June 6, 2007

  • A year of dust


    Today is my second birthday on this deployment.  The first was spent in Camp Shelby, MS, crawling through dirt and rocks, throwing hand grenades, and re-learning basic first aid for the fourtieth time.  This year, it's spent sitting behind a desk, listening to a mediocre pagan podcast (Lance and Graal Pagan Project, if you're interested), and thinking about all the random stuff in this office I need to pack.


    My major thought today is, I've devoted more than a year of my life to this operation.  I've spent more than a year thinking of very little other than how to survive in a combat zone, and to do my job.  Family and friends, while in the back of my mind, have not held the significance they do back home.  I haven't thought about finances, or the newest electronics, or how to get a better job.  I've carefully avoided thinking about what else is going on in the world, how my friends' lives are progressing, the fact that the world has moved on while I sit in the middle of the desert, reliving every day as nothing ever changes enough to tell the days apart. 


    How can I go back to civilian life after this?  How am I going to be able to shift focus that drastically - from thinking about how far away is my body armor, to not needing to think about personal protection at all?  How do you shift thoughts away from life and death, to ... I don't even know.  Is it possible to worry about anything again after worrying that you're going to die?


    And this comes from me, a fobbit, who only leaves the protection of the wire once every couple of months or so.  How do those who live outside the wire survive the transition?  It's hard for me to fathom.  I think this is why veterans don't talk about the past - if they talk about it, they think about it, and then they're forced to confront those differences and transitions, and can't.  So does this mean this past year of my life is just going to be locked away in the back of my mind, carefully avoided, left to grow tarnished until the bright emotions and memories of this tour don't hurt the mind anymore... So has this entire past year been wasted? 


    later