Kandahar; 13.JAN.2012
[From Max]
I’m still at the airfield. I’m never going to leave this fucking dump.
My timeline gets pushed right every other day. The captain in charge of scheduling the movement mentions it casually, in passing, and shrugs at me.
“Oh, you’re leaving on the . . .”
Thanks. Dick.
My relationship with the CO is shot. I’m certain he’s going to fire me. At this point I’ve already accepted it. He threatened me the other day. Called me a “dead man”. I doubt he was serious, but it caused a strange reaction – I felt strangely better. I had a flash thought in my head of him grabbing me by the collar.
I wish it were that simple. If he put his hands on me, that would be a problem I could solve. Quick. Efficient. I shook it out of my head, coming back to the reality that for me the Infantry consists of reams of paperwork and mountains of bullshit. Unrealistic time lines. Fluid deadlines.
It rained the other night.
I walked outside in the early morning to piss. There was a smell in the air – something other than JP8 fumes – a wet, earthy aroma. It took root in some old part of my brain I thought I’d killed off. Suddenly I was standing in the middle of my hometown. That stupid little town by the river. It was verdant in the summer, aromatic and humid. It always felt like an old place to me.
I must have walked forty or fifty meters without seeing where I was going.
This is one of the unfortunate side effects of being clear all the time. The pregnant emotions. It can never be as simple for me as going somewhere to do a task, completing the mission, and moving out smartly. I get stuck somehow. Stuck living in my own head, processing a rubix cube I’d forgotten was ever in there.
I walk everywhere here. I find myself concentrating on bizarre details – relaxing my shoulders, controlling my breathing – I lose myself in that, like meditating. I focus on the present, on being present.
I don’t want to think about home. She is there, and I’m not, and I know what that means and I don’t want to deal with it. She is supposed to be in the past tense.
Nothing is ever past tense.
