A repost of an older blog entry!

A dark trip down memory lane

I'm on the night shift at work for two weeks. It could be worse; I work 4 10 hour nights, and I'm taking vacation for 2 of them. Even so, I'm not a graveyard shift kinda guy, and I find it mildly annoying that I'm here. I'll go ahead and tell you that the night shift is not very busy and tends to drag, leaving ample time to do......whatever else you might need to do (such as post on your blog). So anyway, I get into the office and I start clicking through my work emails, 90% of which I read, take note of, and delete, and the other 10% I simply delete right away. When I get to the end of my furious deletions, I click on the trash bin and prepare to erase them forever when I notice one I hadn't read. It's from a friend who works in Admin. I open it and I'm greeted with "Hey John, you'll never guess what I found......check it out".

It's my casualty report, from when I was wounded in combat in 2004.

As soon as I saw it, a flood of emotions rushed over me. I hadn't seen this thing in over 5 years, and yet I could suddenly again taste the dust in my mouth, hear the roar of the explosion in my ears, and the frantic cries of the people rushing to our aid. I could remember, as clear as day, the disorientation as I struggled to my feet and helped the Corpsman pull Burgess to a standing position, his right shoulder covered in blood. I could feel the wall we were blasted through caving down upon us. I could remember wondering if I had been hit by shrapnel. I could remember wondering if I was going to die. Why did my friend send it to me? Not that I was angry or traumatized by seeing it. In fact, I'm well over it. So why the sudden barrage of images and emotions and sounds? In order for you to know, I need to take you back with me, 5 years ago.

It was May of 2004, on Mother's Day. I was a young LCpl in the middle of my first combat tour in Iraq. My Battalion had set up a little FOB (Forward Operating Base) about 10km south of Fallujah, in a small village called Zadan. The FOB had no official name, but we called it FOB Incoming or FOB Suicide. This was because of the fact that there was absolutely no cover and no place to take refuge from the constant barrage of rockets and mortars we recieved on a daily basis. Sometimes the number was high as 12 or 13. We had been there for about 2 weeks at this point and morale was.......well, it wasn't terrible, but it wasn't exactly optimistic, either. Just days before, GySgt Ronald Baum had been killed by a direct rocket hit, and those that worked with him (myself included) were still badly shaken by his death. There was absolutely no going anywhere without wearing your flak, kevlar, throat protector, the whole nine yards. We even wore our gear as we slept.

That morning, I had been tapped for guard duty at the front gate of our small compound, along with another LCpl named Burgess. He was a nice kid, a bit younger than me, and we got along well. We all shared the burden of guard duty during our time there. We were standing near the front gate behind our concrete barriers talking about how much alcohol were going to need upon our return home, when a massive explosion rocket the outer wall across from us. We were immediately able to guess that it was an RPG round (we were later proven right) and dashed back into the compound, turning to draw down with our M16's once we were behind the HESCO barriers. (A HESCO is basically a big square sandbag that comes up to about your mid-torso). As we were turning, the world suddenly became nothing but noise and sand as a 107mm rocket slammed into the ground not 10 feet in front of us, lifting both of us off our feet and right through a stucco-alabaster wall with no ceiling, which had been right behind us. We landed hard and the wall came tumbling down on top of us, and as it did I could discern two things: Burgess shouting that he had been hit, and that fact that I could hear nothing in my right ear.

A Navy Corpsman was the first to get there and pulled me upright. I did my best to help drag Burgess to his feet, a large chunk of shrapnel protruding from his right shoulder. I'm not sure how much I actually did help, but hey, I tried. We were both ushered to one corner of the FOB, at which the Corpsmen worked to remove the shrapnel from Burgess's shoulder and tried to determine how much hearing I had lost. As it turned out, we were both ok: Burgess would suffer no lasting damage from his wounds, and I was not deaf. However, the BN Surgeon correctly predicted that I would face significant hearing loss over the following years (in fact, a recent physical showed that I scar tissue in my right ear had deteriorated further, and I could expect to need a hearing aid within a few short years). My saving grace had been that my ears were dirty. Had they been clean, I would have been put on a chopper headed for Germany and the Hospital.

