Fifty- Year Sword

One speaks: "We are the men Direction scorned
When he handed round charts
Of destiny ... our dooms were preordained
And we've no commerce with those of you
Whose courses from the outset were drawn straight.”
—Ashbless

It is night time here. It gets down into the nineties at night, so it is kind of pleasant. The tent I’m in, with a bunch of other guys, gets down into the seventies at night. I’m so acclimatized to the scorching heat outside that I feel like I’m freezing to death. I don’t usually wear much when I sleep, but I manage to put on socks, pants, and a shirt during the night. Last night I even draped a towel over my poncho liner. I did just shave my head again, so that makes me a little cooler. It’s funny to me that temperatures that I’d find too warm back home make me really cold here. I guess the body just reacts poorly to temperature changes.

The moon dust gets everywhere. Have I said that already? I think I have, but it is ridiculous. I used canned air to blow out my rifle several times a day. My pockets and boots always have little piles of dust in them when I’m going to bed. We had a pretty bad sand storm two days ago, and when I got back to my tent, all of my things—my cot, my ruck and assault pack, my shaving kit, my socks and shower shoes—were a uniform shade of sandy brown. Brushing the dust off just creates a choking cloud of haze. I can’t believe people live here and don’t either move or kill themselves. It is amazing to me that thousands of people leave this area to go to nice, temperate places for school or business for several years, and then come home again. If I were a young Arab male who’d gone to the States to study agriculture or computer science or something, you couldn’t get me back here at gunpoint.

The first group of us left tonight for home. They will go back to prepare the way for the rest of us. Things need to be in place for our return. The barracks need to be put in order, offices cleaned and buildings repaired, and our parts and supply accounts have to be reopened. The main body will follow along shortly. The last of us should be home in less than three weeks now. I am very excited about getting home, but am also dreading the vast amount of work that needs to be completed so we can leave. My job in particular will be difficult, as I will have to oversee the reconciliation of differences in the property registers of the outgoing and incoming units. The task is made more difficult by the fact that my boss tends to micromanage and, I suspect, give deliberately vague guidance; and by the fact that some of the people upon whom I rely are at best unmotivated. I am worried that one of them will forget to turn something in, or fail to accurately check a report, and it will hold us up here in theater. If I have to stay an extra week or two because of a foul-up or laziness, I will be very unpleasant to be around.

All in all, I think it has been a productive year for the task force. Insurgent activity is down in all of our AOs, and civil works are on the increase. The Iraqi security forces are nowhere near our level or proficiency, discipline or integrity, but they are adequate and have the proper tools in place to be excellent if they are able to resist the seemingly ubiquitous temptation to corruption. Electricity, sewer systems, public water, education, medical facilities, and other municipal and provincial areas have seen incredible improvements. We’ve hunted down and killed many, many bad guys, both local and foreign in origin. Lost one soldier, but this is much better than the average task force. The only area I wish we could have done more in is building bridges over the tempestuous waters of sectarian violence that sometimes threaten to blow the region, and I guess the country, sky-high. I do not have high hopes in this area, but I am trying to be optimistic, and I am praying for these people, if only because their standard of living directly affects how many terrorists they breed.

And the new guys are here. I feel sorry for them, but it is someone else’s turn now. I have many goals, personal and professional, set for the next eighteen months. I am looking forward to getting to work on them.

Brisbyland

And all the time we talked you seemed to see
Something down there to smile at in the dust.
-Frost

I actually got to sleep for eight straight hours last night, for the first time in I don’t know how long. It was great. Got up and had some coffee (thanks, Gary, for the great coffee, and Jen, for the grinder), and work is going smoothly. I feel pretty good. Something about knowing you’re gonna be home in the next few weeks just motivates the hell out of you. Or it does with me, at least.

