Bye bye to Baghdad

The sand was thick in the air this morning.  It looked like a dirty fog had rolled in off the Euphrates, but really it was just the sand that had rolled in last night and had settled in for a stay when the air stopped moving.  Running through it was hard.  I tried breathing through my mouth, but I could taste the sand coating my tongue and the back of my throat until it was painful to swallow, like trying to down sandpaper.  Breathing through my nose hurt less, but then I had to contend with the stink of Baghdad – shit, burning trash, exhaust, sunbaked sand and concrete.  The smell of this war.

The smell will never leave me.  Every time I walk out the door, I’ll be surprised not to smell the stench.  I’ll be surprised when breathing doesn’t mean inhaling sand.  When a mask isn’t necessary for easy breathing.

The time when I’ll be able to forget the smell and all that’s associated with is coming up soon.  Our replacements are here, and our RIP has begun.  I’ll be back on US soil in less than a month.  I don’t think I’ll be able to return to “life as normal”, but it’ll be at least a little bit closer.  I’m living in a TOC tent right now.  It’s not so bad, really.  The site manager hooked us up with beds and a bedside table, so we have some comforts of the trailer.  The portajohns outside are closer than the latrine trailer was to my old hooch.  The only real downer is that we don’t have any shower trailers, and have to drive to a nearby pad to take a shower.  But it’s nothing I can’t deal with.

I’m not sure I’m actually looking forward to going home.  Yes, being deployed has it’s low points, but it also has it’s high points.  I miss my family and friends, and my cat , but I’ve made friends here, some who seem closer than family, and the jackal that lived under my trailer was always friendly.   And I feel that I have a purpose here.  I’ve made a difference.  Maybe not in the role the Army intended, but nonetheless.  What purpose do I have back home?  To be another cog in the great lumbering wheel of some anonymous company, doing a job I hate?  Why go back to that when I could stay here, and make a real contribution?  Stay here with the friends I’ve made, who place their wellbeing in my hands, and count on me to support them?  I know I have friends back home who are waiting for me to return, but I don’t feel the same responsibility to them as I do towards the people here.  Maybe it’s because we’re in a combat zone, or constructed our friendship under stress, or because we’re brothers in arms, but it’s a different feeling.

I know I have no real choice.  I’ll leave in a few weeks with the rest of my unit, and head home.  It’s just a matter of balances for me – will the pain of leaving here be balanced by the joy of coming home?  I’m worried that it won’t…

later

I *hate* Xange Themes.  I tried to use them yet again, and have just succeeded in screwing up my entire freaking page.   And I can’t turn the freaking thing off!  I just want my old setup back.

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

I’ve had a rough week this week, and we’re only on Day 3.  Yesterday was quite possibly the worse day I’ve had since I’ve gotten here.  I was in a blah mood when I woke up, and it just kept getting worse.  Nothing went seriously wrong, but I just kept getting more and more upset.  By the time we got around to movies that evening, damn near anything brought me to the edge of tears.  I was glad when my buddy called it an early night for his own reasons.  By the time I went home, I was in tears.  I meditated for almost an hour before I felt better.  Managed to get to sleep well enough, at least.

Today I was a little better, still blah, but not depressed.  And it was definitely depression yesterday.  It’s been awhile since I’ve felt that bad…

I bought a replacement ring today – it’s just a little silver band, $20, but it keeps me from thinking I’m missing something, so it’s all good.   I also bought a set of Turkish crystal (supposedly – I don’t know how much I trust what the gift shops around here say…).  But it’s pretty, and I like it, and that’s all that matters.

later

Top 21 Signs a Pagan is Militant

1.  You use a flamethrower to light the altar candles.
2.  Your athame has a bayonet attachment to fit on your M-16.
3.  Your robe is made of camouflaged material.
4.  Your cakes and wine come from MREs.
5.  Your book of shadows contains plans on defusing bombs, poison antidotes, and basic survival techniques.
6.  Your circle is marked by barbed wire.
7.  You have to take an ATV or HMMWV to get to the Covenstead.
8.  You use an artillery shell casing as your God symbol.
9.  You use a hand grenade for a God symbol (when an artillery shell isn’t available).
10.  You take down a tent to move the Covenstead.
11.  Your familiar is an attack-trained Doberman, Rottweiler, or German Shepard.
12.  You use a hubcap as a scrying dish.
13.  You use teargas to smudge when doing banishings.
14.  Your Goddess symbol is Tank Girl.
15.  Your Tradition’s 1st degree training includes Ninjitsu or other form of martial arts.
16.  Your Circle name is Spike, Slash, Ripcord, Hawkeye, or anything that ends in ‘ster’.
17.  You use a machine gun to cast your circle.
18.  You use a compass as a divination tool.
19.  You use a bullet on a string as a pendulum.
20.  You call your High Priest ‘Commander’ and your High Priestess ‘General.’
21.  At Beltane, you jump Chemlights.

later

I think Xanga needs to make a policy regarding blogs that haven’t been updated in more than two years.  Seriously, if someone stops posting for two years, do you really think that person is going to come back?  I say, if a blog isn’t updated in 1-2 years, delete it and put the name back into circulation.  Hey, it works for hotmail. (though I think 30 days is way too short a period – especially for those of us over in the sandbox who don’t check civilian email accounts frequently.  Speaking of which, I should probably go do that…)

later

Why do I want to stay?