So what was the fallout? We went back later and examined the HESCO that we had been standing behind to discover large, jagged pieces of shrapnel embedded into the cloth. Had we stopped running on the other side, just one foot forward, it would have torn both of us in half. Burgess and I rested for a day or two and we returned to our duties. We were in the middle of a war, after all, and every man counted. Although my hands shook for the next two weeks and I couldn't hear out of my right ear for four, I was none the worse for wear. Burgess recieved the Purple Heart, obviously. I was denied my Purple Heart by Congress because "despite a debilitating injury for which I would feel the effects over a lifetime, I had not actually shed blood". My Company Commander and my father were livid and both wrote their congressmen, but that was that. In hindsight, I don't really care anymore, as no one goes into combat hoping they'd be wounded. But that was the reason that my friend had emailed my CASREP to me, because I was listed by the DoD to this day as WIA (wounded in action), yet I had no Purple Heart to my name. My friend wanted me to write a letter to Congress and ask for an overturn of their decision. And as much as I appreciated the thought, I deleted the email and declined. Why? A smartass answer would be that I have little desire to ask anything of the current administration. But for a truly honest answer, I would refer you to a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson I came across on a day from which I have happy memories, which has come to give me great comfort:

So nigh is grandeur to our dust
So near is God to man
When Duty whispers low, Thou must
The youth replies, I can.

I leave it to you to determine what I mean.

A nation of sarcasm!

Everyone in the world is getting sarcastic. It's not just comedians and dicks anymore. Years ago, sarcasm was reserved for people talking to people stupider than them. Now the stupids are fighting back, and doing it so badly, you can't trust anything people say anymore. Here's a true story that might show you what I mean. I was sitting in a local Starbucks today, silently kicking ass with a book, and a man came in asking for a mocha something or other. The guy behind the counter said, "Ooooh... we're out of that."
Man: "Oh. Well then I'll have..."
Starbucks: "Ha ha ha, I was being SARCASTIC. We have [whatever]."
Man: "Okay. I'll take one then."

After the man left, the people who worked there wiped their sense off on their aprons and called the guy an idiot. An idiot for believing what the coffee kid told him. If believing things that clerks say makes a person an idiot, then that makes every person on the planet an idiot, including me, and that's medically impossible. I was a little confused at the time, but I didn't ask the brilliant kid wiping the counter to explain it to me. On the ride home I realized it was funny because he said he didn't have the thing, but he really did have the thing*. All that man had to do to know it was a joke was sneak in the back to check the shop's inventory, make sure all their machines were working, and get back out as silent as the night. That coffee-ordering man really was an idiot. It proves the theory that the only true geniuses we have left are the people doing inventory at Starbucks.

*There are variations on this gag. You might pull up to a gas station some day and the attendant will say "Sorry, pal! We're out of gas!" It's a good one. In fact, I might start keeping an empty gas tank in my house just for when I need a good laugh. Not having gas is hilarious! It's killing me! There's still no gas in the tank! Every time I check I laugh!

I understand that people at Starbucks or fast food places might just be doing it as a dayjob until their acting career takes off or until their patent finally goes through for Lazer Shoes 2000. When you see them at the bar, they might tell you they're a writer. No. They're a burger flipper with a diary. Let me give you an example from my own life again. Sometimes when I'm driving across town I might scream, "Are you ready to rock, Highway 26?!" and sing a Whitesnake song out the window. And when I get off the highway I'll scream, "How are you feeling out there, Market Street! I was just on 26, and they said they knew how to rock! But Market Street! Market Street knows how to ROCK HARD!!! YeeeAAHHHHH!" I can do that all day. But you know what? When I get to where I'm going, I don't tell people I'm a rock star.

So if someone at the coffee shop starts to give you shit, don't take it. No matter what you do for a living, chances are you have a better station in life than someone standing next to a milk steamer making drinks that take longer to pronounce than drink. But power struggles with these people can be tricky. All it takes is one grumpy employee with a mouth full of spit to turn you into the bitch. You may wear a tie to work and drive a BMW to financial freedom, but that guy in the apron didn't drink somebody else's spit on his lunchbreak.

I've figured out how the world got so uncontrollably sarcastic. It's warning labels. Everything we buy is covered in directions and warnings so ridiculous that the only people who could benefit from them have no prayer of actually being able to read them. How can you not be sarcastic when the packaging material in your stereo tells you it's not food? Yesterday I saw a soccer ball.....a SOCCER BALL....that felt obligated to call itself a choking hazard. I understand babies love to eat matchbox cars, but if something's more than a foot wide, it shouldn't say "CHOKING HAZARD." It should say, "GO AHEAD AND TRY TO EAT THIS, MR. BIGMOUTH."

You almost can't pick a product up without laughing out loud. A plastic bag will tell you not to put it in an infant's playpen. A bottle of detergent might tell you not to eat it. Who the fuck thought I was going to eat detergent? "Honey, this makes our glasses spot-free, and I bet it tastes great on a cracker!" Do the plastic bag manufacturers picture us standing around a playpen and deciding whether or not to decorate our babies' cribs with plastic bags?

Wife: "You know, sweetheart, it looks like the baby's crib needs a few more plastic bags."
Husband: "That's right, honey. And if we covered the entire bottom in choking hazard brand plastic bags, we wouldn't have to change the sheets for weeks! We could just tip the crib and let all that time-consuming babymess drain drain! drain!! away from our memories!"
Wife: "All that sheet changing. All that cleaning. How did we ever get by without plastic bag bedding?"

Ridiculous warning labels come from two places: idiots and people pretending to be idiots for the purposes of a lawsuit. If people find out you're intelligent, you're going to have a hard time convincing them that you didn't know it would hurt if you poured hot coffee on yourself. If you say something like that, you better follow it by saying, "UURBLLGGGG," blowing spit bubbles, and shitting in your pants. A non-idiot is never going to tell a room full of people that they ate an odor eater because "the box didn't tell them not to." No, if you managed to get to adulthood, chances are you've figured out what products kill you when you eat them, and what's okay to pour on yourself. It's only a matter of years before we won't even be able to watch TV because the screen will be obstructed by giant words saying, "DO NOT RAM HEAD THROUGH. NOT TO BE TAKEN INTERNALLY."

Watching Planes

You're probably thinking "Hey, that's an interesting title for a blog". Or maybe you're not. Regardless, I feel like I should explain exactly what it means, because it oughta give you a little perspective into what kind of person I am. Or at the very least, you may find it mildly entertaining.

I was a U.S. Marine from Jan 2003-Jan 2010. I was, and will always be, very proud of my service. They say "Once a Marine, always a Marine". It's true. I still make use of phrases and words like "good to go....friggin.....outstanding.....accomplish the mission.....etc". I still swear like a sailor, and I still stay physically fit. My uniforms are still hanging in my closet. I even do the exact same thing as a civilian as I did in the Corps. I also had some of the best and worst experiences of my life as a Marine, which remain ingrained into my memory and are carried with me wherever I go.

What does this have to do with planes?

I was on my first deployment to Iraq in 2004 with 2nd Marine Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment shuffled between the violent town of Mahmoudiyah and the even worse city of Fallujah. Me and the boys were so full of bravado on our way over. Brimming with confidence and warrior mentality as we went to the range, hoisted our rucks, and loaded the CONEX boxes in preparation for war. It's interesting how things evolve. The first time we got shelled, we tripped over ourselves to throw our Flak vests on and stared in grim silence at the ceiling, listening to the explosions and wondering if those mortars had enough power to punch through the sandbag-lined roof of the abandoned factory we were sleeping in. We gripped our rifles as though we'd have to open fire on the mortars if they punched through. However, by the end of the first month, when the mortars came as we slept, we simply mumbled, draped our vests over ourselves like blankets, and went back to sleep. By this point, I think a numbness had come over us. We were truly alone in a hostile land completely alien to us, and the lives and people we had left behind seemed like something we had simply dreamt up rather than anything real and tangible.

So where do the planes come in?

One night about a month into our deployment, I was standing on the roof of the factory smoking a cigarette and looking out over Mahmoudiyah (under a brick overhang, for minimal coverage should the indirect fire come in). I scanned the city from left to right, then looked up at the night sky. Arab nights are beautiful, ironic given what was happening on the ground. I was looking aimlessly at the stars with not a thought in my head when I noticed one star was blinking red and moving to the West. Within moments I realized it was a plane, flying high in the sky. Not a C130, but a commercial airliner. I was transfixed. What was a common sight back home had become forgotten to me, and it was as though it was the first time I had witnessed such a thing. I began to wonder who was on the plane. Where were they going? Where had they come from? Did they have any idea what was happening right below them? I followed the plane with hungry eyes until I could no longer see it. It was a reminder that no matter how shitty things might be at that moment, the rest of the world wasn't as far away as I thought, and that one day, I'd be on my own plane up there, going home. And I smiled.

As a result, I developed a habit, or rather a tradition. When things get heavy for me or I just feel stressed out, I look for planes flying up in the sky at night. And when I find one, I just sit there and watch it. To this day, it reminds me that no matter how bad things may get or how alone I might feel, something good isn't far away after all.