The Thunder Road

So I’m sitting here listening to my 1 week-old daughter crying for her bottle in the background. (Don’t worry, her Mamma is warming her up one right now.) I don’t know really why I am writing about it. It’s been so long since we had an edition of The Thunder Road that I figured I would try and get something down on paper while it was all still fresh in my mind.

I’ve not sleep for more than an hour or two in the last week. The good news is that I am off work for a while. The Army is kind enough to give me 10 free vacation days as a “bonding period” with my daughter after she is born. It’s been great so far, but seriously, I need some shut-eye. I’m rubbing my eyes as we speak between each sentence that I type. Truthfully, I’ve enjoyed every minute of sitting with her and rocking her to sleep. Watching her drink from her bottle is somehow priceless. The mundane things are what really get me.  

For the first couple of days I still didn’t feel like a Father. I mean, in theory, I knew that Tracy and I had just had a daughter and that I was now officially a Dad. I know that most new parents say that the first time their child grips their finger is when they feel like a parent. For me the experience was different. There was no one moment that I can point to in the last week and say, “Yep, that was it. That was when I felt like a Father.” It came on slowly, then suddenly for me. There is no doubt now though. I’m truly a Dad and it scares the ever-loving shit out me.

The responsibility of keeping food and clothes on her back doesn’t bother me at all. I know that I will give her everything she needs and anything she wants within reason. No, it’s the responsibility of actually raising a moral and well adjusted human being that’s got me worried. To quote an old cliché, “I’m a big kid myself, how am I going to raise one?”

No gentle reader, I’m not looking for a bunch of comments that stroke my ego and tell me how great a Father I’m going to be. I’m just venting my worries.

The Army has been surprisingly understanding through this whole process. I’m really amazed at the amount of understanding and compassion that I am getting from my whole Chain of Command…and now my mind has just kind of fizzled out. I have no idea where I was going with any of this.

This blog started out as a way for everyone to see a little bit about what it was like for a soldier stationed in Iraq. I’ve always felt almost obligated to write about the military in some way. However, the military is just one part of me and my world. There is a whole other side to me that has absolutely nothing to with the military. I want to be able to express that part of me too. So, to all three people who have hung in there with me to read this, I want you all to know that from this point forward I’m just going to blog. Nothing more, and nothing less. If I write about the military then that’s great, but if I decide to just write about everyday life then I hope you guys will follow with me there as well.

Until next time gentle reader…

Dedicated to my Great-Grandfather Jess Vaughan,

Born: April 4^th, 1909

Died: December 5^th, 2009

He was the patriarch of our family and we will not see his like again in our lives. He took care of us all and he will be sorely missed. I know these simple words cannot do justice to a century of life, yet I have to honor this great man in the only way I know how.  

 “Death smiles at us all,” a man once said, “when it does, all we can do is smile back.”

 I never thought about death in a real way until recently. As most of you know, I have been preparing for my trip back to the states as part of my leave after my deployment. It’s so much fun looking forward to seeing my family and friends. Two days before I was scheduled to fly out of Frankfurt, my mom called me and gave me the sad news. My Great-grandfather passed away. He was 100 years, 8 months, and a day old. I was told that he slipped away in his sleep. He was survived by his three daughters (one of them being my grandma) and one son, numerous grandchildren, and several great-grandchildren. I had the honor of being one of this great man’s pallbearers. 

 This was the first funeral I had ever attended. I was not sure how to act or what I should feel. I had a lot of love for this man. Yet, I knew that he had been ready to go for some time. My Great-grandmother preceded him in death about 2 years ago and he was ready to be with her. Should I be sad that he is gone, or happy that he is now with the woman he lived and loved with for over 70 years? My Dad told my Mom that he didn’t care what people thought about him, and that he would not cry at the funeral. He said that while he was sad that grandpa was gone, he knew that Grandpa was in a better place and that he was with Granny again. I have to agree with my Dad. Death smiled at my Grandfather, and gratefully, he smiled back.

 How much had my Grandfather seen in a hundred years? He was born just as the Old West style of life was dying out. He saw the first automobile. He could remember when electricity and indoor plumbing first came into the main stream. He lived through the Great Depression. He saw the birth and death of the “flower power” years. He lived through the Cold War, and was already in his late fifties when JFK was assassinated. Yet for all of his knowledge and everything he has seen, I remember him most for something very simple. He taught me how to play dominoes. Doesn’t that sound silly? However it sounds, that’s what I remember the most.

 We would sit out on the cast iron lawn furniture that my Great-grandparents had owned for as long anyone can remember and play dominoes. Granny would fuss at me because I couldn’t count up my points fast enough to suit her. I’m smiling fondly at the memory of her saying, “That’s Ok son, I’ll count them for you.” Grandpa would be sitting there at the end of the table with his coffee can spittoon. All the way until his death, he dipped fine cut snuff out of a can. I swear he had been spitting in that same coffee can as long I have been alive at least. We sit out in the yard on those sultry summer afternoons playing dominoes and chatting about nothing. (I never won, not even one game.)

 Another strong memory I have of Grandpa Jess was when I was about 16. I really wanted a vehicle to drive and he had an old International Scout that he was looking to sell. I had no money, and I had no idea how I would have paid for it, but I asked him about it anyway. It always makes me laugh to remember his answer. He said, “Son, you need that Scout like a boar needs a side saddle.” He patted me on the shoulder and I walked on out to the shed with him shaking my head. He was right though, I can see that now. He usually was.

 My regret is that I never sat down and asked him to tell me the story of his life. It occurred to me several times that a man that had lived as long as he did would have some amazing stories to tell. He did, but somehow life or maybe just my impatient nature got in the way and I never did. I’ve spoken to my Grandma since the funeral and she has told me little tid-bits of Grandpa Jess’s story. He was an amazing man who lived an amazing and full life. I wish I had taken more time to sit down and really talk to him.

 How do you move on from death? How do you honor the memory of a man who spent a century of life taking care of a family that stretches all across the United States? I don’t think anything I could write here would do justice. I think, instead, I will leave it to the Almighty. I leave you with a verse from 2^nd Timothy 4: 7-8 that appeared in the funeral program.

 “I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them also that love His appearing.”

 Goodbye Grandpa, I truly wish I had taken more time to listen to the wisdom that you would have imparted to me. Now, my consolation is that one day, you and I will sit on the shores of the Crystal Sea, and you will tell me about all the things that you saw in your amazing life. Then, you’ll stand straight and tall, your back and leg problems gone and we will walk the Streets of Gold. You will match me step for step…Don’t forget your snuff can.

Greetings from beautiful Schweinfurt Germany,

Welcome to a special edition of “The Thunder Road”. Normally, this would be posted in my blog, but on this joyous occasion I have decided to post this as a column so that everyone can see it. Yes dear friends, my tour in Iraq is officially over as of last Friday afternoon. It’s been a wild ride on the “Thunder Road” has it not? A ride full of folly’s, wolly’s, and lick-em-lolly’s. (What the hell does that even mean?) As I sit here on my own couch, in my own living room, and looking at the back of my wife’s head (she’s working on some project for her midterm) I am loving life. It could be the colors that my eyes had not touched in so long that are back in my life, or maybe it’s the warmth I feel when Tracy lays down beside me at night, or just maybe it’s my third Jack and Coke swimming beautifully through my system that has me in such a wonderful mood. Whatever the case, I am floating on cloud 9 right now. Don’t get me wrong, cloud 6, 7, and 8 had a pretty good run…but I digress.

In one of my first blog entries I wrote that being in Iraq made my memory fade. That the good times I had had before that felt like they had happened to someone else. I talked about how it felt like I had never been anywhere else. How it felt like my other life back here with my wife had just been a dream. It’s a sensation that comes on slowly then suddenly. Life, in my experience, comes full circle. I think back now on my time spent in combat and it’s like it happened to someone else. It fades slowly, then suddenly. Now it is nothing more than a hazy image of heat and stress that I would just as soon not look at too closely. This, of course, is an impossibility. I must look at it. It must be catalogued and put in its place much like the memories of childhood that I spoke of in my EXPOSED! Interview. And look at it we shall gentle reader. I can only imagine how many of my blogs from now on will start with, “I remember when I was in Iraq…”

For now though, I am home. I can’t begin to tell you how happy it makes me to be able to say that. I don’t have to walk 300 yards or more to take a leak, taking a shower is no longer an ordeal involving a long walk and lots of things to carry, and if I want something to eat I just get up and go to the kitchen as opposed to having to wait for the DEFAC (Dinning Facility) to open. Yes gentle reader, life is good for this lowly solider.