I am still pretty tired, though. My body aches all over, all the time. Doc says it’s normal near the end of a tour for your body to start to break down a little. A year of combat stress plus little sleep plus the pressure of all the little going-home tasks will do that, he says. And it doesn’t help that I’m eating MREs, with no fresh fruit or milk or anything. I’m taking vitamins, but sometimes you just want something fresh. Something different. Doc is pretty solid. He’s an old special forces guy, and he brings the SF attitude with him to everything he does. No regular army nonsense with him. No acting like you’re in garrison when there are bombs and snipers around. I like that. We need more officers with his attitude.

There are lizards everywhere, now. They must eat the scorpions, or chase them away, or something. I haven’t seen a scorpion in weeks. I saw a camel spider or two, but not nearly as many as a couple of months ago. I wonder if the lizards shoulder them out, or if the scorpions and spiders just don’t come out when it gets too hot. In any event, I prefer the lizards. Brilliant green and orange and brown, if you find one without the dust on him, which is rare. They’re not really scared of you; they just kind of dance around just outside your reach. The camel spiders do that too, but it’s not nearly as unsettling when the lizards do it.

It is time to leave this place, and in some ways I don’t really want to. We’ll only be at the big base for a few weeks, but it’s so nasty and crowded and busy up there. You can’t see the stars at night, and it’s loud. And everything is so filthy. The worst part is that it’s one big vacation spot for REMFs, and it seems like they all compete to see who can do the least work. I am going to stay as far away from the busy areas as I can. The PX and the food court, the bazaar, all of that. I am just going to hunker down in my tent out in the moon dust and do my work and wait to go home.

Home. Our replacements are already trickling in. Their torch party is already on ground up there, moved into their quarters. I can’t wait to see them and get them settled in. It’s almost, finally, somebody else’s turn.

Fishing

When lightly & brightly on tip-toe I stood
On the long level Line of a motionless Cloud
And ho! what a Skittle-ground! quoth he aloud
And wish'd from his heart nine Nine-pins to see
In brightness & size just proportion'd to me.
-Coleridge

When I was home on leave, Jennifer noticed how very tense I was when we were in the car and would pass a vehicle broken down or stopped on the side of the road. Even pulling out into traffic made me nervous. It passed after only a day or two. Something she did not notice, however, was how I cannot stand in lines. I would always warm up the car while she was checking out the movies, or browse the magazines while she was waiting in line at the grocery store. Strange people standing behind me make me so nervous I want to punch them. I have rarely experienced the actual feeling that people are describing when they’re saying their “skin crawls.” That’s what it does to me now. I haven’t been outside the wire, at least on an actual patrol or raid, in a month or two, now, and it still bothers me.

A few months ago, here, an Iraqi woman was working for us on another FOB as a masseuse. This was one of the larger bases, and I believe it’s all shut down now. Anyway, she was working as a masseuse. She was kidnapped, and before they killed her, they cut off her hands. My good friend, who I mentioned several months ago when he got promoted and moved to the intel shop, has video they made of her. That’s what these people do, here. You don’t like somebody, you disagree with their profession or morals or just the general cut of their jib, and you torture them to death and send the video to al Jazeera. I cannot imagine, when I am most lonely or angry or depressed, that we’ve done any good here. It’s not necessarily that these people are evil; they are just insane. I can’t remember ever hearing of an in-depth look, like, a psychological case study, of how tinfoil-hat-crazy tyrannical dictators permanently damage the sanity of their subjects en masse. But is it so far-fetched to imagine that it is so? And if these people are really insane—culturally insane—how much can we help them? We’re killers, not psychiatrists.

Don’t get me wrong. I know many of them personally. They seem like fantastic people. Funny, smart, tireless, and capable of amazing bravery. But sometimes I wonder if they’re all just waiting for me to let my guard down. Or I wonder, at least, if we’re treating symptoms and ignoring the disease. I’m not sure how much progress we can make if people refuse to call a problem what it is. And I’m not sure how deeply I feel the need to protect people who are so violently against what we’re doing here, these self-styled “anti-war” folks and the reporters that reveal code-word-sensitive information to our enemies and get Pulitzers for it.

