Probably Because It Sounds Scary

She dared no more than ask him with her eyes
How was it with him for a second trial.
And with his eyes he asked her not to ask.
They had given him back to her, but not to keep.
-Frost

I saw a big camel spider out by my office last night. It wasn’t enormous, but it was pretty big. It kept trying to get inside, but since there’s a step up into the office, it was falling off and not making it in. I decided to leave it alone since it couldn’t get in. Camel spiders are actually not arachnids; they are more closely related to scorpions. I guess it’s all the family arthropoda, but I’m not a big biology guy.

There was a huge op going on this last week, and whereas last time I got to lead the Forward Logistics Element, this time I had to stay back, probably because my counterpart is on leave. I was kind of upset that I wasn’t getting to participate, but the three days that the battalion was gone were probably the best of the deployment for me. There was not much work to do, and nobody in line at the DFAC or taking up equipment in the gym. I actually got to watch a movie the whole way through without getting sidetracked. I was able to sit down and do my work each day in one sitting, rather than getting distracted by a million different issues and having the process take all day.

We keep hearing about operational security, and people are always cautioning us against even hinting at a specific date that we will return home. But I talked to some guys that came back from leave, and they said that there are already big banners up all over base back home, saying “WELCOME HOME” with the date we get back right under it. It wouldn’t take a genius, or even a very smart person, to figure out exactly when each echelon will get off the plane. I am pleased that the dates that keep getting tossed around for redeployment are about a month earlier than when I thought I’d get home. That is fine with me. I’ll take an extra month at home.

I have been working out, like I talk about nearly every entry, and I’m pleased with the results. However, several of my buddies have remarked to me how white I am, and that if I got some sun on me, got a little darker, it would make me look much more defined. So the last couple days I’ve been crawling up on the roof to lay out on a cot that I threw up there. This afternoon I realized when I was finishing up that if you stand up, up there, you can see right into downtown Tikrit. I realized that anybody with a decent rifle and a scope could put one in me very easily; so I think I will just put the cot down on the ground and tan down there. I can imagine the news story now: “a soldier was killed today by a sniper while he was, um, getting a tan.” All my friends back home would say “I had no idea he was so into sunbathing.” Ha. What would the letter to my wife say? Usually, even if it’s an accident, they try to church it up a little, make it sound like the guy was a credit to the unit and not screwing around when he bought it. I’m not sure how easy that would be if I got shot while tanning. Probably when she got up to heaven and saw me, she’d punch me.

My wife is very excited about me coming home on leave. I am as well; I know down to almost the exact hour when I will get on the chopper to go down to Kuwait. I am interested to see the changes she’s made to the house while I’ve been gone. It is not easy being an army wife. In my short time in the army, I’ve seen it ruin relationships of all kinds. Fathers and sons, husbands and wives, friends; you name it, and somewhere, a deployment has screwed it up. It has made me kind of paranoid about my friends’ marriages; for a while now, in my nightly prayers, I have been detouring off into praying for the marriages of people in my family and my circle of friends. You realize how fragile some of them are when you live this life; you also are surprised, sometimes, at how strong some of them are. I want mine to be one of the strong ones.