The flight from Kuwait to Germany was a nightmare. I swear the pilot was drunk. Imagine if you drove a plane like you drove a car. Imagine the plane having a gas petal and a brake. The entire flight felt was like the pilot was mashing the gas and then slamming on the break. Then (in my head) he would let us free fall for a bit when he let off the break and then just when I thought I was going to throw up everything I’d eaten since Christmas 87 he would mash the gas and repeat the process. I’ve never prayed so hard in my entire life than I did for the 5 ½ hours I was on that plane. I swear, if I ever see that pilot on the street I’m going to abduct him and strap his ass to the front car of “Riddlers Revenge” and see how he freaking likes it. Of course, seeing Tracy at the “Welcome Home” ceremony made it all well worth it, as I’m sure you can imagine.

I now turn my attention to the novel I’m trying to write for NaNoWriMo. I have 8 days to bang out 40,000 words. Can I do it? We’ll see. I’m going to give it my best shot. If I don’t make it, then I’m going to stop where I’m at and go back and do a lot of editing and rewriting and begin to post it in the “Stories” section of litdotorg for critiques and comments. Well, to be honest, I was planning on doing that anyway. Besides, I think I can finish before the 30^th. I have a four day weekend for Thanksgiving so it shouldn’t be an issue to sit down and really focus on it.

I’ve also been thinking of including pictures in “The Thunder Road” when I fire it back up in December. I guess I’m going to have to catch Linnie or Karma and get them to teach me how to post pictures with my bog entries. Wouldn’t it be exciting if you could not only read about military life, but could also put a face on it? I think so, and since it’s my blog I’ll do what I want. *takes another drink and wonders if that was childish…takes another drink and decides not to give a damn*

All of you at here at Lit have been so supportive of me and my family as we’ve gone through this deployment and for that I send you all my most heartfelt thanks. You will never know how much it means to an old soldier to know that there are still people out there that support America’s service members whether they agree with the war or not. Some of your comments on my writings have, I’m not ashamed to say, brought tears to my eyes. Yes, I’m not such a macho man that I can’t admit that I cry sometimes. (But if you tell anyone I’ll kick your ass.)

In closing let me say that I am very excited about catching up on all the work I’ve missed and getting back in touch with all of you. I’ve a got a million ideas swimming through my head for new poems and stories. I can’t wait to share them with you. I’m ready to get back into the swing of writing now that I have the time to do it. I hate it when my work keeps me away from writing. Like our own Beckett Grey is always telling me, “Why do we write? Because not writing is worse.”  I’m paraphrasing, but he has an excellent point. Now I have a half day schedule mixed with a four day weekend and 40 days of leave  coming up to write the keys right off this keyboard. Stay tuned gentle reader…same bat time, same bat channel.

“We are writers, and we never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don’t know.” Stephen King

I’ve got to be honest gentle reader. This took a lot out of me. In fact, this is something that I’ve never told in such depth before. I’m sure you’ve hear the old saying (or seen the movie “Jarhead”) that goes, “If he only talked about it once, then he wasn’t lying.” This is my once. I’ve just decided to tell a lot of people as opposed to only one or two. This a time in my life where I go the closest I’ve ever come to knowing what a crazy person feels like. I was in fact, a little crazy during this time.

 “I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad, that dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.”

            From “Mad World” by Tears for Fears

I told the story awhile back of the events that brought me to Kuwait during the infancy of this now tiresome “war on terror” here in sunny Iraq. Afghanistan was already two years old and now we were going to fight somewhere else. It didn’t make any sense to me but hey, I was just a silly grunt, what did I know? I remember going to the border in March. I remember the Iraqis launched Suds at us as we gathered at different places along the border. I remember spending much of the time in our chemical protective suits and masks. (Next time you think it’s hot outside, imagine sitting around in that fucker for days at a time in the same heat.) I’m speaking like this because there is quite a bit I don’t remember. The most of it was nothing but a blur because we were moving so fast with so little rest. The things I do remember are like snap shots in my head.

I remember the night we crossed into Iraq for the first time. I remember what real fear feels like it felt like being weightless, like gravity had forgotten to do its job with you. It was a heavy feeling in the pit of your stomach, like you had swallowed a gallon of liquid lead. It was like being high and stone cold sober at the same time. You look at everything, but you see nothing. Real fear is the greatest contradiction I have ever encountered. I remember how utterly black the night was and I thought how spoiled I was to the lights we put up in the western world to make us feel safe. I remembered why we humans used to fear the dark.  I remember the Southern Oil fields. I remember jets of fire 50 ft high coming from the top of the machines. I remember the feeling of stepping off of the edge of the world and into a story book that you love to read about but would never actually want to live through. *SNAP* I was sitting in the COC (Command Operations Center) and trying to fix a radio that was refusing to function. I couldn’t remember the last time I slept for more than 45 minutes at a stretch. It seemed to me that the walls of the hasty tent we erected to keep the sun of the sensitive heads of the command group were breathing. Several of the “Head Shed” folks were hollering at me to get that damn net up. People that have never looked at a radio for more than ten minutes at a time were trying to tell me how to fix it. I remember thinking that they must know what they were talking about, I’ve only been doing this stuff steady for the last 4 and a half years and was good enough at it to be the youngest NCO in my unit, what the hell did I know? I remember that our brand new LT came and asked me, not unkindly, how it was going. I was pissed and tired and frustrated because for some reason I couldn’t get that damn net up. I told him that it was the same shit just a different day. He smiled at this and I told him if all the damn officers would just leave me alone for five seconds I might be able to fix the fucking network so they could talk. I meant the people that had been screaming at me for the last 20 minutes to get the radio up again. He assumed I meant him and made it his personal mission to make my life a living hell from then on. *SNAP* I was somewhere between Kuwait and Baghdad, that’s about the best I can do to tell you because I really don’t remember. I was digging a useless fighting hole because the LT was still giving me shit and he just wanted to see me sweat. The whole time I’m thinking about how deep I needed to dig it so that the animals wouldn’t be able to get to his gutted corpse before we left. I even pictured what I would write on the MRE (Meal-Ready-to Eat) box that would be his head stone. “Here lies LT Such and Such. He should have let me explain what I meant.” I got done and shortly got into a fight with one my best friends; we were all wound so tight at that point that we would have killed each other, I think, if Gunny Rogers hadn’t stopped it. I hadn’t had a smoke in weeks and there was not a chance of getting any for quite some time. I remember another buddy coming up to me and telling me that he was sorry for the way he had been treating me lately and he wanted me to know that he counted me among his really good friends. I thought as hard as I could but could not remember the last time I had spoken to him. I found that extremely odd and felt hysterical laughter bubbling up in my throat but held it in check. Later, I was sitting on the tail gate of some truck or other trying to remember what it felt like to feel normal. I was trying to picture a Saturday night in town with my friends and all their faces were blurry. I felt like there were two me’s, the one before all this and the one after, like I was my own evil twin. I then thought about what a great soap opera story that would make. This thought made me laugh so hard that some random Staff-Sergeant stopped and asked me if I was alright. I remember he called me son. “Are you alright son?” For some reason this made me laugh even harder. He looked at me as if I had lost my mind and I wondered, as I wiped tears out of my eyes, if maybe I had.

“Voices, like the roar of a crowd, came. I felt like Jesus; I was being crucified. It was dark. I just continued to huddle under the blanket, feeling weak, laid bare and defenseless in a cruel world that I could no longer understand.”