Anti-war people amuse me, as a warrior, for several reasons. For one, they always assure everybody very loudly that they “support the troops.” I am a troop, and I don’t feel very supported when it’s insinuated that I’m a jackbooted thug for Big Oil or the Trilateral Commission or whatever other shadowy New World Order group these people are hip to this week. And what kind of person goes around reassuring people of their innocence for no reason? What would you think if somebody came up to you and asserted loudly and firmly that they were NOT a rapist? Or a drug dealer? Seriously, what if some random guy approached you and without any introduction, just said, “I tell you one thing, man: I’m certainly no arsonist!”

Mostly, though, the whole concept of being against a practice but supportive of its practitioners is hilarious to me. Anti-abortion activists don’t tack “but we really support people who have them!” onto the bottoms of their protest signs. People who hate football don’t say “but I sure do love NFL fans!” You never hear anybody say, “man, I really hate Star Trek, but I support Shatner and Nimoy, as well as fans of the show!” That would be stupid, and counterintuitive. If people would have to guts to stand up and say “war is wrong, and anybody who chooses it as a profession is also wrong,” well, I would disagree, but I could at least respect it. Just come out and say that you hate the military, if it is so; beating around the bush just wastes time.

In any event, I think after contemplation that I have not changed at all, really. The two worlds I live in are divided very clearly; and once I remind myself a few times that they’ve been juxtaposed, and I’m back in my home world, I will go back to normal.

But the Outer Fringe

Once more we hear the word
That sickened earth of old:
"No law except the sword
Unsheathed and uncontrolled,"
Once more it knits mankind,
Once more the nations go
To meet and break and bind
A crazed and driven foe.
-Kipling

It is hot here. I thought that it was hot before, but I was wrong; that was lukewarm, maybe, or tepid. Whatever. The point is that now it is definitely hot. It is August in Iraq, and the only thing that might be hotter is August in Kuwait. Thankfully, we’re only gonna be there for two days or so on the way out. I am so anxious to get the hell home that I’m having dreams about it. I dreamt the other night of sitting on my couch playing Oblivion and Jennifer bringing me beers.

I’ve been showing the Iraqi officers from the nearby battalion around the FOB. They will be moving in here when we leave, and they needed familiarization with certain aspects of the installation. I showed them where the ammo storage yard is, and the wells. Apparently Saddam had all thirteen of them running when he was here, but now only four or five work. There are also these enigmatic fields toward the north end of the FOB, with cyclone fences and enormous gates. The land inside the fences was so well-kept that the grass and trees inside are still green. They may have even diverted a spring or something over that way. I theorize that these were tiny game preserves, because I cannot think of why else there would be fields of grass and trees, fenced in, and so far away from any buildings. I wonder what kind of animals were kept.

We had some indirect fire today for the first time since I can remember. At least a month. It didn’t hit the FOB, but came pretty close. It is funny how you come to know, somewhere deep in your subconscious, the sounds of friendly and hostile fire. The range is not very far from where I sleep, so every other night or so I can hear the stentorian, masculine bang-bang-bang of the fifties as they’re test fired before people roll outside the wire. They don’t even wake me up. I even know the sounds of the det cord and C4 the EOD guys use to blow up IEDs out on the road. I don’t even lift my head up anymore when I hear that. But dammit, I know what incoming mortar and rocket fire sounds like; and even if I don’t hear it in the air, for some reason I’ve been able to tell, recently, if it was ours or theirs. Some of the older NCOs and officers say this happens to everybody—eventually even the dumbest people can realize the difference between American and hostile ordnance from sound alone. But this seems incredible to me. It’s like in Kingpin, when Woody Harrelson is able to tell that Randy Quaid needs to move three boards to the right when he lines up to bowl, just from listening to the sound of the pins being knocked down. It doesn’t seem natural to me. But I observe it in myself, and in others. All the firing and explosions we hear all the time, and it doesn’t bother us; but a couple of hours ago that round came in and all ten or so of us stopped talking, and the officers went inside to listen to the radio, and the NCOs went to find their soldiers to do a headcount, and everybody made sure they had ammo, without anybody having to say anything.

Sometimes it is like I’m living in another world, out here. I am anxious to get back to my own.