language

Some things people say do not mean what you think they mean.
“I think we should see other people”
Means:
I think _I_ should see other people.
And by “Other people”
I mean:
“Lots of people, in fact, probably quite a few people you know”
And by “see”
I mean:
“Have sex with, frequently”
And by “I think”
I mean:
“I have been”
So: “I think we should see other people”
Means, in fact,
“I have been having sex, frequently, with lots of other people, in fact, probably quite a few people you know”.

sex

Sex.
Sex is communication.
Two people, grappling with their mortality.
What do we tell each other?


"see me"
"feel me"
"hear me"
"tell me I am real"
"tell me you want me"
"tell me i am important"
"let me deface you"
"let me hurt you"
"let me defile you"
"I want to do things to you"
"I want you to do things to me"
"let me make you my thing, so i can feel good about myself,
so that I can feel powerful"
"i am weak, make me feel strong"
"notice me"
"love me"


"I see you."
"I feel you."
"you are important"
"you are special"
"I respect you"
"I am paying attention to you"
"I want you"
"I want to do things with you"
"I want to be with you"
"I want to be happy with you"
"I want for us to be together"
"I want us to be one"
"I love you"


So many things we can tell each other. So many things we want,
we expect, we hope for, we dream of.
And, oddly, enough, we almost never honestly tell people what
we want, what we expect or hope for. We are rarely enough
honest even with ourselves.

Don't you get it?

Every couple of weeks, someone posts something that I just don't get.
I'll say I'm working on being stronger, or more fit, or smarter, and they'll
make a comment about getting old.
Hey, no offense people, but what the fuck?
I am thirty eight years old.
Five years ago, I had damned near nothing in my life.
My wife weighed 78 pounds, and had nearly died.
My ex had sued me, taken my child from me, then sued me
again, and I had gone bankrupt immediately from it.
I lost my phone, we moved in the middle of the night to avoid bill
collectors. I lost my car, my customized car that I had spent hundreds
of hours and thousands of dollars working on. I lost pretty much everything
I owned.
When my wife would go upstairs to put the kids to bed, I would eat the cereal
off the floor that they had spilled. I waited till she was upstairs, because if
she had seen, she would have cried.
I stole food from work so I could have enough to eat and spend all my money
on them.
I walked ten miles to work, I am not making this up, each day, and hoped each
day someone would offer me a ride home.
I dropped out of college, and eventually lost my job, and with it, most
of my self respect, and most of my sanity.
And when my best friend offered to let me use his car
for my birthday, so I could see my son,
his mom said "no".
And I started over.
With nothing, except my wife, my amazing, beautiful, wonderful wife,
and my children.
I started over.
And since then
I have done so much
I have earned the respect of men who amaze me
I have seen the moons of Jupiter from a spotting scope on the side of a mountain in the
foothills of the Himalayas. I have seen the tracers streak the sky from a helicopter on
an attack landing.
I have seen the birth of my daughters.
I have reshaped my body, I am infinitely stronger, more confident and more resilient than ever before.
I have done things I never would have dreamed of even five years ago.
And I feel like my life is just beginning.
And nothing is beyond my grasp.
And you tell me I am old?
And I should accept things the way they are?
I tell you this:
It is never too late to start over.
It is never too late to begin again.
It is never too late to do something amazing.
The world awaits you, and age just means you do fewer stupid things.
And I can run a man half my age into the ground.
So, no offense, but if you are thinking of retiring,
thinking of relaxing, thinking of taking it easy,
then you are already dead.
I plan to do this till I get everything I can from it,
and then I plan to do something else.
And like my Grandfather,
and like my Uncle,
I expect that I will work till I die.
And I love that.
Live.
Live like you love life.
Do things. Go out. Challenge yourself. Run.
Old age might catch you, and it might catch me,
but I think it'll have to wait till I'm dead to try,
because I'm not stopping
and I'm not slowing down.
Not today.
Not ever.

FML

Ok, so there's this female who works at the compound here.
She's been having sex with various soldiers.
She's single, and junior enlisted, so as long as she's not banging a superior and as long as she doesnt get pregnant, her superiors are letting it slide. Granted, she is currently having sex with someone two ranks higher than her, so TECHNICALLY thats a total violation of a WHOLE BUNCH OF RULES, but that doesnt matter, because her bosses wouldnt want to have to do paperwork, I guess.

