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.

Grasp

You ever play a card game that revealed the
balance of your existence? Well, my sister, Anne, and I just discovered such a "game"...or Grasp as we now call it. What you will need to get started: One regular deck of 52 cards, one nickle, a willingness to understand and, perhaps, most importantly, one, or two, bottles of wine (the quantity and quality of which is entirely up to the weight and willingness of you wallet).


Grasping for the wind...is this not what the rigid and habitual survivors consider a futile pursuit? Nonsense! Let flow the the uncertain and sumptuous vitality of experience. Let question beget question and life beget life. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, fall prey to our inquisition and desire to discover! Behold, the Beauty and the Revelation....

Key:

Clubs = Family

Spades = Work

Diamonds = Money

Hearts = God/Love

Ace = Self

King = God

Queen = Soul Mate

Jack = The Variable Humor

1-9 = Degree of Measurement/Quantity

No formula here, just a simple and totally open communication within a symbolic and representational framework according to the musings of two siblings under the influence and in search of their souls. Bear with me, or bare with me.

Each player/seeker is dealt three cards. A nickle (as it is neither too rich nor meager) will be flipped or spun to determine who will be the first to show. The first card represents "Transitional Trials," and having called heads, I flip my first card....

Ace of Clubs = Family break down. Joined the Army for my self, resulting in my ultimate seclusion from the lives of my family and general disconnect from the rest of conventional society. My hand is now open to the insights of my quisling sibling. I am fair game to any and every association she might make with the Ace of Clubs. We dive into a dynamic and searching stream of consciousness to dance with the circle of life and dispel notions of a linear reality. Anne flips her first card....

7 of Clubs = Inclusive family break down. In touch with the transitional trials of each immediate family member and the symbiotic effect of each. Our father is dead and now more a part of our lives than ever before. A holy number, 7 is the measure of his influence: Divine. We all know him more intimately in his absence and feel the love and provision he embodied now that it is gone. Regret is destructive and instructional. We miss him and move on.

We step outside for a cigarette and ponder the providence of our immediately recent development, not only as card-readers, but as friends. Anne tells me things I've never known about her and I stop feeling so frustrated about returning to Iraq. There is such great meaning in everything and Anne's heart is a new treasure. We really are growing up together. The next card will represent the potential resolution of the first. We return to the table and I flip it over....

Queen of Spades = Work will be required and my soul mate and I will work together. Our union will consummate a love that heals the transition of one era to the next. A woman I love with my entire existence will require a sacrifice greater than I can give. Grace will prevail and the Holy Spirit will replace my desires. Anne flips....

9 of Spades = 3 being her nemesis number, representing uncertainty and irresolution. Hard work toward acceptance and simply being will be required. The trinity will never be grasped enough to make a representative image of God. Faith is required by the moment. 9 is also phonically "No" in German, whatever that means. Another cigarette... back to the cards and the third is the "tie down," the reinforcement of resolution. I flip my last card....

5 of Spades = More work. There are five immediate family members to whom I owe my love and understanding. To whom I am the seed of their father and husband and the brother by whom they have stood and encouraged for these 27 years. For rushing headlong into the infantry and war I've taken days of their worries on my shoulders and given them cause to fear. They understand, but to ask them to is the weight of my soul in their hearts. Forgive me. God give you peace. Anne shows her final card....

8 of Spades = Acceptance of family as a group of individuals and reality as infinite. "Time" is but a measurement that renders reality as a linear reference-point and a convenient ear-mark for masturbatory memories and masochistic indulgences. The end is as often the beginning as the beginning is the end. Embrace the vast expanse of experience and the dynamic throbbing of existence that is your life. Fight and bleed.

The "game" was over, I thought, then Anne swiped a card off of the top of the deck and flipped it over on the table between us. Up to this point, our hands had been only black and of work and family. The card was the 2 of Hearts. How beautiful, I thought. The two of us imagining and exploring God's infinite creation. The thoughts surging between us on our breath like lightning, like the Holy Spirit.

Inspired by Gene Autry

I'm sick and I'm tired of your face,
Looking just like a loaded gun.
Like you robbed the grave of the setting sun
And called it the day the west was won.

This looks like goodbye, I hear my train a-comin
It feels like pulling teeth
With a back that was broken from bearing the weight
Of wings that never opened to carry you away.

It's high time you were brought in
You're wanted in every state of my mind
So put down your arms and come quietly
It's not so lost we cannot find.

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....

war, what is it good for?

I really thought that this whole infantry gig might spur some creative exploration in the realm of the writen word...if only I could colour this experience in such a way that would reshape some common misconceptions about the life of a soldier and the war in Iraq. Alas, I've come to the conclusion that you are probably right about alot of things. Why am I here? Without chasing the rabbit down a trail of infinite regress, I can only say that I am here for my story. I am here so that one day, when I get out of the Army, I can stand on this experience and see what else is out there without it being in the way. A little college here, some travel there, add a dash of substance abuse, a few broken hearts, hell, throw in some combat and you might be on to something.

Here we are so miraculously
in an ancient and holy land
so high-speed and presumptuous,
dusting our weapons and buttressing big tobacco.
My thoughts are a perfectly formed skipping stone in my pocket
as I scan the desert horizon.
I am nameless and aware of the enemy.
I disappear behind my eyes and retract my soul.
If my name is written on brass,
it is by that name that the spirit will release me.

Moon Dust

As our plane banked over Kuwait City in the middle of the night I was surprised to see so many sleak and stylish skyrises. A touch of Las Vegas neon and Toronto crispness. Big money here. A lot of oil apparently. We deboarded the plane and loaded a bus headed for Camp Beuring. When my boot hit the ground a cloud of dust rose and was swept away by the wind. "Moon dust," somebody said. Sombody who knows all too well what a year in the desert can mean for a soldier.

For me, the desert is perhaps the most beautiful landscape. In its harsh and hostile countenance there are hidden treasures...the beauty in the discovery of which is double-fold for how well it is burried and how well it's alure is isolated against a stark backdrop once uncovered. A sunset here hypnotizes the observer into a melting state of mysteriously deep appreciation. And a slow and hypnotic sunset here absorbs and reminds a soul just how far away tomorrow can be, and how ripe the night is for his purposed undertaking.