Light Scribed | Jeffrey Dale

"I should have known the tides were getting higher, we can still survive (I never said good bye)"

 

We are ghosts. When will this ever fucking end? We died together as the people our families loved, the kids people went to school with, the lovers held, the laughs had. That all changed when we left that world. It ended and we died because it can never be the same again. We ignorantly tried to pause our lives, and to live in a new existence until we were allowed to return.

 

I get asked all the time “what was it like over there,” and I have always answered just like it is here. We slept, we ate, talked, made friends, found lovers, inhaled air and got sick. In that regard it was exactly the same. We stopped sleeping. We ate because we had to, but it had no taste. We showered but were never clean. Our clothes decayed with time and with them our long held upbringing and beliefs - replaced with a new upbringing. A new understanding. A new world. Its okay to use violence. Its okay for people to beat each other to near death to labor for you. OSHA does not exist. Religious sacrilege is okay, you have no practice, no one else may either. The guy you trust to clean your toilet, to fix your heater, to deliver your water and food; he will kill you. The guy in your uniform, who grew up in the town next to you - he will repeatedly try to kill you. The guy who grew up in a country on the other side of the world currently isn’t. He is more concerned with getting a second stamp to collect money. Once he gets paid though he will tell the enemy the layout of your home so he can bomb it.

 

A fist fight can break out over a rare bag of Tostitos. There is enough salsa in the PX trailer on the camp to meet the caloric intake of a high school for a week. Day after day the people you can bear witness to the torture of small animals, the methodic and planned killing of rodents to the point it becomes competition. Those people are your best friends, guys you would ‘take a bullet for’ in a place where bullets are aimed at people on a daily basis. The guy who wakes you up at 4am has earned a serious consideration in your mind to get one of those bullets. The fuck is his problem anyways.

 

We are one team, in one fight - with each other. The assholes who use the aerial gunnery range every day that drown out your movie on your laptop should crash. You pull your lawn chair in front of the tent you all live in and cheer with everyone else as the same guys deliver ordinance onto some poor soul who happened to challenge your side’s authority. You flip the bird to the pilots for waking you up on the one day in three weeks you get to sleep in. You gather around to watch CCTV footage of an air force patrol being ambushed point blank with hand grenades in the office, all the while screaming at them for not taking cover when the guy three feet in front of them throws the grenade. Why did the turret gunner drop from the turret? You watch with the same glee as you would as your team ends the final offensive drive of the opponent to win the super bowl as an SF guy in pt shoes (tennis shoes) unloads his magazine into the some asshole point blank. You swear to each other you too will sport pt shoes during the next battle just because.You wake up every day hoping to wake up to gunfire, hoping that day will be the day you get to wear pt shoes and kill someone point blank in style. Hopefully a camera is watching. When EOD sets off a controlled detonation without warning as you ride in a soft skin vehicle within 100 meters of it you are pissed the fuck off, and exhilarated. You each look at each other and laugh. That night as you try to sleep you are thankful another day of fighting didn’t reach you, and you hope a rocket will not crash through the ceiling and kill you. That’s just bad luck - nothing you can do to avoid that one.

 

It is a world of wire, land mines, improvised explosive devices, machine guns. It smelled like shit. It is never quiet (except once). The air is filled with smoke, dust, anthrax and poison gas. Always. Everyone coughs and gets strange headaches. It is okay to shoot and kill people, change a magazine in the heat of battle but if your magazine release is bumped and the magazine falls you have to find a clearing barrel to ensure it is unloaded. Unless you are turning your rifle into the arms room you can leave it loaded and no one will know. Snipers will watch who is saluted to select targets. You wear camouflage uniforms to hide you from the enemy. Ensure you wear a reflective belt to make sure you are not hit by a car, and salute officers. Only drink bottle water. Check the water bottle prior to drinking to ensure it has not been tampered with and poisoned.

 

Be nice to the terps. Don’t shoot them for shitting in the showers. The enemy is wearing our uniforms, so you must dispose of them in special bins which are locked and will be burned. The terps need more uniforms because they are losing theirs. Celebrities visit and put on free shows. You can’t get to the base they are on. They will never go beyond 1000 feet of the runway they landed on. You avoid the area within 1000 feet of the runway (on another base) because it is too crowded.

 

The enemy kidnaps troops in their sleep from their bunks and escape off camp with them and behead them. Make sure your rifle is close and a knife is positioned where you can grab it to kill them while they kill you at your bunk. To leave the camp you must have a full combat load of ammunition, special identification, several officers must know you individually are leaving. An eight foot chain link fence separates your camp from their world. Its okay to run along the fence line unarmed and without armor. Large dogs have no trouble changing sides of the fence when you go running. The ‘patrol’ of the fence line is more notional than actual.