                                                                        Testimony of a diagnosed schizophrenic

*SNAP* We were in this swampy marshy area and gunfire broke out all around us. The Helios came in and took out the sniper position. I watched them turn a small crop of trees with a few houses in it, probably built there for the shade, into a parking lot. There was nothing left.  It all happened in a matter of moments. *SNAP* We are camped in this little embankment off the side of some road. They had just told us the night before we had totally outrun all supply trains and we were only allowed one meal a day until further notice. Across the road a white Toyota pick-up pulls up and stops about 200 yards from us. It just sits there watching over one hundred  M16A2 service rifles being aimed at it by an equal number of high skilled Marine Corps Riflemen. Not to mention a scattering of 249, 240, and 50 caliber machine guns. I hear someone yell, “HE’S GOT A GUN,” and we open fire. I remember how funny it looked when the one guy that was still alive stumbled out of the truck. He had taken off his shirt and was waving it over his head in a signal of peace. You could just make out that the shirt used to be white. Now, it was a deep crimson that I assumed was the man’s blood. He died about 10 minutes later. *SNAP* We were…somewhere else, in another marshy area. I took my ammo crate and dug my little hole to take a dump. (We would remove both ends of the ammo crate and set it with one of the openings facing up and the other over our hole and POOF, insta-toilet.) I remember sitting down and immediately getting set upon by mosquitoes the size of June Bugs. I itched for weeks and ended up with a mild case of Malaria. *SNAP* We were in some god-forsaken sand field and I knew what it felt like to go weeks without a real shower. I had been taking whore baths (using baby wipes to clean ones self) so much that I was starting to get turned on by the smell because it was the only time my dick got any attention. I was standing outside the COC smoking one of the precious few cigarettes I had been able to acquire and I noticed the sky was beginning to darken. It went from blue to orange to brown to green and then to black. It was 1400 and you could not see your hand in front of your face. It was my first real sand storm. It snuck up on us so suddenly I hadn’t finished my smoke before I couldn’t see anything anymore. I really thought that that was it, and Jesus had come to call home his faithful and now the world was ending in darkness. The sand storm ended in a 10 minute downpour shortly after midnight. I was out in the whole ever fucking thing trying to get a trailer hooked to my truck while two Captains and a Major sat in the truck waiting for me. By the time I had wrestled the thing onto the hitch by myself I was soaked to the skin and shivering violently. I got into the truck and started it so I could let the heater run. It was just starting to warm up when the Major said, “CPL Moore, turn the heater off, it’s getting too hot in here to suit me.” I smiled pleasantly while picturing what he would look with my bayonet sticking out of his throat. *SNAP* We are sitting on the side of the road for a rest and one of my fellow Marines rummages out of his truck a very Middle Eastern looking rug. He takes off his boots and kneels to pray, touching his head to the rug and muttering in Arabic. I suddenly had such a powerful urge to wait until his head was down so that when it came back up it hit the barrel of my locked and loaded weapon that I had to set it down and walk away. An odd time to let your comrades know for the first time you are a Muslim in my opinion. *SNAP* We are driving through some unknown town. We have removed the doors of our Hummers because…what’s the point? Damn things are just fiberglass and canvas anyway, and it’s hot. People are flocking the streets, the cry and scream and raise their fists in joy at seeing us. At least it looks that way. All of them are smiling. I hear their broken English very well. “USA, USA, USA, don’t leave. You stay here. Is no problem USA.” They are throwing packs of cigarettes at us and believe me we were catching them. My passenger was laughing and telling me that maybe they really were glad we were here to help them. Wasn’t that awesome? I said yes, of course, that was great. What was running through my head was, “I wonder what would happened if I just stomped the gas?”

“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where violet tint ends and orange begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the others, but where exactly does the first blending enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity?”

                                                                                    Herman Melville

*SNAP* We were driving again, we hung a left and were between what looked like an apartment building and an empty field. Two snipers on the building arched an RPG (Rocket Propelled Grenade) apiece over the convoy. We followed standard procedure and laid covering fire so we could get out of range of the RPGs. Once it was clear that we had all of our attention focused on the building, a double line of Republican Guard Riflemen jumped up out of the ditch on the empty field side not 20 feet from the convoy and started spraying it with AK-47s. I could hear someone screaming over the radio, “SHIT, SHIT, SHIT, IT’S ANOTHER RPG! GO! GO! GO!” *SNAP* We had taken over a little schoolhouse somewhere and I had scored a pack of smokes from some guy in 11^th Marines when they stopped about an hour before hand. They had raided a cigarette factory a few days back so they were stacked. I found a little out of the way room in which to sleep and was going to sit there and just smoke my precious cigarettes and think about whatever floated to the surface of my nicotine pleasured mind. I heard a scuttling noise and pointed my flashlight in the direction it came from. The biggest fucking spider I had ever seen (I found out later it was a camel spider) was in the corner and it hissed at me and charged when my light hit it. *SNAP* We stopped at an intersection about 12 miles outside Baghdad. We were mortared several times during the night so in true Marine fashion we used our “kill a fly with a sledgehammer” approach and called in an artillery strike that was quite capable of taking out an entire grid square. When it got light out, we noticed two dead guys across from the street from us. I guess they had been killed in an earlier battle. We found out that they were an Iraqi General and his driver. Marines were laughing and joking and taking pictures. I didn’t, it didn’t seem right. I was the only one who thought so. When we left, the place had been dubbed “Dead Generals Crossroad.” I thought well, at least he didn’t die for nothing,” and right after that I thought, “What the fuck does that mean?” The General had been shot in the guts and the driver in the head. Both had things better left inside hanging out, and I couldn’t help but wonder how both of them had managed to only get hit once when behind them, the car they had been in had so many bullet holes in it I was not at first able to tell that it was a car at all. Later that day we were sitting by our truck and someone had broken out a deck of cards so we could play spades while we were waiting for our next movement. I had just got done dealing and picked up my cards when the first mortar of the day fell. Everyone went running except me. My thought was, “I’m not giving up this hand, first time I’ve had good cards all day.” While everyone else was in their fox holes, I was sitting on my Kevlar looking at my cards, smiling as the mortars fell.*SNAP*

“If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.”

                                                                                    Oliver Wendell Holmes

The next time I had any kind of rational concept of time was on a soccer field somewhere in Baghdad. We were there for several weeks and they finally started bringing us box mail. (Until then, we had only received flat mail, which is why none of us had any smokes except what we could beg, borrow, or steal.) We had built a make shift shower, and my Dad had sent me two cartons of Marlboro Reds. I was living high on the hog. The cookies my Dad’s girlfriend made had mildewed but the Doritos tasted like sexy sin on a stick to me after several months of nothing but MRE’s. He also sent me a very sincere and heartfelt letter. It’s the only time I’ve every seen a softer side of my Dad. I wish I could say I still have it, or even remember what it said, but I don’t. Somewhere along the way in the countless moves between then and now, it got lost in the shuffle. It was really beautiful though. I remember crying as I chain smoked several of the cigarettes that he had bought for me. We headed back down south shortly thereafter and stayed another month at some unnamed and unremembered Republican Guard base. Then we started filtering back down to Kuwait to head home. On the way back a bunch of locals were mad at us for some reason and rushed out into the streets of a town near the Kuwaiti border in an attempt to make us stop. Some kid who could not have been more than 15 jumped right in front of the truck I was driving and slapped both hands down on the hood. Not wanting to kill the boy, I stopped. I’ll never forget the look on his face. I had never seen such intense hatred directed at me before. It was if he was trying to kill me with nothing but the force of his will. Without breaking eye contact with me, he walked around my truck to my open window. Quick as a snake, he reached in and started clawing at my face. I realized later that he was just trying to rip off my sunglasses. Whether to steal them or to be able to look into my eyes directly I’ll never know, but I think it was the latter more than the former. At the time, I had no idea what he was doing; only that he had scratched my face with the first pass of his hand. I let go of the wheel, and grabbed is wrist, simultaneously twisting it away from my face and pulling forward as I launched a right and probably broke the kids nose. He fell backward in what looked like slow motion to me…and then we were passing out of Iraq and back into Kuwait. Everything’s back to normal, right?

“It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

                                                                                                            Krishnamurti

I came home and my Dad said I was different. I didn’t hear this until later. He didn’t even tell me. To this day, he’s never said a word of this to me. She wanted to know if she should expect any changes. My wife called and asked him what he thought I would be like when I got back from the deployment before this one. She need not have worried, there is a big difference between the above, and sitting on a base for 12 months eating Burger King and fixing trucks.  Dad told her I came back a totally different person. He told her about how I was more prone to anger, I was completely unmotivated to do much of anything, and that he thought I was drinking too much at the time. It was all true, but seriously, he could have said something to me. I mean, it took awhile for anything to matter after I got back. I saw life and death flash by in the blink of an eye, so how motivated do you think I was to keep the job I had delivering lumber to construction sites?  Would I have listened at that time? Probably not, but still…

This blog is rated R because of my military mouth, begging forgiveness of anyone with virgin ears. It wouldn’t be real without the swears, cause it’s hard to talk about the military without swearing. 

