to open because of a breeze or something, so we all kind of looked at it confusedly. Then we all looked at each other. Then, all at the same time, we went and got our rifles and a magazine and went out and looked around the area. We didn’t find anything, but to somebody watching with NVGs it must have looked hilarious. Five or six guys in boxers, flip flops and night vision goggles stalking around the bunker with night vision goggles on. It kind of made us nervous, the door opening and closing like that. The guys on the two guard points nearest us are not from my company, so we don’t really know them. Who knows if they were sleeping while Haji jumped the wire right underneath them. Also, the locals around here think our FOB is on the site of haunted ground, or something. The point is, it was eerie and in retrospect, kind of funny. I’m still nervous, though. I slept with my rifle last night instead of hanging it on the hook by the door like I normally do.

We’ve had several soldiers become fathers in the last week or so. I can’t imagine knowing you have children and never having seen them. And knowing that it’ll be almost a year before you meet them for the first time. Hell, by then the kids’ll be able to drive you home. I should probably stop thinking about it so I don’t jinx myself. It may be me getting a Red Cross message in a couple years telling me I’m a dad, in the middle of the night in Syria or North Korea or France.

Tell me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t that DC Sniper guy caught using satellite photos? If we can do that with a guy in America, why can’t we do that in Iraq? I know satellites are expensive, but imagine how useful several geosynchronous spybirds would be. A convoy gets hit on a road, and you call up the satellite imagery to see when the bomb was planted, where the guys came from and where they went afterward. We’d be able to find anybody that way. Maybe it would make people too uncomfortable, contemplating the various evil implications of such technology, but those people can come here and drive our convoys for us if they want to.

People are always so worried about The Man spying on them. They love to paint these slippery-slope dystopian panoramas of evil 1984-ish fat cats putting cameras in every room of your homes. What kind of ego must you have to think that a government agency cares what the hell you do with your spare time? I’ve even heard people say that there’s a constitutional right to privacy. I took all the required government and Poli Sci courses in school, and I never remember reading that. Honestly, what does anybody do in their house that is so secret? Everybody gets sick, and spills food on themselves sometimes, and drinks, and scratches themselves, and has bodily functions. It’s not like it’s a big secret that you go to the bathroom or have relations with your spouse. I don’t know, maybe I’m being simplistic, but it seems to me that the only people worried about privacy are the people who are breaking the law in the first place. People who abuse their kids or have child porn or smoke grass. Kind of like how the only parents that get upset over mandatory student-athlete drug tests are the parents who know their kids use drugs and are okay with it. Those parents should be publicly flogged, by the way. But the point is, putting satellites in orbit to catch criminals doesn’t mean the government is going to put surveillance cameras in your bathroom.

Which brings us back to where I started, I just realized. That camera in the can is hilarious. I sent the picture to Jen. I’m too easily amused. Maybe I’m just starved for entertainment.

Thanks to Mom for the extended version of Dances With Wolves, by the way. I haven’t had time to watch it yet, but soon, I hope.

Cowboy

One more sun goes sliding down the sky
One more shadow leaps against the wall
The world begins to disappear
The worst things come from inside here
All the king’s men reappear
For an egg man, fallen off a wall,
And he’ll never be together again.
-Duritz, Einstein on the Beach

Jen sent me an email with a video of Jason, my puppy, barking. It’s only about fifteen seconds long—any bigger and the file wouldn’t go through—but I watched the damn thing for about half an hour straight, over and over. I miss the little guy. I feel silly to admit this, but I’m worried that he won’t remember me when I get home.

I had a good idea. Now that we have whole series of TV shows on DVD, and it would be possible to even do this, I wonder what it would be like to take a whole show and watch it backwards. Watch the series finale first, and then work your way back to the series premiere. Or take the season premieres and finales and watch only those. I don’t know, maybe it’s stupid. I think most television is horrible drek, but the shows I like, I love. I wonder what insight you could gain, or enjoyment, by watching a character regress from the fully-developed final product to the early one-dimensional stereotype.

