R and R

Rest and Recuperation...at least that's what I think it stands for. If nothing else, the 15 days of leave from the theatre of war is a soldier's round-trip ticket to any destination in the wide world, at least any one serviced by participating airlines. Paramount in a soldier's mind, R and R is anticipated with a kind of suspended hope and restrained longing that is an undeniable source of strength in the midst of his personal parade of miseries. It is that pure and holy diamond in the mind, the slowly rising sun of salvation on the distant horizon. It is freedom ringing...so vague at first, then sweeter and clearer with every day, every mission, growing in proportion to the steady degradation of your capacity to endure the blunt trauma and monotony, until that fateful day when the river reaches the sea and all the tormented and muddy rush is diffused in a display of perfect release.

I vividly remember when my day had finally arrived (it was just 11 days ago, but the feeling is so momentous that it resonates almost with an eternal longing, touching the Edenic memory). I walked out to the front of the CHU's and smoked a final cigarette with my two closest friends, both of whom are still anticipating their R and R. "Have fun, man...now get the fuck out of here, asshole." With pleasure. As I stepped off I considered the fact that this was the first time since arriving in country that I'd walked anywhere by myself, and without a weapon. A strange sensation of suddenly meaningless muscle memory made me wonder just how effected the rest of my body and mind had become.

Around midnight, in the cooling of the desert and the reeling of my thoughts, the Chinook pulled its massive self into the air and I was officially leaving. Going home and leaving my self-imposed imprisonment and the animal of existence that it caged. Though my body was some thousand feet above Baghdad, sporadically lit and blinking, my heart was pumping blood from eternity past and beating my mind into submission to the surreal levity of my improved state of being and the infinite potential of the very swiftly approaching future....