I’ve got less than 90 days in country.  I’m excited about being home again, stateside, getting to do all those civvie things I miss here.  I miss my family and friends.  I miss my kittens.  I miss being able to drive outside of a 10-mile radius.  I miss going to a store and knowing that whatever it is I need, they’ll have it.  I want to go home.

But I don’t want to go home.  I don’t want to abandon my friends here.  And that’s exactly how I see it.  I’ll be going home and all my friends, my brothers in arms, will be here, without me.  I can’t help but feel that I’ll be abandoning them.  And I feel guilty about it.

I’ve been toying with the idea of extending.  But I don’t know if I can do another 6 months here.  Three months, sure, too easy.  Six months?  …That’s a whole ‘nother ballgame…  So I guess it comes down to this: does the guilt of leaving outweigh the joy of going home?  At this point, I just don’t know.  I’m going to give it a bit more time.  If I get picked up for active duty, it’ll be a moot point anyway because I’ll have to redeploy with my unit, get out of the Nat’l Guard, and PCS to my new duty station.  I’ll wait to hear from the acessions board, hope and pray that I get the results before I leave, and that I get picked up.  If I hear back and it’s negative, well, I guess then I’ll have to make a decision.  I just wish it were an easier one.

later

Scariness revealed

Got bored, so I started to play around with my Look & Feel settings.  I went pastel.  I tried Xanga’s new skins/modules, but I *really* don’t like them.  It’s too complicated, and I couldn’t find a preview button, and I was afraid of losing my current design if I saved the update.  Whatever.  I’ll stick with my happy html.

Not too much going on in the life of me.   Same old, same old.  The groundhog effect is taking it’s toll.  I’ve been forward a day all week.  I was screwed up enough that I actually made the slides for today’s meeting, yesterday – completely unaware that it wasn’t the right day.  Yeah, I’m high speed like that.

I’ve gotten to know some LTs and CPTs pretty well over here.  It’s good to finally find people in my peer group that don’t annoy the crap out of me.  Seriously.  However, this led me to several scary thoughts:

My first scary realization for the week: all the people that I consider to be in my peer group are in their mid- to late-twenties, or early thirties. 
My second scary realization for the week: I don’t consider them to be old. 
My third scary realization for the week: The kid who works out in the gym in the morning, who looks like he’s 12 (maybe) is 18, and I do in fact consider him a ‘kid’. 
My scary conclusion for the week: I’m getting old.

Ahhh, the life of a twenty-something…

later

The Bird Flu is killing me, and so is my run

If you didn’t know, there’s bird flu in Kuwait.  Why does this matter to anyone outside of Kuwait?  Because all of the fresh eggs in Army bases across Iraq come through Kuwait.  And since they’re not letting any eggs cross the border, whether they originated in Kuwait or elsewhere, there are no fresh eggs to be found.  Still, you might think, not a major issue.  Amazing things can be done with powdered eggs, which are still available. 

However, there are apparently a number of entree items you cannot make without fresh eggs.  And after eating the same damn thing every couple of days, I’d almost rather rip open a MRE box.  I’m getting so incredibly tired of chicken cordon bleu (or at least KBR’s version of it) and cheeseburgers.

Anyway, that’s my rant for the day.  On to other topics!

I took a diagnostic APFT yesterday.  I’m … content … with my scores.  I maxed out my pushups and situps and cut my run time by a minute and fifteen seconds, but I only had 5 seconds to spare on both the pushups and situps, and I was shaking by the time I finished my pushups.  I was kind of disappointed in my run, I really was hoping for better.  All in all, acceptable, but needs some work.  I’m going to try and work more running into my workout schedule.  Right now, I primarily only do the elliptical machine.  Hurts my knees a lot less.   I hurt like hell today, that’s for sure.  I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s impossible to do an APFT and not hurt the next day, no matter what kind of shape you’re in.

I finally made my goal weight!  And I’ve been able to keep my weight pretty steady.  I set a new goal for 150 – it’s only two pounds less than my current, but it’ll make me feel better, and it’s getting really hard to lose weight.  I think I’ve pretty much hit the equal ratio plateau – my weight loss is equaling my muscle gain, so no change in weight.  But I’m going to try anyway.

later

I love quotes!

This is quite possibly the best quote website I have ever seen in my life:

later!