I’m sitting in an office friends let me borrow when I’m in town. There is a computer I can use to check in on work affairs, a phone I can use to call my wife and even a cot in a spare room in case there are no vacancies available in local lodging. This all sounds very normal. Except, this office and I are both in Afghanistan, and tomorrow I go to America.
If anyone regularly reads my diaries (which is impossible being that (a) I do not regularly write diaries (b) when I do write diaries they do not elicit a response that would encourage the reader to read them regularly) you’ve noticed I have been conspicuously absent. I haven’t written or posted a comment for a few weeks.
I recently relocated to a more rural locale (there are very few non-rural locales in Afghanistan, and I had been fortunate to be located at on of them). In said locale, I had no internet access with my personal computer and dkos was blocked on my government computer. I spent a few weeks living in a tent and working in a place with people who I perceived saw me as an intruder, even though I wasn’t particularly there by choice.
All of this did allow me to catch up on reading. I completed "The Assault on Reason" Arthur Nersesian’s "The Fuck Up" and I am a chapter away from concluding Chuck Klosterman IV. I was saving these for the plane ride home, but now I will be forced to scribble some thoughts I’ve got swirling around. This will eventually evolve into either a diary that will be so long that it will be unbearable, or a book that no one will publish, read, purchase or care about.
Its not that I lacked a desire to read these books I’ve carrying around for the last six months. However, my ADD makes it difficult to read when there are other things to occupy my time. See, I am part of the Ritalin generation. Only I wasn’t diagnosed until about four months ago, which I suppose leaves me eating the dust of my peers. I’ve decided to blame everything which is less desirable that has happened to me on this circumstance. In actuality, these things have happened because I suffer from habitual laziness. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gone to summer school to complete my senior year, I wouldn’t have joined the Army at 18, and I wouldn’t be sitting in a plywood building writing about an upcoming two week visit to America.
However, I also wouldn’t have met a beautiful woman, gotten married, had a beautiful daughter and host of other great things that have happened to me. In the grand game of life, I suppose I’m breaking even.
So, tomorrow, on the day that, if not for stop loss, I would be getting out of the Army I will try to board a plane out of this place. I will embark on a trek across the globe that would be painful if in my military career I hadn’t flown across the pacific six times. I will arrive a few pounds lighter with darker complexion at the local airport. I will be greeted by my wife who has spent the last couple months training for a marathon (the last nine months I remember her, she was pregnant). I will meet my daughter who I haven’t seen since she was a week old. I’m going to take her to her first baseball game and explain to her the bastardization that is the designated hitter rule. I’ll eat my mother-in-laws homemade enchiladas.
But what is truly terrifying is the unknown. My daughter will not know me. Will she wail whenever I come near? Will a wife who as grown accustom to life without me be able to adjust to my presence? Will I be able to successfully operate a vehicle with the steering wheel on the left side?
I’d venture a guess that all of you share this same hopeful apprehension about the general state of our nation.
I will enter a country sometime in the next 36 hours that is so entrenched in despair that we must take respite in the knowledge that things can’t get any worse (can they?). I will spend 18 days in a place where I am terrified of the present, but with optimism for the future that is unlimited.
The reality is that none of us know for sure. None of us I’m sure thought it possible that our country would have elected a tyrant to consecutive terms. None of us thought our government would lie to us about a problem so great that it has killed over 4,000 Americans to date. None of us thought that a country founded on the principles of liberty would spy on its own people. Or maybe you did, and I am just more naïve than the rest of you. Either way, nothing I read that our government has done surprises me any more.
I have spent six months in Afghanistan, and I will spend another nine before all is done. I will serve five years on a four year enlistment. If there is one thing I’ve learned from all of this, it is that for all its faults, America is the greatest place on Earth. And all of its faults give me little choice, other than to work as hard as I can to fix them.