September is gone and that's a good thing. It was a bad month around here for everyone. Ramadan left a foul taste in my mouth. Sometimes I worry that my experience in this Islamic country will permanently bias my view of Muslim people. Killing in the name of Allah seems so barbaric and primitive, but then if you look around here you can't tell what century it is anyway.
It's easy to just give up cognitively and emotionally, and take a position that we should just leave them to cut each other's head's off the way they have always done. I go back and forth between this perspective and something more fitting of an educated child of the West. Even so, I have a new understanding of where the old stereotype of the crusty Vietnam vet who hates Asians comes from. It's illogical, but hatred finds good purchase in the frightened mind.
Being here has made me more forgiving of my own country. For all of our faults and our war-mongering ways, there are cultures out here that are darker and much more brutal. Yes, we are greedy, wasteful, and slightly imperialistic. We are arrogant too. But some of these people (Mullah Omar, Jalaluddin Haqqani for example) are way scarier than Sarah Palin or even Dick Cheney. The way females are treated, the whole beheading thing, the rate at which blood is spilled in these countries, the extreme and absolute interpretation of religion. Evil is relative.
I'll kiss the ground of the good old USA when I get back (metaphorically—airports are unclean) and I'm sure this experience will have changed my civic and political perspective. A conglomeration of anger, pride, and renewed patriotism. I know that this service will have made me a better citizen.
That said, I'm getting out of the military in about 270 days. I'll throw a party.