I’ve been to this place (Iraq) three times now, and the war has changed drastically between now and then. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Some of these kids that are here now were still picking their noses in Jr. High when I was here the first time. It amazes me in a very real since, and as a result, I have a tendency to be bitter toward them when I hear them talking about their “combat” tours. Please don’t misunderstand me gentle reader, they are doing their part to serve their country, and for that, I will always be grateful to them. By them, I’m speaking of this younger generation of soldiers that I’m working with these days. They are smarter, faster, and stronger than we ever were in some things, and in others……well you’ve heard the expression, “some people’s kids” said with an incredulous tone of voice and a shaking head. That’s how I feel sometimes. Ahhh, what can you do, right? They make me feel so old though. I’m only 28, and yet I feel like I dinosaur. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that because of my break in service, I am the same rank as all of the 19, 20, and 21 year olds. Most of the soldiers my age are all E-6 and E-7 ranks. Have you ever noticed that if you hang out with a certain group of people long enough; you begin to pick up their traits? It’s been a central theme for me here lately.  I wrote a song a while back for the Song Writers Challenge called, “All Alone.”  In was this line,

“With the I’s and the Me’s and I want it now please,

  It’s the cancer of us it’s our human disease.”

I think I hit the nail right on the head with the kids I’m seeing come into the Army these days. Whining about having to work, or having to follow orders, or even something as simple as having to be in formation at a certain time, I look at them and wonder just exactly what the hell their recruiter told them about the military if they are crying about simple things that any idiot would associate with military life. Granted, I’m not always a happy camper about having to follow orders and what not, but I do it. Why do I do it friends? Because I have to, that’s why. I knew what I was doing when I joined the Marines, and when I joined the Army. Hell, I’d seen enough TV to know that it wasn’t going to easy, and it certainly was not going to fun all the time. Here’s and insight into military life for you gentle reader, THIS-IS-NOT-A-FUCKING-DEMOCRACY!!!!!! It says it right there in your contract you fucking babies. There is no freedom of speech, choice, or anything else. When you signed your mother fucking contract, you became US government property. You chose to give up certain freedoms in order to serve your country. It has to be that way, there has to be a rank structure otherwise the entire system breaks down. Under fire, you don’t have time for a fucking committee to decide what to do, you need one person in charge and everyone else will shut the fuck up and listen or you get your damn head blown off. Damn kids make me sick sometimes. (I just re-read that and pictured myself as an old man swinging my cane at teenager that were stepping on my grass *shivers*) It’s true though, not a damn one of these punks has ever seen any real combat, not these I work with now any way. Where do they get off talking about how stressed they are. I heard one the other day say that he didn’t need his NCO riding his ass about being at work on time or keeping his living area clean cause we are in combat and he didn’t need the stress. I looked at him and said, “Bitch, you don’t have the first fucking clue about what stress is. Shut the hell up and clean your fucking room!” Remind me at some point to tell you about my personal experiences during OIF 1. (Operation Iraqi Freedom) I’ll tell you about some stress if you like. It’s not something I like talking about, in fact, I’ve only spoken of it once before, and that was to my wife. However, if you ever met me in person and get me drunk enough, I’ll explain real stress to you.

Do you know what’s worse than the younger generation of soldier gentle reader? It is the soldier that tries’s to turn his military career into some kind of religious/spiritual experience. I will grant you that being a soldier is more than just any old job, however, a job it most certainly is. In order for you to understand where I’m going with this, I will give you the Reader Digest version of how a soldier goes about getting promoted from E-4 to E-5, which is, getting promoted to an NCO. Basically, you go before a board that has your Command Sergeant Major and every 1^st Sergeant in your battalion. They inspect your uniform, and then ask you a bunch of questions about the military and all sorts of stuff. There is slightly more to it than that, but that is it in a nutshell.  One of the questions that most Specialists get asked while in the board is, “Why do you feel like you should be an NCO?” Or they might phrase it like this, “Why do you want to be an NCO?” I suppose this a fair question because there is a lot of responsibility that goes along with the job. Now, let’s go back to our original thought about soldiers turning being in the Army into some kind of spiritual experience. I was standing out in the smoke pit the other day, and posed this question to the guys sitting there. “Why is it that when you go to the board and they ask you the why do you want to be an NCO question, do you automatically become a shitbird if you say you want to get promoted so you can make more money?” Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all about taking care of my soldiers, and doing all of the other things that come with being an NCO, but why is it so wrong for one of the reasons to be that you want to make more money? This guy starts telling about how it shouldn’t be about the money, and how it should just be about the soldiers you’d have working for you, and he just goes on and on and on and on about the fact that because I would enjoy the money that comes from a promotion, it must mean that I’m not ready to be an NCO yet. Now wait a minute, I’ve got a wife that’s back in college working on her Masters, a baby on the way, two dogs, and more bills than I can shake a stick at. If this was a civilian job, no one would be surprised that I wanted the money that came along with a promotion, why am I not ready to be promoted because I want more money to take care of my family? He had an answer for this as well. “Well, it shouldn’t be about the money, which would mean you care more about money than about taking care of soldiers.” (Did I say that?) “For me,” he continued, “It’s because I want to take care of my soldiers and my battle buddies. (peers) I don’t care about the money, God wants us to take of each other and the money just gets in the way, if I had to, I’d do this for free. They wouldn’t have to pay me nothing. “Are freaking kidding me? Is this guy for real? We argued for quite some time, but it’s me trying to get him to see that it’s not such a bad thing to want a little more money to support  your family and him repeating that I’m a piece of shit for even thinking about the money because God wants us to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I won’t bore you with the details.  What difference does it make where your drive to succeed comes from? I believe in God, I am a Christian. Do I think God is frowning at me wanting to be a Sergeant because I’ve got bills, a wife, and a baby on the way and I want to be able to support them? No, I most certainly do not. Does this mean I’m going to be a shitty NCO that doesn’t take care of his soldiers? Of course not, in fact, I’m going to work harder at taking care of them so that I will be a good NCO, getting me further promoted, thus further money, thus taking better care of my family………you get the idea, right?

It’s like I said last time about the brainwashing, it catches with some, and doesn’t with others. I’m a firm believer that you should think for yourself in the Army. Does that mean you do what you want, or run your mouth about what you’re thinking? No, you shut up and do what you’re told. However, you should maintain your free-thinking status. No one can regulate what goes on in your mind, and if you let it all get to you and start spewing that useless Army drivel like the guy who treats everyday in the Army like Sunday, then you’re just another useless robot. You have to find the balance, because you can’t be doing whatever you want and disrespecting whoever you want and not doing what you need to do either. It all comes back to balance people. You have to find the balance between keeping your identity and being a good soldier.

I think I’m just frustrated because I’ve been trying to turn in some paper work that will help me get promoted and I’ve been hitting roadblocks and nimrods all day. The nimrods are the worst too, I tried to turn the shit in almost two weeks ago and the dipshit who signed for it up at BN forgot about it and I missed the cutoff for turning in points this month. I could just strangle someone. Here’s another insight into military life, its way easier to get promoted in a combat MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) as opposed to a support MOS. Sometimes I think I should have never switched. I spent all day screwing with that crap and missed my class at the gym.

I’m in a work-out program called P90X. If you’ve heard of it and were wondering if it was any good, wonder no more. It rocks! I was not ready for it at all when I started, I limped away from that thing, but once I got used to it, it is one of the best programs I’ve ever been a part of, very good stuff. Anyway gentle readers, I’ve rambled long enough. I leave you with this thought that pretty much sums up my feelings for the day:

“Some say the glass is half full, others that its half empty. I say, who the hell’s been drinking my water!?”     Gary Larson

-The blog is rated R because I have a military mouth.

As you can see, I have decided to go with “The Thunder Road” as the title for my blog. It’s a fitting title I think. These blog entries are the essence of the way my mind works. “The Thunder Road,” as I explained in a previous entry, is a switch in my head. It’s the place in my mind where all of my writings come from.  That being said, enjoy the ride!

Linniered asked me for a “backstory.” She wanted to know the story of how I came to join the Marines in the first place. Initially I had not thought to write anything about it because it didn’t seem very interesting to me. However, if there is interest, then far be it from me to hold back.