Now, I usually get people a ride home, so they don't get raped and murdered. This one asks for a ride. I can't give her a ride, because I'm a male superior, so I cant be alone with her, because NO WAY IN FUCK am I letting ANY HINT OF GOSSIP or stupidity stick to me. FUCK THAT. Since I am higher ranking than her, and seriously married, even allegations would be a royal pain in the ass. I'm doing my best to be about a mile from this person at all times. My life is conplicated enough without more stupidity.

She cant walk home alone, cause she'll get raped. Ok, she might not, but KAF has a population of thirty thousand, mostly transient, few people know each other, lots of dark areas, lots of people from different countries. Basically, while you are here, these are the bad things that can happen to you, in order of likelyhood: Death by Traffic Accident, Death by Fire because your roommate fucked up the power cords, Rape, Death by Negligent Discharge because your "buddy" cleaned his weapon and shot you, Death by Suicide. So, at night people tend to walk in pairs and women get escorted. Now, as many me get raped as women, so escorting women doesnt exactly make sense, and more than half the rapes are acquantance rape (I guess "friend rape" isn't a word?), so walking with someone you know might be a mistake also, but it doesn't have to make sense. We also wear neon colored reflective belts because of the traffic thing. I don't have a solution for the negligent discharge issue. OK, I carry a tournequit at all times, but that's only a partial solution. For suicide the army "Solution" is that if a soldier has a problem, they take his weapon for a couple weeks, manadate councelling, and humiliate him. Interesting approach, but not sure how effective it is, really.

Anyways, back to this annoying woman.

I can't have a woman walk home with her, because how would they get back without being raped and murdered? So I have to have TWO PEOPLE escord this idiot to her room each night, so noone gets accused of having sex and so noone gets raped. MIND YOU SHE HAS A GUN. If you have a gun and someone tried to rape you, SHOOT THEM. FML. All because a) this woman is too stupid to keep her vagina in her pants and b) because we don't want her to get raped and murdered. FML. THIS is the kind of stupid shit I deal with every day.

Somewhere around 9 out of 10 soldiers who drink drink because of this shit. Not because of their buddies getting turned to hamburger, but because of stupid, pointless, annoying drivel. Because of being cooped up with people who cannot do a job, who cannot be professional, who cannot even decently stay out of the way for you to do your job.

A whole year of this shit, interspersed with random rocket attacks and lots and lots of stupidity.

Oy.

Fight or Flight

Right now, my stress level is rather high.
Whether I am doing good or bad, either way pretty much every hormone in my body is at highly elevated levels, every day. It’s a fact of life while deployed.
There is a whole school of research that says this is one of the primary causes of PTSD: the body spending months and years detoxing from the constant intensity of being over here.
Even when you are tired and bored, and doing nothing, you are still wound up far tighter than you ever are elsewhere.

Colors are more intense. Smells are sharper. Mood swings more radically.

Coming off of that is hard.

The mind fixates on simple things, and obsesses over them. I had a guy last deployment, he wanted to buy fuzzy purple handcuffs for his wife. He had this image in his head, of her wearing the handcuffs, wearing a short skirt, leaving partway over a table. When we were coming home, I bought a Russian infantrymans dress uniform. I know soldiers who obsess over cars, or motorcycles, or who plan a cruise. Your mind grabs something small, and meaningless, and invests it with all your hopes and thoughts and focus. Does it mean anything? No. Quite frankly, it is just how the mind adapts. Obsession allows the mind to still have the feeling of hoping and planning and thinking, even when you are in a position where nothing you hope or plan or think matters. We are deployed. When we come home, we will find our children distant, our money gone, our girlfriends left, our wives cheated, our family pull away. We will find ourselves returning to empty houses and debt, and alienation.

So we obsess. It keeps us busy, keeps our mind focused. A good wife, like mine, just puts up with it. I want to buy a Russian Army Uniform? Cool. I want to listen to stupid music? No big deal. I need to sleep on the floor? Ok, we move the pillows to the floor. I need a tournequit hung up in the kitchen and a VS-17 Panel (It’s a 2’x2’ fluorescent orange flag used for signaling helicopters and suck) in the trunk of the car? Ok, no problem. A good wife knows that when you come home there will probably be a lot of crazy, for a while. My friend A. with the handcuffs thing, his wife didn’t realize it was a harmless coping technique. He’d keep thinking about how cute she’d look, she’d get mad, he’d ask for a picture from her in this particular pose, she’d put him off. Basically he was just asking her to reinforce the knowledge he already had that she loved him by going out of her way to do something for him, she didn’t, he got steadily more frustrated and angry.
You know when your kid wants to be tucked in at night, and he wants this toy, and a glass of water, and a hug, and a song, and a story, and the other toy? That’s us. We want to be reassured. We want to be told that we are still loved, still able to be loved, still deserving to be loved. We want to know that we haven’t been forgotten, that someone, somewhere remembers us, and thinks of us.