 

Sexual contact is forbidden. Physical contact is forbidden. Enemy contact is forbidden. Drinking is forbidden. Two thirds of the population of the camp are getting laid. There are roughly seven men to every woman. Only 1/5 of the camp is probably gay. Every week new rules are posted to ensure men and women don’t have sex. Every week anger mounts that such regulations don’t apply to the lesbians. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell hasn’t been lifted yet - but it isn’t exactly a mystery. “Faithful” reserves only certain aspects of it’s definition. Monogamy does not exist, except for the married couples. There are only a few of them, and most of them are in the process of divorce or sleeping around as well. There are no secrets. It is socially acceptable to discuss your sexual relations with a person to other people in regards to the same partner with them in the room. Jody back in the states is a dead man for hooking up with your girl.

 

Your training ensures you can control your breath and muscles to deliver small arms fire effectively into a target, adjusting your point of aim for the distance to the target. Mice still freak your companions onto chairs and tables. You laugh at the new guys who still stand properly, who still carry their rifles correctly - ready for action. They are the dead arriving to purgatory. Their uniforms are still new. For months you hassled your officers to get you the new pattern of uniform because Congress said you could have it. It was like Christmas when they gave you issue dates to receive the uniforms, and worse than hearing your parents died when they cancelled it.

 

Eventually you become part of that landscape. Your transformation is complete. The formal military qualities instilled in you disappear, replaced with a local culture. The people you came to liberate, you studied and wanted to understand their culture you now consider shooting for sport - because that is their sport with you. You even make it fair and stand in the open for their snipers. You could care less about them. Life is not important anymore. Not yours. Not theirs. Your brothers are a different matter. You can define easily the difference between a friend, the enemy and your brothers. You can’t remember your age or the names of anyone you went to high school with. The uniforms you so badly wanted are starting to be worn but you wouldn’t be caught dead in one because your time in hell is almost up and that uniform means staying longer. Equipment your replacements might need is thrown out with everything else to make ready for them. Fuck them, the people before you left you with a bunch of shit you never used and tossed useful stuff. You wont need it.

 

The new guys are weird. They talk funny, they think the Taliban will crawl from the shower drain and kill them. You have pictures with the Taliban. They are concerned with the locations of IDF bunkers and you are not sure how many months it’s been since you wore body armor during a rocket attack. They kill you or they don’t. You destroy everything you don’t sell to the new guys or pack to take with you. The third country nationals on the camp will rummage through your garbage like it is Christmas morning. They don’t deserve an xbox.

 

Then you return. It is quiet. If you never see the fucks you just spent every waking moment with for the last year and a half it will be too soon. No one remembers there is a war in Afghanistan. Did you see what Snookie did last week!? You go to sleep in the luxuries of your old room at home. Your family tells you how happy they are you are home. You are not sure what you feel. The public is not so nice. Oh wait, you were in the Army, did you kill anyone? That is so cool. I love Call of Duty. You’re so lucky you got to ride around on ATVs and shoot all those cool guns. Some prick cuts you off and makes out like he is going to fight you. The only dead guy he ever saw was a relative in a casket.

 

You were fighting for oil companies, political agenda, killing babies. Kids are weird (there were like three in the whole country of Afghanistan). They are loud and obnoxious. Why can’t that lady control her fucking rug rats in this restaurant! You meet back up after a month with your unit. You have never been so happy in your life to see someone. You talk about stories from Afghanistan. Nothing important happened in the last month. Half your buddies are getting divorced. The other half are reuniting with long ago divorced wives. That wont last a few more months.

 

You go back to school. Your professors call them Afghanis. You explain that is the name of their currency, they are Afghans. Your professor looks at you like you must be retarded. Training movies are made by schools to teach staff how to deal with ‘you’. When you arrived back in the US and you went through medical processing you could tell the doctor you wanted to kill yourself and lay out in detail how you planned to do it. They give you a clear bill of health. Now you tell the medical people checking up on you a month later you drank a beer and they want to commit you to an alcohol treatment facility. The politicians who sent you there in the first place argue you are a danger to society and you should not be allowed rights you had before they sent you. You are lectured at length over the problems of readjusting back to civilian life, about medical symptoms that can turn into life long illness to seek treatment for. It takes over a year to make an appointment to see a doctor. Funding for Veterans Programs are cut to keep Welfare Programs going. More than anything you just want to be back in the 'Stan.

 

Your relationships collapse. You cannot explain things that happened overseas to someone who wasn’t there. Your conscience is shaped by a world that says you can sleep around, you can kill, you can take what you are willing to fight for. You can fight for something. You are no longer the child your parents raised. The things you have done in your life cannot be undone. You are unleashed upon a world you realized in the clutches of death you had not yet lived. All the drinks you did not drink, the women you didn’t sleep with, the places you did not go, the things you did not do.

 

And yet, that world is gone. Your chance to live there ended when you died and were taken to a new life. The person you could have been is no more, just as the people buried in the local cemetery. That person had aspirations and dreams. Now you don’t sleep because the only dreams you have are terrors, sickly welcomed on occasion because they put you back there, in a dusty hell.