D-Day

As our Boeing 757 flew over the beaches of Normandy 50,000 feet below, in route to our pit-stop in Germany, before continuing on to Ali Al Salem, Kuwait, I realized that it was June 6, of all days. D-Day. I tried to draw the symbolism out of it but decided to simply ponder the sacrifice made by so many men before me. It certainly put my experience in Iraq into perspective. It's really not so bad. Five more months of fun in the sun and then it's, "Adieu my torturous lover, sweet as a razor's edge... it's not you, it's me."

Currently, I am sitting in the Kuwait holding tank for transient soldiers, still with enough elbow room to remember the embrace of my last two weeks of unadulterated freedom. The depths of which I shall not attempt to plum. Suffice it to say that mowing my grandmother's lawn at dusk, drinking a glass of wine and kissing the girl of my dreams, meeting my new niece for the first time, hiking with my sisters, having coffee with my mother and simply breathing an extended sigh of relief was enough to leave my heart brimming with love and longing and impossible sorrow.

The second week of R and R becomes harder to enjoy as your return to the real world of mechanized submission grows imminent, the impending doom. It's a wave of emotion you don't fully acknowledge until it is immediately upon you, at which point your defenses are useless. The day I left, Anne was going to hang out with her friend for a fun-filled afternoon of beer consumption and varmint control (a win-win in Montana as cattle tend to break their ankles in the ground squirrel's holes and, after a few beers, the sport of it really starts to take hold of your emotions). "Have fun killing gofers," I said before I walked out the door. "Have fun killing people," she replied with a kind of sadness masked in the joke. We both laughed at the contrast. She's pretty damn funny sometimes.

Now the gavel has landed and still echos through my consciousness like a distant rolling thunder and lightning strikes of heartache that seize you without warning and hold the pit of your stomach captive in your throat. Its back to work but not all she wrote. The new diamond in my mind is re-deployment and returning finally to Germany. As bleak as the Grafenwoehr post seemed before Iraq, it's acquired a new flavor. One of sweet release and simple opportunity.