The Things They Sent

I wasn't aware of this before getting here, but there is a massive cottage industry devoted to sending care packages to deployed US service members. There are a variety of organizations that facilitate the connection between giving citizens and receiving deployers. We have been on the receiving end of this generosity and we have personally distributed hundreds of pounds of food, hygiene items, and entertainment to Soldiers across eastern Afghanistan.

This is a cool thing, because there is no easy way to buy any luxury items out here. There is a weekly bazaar and a few small shops run by the Afghans, but you can't get simple American things like a bag of M&Ms, or some deodorant or dental floss, or a pack of gum. You can get plenty of black market DVDs, fake Oakleys, and poorly made Chinese and Pakistani electronics.

Periodically I am touched by the messages that people send with the packages-- they seem motivated because their own children have served in the military, or they themselves served during an earlier conflict. Sometimes they seem to do it out of religious or patriotic obligation. Many people send American flags, prayer books, bibles--- they send baking soda, golf balls, refrigerator magnets, drywall screws, coupons, calendars from 2007, floppy disk drives, half-used pencils, used underwear, and someone sent a smashed sandwich in a Ziploc bag.

People describe their families, their cat, what they did last weekend in Cleveland, what kind of flowers they have in their garden. They tell us about their son who just got his driver's license or their daughter who just joined the Navy, and they send photos of themselves and their kids.

Sometimes children from someplace like Texas, maybe a Mrs. Bailey's class, send a box of Slim Jims and bubble gum. They write about their favorite football teams and video games. They write things like: "I hope you don't die" and "I am just an average kid" and ask "what do you think of the new president? or "do you have a kid or a wife?" "have you ever seen a real polar bear or a jaguar?'

One kid wrote to me that she hopes I don't do drugs: "It's good for you not to do drugs because drugs is bad, for it makes you have a small life." She must have heard something about the Army.

Another kid asked me to solve a math problem: "What is (6-7) x 8 + (5/15)=?" I can do that in my head kid, I think. Is it -7.67?

One child wrote the following: I"m just a kid. My Dad and Brother were in the war. But how are you doing in the war. I beat it is hard fore you and your familey. I want to be in the war when I grow up. I want to help my country. But my dad died in the war a while back I don't know about my brother I have never seen him before. My dad went to the war and I never seen him again."

The kids write simple letters that cut to the quick-- they know they are writing notes to to people who have favorite colors, have pets and kids and wives, people who like pizza and football and don't want to die and just want to come home.

In contrast, many of the adults emphasize their thankfulness for soldiers fighting for our freedom, fighting to protect our country, fighting to protect freedom of speech (?), fighting evil. I have never heard a soldier say that he is fighting for our freedom or fighting to protect the United States. They fight to help sort out the Afghans, fight to kill the bad guy who plants IEDs in the roads, or fight to protect each other. Everyone has a strong sense of accountability to his or her fellow service member, and that in itself can be inspiring because it seems to transcend all the higher meanings that people try to place upon the war.

A few months ago I re-read Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" and I marked this passage:

"We won't talk about losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain."
I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names had dignity... Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of the rivers, the numbers of the regiments and the dates."

I'm not sure if I will send packages to Soldiers and Airmen when I'm back, when I'm out of the military. Maybe I will. But if I do I won't write about lofty ideals that they are fighting for, or thank them for their sacrifice or bravery. I'll just tell them that I hope the contents of the package makes the war suck a little less, and wish them a safe return to their family and home and their Ford Mustang.

The quiet in between

Time definitely slows down at the end of a deployment. I have observed this personally and everyone I talk to says that this is a real phenomenon... people don't get excited until they are on the plane or helicopter, actually leaving. When you stay in one place long enough, it becomes your default reality. Everything else is either sentimental reminiscence, or an imagined future. Here it is easy to imagine a different future (i.e. being home) but is difficult to make it feel imminent. It is a really strange feeling and I think it must be related to how the days are so similar, the same people orbiting in the same square mile for days and weeks and months.

As my deployment winds down I am more aware of the slowness of each day, but behind the slowness is that subtle anxiety that I have written about before. The persistent sense that there is something lurking around the corner.

The spring loaded slowness is the worst part-- worse than fouled latrines, worse than the endlessly rotating menu at the chowhall, worse than sleeping on cots, the noise, being dirty, the omnipresent smell of diesel. When there is shit blowing up, the anxiety of expectancy is erased by the adrenalin of the moment. Everything shrinks down to what is going on right now, right at that moment.

I'm not combat arms, so I can't fully articulate or appreciate all of the nuances of anxiety, adrenalin, and combat, but I do know that waiting for the next mortar or rocket to hit is almost as bad as the nervous jump you get from the actual blast. The mind is relieved that the explosion was elsewhere but it also starts calculating the odds of the next one falling closer. Maybe you nervously look at the plywood walls and remember seeing what a 107mm rocket did to a Hesco barrier full of a thousand pounds of dirt and rocks.

In August I was visiting a COP that had been getting attacked with indirect fire fairly frequently. I had settled into my sleeping bag and turned off my headlamp when I realized that I didn't know where the nearest bunker was, so I put my boots on and found it, just meters away, and then I went to bed.

The quiet in between. That's the feeling that keeps people up at night, not the fear of being rocketed in the night, but the agitating background anxiety that is like sand in your sheets.