I was a Jr. in high school when I met the Marine recruiter. He was giving a standardized test that the military uses to help pick MOS’s (Military Occupational Specialty) for young men and women who decide to go into the military after high school called the ASVAB. Don’t ask me what it stands for because I honestly don’t remember. I was walking to class and he was standing out in the hallway. I stopped to talk to him because I thought his uniform looked cool. He asked me if I was going to take the test too and I said no, I had to get to class. In true recruiter style, he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. He said that if I took the test, then I wouldn’t have to go to any of my classes for the day, and I would get out of school early. And so it began……

Almost a year later I ran into him again. My Sr. year was drawing to a close and I was getting a lot of pressure from my Dad about what I was going to do after high school. I didn’t have a drivers license yet (which was his damn fault, but that’s a story for another time) and he was riding my ass about getting a job and this and that. I respectfully asked him on several occasions how the hell expected that when we lived way out in the damn boonies and I had no vehicle or even a license to borrow one. For some reason, the conversation always ended after that with an ass chewing about the fact that I was not going to be mooching off him for a year or two after high school, with no answer to my question forthcoming.  I didn’t really have any prospects for college because I was a lazy turd and didn’t take the SAT’s. Not to mention that I was a C student at best.  I honestly can’t remember why the recruiter was at the school, he happened to catch me on a morning where I had gotten yet another lecture about not mooching and what not. I was young and confused and needed an out. Of course, he was there to tell me about how cool the military was, and all the groovy shit I was going to get to blow up, and of course, I’d have the opportunity to go and punch as many Nazi’s as I wanted right in their communist kissers. (This was in 1999, several years before Sept 11^th. So we were still punch Nazi’s as opposed to Hajji’s.) I ate it up. It was a way to get a job, get money for college, and get the hell out of my house in a timely fashion after graduation. I took the paper work to my dad and told him that if he didn’t sign it, I was going to wait the two months until I turned 18 and do it anyway, so he might as well get it over with now. He signed.

The rest, as they say, is history. I chose the Marines, because the recruiter told me they were the best, and he wouldn’t lie to me, right?

Of course, most of the crap he fed me was a lie, but I’m not sorry I did it. I would still be the lazy piece of shit I was in high school if not for the discipline I learned in the Marines. I would not be the Soldier I am today if not for my time in the Marines.  All and all, it was an experience that I’m glad I went through, but not something I would care to do again if given a choice. Marines are…..brainwashed to say the least. For them, it’s some kind of spiritual experience I guess. It never was for me, it was just a job, and I was a shitbird for looking at it that way. Not that I wasn’t successful, I was the youngest person in my unit to get promoted to NCO. I was 19 and telling 25 year and 30 year olds what to do, defiantly a power trip. Now here I am, 10 years later, and I’m the 28 year old with kids telling me what to do that were still picking their noses in Jr. High when I was serving my first tour in Iraq, my, my, how the tables have turned. A three year break in service will do that to you. I figured it out the other day; if I would have stayed in I would be an E-6 looking at E-7 right now. Oh well, thems the breaks, as my Dad would say. 

I’ve often wondered what my life would have been like if I had decided to stay in the Marines. I would probably be married to a lady named Julie, which would have been a huge fucking mistake. I would be the egotistical asshole that I used to be, just grown a little bigger. I look at my life now and just smile at the thought. I’m married to a beautiful woman who is now pregnant with our first, I’m focusing on my writing career, and I’m not brainwashed into thinking that the military is the end all be all of my existence. If I would have stayed in the Marines, I’m sure I would have developed that idiotic spiritual thing that most career Marines develop. I wouldn’t have given my writings I second though. I don’t have a perfect life, hell; I don’t even have a normal life. I wouldn’t trade it for anything though.

So what’s my life like now? Well, it has its ups and downs like anyone else’s. The benefits rock but the time away from family sucks. I get 30 day’s paid vacation a year but I spend a 12 months at a time in some desert or another every other year. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Right now I’m struggling with working with someone I can’t stand. It’s really hard for me, because I have big mouth and I’m brutally honest. Hate is a strong word; it’s a word that I don’t use very often. I don’t like feeling that way toward another person. However, every time I am in the same room with this person, my stomach clenches and I have an overwhelming urge to do violence. It’s a physical reaction as well as emotional. I’m in the military though, and I gave up my freedom of speech in situations like this. I have to swallow my pride, walk from the room, and take another 800mg of Uncle Bob’s Suck it the Fuck up. (Can you OD on this stuff?) However, whenever this is becoming more than I can stand, I call my wife, and she calm’s me down, tells me it’s alright, and I go back to whatever it was I was doing. Balance again. It’s rough sometimes; balancing a military life and a family life. I found out I was going to be a father for the first time in a yahoo IM. My wife has to go through her first pregnancy alone. When I first got to Germany, I got 4 weeks to in process and then I got sent to the field for 2 months. Tracy was basically dropped into a strange country to fend for herself. She had to learn her way around, and unpack our entire house all by herself. I got back from that two months away, and two months later got sent here.   However, Tracy gets full medical and dental, there are all kinds of Army programs to help her out, and she doesn’t have to work and can focus on school. Again, balance is everything. I guess the real trick is deciding whether or not the pros are worth the cons.

The time of separation is not as bad as it sounds I guess, I get up, I go to work, I get off, I go work out, and I go to bed. Most of the time, I’m to busy to let my mind settle on it. It’s the in between times that suck. Waiting for the shuttle bus to take me to the defac, after the gym but before bed while I’m sitting their reading my book, or during the work day when I don’t have much to do, that the missing my family hits me really hard. I was bitching in my last blog about how this places makes my memories of a better time in the “real world” fuzzy and faded. However, maybe that’s my minds why of protecting me and getting me through a very trying time. It’s hard, but we make do. In the end, it’s all anybody can really do. Does the Dad on a business trip to Arizona or the single mom working double over time to feed her kids sacrifice less time with family than I do because he/she gets to sleep in a house as opposed to a little trailer in the desert? They see their family about as much as I do, and I can bet you they don’t get thirty days paid vacation a year.

Well, I know I rambled a bit toward the end, but I hope that I have answered Linniered’s questions. I don’t know how interesting it is, but there it is anyway. I want to invite reading this to feel free to ask any question about military life or my time spent in Iraq that you would like. Hell, if you want, ask me questions about my personal life if you want, I may not answer them all, but I’ll do my best. In fact, it will help me to write about what people are interested in as opposed to just what I think is interesting.  *chuckles* I do this for a living, so there isn’t a lot of it that is interesting to me anymore. I’ll put a comment on the front page, opening up this forum for questions.  Until next time I’ll leave you with this quote that sums up my time in Iraq quite nicely.

“War’s a bitch, wear a helmet.” David Bellavia

As you can see, the title is a work in progress. I read the new issue of “Majestic” today. (Is it “Majestic” or “The Majestic”?) This was the first time that I read it all the way through, and I noticed that one of the staff members has a column called “Musings.” I figure Sandra has been around longer than me so I wanted to come up with something a bit more original. While a lot of my writing here focuses on my time in Iraq, my deployments are not all I want to talk about. I mean, life in garrison can be just as tough, and just as interesting as being deployed, in its own way. (Garrison is what we call back in the rear, or our home duty station, or wherever we are stationed that is not in a combat zone) So even calling my blog Letters from the “Sandbox” is misleading because I don’t intend to be writing about this only while I’m here. If that was the case, then we would only have another few months before my blog would stop and I would be back in Germany. I’ve been doing this whole “military” thing for almost ten years. I don’t think I could write everything I want to write in that short amount of time. I don’t think the powers that be here at our beloved litdotorg would let me post blogs long enough to squeeze all that in. If I tried to do this, we would have to change the name of this site to “Dave’s litdotorg” and the front page would be nothing but my blog. It would take at least an hour to scroll all the way down to the bottom of each blog entry and it would have to be a live stream popping up as I type it…….somehow, I don’t think Ochani would go for that. So for those of you that have decided to come along with me on “The Thunder Road,”  I said all that to explain about the title….I’m a long winded SOB sometimes……and to say bear with me as they change, I’ll eventually figure out something I like.

For those of you who are a first time reader and are curious to know what I meant when I said “The Thunder Road,” I will explain. The whole “Thunder Road” thing started about a year after I got out of the Marines and met a person who is still very near and dear to my heart. Her name is Vicki, and she is one of my “best good friends.” (Tip of the hat to “Forrest Gump” for that delicious turn of phrase)

Vicki had a journal. It wasn’t just any journal, it was….drum roll please……..”Vicki’s Totally Readable and Commentable Journal.” The idea was that she wrote in her journal, but it wasn’t private, anyone could read it. Not only could anyone read it, but if you felt a stirring in your soul to do so, you could write back. It was like a blog, back before I knew what a blog was, except we used a totally outdated and archaic method…..pen and paper. (Just a side note, the first blog I ever had was at a site called Xanga, if you dare to tread that shaky ground, the url is www.xanga.com/herocomplex179) I loved this idea, and immediately zipped my skinny ass on down to the local book store to buy myself a journal. I wrote several pages over the course of about a week, talking about all sorts of different things. At the end of the week, I proudly presented my journal to Vicki for inspection. 

