Weather and War

The light was dim this morning behind a sunny but cloudy sky that had the consistency of wax paper covering the orb of the sun. To the west the horizon was heavy with grey and black bullying clouds. The wind was flipping our American Flag as I walked below it. Later in the morning I noticed the smell of two old friends meeting: rain and desert.

In Vietnam, we called the enemy Charlie. In Operation Iraqi freedom, he has earned the moniker of Haji. I don’t mean it disrespectfully, but it’s easier than saying terrorist or enemy or insurgent or “freedom fighter,” so I choose to use it. Haji doesn’t like this weather. Apparently he doesn’t want to get wet. Coalition forces still get killed and injured. Iraq can still be a dangerous place. But in my little chunk of this ancient country, fewer mortars and rockets get fired at the FOB when the wind is gusting across this massive desert and the rain clouds hover like a foreshadowing of evil. I suppose that where he is the ground is also now a morass of mud and puddles that are deeper than they appear at first glance.

How can I describe the mud? Imagine thick chocolate pudding all over the ground, broken up by semi-dry patches of hard clay and large 20-100 foot lakes of standing water which have more pudding at their bottoms. In some places, the pudding is hard and crusty on the outside with a creamy filling like an éclair. In other places it’s piled up a foot or more, and it has the consistency of ice cream that has been in a microwave for two minutes. It sticks to everything. There is no escaping its clutches.

Picture it. Men who were once crying infants now killing each other in the name of their own beliefs and calling and duty, sitting around wood fires or drinking warm tea waiting for the weather to break to resume the bloodshed and fighting. There's a chaos in war, and there's an order to poetry. But there is poetry in life and even war as well, and there is a pendulum that swings between the bleakest of days and those singular moments of pure inspiration, and this graceful movement slices through time with its own form of cadence, its own pentameter - mysterious and beautiful and tragic and wonderfully imperfect all at once.

Bad weather not, it is compelling to imagine all of military forces fast at work in their labors. Imagine a view from a satellite, real-time, and the unending stream of military personnel moving to and fro, shooting, running, driving, sleeping, planning, and the multitude of communications systems that link us all together. If each transmission on each different system were visible to the naked eye, they would appear as neon optic missiles of information, moving at the speed of sound, or the speed of light, all blanketed lately by cold rains the likes of which have probably been saturating Southwest Asia for eons. I am learning from this war. The experience of dealing with personal tragedies back home and on the battlefield simultaneously has taught me new meaning for the terms resilience, patience, frustration, sadness, optimism, and multi-tasking.

We'll get through this together, for better or worse.

"Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."  Oscar Wilde

links: digg this    del.icio.us    technorati    reddit