It's not fair to them

I have a love-hate relationship with the Marine Corps, mostly hate.  There are a few things I will miss when this part of my life is over but for the most part I can’t wait for it to be done with.  Every time I go back home or speak to my family they want to talk about this job that I don’t like.  I realize that to them it is interesting, exciting even.  I understand that they have no idea what my life is like now and they want to be informed.  It frustrates me for so many reasons.  No matter how much anyone in my position tries to explain what our life is like nobody can ever really understand unless they have lived it.  It especially bothers me when I’m home.  Who wants to talk about their job on vacation?

 When conversation leads to my job, as I know it inevitably will, I prepare myself for the dreaded routine I have developed.  I usually humor them for a couple minutes with short, vague responses to be polite.  I then try to change the subject as gracefully as possible, which thanks to my notorious social skills is usually borderline rude.  Sadly, I don’t have much else to talk about these days so awkward silences are always present.  Sometimes I am so worn down and tired of being here my conversation is extremely negative.  Talking to my folks recently I basically described Afghanistan as a huge dump and its people as lower life forms. 

I have been thinking pretty heavily on this lately.   It’s not fair to the people back home to keep them in the dark, no matter how difficult it may be for me.  I decided I need to write about all the positive things I see.  Topics have been running through my mind all week.  Since I started this blog I have been surprised to see how easy it is for me to write about certain aspects of my job.  When something is deep in my heart, like The Answered Prayer or Ad Astra per Aspera, the words flow easily through my mind, soothing me as they hit the paper.

I going to try posting one tonight because theres no telling when I'll be able to get on here again.  I already have something in my head but I need to figure out how to put pictures up on here.  It's probably really simple but I am internet illiterate. 

The Answered Prayer

I watch as he cautiously walks through Death’s territoy and I begin to pray.

My eyes are fixed on his every action as I ask God to protect him.

A loud explosion makes my heart sink and he disapears into a cloud of dust.

My hand moves quickly to my door handle and then reluctantly back to the steering wheel.

There is anxious movement all around me, I am silent and still.

My eyes never leave the cloud.

I never stop praying.

Time slows down as my mind speeds up.

I see his wife.  I see his baby girl.  I force myself to put them out of my thoughts.

Eyes are wide, heart is pounding.

The man without fear is scared.

I swallow hard and steady my mind.

The dust slowly settles and I see him walking.

Thank you God.

He walks to my door and climbs up.

I want to laugh and I want to cry, I am silent.

I want to hug him, I want to shake his hand, I am still.

My eyes still haven’t left him, as if they haven’t caught on to the fact that he’s alive.

I look away and look back.

My eyes meet his and words are spoken without a single utterance.

I love you brother.

Visiting the Past

I’ve been taking a lot of trips down memory lane latley.  It takes a lot of work for me to get all the way back to my early childhood, but once I’m there the memories greet me with a smile.  They start to come back to me in brief  flashes until my mind puts everything together.  It always starts with a feeling, that’s how I remember anything.  I don’t know how else to explain it, but if I can remember how I felt I can bring the past back to life.  Sometimes it’s a strain, but I dig deeper until I have built a solid scene around the feeling. 

The bad is brought to the surface with the good but I don’t mind.  I used to allow myself to be sucked into  the bad because in remembering  it I felt it.  These days I don’t let anything in my past haunt me, I am free from it.  I have come to terms with the fact that every moment leading up to this one has made me who I am today.  I am even proud of some of it now, considering them conquered obstacles.    I have learned from them and grown.

My mind becomes a time machine that travels the continuum freely as it pleases.  I feel scalding asfault on my mulberry stained feet as I run across the street into a sprinkler.  I hear “daddy’s home!” from the kitchen window as we sneak to our ambush positions, squirt guns in hand.  I smell that familiar smell of concrete as we creep closer to him.  The memory shifts to another and I am lying awake in the still of the night, I can’t stop thinking.  I feel thick black hair as I pet the dog that keeps me company,  nobody knows but but he’s the best friend I have.  Flash forward again, I feel a fist hit the side of my face.  I like it, it wakes me up.  The  pain in my face is followed by a pain in my fists, which I like even more. 

Once I get started, the memories from  High Street  come flooding in.  I have to stop myself from writing before this gets out of hand.  So many memories and I haven’t even made it to 13 yet.  That’s when the plot thickens my friends.  That’s when the real nitty gritty of it begins.  I’ll save those for another time perhaps, I haven’t even got to the reason why I started writing this yet.  Maybe I never will get to it.  What I had in mind when I started writing has changed completley.   I find myself wanting to add more but I have to bring it to an end before this blog turns into a book. 