Ok, in order for you to understand the rest of the story, I have to explain some things to you about Vicki. Vicki is a wonderfully random person. As such, her writings are wonderful random. She has a quirky and dry writing style that I find hilarious. In fact, my own writing style is influenced a lot by her. Vicki also has a fondness for quotes. Any quote, all kinds of quotes, quotes from bumper stickers, quotes from movies, quotes from people she knows, quotes from that bum that felt her up at the drug store last week……quotes are her specialty. She had a way of taking something that someone else said and turning it in such a fashion that it totally said exactly what she wanted it to say without changing one word of it. (Did that make any sense?) Quotes like:

“Blessed are the forgetful for they get the better even of their blunders.”  Friedrich Nietzsche

Or something like:

“If a man is in a minority of one, we lock him up.”  Oliver Wendell Holmes

These are just a couple that I remember off the top of my head. These two and one more that I still, to this day, apply to sticking my nose into business above my pay grade, or anything to do with women:

“Never meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”

I’m reasonably sure she pulled that one off of a bumper sticker or something. The point is that she loves quotes. It’s very important to this story, so bear this in mind as we continue.

As I said, I submitted my new journal for her approval. I had been a “hobby writer” as I liked to call it at the time, for a couple of years. I assumed she would find my ramblings about love and views on life to be somewhat deep and of course very serious. She read my journal with single minded concentration, and then shocked the shit out of me by laughing her ass off.

Then she looked up at me and said, “Grit your teeth, bear your load, and enjoy your ride, on the Thunder Road.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” I asked.

“Well, you said something at the beginning that made me think of this quote that I wrote in the front of my journal….”

“I read it.” I interrupted.

“Well, it went along with how you wrote this, kinda just rambling off what was in your head. Why do you look so pissed?”

“Because laughing was not the reaction I was looking for.”

“Why the hell would you care what my reaction was,” she said, “the only person that has to like it is you.”

Vicki had paid me a very high compliment by assigning one of her quotes to something I wrote, and I completely over looked it because I had wanted her to react in a certain way. In fact, what I wrote was not as real as it could have been, because I was writing to get a certain reaction out of her. It took me a while but I finally realized that I can’t write that way. I’ll never be a real writer if I’m writing to please a crowd. “The Thunder Road,” is how I think of……….how I think and how I should write. It reminds me to be real in my work. Without knowing it, Vicki gave a name to how I express myself. In essence, she named all my writings.  That’s why, whenever I write anything, I tell anyone who reads it that I hope they enjoy their ride on “The Thunder Road,” because it is a ride. It’s a ride on the, “twisted track that my train of thought always seems to take.” Which by the way, is the line I wrote that made Vicki think of the quote in the first place, it’s a quote that I over use the fuck out of to this day. (If you want to know where the “Thunder Road” quote came from originally, refer to Chapter 1 of this blog.)

Now that I think of it, what a great title for my blog that would be.  

“The Thunder Road” by David Moore

My deployment is winding down, and the last 90 days are a bitch. They always seem to drag the fuck on like frozen honey. At the beginning, you know you have a long assed way to go, so you don’t bother to pay attention to how long you have left. When you’re this close, you can’t help but know, and the knowing sucks, because you feel each day go by. I mean you feel it. I mean you really feel it. *KNOCK  KNOCK* Are you listening to me? You feel every freaking second in your bones. You hear ever second that ticks off the clock reverberating through your head. Imagine a little gnome, or imp, or goblin, or whatever you prefer. For me, it’s a tiny little gnome. He looks like one of those plastic yard ornaments with the light in it that people but in their gardens. He has the red pointy hat, blue coat, pants that only come to his shins, and work boots for some reason that I cannot begin to understand cause that’s not normally the kind of shoes I would picture a gnome wearing…….but I digress. So imagine a gnome standing on each one of your shoulders and each of them have a tiny little gnome sledgehammer.  Yeah, I think you can see where I’m going with this, because during the last 90 days of a deployment, they beat the tick’s of the seconds into your skull, to make sure that you feel every…………..last…………….one.

You begin to catch yourself thinking like you’ve never been anywhere else. It’s hard to imagine having lived a life with green grass and mild weather. I mean, Iraq has 4 seasons, just like anywhere else. They are as follows: Hot, Damn Hot, Fucking Hot, and Shit, Its Cold. I’m tired, I’m hot, I wanna go home, I want a beer, and I certainly don’t want to play anymore. I remember when I came back from R&R. Picture this with me gentle reader; I left my house at 7:00am to go to the airport. Before 10 that night, I was sitting in Kuwait and it was already fading into the background, like something that had happened months or even years ago, as opposed to less than 24 hours. I had not be back a full day and the two weeks I had spent with my wife at home was already becoming fuzzy. That’s what this place is, a death trap for fond memories of “real life.”

I know, I know, I’m whining. However, there is a cure for whining. Army Regulation states the remedy for whining is 800mg of Uncle Bobs Suck It The Fuck Up And Drive On…..Hooah?

I’m not whining about being here and serving my country, don’t get me wrong, but just once couldn’t we go to war with like…..The Virgin Islands or something. Just once, I’d like for the Army to deploy me somewhere that doesn’t require me to “embrace the suck so the suck doesn’t embrace me…”

There is a feeling of….not moving forward here, of being stuck in the past. Like it doesn’t want anything to do with technology or the western world, I feel like an intruder here.

Oh yes my friends, Iraq hates technology. I’m not referring to the people; I’m talking about the country itself. I’ve seen more Xbox’s, laptops, TV’s, PS3’s, and anything else that speaks of technology go ape shit here, than anywhere else, and I am a pretty well travel individual. I’ll give you an example. During my last deployment in 07, we killed time by playing Halo 2 with each other. This was before the Xbox 360 and the coming of Halo 3. We had a bunch of ether net cable stringing several Xbox’s together into a system link. In our precious free time, this is what we did. I always played in my friend Adam’s room on his Xbox. One day, after many hours of sweat and toil in the motor pool, we settled down to do the only thing that gave us joy. (Our definition of joy was yelling “FUCK YOU DICKWAD” and other colorful quotes at the screen and throwing controllers because we were losing, or because someone “cheated by shooting us in the back.”) We put in the disc, turned on the power, and the screen told us it couldn’t read the disc.

“What the fuck?” We all asked. 

We cleaned the disc and tried again….and got the same response. So went and got someone else’s copy of Halo 2 that was working fine and tried it in Adam’s Xbox……and his Xbox told us to go to hell. So we took the original copy of the game back over to our buddies Xbox and tried it there…..it worked fine. We brought it back and tried the original configuration one more time……and the Xbox told us to get bent . Every other game worked fine in Adam’s Xbox, and Halo 2 worked in everyone else’s. But for some mysterious reason,  it was just tired of playing Halo 2 and didn’t want to play anymore.  That’s just one of the crazy ass stories I could tell you about Iraq making electronics lose their ever loving minds.

In closing today, let me say that the whining, bitching, moaning, and complaining is meant to be funny and not necessarily true……well, it’s only about half true anyway.I’m proud to be here, I’m proud to be serving my country, and I’m proud of doing my small part to help the Iraqi people have a better quality of life. However, I did put in the suggestion box that the people in Tahiti might need a better quality of life too, I mean, I’m just saying………….