When I came home, I had two people who I liked a lot who stopped speaking to me after I talked about the war. People don’t want the truth. People don’t want to hear that you piss yourself, they don’t want to hear that you put bodies in a bag and then go eat spaghetti, they don’t want to hear how funny it is that the coolest scar I ever saw on a guy is on a black guy and now everyone who sees it doesn’t think “war hero” they think “thug”. On me, it would look like a war scar. On pretty much any vet it would look completely badass. It’s a giant slice down the side of his throat, like would be caused by a knife. Everyone just figures he’s in a punk gang. Too funny. They don’t want to hear about how B. remembers that E. didn’t scream hardly at all after the IED, when his foot was blown off. I remember. I remember he screamed like a wounded animal. He screamed and screamed and screamed. B. Remembers him not screaming, telling jokes and shit. It’s not what I remember. I remember him screaming, and throwing the parts of his foot in the river so the dogs wouldn’t eat it. You tell people that back home, people stop talking to you. Have you seen Restrepo? There is a scene in there where they get hit by an IED. There is dirt all over the windshield; people are yelling the vehicle is at a 45 degree angle. That scene, I laugh every time I see it. Every time. Why shouldn’t I laugh? It happened to us too, and I’m still alive. We laugh when we go on a scary rollercoaster and don’t die. I laugh when the IED strike doesn’t kill me. Actually, I also laugh when I am scared, which is actually a pretty handy trait, btw. But if I laugh at that part of the movie, people are going to get upset at me.

When I was 18, I almost lost my virginity, but I laughed during the end of “Silence of the Lambs” and that was the end of that. Some things are socially appropriate, some are not. When you are here, and when you come home, what you consider appropriate, it’s different from what other people consider appropriate. So it’s easiest to not talk to people.

Here are a couple of situations: you come around a corner the same time as someone coming around in the opposite direction. Both of you step aside, say excuse me, and move along. When I come around a corner, when I walk down the street, when I stand in line, my shoulders are square, I don’t move aside, and I project what the Army refers to as a “dominant body posture”. Civilians call it “being an asshole”. Usually they call it that after they get out of the fucking way, and when they are far away. In the Army, it’s a good thing, its self confidence and an aura that demands respect. Amongst civilians, it is called being a dick. Another example: I met a new coworker today. She’s Southern. I pretty much hate southern girls. When I was young, I was poor. So poor that southern girls were pretty fucking uppity. So, when I said “I don’t think we’ve been introduced” and she said her name, normal people would have said their name, like “I’m Sergeant Geerts, I’m the CJOC SGT, if you need this or that I’ll be glad to help you out blah blah blah”. What I did was just continue the conversation after she had given her name, not giving my name in return. What do I care? My name and rank are on my chest, she’s a southern belle, and I’m here all year, she’ll probably figure out what my job is sooner or later, and if she doesn’t then she’s and idiot and it would be better if she didn’t interact with me. These are not the social skills that win friends and influence people. I wish to make this perfectly clear: I know how to massage egos, make people feel important and good about themselves, how to make people like me. I choose not to. Fuck that, too much work.

I reiterate: these are not the social skills that win friends and influence people.

This all being the case, I have less tolerance as well. So maybe someone makes a borderline joke, or an offhand comment, and instead of not noticing, or letting it go, I am more likely to read the worst into it. It's a fact of life that must be weighed into every situation, every interaction. It is not wise to make big decisions while deployed.

The Chicken Conundrum

Where do you suppose chickens came from?

Do you think there might have been Paleolithic herds of Proto-Chickens, weighing a ton or more each, covering the plains of the Serengeti during the last Ice Age?

Or were they loneres, eking out a meager existance, solitary by the side of the river, warily watching for predators, coming together only to mate? Steely-eyed warriors, cold velociraptor eyes peering out at the world....BKAWK!

I find the animal to be wildly improbably. A blightless, brainless bird, that eats and lays eggs and nothing else? Clear evidence both that there is a Creator, and he has a wicked sense of humor.