Numb

The days bleed into nights and the nights bleed into days and there’s really no point in acknowledging the difference anymore. The sun just means we drink more water, the night just means we live in the green world of night vision rather than the grey world of day vision. Patrol. Eat. Sleep. Patrol. Go to meeting. Patrol. Eat. Make phone calls home and ignore the strain in their voices since they're doing the same. Patrol. Sleep. Get woken up in a panic, it’s time for a new and Fragolicious. Patrol.

If my calendar hadn’t hung itself in the winter, it would tell me that we’re a third of the way through the deployment. That’s something, at least. Something tangible. Something concrete. Something that seems far too long and far too short all at the same time. Time over here just doesn’t make sense. It does make cents, though, which you know. Matters to some people.

(AMERICAN DISCLAIMER: It’s easy to be flippant about money when you’ve always been comfortable and are only responsible for ensuring that such flippancy remains one’s only responsibility.)

There’s nothing new to this war, anymore. Same threats. Same bitches and gripes. Same bad guys, even if they have new faces. Same lie that death is the ultimate consequence. Same truth that death is the ultimate release. Same old rivalries, same old skirmishes, same old riding to the sound of the guns because no one else will. I’d comment on that ambiguously hollow word “progress,” but I realize such would be unfair since the tip of the blade isn’t supposed to understand the motion of the sword as a whole. (Although it has a pretty fucking good idea this time around.) I’ve accomplished everything I’ve wanted to personally, now it’s just a matter of avoiding complacency and ensuring the platoon does the same.

Remember. It’s better to be lucky than good. And that truth has nothing to do with war.

My girlfriend thinks I need my mid-tour leave. My family thinks I want it. My soldiers think I’m dreading it. They’re all right, of course, but all wrong, too. It kind of depends on what mood I’m in. And whether I have the energy at the time to even care or spawn a mood in the first place.

I think I’ve figured out why soldiers have trouble telling their war stories back home – these are the real soldiers, by the way, the ones with war stories not only worth telling but worth listening to. It’s because they know the words that come out of their mouths, no matter how eloquent or clear or fair, will do a disservice to what actually occurred. How can you explain absolute madness to people who have only known order? None of this makes.

(Insert interpretation here.)

If you really want to know what happens over here, or happened before in other foreign lands in other Sucks to older soldiers, you have to disappear. Find a big group of recovering warriors, get them drunk so their relearned civilities fade, and just listen. I’m new to this whole veteran gig, but I gotta think, that’s the only way. That’s only if you really want to know, though. Know about the fears, the panics, the epical failures, the late night bullshit sessions that always end in “I don’t know, man. Fuck it.” None of the parade stuff, the Red the White and the Emo. I’m not sure there are too many individuals who want to know about it all on that level, not that I blame them. An abyss of confusion is best reserved for those who sought it out willingly.

Draft that, scumbags.

Except for the truly good ones – and I love my soldiers, but truly good men are as rare as truly logical women - we are all emotional burnouts by now. I don’t know if it’s a natural reaction to the darkest humanity has to offer. I don’t know if it’s a cop-out. I don’t know if the brain voodoos could explain it. I do know, though, that I just don’t feel things the way I used to. I tried to reread some of my early posts the other day, in search of some clarity, and couldn’t get through them. Well written, to be certain. But it was all too right, too clear, too surprised at the everydayness of the now. I would have laughed, except that I know that that mother fucker was way more well-intentioned than I am. He deserves his peace. It’s a dangerous thing to mock a young man’s earnestness.

Someone with too few life experiences will read these words and say, “Gee whiz, he’s depressed!” Someone with too many life experiences will read these words and say, “Damn it, those bastards got ‘em again.” Those bastards, of course, being the world. Collectively. Consider it a cross-gender slur.

God will read these words – well, He has already read them, even before I wrote them, because he’s omniscient and everything – and say. “And.”

God tends to avoid using question marks.

I’m not okay, but you know, that’s okay. You’re not supposed to be okay. I don’t know how it was for previous generations, but being born after Vietnam, you have no illusions about what war is and what war does to the human condition. Sure, it still shocks the senses into nothingness, but no one can claim ignorance to this inevitability. In post-modern America, going to war for some of us was almost like finding a validation for being so disillusioned in the first place. Yeah, we did it backwards, but at least we did it. At least our children and grandchildren might be tricked into thinking that the iWar destroyed our wits and yielded our indulgences, and not the Smurfs some twenty years previous. How embarrassing would that revelation be? Ruined before puberty; truly, a historical achievement worthy of posterity.

Some want this to be another silly little imperialist war, others, a generational calling called the GWOT. (Seriously, who signed off on that acronym?) Having been here long enough to comment, I will steer clear of the politics of the issue and simply state both are incorrect labels. This is too protracted, too bloody, and too starkly different than everything else going on in the new century to be the neo-Philippines – but who are we kidding, a generation has to be involved and interested for a generational calling to occur. Something beyond stretching the limits of the warrior caste has to transpire in that wet dream of slogan-speak and Orwellian doublethink.

Lord, give me the strength not to attack with a baseball bat every fool and every chickenhawk and every Apathy Kid and every soft elitist and every intellectual hack and every Jody and every yuppie and every thirty-something child still finding himself when I get home. It’s not worth my time. Do give me the strength to convince them to stop breeding and to kill themselves, in the name of bettering America. It’s the only chance we have.

And yes, I am that self-righteous. And kidding.

One of the above statements is true.

I say again - I’m not okay, but you know, that’s okay. I didn’t want to be. Okay people suck. Five months down, ten to go. I’ll get my men out of here, honor intact, then get myself out of here, sarcasm intact. Honor and sarcasm do not suck. They are the staples of sane people, albeit two different variants of sane people. The rest we can figure out later, in gardens across the sea where our compassion will grow back, under the careful supervision of loved ones who let us pretend we’re in charge, and the comforts of the lost knowns. Until then, we’ll charlie mike. Numb to it all, some of us okay with such, some not. That’s the thing of it, though.

Either way, it doesn’t matter. It just is until it is not. And then it will be.