Someone spoke to me of sacrifice awhile back. Something to the effect of, “…..thank you so much for your sacrifice,” or something similar. It got me to thinking about what that word really means. Webster says that sacrifice is the; destruction or surrender of something for the sake of something else; something given up or lost.  Have I surrendered anything for the sake of coming over here and serving my country?  Have I lost or given something up? In a manner of speaking I guess you could say this. I have given up or surrendered some of the mundane things in life while I’m here. I can’t drink because this is a Muslim country and they don’t drink. We must respect the culture of our host country after all. Sometimes working long hours with not a lot of free time is a sacrifice of sorts. Our unit does their best to get us as much personal time as they can, however, the mission comes first, and I understand that.  I sacrifice my freedom of speech at times.  Meaning if someone that out ranks me says something I don’t care for, I can’t just tell him/her to fuck off like I would like. I’ve been in the military for almost ten years, and while I have a problem with authority, I understand the reason for the rank structure, and keep my back to myself….allow me a chuckle in saying well, most of the time I keep it to myself.  The thing that I consider my true sacrifice in serving is time with my family, or more specifically, my wife.  However, who sacrifices more, the one who chooses to leave, or the one who gets left.  My wife told me once during a discuss about whether I would make the military my career or get out when this enlistment is up, “I’ll be here if you decide to stay in, even if there are six or seven more deployments in that time, but it will be nice when I have a husband instead of a pen pal.” What the fuck do you say to that gentle reader? If you know, please tell me, because I don’t have the first damn clue. She has been wonderful during my last two deployments. (During the first one, the one spoken of in Chapter 2, I was not yet married.) She is my rock, the anchor that keeps me grounded while I’m here. She is what keeps me running my mouth to my higher ups. She is the reason I try so hard to get promoted and to look good in the eyes of those above me. I do it all for her, so that she will be taken care of. Yet, is money all that is needed to take care of someone? I think not. I think she’s right; she deserves a husband and not a pen pal. While I’m proud of the time I’ve spent in the Marine Corps and the Army, I have to admit that I am probably not going to stay in and make this my career.  At some point, I think sacrifice would become more than either one of us cares to give. Yet, I know beyond any doubt that if I did choose to stay in, she would be right there waiting on me.  

I’m sure, gentle reader, that you are probably wondering what brought this on as opposed to some more “war stories.” The answer is in an email that she sent me today. I know that somewhere in the rules that govern our writing colony, it says to only post things that I have written and not things that someone else wrote.  However, this is pertinent to what I’m trying to get across. So, at the risk of angering the “gods,” I’m going to show you what she wrote me. (Tip of the hat to Ochani for humoring me.) *laughs* Tracy is going to kill me for this……….

“Just wanted to tell you……that I love you so much Dave, and I am so profoundly happy I met you baby.  You have no idea how much I think about you throughout my day.  It’s amazing how sad I get when I don’t get an email.  *smiles* I just want to throw a temper tantrum when I don’t see your name in my inbox.  But, man, when I do see your name…..I get the butterflies, just hoping it’s an email where you put your wordsmithing skills in action and just gush about how much you love me.  Those are my favorite ones.  Tehe.  But no matter what, I love hearing from you.  I know sometimes I seem distracted or on edge or uninterested in your day, but I want nothing more than to talk with you.  Sometimes I let my desire for sleep or food get in the way, I’ll admit, *grins* but when i don’t hear from you for a few days in a row, I miss the hell out of your voice baby.  I crave to hear it.  And once I do, I’m ok again, I feel I can get on with my life for one more day, ya know? 

I pray you’re day goes well today baby.  I pray for you all the time by the way.  About all kinds of stuff.  I pray you’ll make it a day at a time without smoking, and that you won’t get down on yourself too hard if you do fall off the wagon.  You’re only human ya know.  *smiles* Just get back on keep trying.  I pray that you believe our family will be ok, no matter what b/c we’re gonna stick together and we love each other.  I pray that you believe you’re a good man and you’re worth so much more than points in some system.  I pray that someday you’ll get to realize your dream of becoming a teacher, hopefully sooner rather than later.  Ok, so those are big ones, for the most part, but I pray about small things too, day to day stuff.  The point is, I’m always thinking of you baby, in everything I do.  I was actually on my way to bed, and I honestly have no idea why this email got a little deep, but I guess I just don’t tell you enough that you deserve all the best baby and I couldn’t have hoped for a better husband, friend, confidant, lover, and provider.   

Loving you with everything I have,

Your wife, friend, confidant, and lover

And she calls me a wordsmith……….

Authors Note: Everything that follows is true to the best of my recollection. Any conversation’s included are recorded here as I remember them.  I’m not perfect, so if anyone out there remembers it slightly different, let’s get together in some forum and see where our memories are clashing.  This blog is rated R for adult language and material that could be considered offensive. Please note that anything offensive written here is written only for the sake of keeping the telling true, and not because it is the author’s personal viewpoint.  

I just finished the final revisions for a poem I wrote a week or so ago.  I am afraid to say, while I feel like my muse has cracked me in the back of my dome with all the idea’s running through my head, I am woefully ignorant of the mechanics of poetry. Form and meter, abstract and realism, it’s all lost on me.  Luckily, two of the litdotorg “writing gods” descended from their heavenly abode to share with me some of their wisdom.  I said once that when I write, it all just spills out of me. There really is no idea, just a spark of….something. The best way for me to describe it is with the game “Hungry Hungry Hippo’s.” Did you ever play that as a child? The premise of the game is simple; there is bunch of tiny white balls in the center of the game board. Attached to this around the edges, are four or five “hippos.” There is a button on the rear end of each one that when pressed, will extend the head of the hippo up and out into the center in an attempt to get as many balls as you can before they are all gone. My ideas are the balls and my ADD is all of the other hippos, snatching my thoughts right out of my head if I don’t get them down on paper quick enough.  It’s very frustrating to know you’re on the verge of something really good, and then a fly buzzes past, or your significant other want you to take out the trash, or a butterfly flaps its wings in central park, and that quick….poof…..it’s gone onto the ether, never to be heard from again.

 Speaking of my muse, she was not always around. I’ve been a writer ever since my first grade English class…..with decade long gaps between then and now.  Then, just like now, I had milliseconds of inspiration where I couldn’t make my pencil move fast enough to keep up with twisting track that my train of thought was riding. (I tend to over use that phrase, I just like it a lot because it speaks so clearly to how my thought process themselves) Of course, there were other times, again like now, where I could sit and stare at a blank piece of paper for hours and my usually crowded mind would look exactly like the object of my gaze…….all the way down to the college ruled blue lines that I would not have been able to fill if I had a 9mm against the back of my skull. I guess all my semi-serious writing day’s started about 2 ½ years into my Marine Corps enlistment:

Lost somewhere in the desert is a place where 99% of the Marines stationed on the west coast go to do their training. The post, (due to security reasons, it shall remain nameless,) is situated somewhere between the sun and the 7^th circle of hell.  I was about midway through my second month in this place when, over the shoulder of one of my co-workers, I notice a funny looking type of word processer on the screen.  He was the only one in the “office” at the time, (I put office in quotes because it’s hard for me to think of a d-framed, sheet metal hut with no AC, in a place that we playfully refer to as God’s ashtray, as an office,) and since I had nothing better to do at the time, I asked him about it. He told me, the whole time the clickity clack of his typing never slowing, that he was writing a sci-fi novel about futuristic Marines fighting in space. My first instinct was to pull the typical Marine response to anything that was not beer drinking, hooking up with large quantities of women, or fighting in bars or otherwise, with the usual condescending laughter and vulgar name calling trademarked by those of us that name ourselves “Devil Dogs.” Instead, for some reason that is still unknown to me, possibly because there was no one else around to hear it, I asked him why he was doing it on an internet page as opposed to on Word or Notepad. He said because once he was done with that section, he would post it on the website for others to read and comment on.  My mind racing with possibilities but not wanting to sound like I gave two shit’s or a god damn, I asked, “What’s the site called?”

“Strangeminds,” was his one word answer.

“Does it cost anything to join?”

“Nope,” he said without looking up

“I wonder if I’d be any good at writing.”

Without missing a beat or otherwise acknowledging my presence he said, “Write something and find out.”

I did. And so here I am, after just shy of ten years, writing something to find out if I’d be any good at it. A year or so later is when that fateful day in September took us all by surprise. I remember it in the crystal clear quality that you might remember your first kiss, or an embarrassing thing that happened to you at school. It’s like a snap shot in my head.

