31 July 2007

It's over now - this was meant for several days ago

The moon has been huge lately. Bright and high in a nearly cloudless (and haze less) sky. Makes getting around at night much easier. The FOB at night is rather dark – no exterior lights to make mortar spotting harder – so walking around can be an interesting experience. This is the sort of place that makes you realize the importance, and our dependence on, street lights (and sidewalks). The ground here is uneven – occasionally rocky – moving from gravel to thick silt and back and then to hard packed ridges left in the road from previous rains. I try to get around without a flashlight, partially because I don’t want to have to use one, and partially because I don’t often remember to grab one. The moon’s size and position can be predicted fairly easily – it’s the clarity in the sky, the lack of light-choking dust, that has caught me off guard of late.

Communication Blackouts suck.

The first reason is obvious – they only happen when someone on the FOB has died. It allows the Army to make next of kin notification through official channels, ensuring that no one discovers that they’re a widow on MySpace. Commo blackouts suck because it means that someone, a fellow soldier, has died, in most cases someone you didn’t know – and to find this out at the phone center is a strange thing. You feel for this person’s friends – the ones he or she lived with on the FOB, the ones who likely had to recover the remains, the people who are simultaneously grieving and thankful they’re still alive – and you feel for this person’s family – the ones who don’t know yet what they don’t yet know. But for the rest of us, those who know this person only by the uniform and the FOB we share, it’s a disconcerting reminder of both our own mortality and the smallness of one person’s death.

The other reasons become apparent as you live through the blackout. There’s no way, no matter how cold your heart, to really blame the dead for your inconvenience – for your inability to call your girlfriend. But you can blame the Army. For whatever you want – that is a soldier’s right. You can blame the Army for (in order of increasing import and decreasing rationality) for its inability to contact the next of kin. Honestly, how hard can it be – the number of times I have had to give various parts of the Army my parents address, phone numbers, place of business, most common route to work, stride length, etc baffles me – to find someone? You can blame the Army for getting this soldier killed – through some overt act or negligence or lack of training or maintenance or equipment or leadership. You can, and many do, blame the Army for us being here – Iraq, Baqubah, not in the US drinking beer – entirely, seeing that as cause enough for this most recent death.

Communications with the outside world is what keeps us sane. Most of this communication is one-sided – in the form of movies, tv, dvds, magazines, et al. – but it helps keep us sane. That’s why the Army lets the Haji shops sell bootleg dvds – we’d all revolt if they didn’t, or get the same product off post, in a much more violence-prone locale. But at least in my case (and I’m not even married, or in a relationship or trying to raise children), you can only watch so much tv and play so many video games and write and not send so many blog posts before you need to actually hear a familiar voice telling you anything at all. We all have friends here, work friends, close friends, friends we would likely die for, but it’s the communication – the personal communication – with all of you out there that keeps us sane. For good or ill, we here are all tainted with this place, this place we all fought to get, continue to fight for, and want so much to leave. Talking about the world outside this place – the little things, the personal bits, the tiny and huge things that we miss most about the world we’ve all left behind – that is what keeps us from despair. (I once told a friend of mine, in fact my favorite bartender, that his place was the reason why I fought. I find that just as true now – I’ll keep on going here so that when I get home I can sit at that bar and drink amazing microbrews and Belgians.) Remember what good – what small, seemingly insignificant, taken for granted things – we have to come home to, that is what we lose. That we lose at the same time as we are filled with uncomfortable reminders of our own transience.

Of course the blackout isn’t as total as I make it out be. For one thing, you’re reading this. Because the death wasn’t in my Brigade, our internet center is open, working on the assumption that I either don’t know enough about the death or don’t know anyone to tell. However, the post phone center remains closed, which is why none of you have received any calls this week.

- In fact, if anyone could find me the email/snailmail address of Steilacoom Wine and Brew (of Steilacoom, Wa), I would be much obliged. I’d like to drop Jake a line.

posted by Interested Soldier @ 04:26