Think about Scully at the beginning of the X-Files and at the end. Chris Moltisanti at the beginning of Sopranos and the end. John McGuirk in Home Movies. Shepherd Book in Firefly. Jimmy James in Newsradio.

It is not possible to do this with most shows, I realize, because most shows are crap. They are lowest-common-denominator garbage that are never clever or surprising and where everything is back to normal at the end of every episode. Characters never develop in these shows because most of their audience doesn’t have the patience or attention span to watch a character grow. But the good shows, the excellent ones, have excellent characters that are really worth following. I admire writers that say dammit, I want my characters to change, to have real challenges and life-altering experiences, and if some of the audience are too frightened or stupid to follow, then screw them.

We are working hard here. I am not sure that leave will be possible for anybody, with how short we are. It should get better with the drawdown in troop strength, but by the time we reap the benefits it will probably be too late.

I saw on AFN that we lost again. To Tech. How humiliating is this going to get? We went through all this nonsense a couple years ago to boot out a perfectly good coach and bring in a new one that everybody talked about like he was Jesus. Well, here’s his chance to prove it—for us to be taken seriously as a football team, he’ll have to perform a miracle. One of my buddies said that he doesn’t care how many games we lose as long as we beat Texas. That would be lovely and very poetic, but at this point we’d be lucky to beat a 5A high school team. They need to shape up. This horrible record is negatively affecting the war effort.

A Fine Line

“Welcome,” he cried, “to the Halls of Valhalla, where
Everyone struggles for naught but their name.
Trifling contrivances here are forbidden,
And no one is different, and no one’s the same.”
-Elmwood, from Paradise

I can’t bring myself to complain much about this place for very long. This is a very easy war, compared to how most of my forbears fought them. We’ve got our video games, our books, our movies and our hot food. We are much safer, and much more often. We’ve lost so few compared to other fights.

And in a way, this place is pure and whole in a way that America is not. I don’t mean the physical location, but the life here. No traffic or bank lines or stupidity. No hassles. Just killing and business of supporting the killers. No wasted time, no frittered thought. Eat. Sleep. Smoke. Convoy. Patrol. Raid. Lock and load. Drink water. Clean rifle. Maintain equipment. Watch your six. Watch the crowd. Incoming. Check your buddies. Shoot or don’t shoot, but decide fast.

Simple. Quick. Brutal. Direct and spartan and very spiritual.

I contrast this with the crap I see going on back home. It seems like about 90% of the country is not aware there’s a war going on. Why are there no war bonds being sold? Why are our leaders not issuing a call to service? Not a draft, but a “hey, why don’t you give back to your country for a little while?” Why are people not collecting clothes and stuff for the children of Iraq?

I see millions of people still trying desperately to define themselves through what they watch or eat or wear or say, or what kind of cellphone they say it on. There is a growing discord in our country, and nobody is talking about it, or perhaps they are, but it’s in whispers. Those who serve and those whom they serve. The disciplined and hardworking…and the flabby and impatient and lazy. The noble few who place their mortal bodies between the horrors of war and their loved ones……and everybody else. All the flag-waving and slogan T-shirts and patriotic country songs in the world won’t change the fact that many Americans seem to look down on the military. We are warmongers and practitioners of an increasingly obsolete and disgusting art. At best, we are unwitting stooges of corporate fat cats. Many schools won’t permit ROTC or recruiters on campus now. The glitterati and academic intelligentsia stereotype us. Why? What is so stupid or undesirable about this life?

I like this life. I like everything about it. All of my meetings and disputes and arguments and stress really mean something. Most people have stress and meetings and work hard on projects, and for what? So another khaki ad can get thrown in our faces? So the seven-hundredth article this month about the president’s new bill can get proofread? So another off-brand ibuprofen tablet can be rushed to market? So all those transactions of electrons can be completed? So they can earn more money to buy crap they don’t need? That’s not real, none of it.

I am living the life, here. I am miserable and lonely and miss my home and my family, but we’re doing the Lord’s work here, catching and killing servants of evil. Don’t pity me or worry for me. Envy me. I am a young man at war. This is my place. This is paradise.