Morning PT (physical training) was over and I had taken my shower and donned a fresh uniform. The starch in it was so heavy that I used to brag that I could cut people’s throats with the creases in my sleeves. I had not yet put on my top and was standing outside on the sidewalk in front of my room with the door open so I could hear the music that was playing inside. I had a Marlboro light hanging off of my lip and was getting ready to light it when one of the NCO’s (non-commissioned officer’s) in my platoon bolted past me like his head was on fire and his ass was catching. My lighter paused halfway to my mouth and I stared after him for a moment wondering just exactly what in the blue fuck was going on. Deciding I that I didn’t really give a shit, my lighter continued its journey and I resolved to put it out of my mind. I had just taken my second drag when at the other end of the building I saw three guys coming toward me at dead sprint and break left into the hallway that lead to the interior of the building. All of this happened in the course of about 45 seconds. My curiosity getting the better of me, I flicked the cherry off my barely lit cigarette and went back into my room to put my blouse (uniform top) and cover (uniform hat) on so I could see what all the damn running was about. I saw two more green forms flash by my room by the time I had finished dressing and was locking my door.  Another Marine brushed past me just as I was turning the corner into the hallway. The first door on the right was the CQ (Command Quarters) office. Just about everyone in my Company was squeezed into the room in front of the only television in the barracks to have cable. I waded into a sea of green, assaulted by the smell of aftershave and starch as I pushed my way through to the front of the pack with a trail of mumbled, “Excuse me Corporal,” following in my wake. Rank has its privileges sometimes. Just before I broke through to the TV I heard the newscaster scream, “OH MY GOD THERE’S ANOTHER ONE!!” There was billowing smoke on the screen.  I looked at it uncomprehending, my mind not able to make sense of what I was seeing. The camera panned back and the gravity of what had happened crashed home in my head. As a member of the self proclaimed “few and proud,” we are given to the thought that the US is invincible like us. You can’t spend all your time hearing that you are a member of “The Elite Force,” and that the Marines are the “best in the world” without developing an ego. You’re bombarded by it throughout your career. Seeing the smoking ruin and knowing that I was not watching a documentary on some third world country, but a news report about my home, sent my mind rambling about war, killing, and death.  I couldn’t get my thoughts in order, it was like standing in a crowded room with the incessant droning of hundreds of voices in the background and trying to pick out one you recognize, only, for the first time in my life, I didn’t recognize any of them….save one. It repeated over and over again in my own voice at ten years old: “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want die…….”

Roughly a year four months later I was sitting on the parade deck, as part of the Enablers, the all important first wave that would go to Kuwait and set up for the coming of our units main body. Somewhere in amongst the training, packing, repacking, react drills, more packing, more repacking, and getting our affairs in order in case “the worst should happen,” they said we were going to Iraq instead of Afghanistan and we were hunting WMD’s (weapons of mass destruction) as opposed to terrorist groups responsible for attacking America. To this day I’m still not sure how that happened.  I looked over at my buddy and said,

“You think this is another drill?”

“Yeah, we’ll sit around up here for a couple of hours and waste our fucking night, then have to lug all this shit back to the barracks. Just like the 20 other fucking times this week we’ve had to do this. I swear, we could do this in our sleep by now.” Jackson complained.

They came around issuing ammo and magazines, to which Jackson said,

“Don’t mean shit, it still just a drill, but now we’re going to spend another hour or so giving all these rounds back. “

After almost 4 hours of sitting on our packs and doing what Marines do best, “hurrying up and waiting,” all the while listening to my friend complain to me about “all these fucking drills,”  3 buses showed up. We loaded up and rode about two hours to the nearest Air Force base.

“Just trying to see how long it will take us to make this trip and be ready to head out,” Jackson said as the buses pulled out.

After a short wait in the PAX terminal there, we were marched out onto the runway and boarded onto the plane. 18 hours and countless nervously munch bags of stale peanuts later, they took us off in Kuwait and bused us and hour and a half out into the middle of god knows where. After much debate and moving our gear from one patch of sand to the next, we were told to bed down for the night.  As I got into my sleeping bag, I caught my buddy’s eye;

“Jackson?” I said, wiggling around in an effort to push the sand into some semblance of comfort.

“What, dude?” he asked irritably.

“I don’t think this is a drill man.”

He turned from settling into his own bag and looked at me, the Middle Eastern starlight reflecting back at me in his eyes.  How does that old saying go, “If looks could kill………..”

If any of you read my piece “The Process of a Writer” you’ll see that most of my inspiration comes from free writing. Therefore, I have decided to do my free writing where I do my writing, here. After all, this is my new favorite site. I spend most of my spare time here…..well, “spare” time is such a strong word. I actually beg, borrow, and steal time from Uncle Sam….but you get the idea. My hope here is that somewhere in the ratings’ and raving’s of a bored and tortured soul… (Maybe not tortured, but at least mildly annoyed)….will come something worth writing about. My hope is that I can talk enough people into paying attention to my blog that they can help me pick out the diamonds in amongst the shit. From the inside looking out, it all looks like crap to me. Just the random jumble of nonsense that fuck’s off in my head. My opinion is bias though. I am, after all, my own worst critic and all that jazz. Contrariwise, from the outside looking in, perhaps one of my gentle readers will see something that would make a good poem, song, story, or article. Perhaps someone will ask a question or make a comment that leads me to something that turns into my masterpiece…….who knows? So read it! Read it now! OR FACE MY SQUIRRELY WRATH!!!!!!!! I do have squirrely wrath you know, it’s one of my hidden nature things……
My goal is to eventually be able to make a living with my writings. Actually, the goal is to write a series of fantasy novels that rival Goodkind, Brooks, Martin, Jordan, or even the master himself….Tolkien. When I was in Marine Corps basic training, my senior drill instructor said something to me I will never forget. “If you set your goal impossibly high, even if you fall way short, you’ll still be miles and miles ahead of the rest.”

This will also be a kind of journal, like a log of all the screwed up shit that happens when you’re a soldier, soon to be father, husband, leader, and whatever other label I choose to label myself with. After all, no one has the right to put a label on me except me, right? I mean if you label someone else, and they label you, how will that person know if your label is really the right label on the inside as well as the outside. On the other side of the coin, if you label that person…..but I digress, I was saying that this will be a kind of readable and commentable journal as well as a well of free writing possibilities. Maybe people want to know what going on in the head of a soldier in Iraq, or maybe people want to know whats going in the head of a guy named Dave….or maybe not. Anyway, without further ado, and with no more delay:

“Grit your teeth, bear the load, and enjoy your ride, on the thunder road.”

See what I did there? I compared you reading my thoughts to riding on the thunder road. “But Dave,” I hear you all screaming in my head, “What is a thunder road?” The answer to that question dear reader is that I don’t have the first damn clue. The quote sounds awesome though, tell ya what, let me open up a tab and I will Google it…..and so I have found your answer gentle friend, fear not. The Thunder Road is a wooden roller coaster at Paramount Carrowinds, an amusement park in Charlotte North Carolina. Apparently as you are taken up the hill, there are sign’s depicting this quote, ending with, “the thunder road” just as you go down your first big hill. There’s a piece of useless trivia for you, but it does make the comparison between the quote and the random trickle of bollocks….is that how you spell that???…..that matriculate’s from my head and into my blog a little more clear….moving on:

So I have an idea for a song. It’s a song that I want to get into the song writers challenge for this month. Ken’s second song inspired a comment from me that said, “she hid her pain behind a light hearted mask” and then after reading Shannon’s piece, I got an idea for what pain she may be hiding. Thus, a song is born. I’m working on it, but it’s tough because while I’m good with the words, I’m not all that great with the music part. I can play the guitar a little; however, I know nothing about musical theory. So what chords fit with what and what kind of progression you should use, and what chords make a good bridge if you use this progression for the chorus and this for the verse and blah blah blah blah blah, yackety shmackity, blah blah blah. I’ll get it though; just takes me longer to find the note’s that go together…..

It’s hot.
Not hot like you think about hot. It’s not wanting to run through the sprinkler or jump in the pool. It’s not the kind of hot that turning on a fan or opening a window will take care of. It the kind of hot that meat feels on the grill out back of the house where dad used to yell for me to bring him a plate to put it on. It’s a heat that oppresses you, a weight on your shoulders that you can’t shake off. I can remember a day in Baghdad, August 2007. We took a thermometer and set it out in the sun. We stood there watching the needle rise, placing our bets as to where it would stop. When it hit 135 and continued to rise, we got disgusted and picked it up. For some reason, the game wasn’t fun anymore.
I watch the soldiers trudging around the camp in a haze of dust and sweat. Depression is something that comes on slowly, then suddenly they say….this is a heat that sinks in like that, but it’s baser than that. Something in your blood remembers back to the beginning days. When we all lived here, in what was once the cradle of civilization. Wondering the desert, searching for “the land flowing with milk and honey.” It’s a heat that gets under your skin and settle’s down for a long summers nap. It’s a heat that you cannot imagine unless you have been here, and even then, once you leave your mind blocks out what it was really like, until you are there again. Unfortunately, this is not my first time…….