What got me thinking about writing this post was a memory trip I had last night.  I found out that a good friend of mine is signing with the Army against my very strong and persistant advice.  Not only that, but he is signing an eight year contract.  I wish him well in all his future endevours and I hope he enjoys slaving for the man more than I do.  It got me thinking about my hometown, the way I see it. 

My mind drifted into the past again and I was blunt cruisin down a country road, summer wind hitting my face.  I was wearing nothing but water as I watched a beautiful girl’s carefree smile.  I was sitting around a bonfire with the boys laughing and telling stories.  I was in the place I loved, I was home. 

I have to stop myself again because I have even more to write about Douglass than High Street but the point is this.  Cherish the memories you have and don’t ever let them leave your heart.  In thinking about my friend I fell into a bittersweet nostalgia because I know my hometown will never be quite the same as my memories depict it.  I left it and journeyed to a new world.  I had to do it, I had to write the next chapter of my life.  All I can do is continue writing out the pages of my life and know that whenever I miss those days I can always see them again down memory lane.         

Ad Astra per Aspera

The day had been long and hard.  After working well into the night I wanted nothing more than to relax and the opportunity had finally arrived.  I lumbered my way through the thick dust cursing it and the country it belonged to all the way back to my truck.  The frigid winter of the Afghanistan desert taunted my body as if it knew how much I hated the cold.  A river of negativity flooded my mind.  I was tired, hungry, and freezing cold.  I sat down in the thick moon dust and leaned back looking to the sky.  It was that small motion that changed my frustration into awe. 

I was mesmerized by the shining beauty of what I discovered up there.  An instant calm came over me and my mind shifted its gears, automatically thinking poetically.  “Thank you father, for giving me something so beautiful in a place so ugly.”  My irritation at the cold and the horrible food I was eating turned to gratefulness.  I thanked God that I had food to nourish my body and clothes to warm it.  My gaze never left those stars as I sat there talking to my Heavenly Father and praising him for all his goodness and the blessings in my life.  

It was late and the desert was quiet.  Faint bursts of gunfire accompanied by occasional explosions were the only sounds that broke the silence.  To me the contrast in itself was poetic.  People where dying violently not too far away, I could hear them.  I was listening to man’s hatred as I looked at God’s love.   The fighting silenced and suddenly my mind was home.  I was in a Kansas wheat field laying on the bed of my truck and staring at the summer sky.  The stars popped here just like they did there.  No bright city lights to chase them away.  No smog to cover them up.  The stars were free to do what they did best, shine like Kansas fireflies on a July night.  I thought of my state motto, Ad Astra per Aspera,  “To the stars through difficulty.”  It seemed as if those stars were placed in the sky just to ease my troubled mind.  I sat there watching them until the cold drove me to hide my face under my blanket.   Lying there in the dark I said it outload to myself, “to the stars through difficulty”, and in peace I went to sleep. 

The potato that broke the camels back

Writing has been a passion of mine since before I can clearly remember.  I have always been better at conveying my thoughts and emotions with writing than talking.  As a young kid I dreamed of one day being a journalist for National Geographic, an idea that still lives in the back of my mind today.  My love of reading literature and poetry runs as deep as my love for writing it.   Latley my mom, who inspires me to write and is a blogger has been insisting that I start my own blog.  Everytime the subject has been brought up it has been met with a big fat NO.  The thing about it is that I have always been very private about my writing.   Another thing that held me back was my perception of grown men blogging as…well…kinda gay.  I had a picture in my head of some softy complaining about his life on his online diary.  Obviously this was before I actually started reading blogs other than my mom’s.

In highschool I wrote “A” papers for my friends and helped them with their english homework.  If someone needed to know how to spell a word or who wrote the Canterbury Tales they would wake me up from my spot at the back of the classroom and ask me.  Since I have been in the Marine Corps the amount of writing I do has dramatically decreased.  I have been noticing a decline in my spelling and grammar abilities and its unnerving.  Sometimes I imagine that I can actually feel myself getting dummer.  I picture imagination and creative thoughts oozing out of my ears with vocabullary and intellect.

  The other day my good friend LeRoy was talking to his wife online and asked me if his spelling of potato was right.  My response was “nah man, its POTATOE”, which is definitley not how you spell potato.  I decided that night that I needed to get back into writing.  So here I am, after a week of finding potatos hidden in my stuff like easter eggs and a couple thousand potato jokes.  I’ve made up my mind, I’m going to blog.