For me a general feeling of being isolated from everything that has meaning. My new puppy wandered off, lost and homeless, and my wife frantic to find her. Incommunicado...no phone...no internet...
Someday, anyday-back from another hot patrol. A sense of being trapped in a world of smoke, haze, heat, unfamiliar languages, and customs. Drab and dingy colors. The air sometimes reeking of raw sewage and the skyline a collage peppered with evidence of JDAMS and warfare. Moments of action puncuated by hours of cloying boredom.
At night, back home, CNN sells doom, despair, and propaganda on the uninitiated. While here in the epicenter we pass the days serene, meaningfully, and unaware of the dramas played out on nightly television like surreal holocaust scripts. What a fearful disservice these circus clowns turned journalists drive into the people back home! Amateurs with agendas and backed by those who never felt raw life, except from the emotion of a newpaper article, or a rancid essay highly touted by a feeble english professor.
Like unaimed darts of panic they launch words across the airways. An event they never witnessed. The name of a person they've never met. Their target, their aim, a story. A secondhand vision sold as fact by those who never saw. Intent only on capturing some slice of Baghdad they came unto secondhand. From the safety of the Al Rasheed hotel they swarm to it like maggots trussed up in their Eddie Bauer vests and REI zip off pants.
A bomb blast, unknown to all but a few, is played over and over. Mesmerizing it's crowd of millions, but fear and pain has left those involved. Just another day.
Locked in couch bound goosestep the arm chair generals blend politics with opinion and from the safety of the most powerful nation in the world pass judgement on anything and everyone except themselves. Such is the way of the modern world. Freedom becomes entitlement becomes self induced truth.
Here, far away, we know only the blocks we patrol. The streets we traverse become our neighborhoods. Children marvel and wander amongst us like children did in our grandfathers wars. My watch a marvel of curiosity. My sunglasses a badge of my invincibility. Our money more so than our weapons a symbol of our divine power. A gun is like water here. No, like dirty water. Weapons bring only unwanted attention, or temporary power, and sometimes death. Money is like wine to the mouths of these children, these people. Long oppressed by a dreadful regime, beaten by police, harrassed for their ethnicity or their politics. A women straying from her husband will be killed here for his honor. Money brings food, a new shirt, a pair of shoes. Enough gas to get through work for another day.
10.00 US a day is a good salary. Something to take pride in. How can someone so far away see what I see everyday? Know what I know because I am here? Living amongst these people. Interacting with them, laughing. seeing everyday more cars hurtling to work, finding freedom...finding hope finally. How pitiful is our media? How corrupt our journalism? Success does not sell. A 19 year old private standing on a corner buying a coke from a 6 year street vendor is success. Finding a decent job for a homeless teenage girl is success. What success can those who degrade our effort here claim? Do a few short days or weeks travelling around under heavy armed escort count for much of anything?
The space between days filled with damp nightmares of events unrealized. The unknown leaps out like a wild beast and the rapture of somnolence is decimated by arcing fingers of lead core punching into my safety free from pain. I wander among my dreams searching for cover. I dance between those same dreams looking for the door out. A way home. To wake up in the mist filled rainy mornings and lay back down to listen to my wife breathing. To stumble down the stairs and set the coffee brewing. To do yoga by candlelight and set my skis by the front door expectant. Little things, now so far away, probe my thoughts like slivers of light from a different life.
Here on the watchtower, I know only the rustle of a grainy wind in the date palms, and the shuffle of reeds alongside the Tigris. My face burned dark by this distant foreign sun. My horizon the wild east. Uncontested space. Tomorrow another patrol along the banks with my strange allies. Ali baba crouched in waiting. Another day of Haji in Haji's land. Tearing rotorwash and staccato gunfire unheeded by familiarity. In a stuttering economy we are forced into the business of warfare and business is booming.
Life here is like the famous apocryphal quote of celebrated British climber Don Whillans "It's a good life provided you don't weaken."
In a nation of hundreds of millions, we the few, stand up and walk straight into the danger that is here. We are rewarded with the truth we see with our own eyes and hearts. We are rewarded by our Iraqi friendships that dispel the darkness of ignorance. We will return home someday and share our light. We will do combat against the ignorance of petty sensationalism that has become the American journalistic experience. We will bring truth to a pop culture nation starving for honor lost.
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