Right Now

Right now there’s a Private sitting at a desk in a room lit by lamps. It’s 2 a.m. and he’s on radio watch. He’s reading a Stephen King novel, and answering calls on the radio when he needs to. Most of his unit is asleep or out on a mission, and he’s manning the helm, like some mid-shipman of old on a giant craft out at sea. He's not unlike a 911 operator, a calm, collected voice when something goes wrong.

Right now there is a female sergeant running a PX on a base in western Iraq. There's only one room, and it’s hard to keep the dust off of the merchandise. To the average American, it would look like the poorest excuse for a convenience store in the world. But to her customers – the 1000 or so soldiers stationed on the base – it is an oasis. Hers is a place they can go to buy magazines, batteries, snacks, beverages, and even some video games and electronics. Sometimes they come in and just look around, chit the chat. It gives them some sense of normalcy when they walk in and she says “Good evening. Nice to see you tonight.” She takes pride in her little store. She has decorated it for Christmas this year.

Right now there are countless soldiers standing in complete darkness in guard towers in the Middle East. These soldiers have brothers, sisters, parents, wives and children who think about them and miss them all the time. These men have a very important, but monotonous job. They keep the bases secure so that soldiers can work in relative safety, planning missions, training, and taking care of personal business. These men see the night through thermal imaging scopes and night vision goggles. Electric green and red are the colors they become familiar with. They can see a mouse running in a field from 100 meters, a desert fox, or a man trying to sneak up on them.

Right now there are Soldiers and Marines in the Al Anbar Province driving on roads that are laced with IEDs. Every single moment is a tense one when every single object they pass has the potential to explode in a ball of fire and flying shrapnel. Men their own age place the IEDs, and watch for them, and pray to Allah when they kill and maim. Sometimes back on the base, when a fellow soldier is badly injured, they get out of their beds and rush to the medical facility to donate their life blood to save him. When they return from this war, they’ll swerve to avoid trash on American highways. It’ll be reflex.

Right now there are staff officers working on countless reports and projects. They do not leave the base much. Their job does not require them to. They maintain situational awareness of the battlefield, which is difficult for the soldier outside the wire to do – he is too busy staying out of harms way and accomplishing the mission. These staff officers write the missions. They do their best critical thinking, have constant meetings, continuously working and refining the planning process, to make the most well-informed decisions possible and to resource the soldiers outside the wire, setting them up for success. These officers work long hours, and they care very much about the soldiers in their units. They are not action heroes, they are silent heroes, doing work that goes mostly unnoticed, but without which none of the other work could be done in any kind of an organized manner. And sometimes, they do go outside the wire. Everybody is a gun in this war, and regardless of whether you’re supply specialist, a communicator, or an intelligence officer, you will go out on missions sometime or another. You will face your fear.

Right now we are a country at war, and only time will allow us to reflect on the eventualities this war will create. We are once again coming to the aid of another country in need, and making incredible contributions, sometimes with our own blood and sweat and tears, to humanity as a whole. And right now we are getting ready to spend Christmas in the Middle East. There are little Christmas trees everywhere, and people have sent us so much candy we’re going to keep the dentists in business for years to come. We’re getting presents from home, and we’re putting them under the tree, maintaining the tradition. A lot of us have webcams. So even though we’re not home, technology will allow us to watch the kids open presents.We're in the middle of a war. We're fighting to stay alive and finish the mission and get home safely, but we're trying to make Christmas as nice as it can be. And it's not so bad, really. It could always be much worse.

One Christmas tree is pretty big. It has ornaments and cards hanging from it, and, in a nice dark touch that exemplifies the mood of war, there is a belt of .50 caliber ammunition placed carefully in a ring around the bottom, reflecting the multi-colored lights off its brass casings. It’s actually quite beautiful.



Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish. -John Quincy Adams

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit