BACK TO WAR
Jul 09, 2008

BACK TO WAR
Name: Mike T.
Posting date: 7/7/08
Stationed in: Afghanistan
Milblog: c/o bouhammer.com

So we sit, in the middle of New Jersey.

I listen to everything that happens around me.

I have Dead Kennedys and One Republic, Cicero.

I have something in my life.

There’s something in combat that you lose.

You look at the flowers, the literature. You look at your life.

There are things that you see that no one else can find.

You grow old, you grow tired. You find happiness. You call in an air strike.

You watch as somebody grows upon you. You just wanted her to know how you felt.

You’re tired of feeling like some used up bag of war. I am ready to stop and come home.

I get tired of telling her that she’s nothing but beautiful.

But you’re old, you’re tired, you’re beat up.

Yet you don’t remember what it was like not to drink a bottle of vodka and make excuses for your country.

You sit there and just say I’m sorry. How do you sit there and say I drank too much and believed too much? Because that’s what I did.

How do you sit there and say this shouldn’t have happened, but I did them? Part of my life that I can’t explain.

That’s it.

That’s what you’ve got. I’m sorry I blew up this village or shot down these people. It is what it is, right?

You come home on a C-130 to nothing.

To you, to this imaginary life. To a woman who loves me to no end.

I have music and I have art.

Everything stops when I get off that aircraft. And here I am, still missing everything. It’s never fair though.

It’s not fair to say what we want to say and do what we want to do because it just never is.

Last night I got to hang out with good friends, and tonight here I am, ready to argue again. If I have to do this, then they’re the ones missing out.

Sometimes I wonder if I gave up everything. I’m so pissed off. Find war is such a simple matter.

I’m not sure it’s that anymore. But what about my beach? My Ocean Grove? Having wine with my future wife?

What about the things that I care about?

What about the things that I gave up?

What happened to the things that I cared about?

What about the drafting table, Osaka, Piancone's?

Where is my rose that I left so long ago?

I sit here and sometimes wonder those things because I have a house and I have a family.

I have shot and killed, and the worst part is that my family thinks I’m a drunk. They think I’m a failure.

Sometimes I think if my new family thinks that too?

What do you do? How do you suffer? I’ve seen life. I’ve tasted art. Will we find our own way? I just don’t know how to do it anymore.

I’m tired.

So I write this, I sit here on my living room floor, my future wife typing as my German Shepherd sits with us.

But I can’t explain shit. Here I am, tired, worn down, beaten down. But I love my country. I love my ocean.

How do you explain what you have given up for 11 years?

How do you explain what you’ve given up for everyone else for 11 years.

I miss the times, I miss the art. I miss the humming in my life.

I’m tired of people shooting at me. That’s what it is.

I get to sit on my floor, drinking a beer.

I’ve got 48 hours left until I go back and I’ve got no excuses.

But I have rosemary wine, I have salty wind.

These are the things that people dream of. I have books that people imagine having.

And I have a fiancée that no matter what, I will jump out of a helicopter for. I will do anything for her because I can’t do anything about the war. So it's back to war then back to my real job.

A LETTER TO THE REPUBLIC
Jul 09, 2008

A LETTER TO THE REPUBLIC
Name: CAPT Lee Kelley
Posting date: 7/4/08
Returned from: Iraq
Hometown: St. George, Utah
Milblog: Wordsmith at War

It's been two years since I stepped off of that airplane in Salt Lake City. No cliches about "time flying by" seem fitting at the moment. Life is too colorful, too much of a grand adventure to taint its description with an overused play on words. I remember everything as if it were yesterday, and yet I've learned and grown so much that it's like watching someone else in my mind -- some other soldier, some other father, some other soul.

I'm enjoying my days more than ever before, writing full-time, and working hard to build my company Desert Sun Writing and Editing. Although my hometown is New Orleans, I've been living in Salt Lake City, Utah (on and off) for the last 12 years. And I have now moved my little family to an absolutely gorgeous town in southern Utah. It's actually a desert climate not so different from the deserts of Iraq. Do I smell irony?

To mark my anniversary and the exciting changes in my life, I'm going to re-post something I wrote two years ago, when I was flying back and forth across the Atlantic on emergency leave because my mom was very sick and Hurricane Katrina had recently struck. I saw soldiers walking around my hometown with loaded weapons, but I had to go back to Iraq. I felt frustrated and wondered if I should be serving in New Orleans or the Sunni Triangle. I questioned my own path and sometimes grew cynical and philosophical about the way Americans were supporting their troops.

We are still a country at war, and I still have soldiers in Iraq who I sent there personally as their company commander. And yet very few people that I meet in my little microcosm of America seem too concerned. I don't know... is it just me?

A LETTER TO THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH WE STAND

America, we remain your constant and faithful servants. Satellites that hover 23,000 miles above the planet in geospatial orbit feed down into our little dish and we get to see sports, current events, and news.

We know what you’re up to. We might watch the news for 10 minutes after a long shift outside the wire, just enough to get the highlights, read it on the internet, have friends mail us copies of newspapers, or monitor CNN just as the insurgents do, for breaking news. Maybe you know one of us personally, or maybe we’re nothing more to you than nameless faceless soldiers on TV. Either way, we still know about the hurricanes down South, the newest movies and music, the earthquakes in Pakistan, and the latest football scores.

You populate our dreams.

Your state of affairs is part of our thought processes, however hard it may be right now to recall exactly what it felt like to stand within those borders. The mind and eyes play tricks on you when you live in this environment, always on guard, ready to kill if needed.

Yes, we’re soldiers, but who wants to live this way? What man enjoys being threatened all the time? Show me that man and I’ll show you a fool. But ask me to show you a person who is willing to live like this so that Americans back home can live more safely, and we’ll show you a couple hundred thousand.

Drive your comfy cars to work, we want you to. It makes you the personification of our daydreams. As you’re giggling at the immature humor of local morning radio comedy, sipping a vanilla latte from Starbucks, oblivious of the gunshots and explosions in Iraq, and tailgating the car in front of you, we’re trying to stay alive out here. We are not complaining -- we raised our hands and swore to serve. But we do envy the ease with which you can walk out of your door and take a casual stroll through streets that are not your own in that soft suburban streetlight safety.

We wouldn’t expect you to alter your lives for us -- you’re not soldiers. Don’t travel 7,000 miles to fight a violent and intelligent enemy. We’ll take care of all that. You just continue to prosper in the middle class, trade up on your economy sized car, install that new subwoofer in the trunk, and yes, the red blouse looks wonderful on you. Buy it.

Remain the same embodiment of our fading memories, the portal to our daydreams, the catalyst for hope when hope eludes us, a land of winding roads and fishing holes, pretty pictures in frames, campfire stories, fields of wheat, skyscrapers made of glass, a woodshop, a fireplace, a patriotic song. Be you a mantle full of family photos, a smiling face at a convenience store, a dog that follows us around the yard, someone we meet spontaneously and get along and laugh with, the feel of grass on our bare feet as we walk out to get the morning paper, a parade or a fair or a swap meet.

Be you a pool table in a dimly lit room, a candle in a window, a Christmas tree, a rainy day, a hug after a hard day, a bowl of chicken noodle soup when we have a cold, the feel of a steering wheel in our hands, gravity tugging at our calves as we walk up a mountain trail, the thrill of water running over rock, a stone thrown from a bridge, or skipping across a lake, someone to call on a cell phone just because, or our favorite band coming to play a show in our hometown at an outdoor amphitheater. Be you the faces of strangers at that concert, laughing, smiling, silhouetted in light and smoke amidst the energy of musical celebration, or be Chris Cornell’s CD Euphoria Morning, which has some lyrical moments that put chills down my spine.

Be all of these things and more, as we know you can.

Just be what you will, Americans, with your goods and bads, your lights and darks, your jerks passing at 100 mph in the slow lane ( Believe it or not, I miss you jerks -- I will relish the next opportunity I have to give you the finger), your wrong change and bad attitude because you don’t like your job at the drive thru, your high school boy with braces handing us that delicious movie theater popcorn (extra butter please), your mall food courts, your egg-drop soup, your soft shell taco for .49 cents on Tuesdays, your dryer sheets that make the pillow case smell so damn fine, your beautiful face the first thing we see in the morning, your crying children, and yes, your diapers that need changing.

Remain a perfect parody of yourself by having a mid-life crisis and listening to tribal meditative music on a state of the art CD player that you ordered from Sharper Image.com. Buy that Porsche and drive it to Yoga class, or be the guy in Wyoming whom I cursed because he won the Power ball and he was already a millionaire.

Be whatever you choose. Let fate and synchronicity guide you.

But please remain constant as well, because we have changed.

Don’t move the continent. Don’t sell the house. Don’t lose the dog.

THE BLACK BUNNY OF DOOM
Jul 09, 2008

THE BLACK BUNNY OF DOOM
Name: Sean Dustman
Posting date: 7/2/08
Stationed in: Iraq
Milblog: Doc in the Box

Going to war has always been a somewhat mythical experience. Legends often rise up, and just as many are dashed to the ground. One tale I've heard over the last couple years is of a black bunny who comes out at dusk and goes up to strangers and allows them to pet him. Yeah, right. In the middle of war zone, with some sort of howling beasts living in the waddee a couple hundred feet away. And face it, I know that there are some very unfriendly military folk out here as well. This has to be one of those urban myths that they use on the new guys fresh off the plane. I'm not about to fall for it.

Well, I was walking home the other night, the light was at my back, and a black blur came up on my left. I froze and looked, and along came a little black bunny. He hopped right up to me as friendly as can be and put his head on my foot, and my hand, without asking my brain for permission, reached down and started scratching him behind his ears like it was the most normal thing in the world.

I sat there dumbstruck, as the light drained from the day, and continued petting him. What do I do now? Who's going to believe me?

Oh yeah! Me being me, I had my trusty camera in my pocket, and so I am able to prove to the non-believers that indeed, there is a friendly black bunny that comes out to be petted in the twilight. I gave him a granola bar from my pocket. It's not often you get to prove a legend on film.