Journal Entries
Sunniland
Posted Jan 17, 2004
17 January 2004
So often lately I have been trying to tell myself that I am on the cause of goodness, that things here have been changing that there is hope for people after all. I am not quite ready to give up on that yet, I will not allow my mood to cycle so rapidly. I know that what I am facing here is nothing more than the actions of a few assholes, but why are they such assholes.
An interesting night, for so long here things have been so calm. The occasional half-hearted mortar attacks, occasional RPG nothing big. Protest yesterday, dead interpreter and that was about it. My perspective is changing. There was a time in my life when someone that had been shot was a murder victim, his death to be investigated and the culprits brought to justice. Now, it is just another death. In a land where death is so commonplace a dead man is just that, only a dead man. One death seemed so light until just now, as I type it. Still it is only significant in its insignificance, in the fact that it I describe yesterday’s protest as basically peaceful because only one person died.
Tonight’s mortar attack was more than half-hearted. It started with 5 rounds around 8 PM. Four duds and the fifth exploded on a part of the compound where no one happened to be standing. No big deal, we joked about it. Couple of hours go by, I’m waiting to go out on patrol. More mortars started coming in. Still nothing more than an annoyance. Of the hundreds of rounds to have dropped on me there have only been a few that have done any damage to anyone. I idly thought about the difficulty of actually finding a mortarman who pops a couple of rounds and moves. You basically have to stumble onto him.
Then came the patrol. Routine, nothing that hasn’t been done time and time again. We took rounds, returned fire. Yet another firefight, routine even if it is unusual lately. None of what I have described to you is anything new for me. It has all been done so many times in so many ways. In the words of the Bhagavad-Gita; “I am become death the shatterer of worlds…” The past ten months of combat haven’t been heavy. I still find what I have done and what I have faced to pale in comparison to the great wars of the past. I can vaguely understand what people that have seen years of combat go through and I am amazed at every single one that makes it back into the world. I have seen so many broken human beings. Gunshots, shrapnel the worst are the would be bombers. Finding what used to be a human being in small, wet, red pieces is something that just cannot be described. I remember once seeing someone’s face lying on the sidewalk. No head, no skull just the face. It didn’t even look real.
You and I gentle reader find these things to be unnatural, disturbing. High explosives and automatic gunfire on your streets seems so out of place. Here it is simply a part of life. I am not talking from my point of view but from the locals. It would seem that mortars and gunfire are as natural as thunder and rain. This is what is finally starting to get to me. I just want to know. Why? What is wrong with people? I know these are unanswerable questions. Yet, I must ask them. If I don’t I think I just might lose my humanity. Although after viewing so much of humanity I am not sure I still want to be a part of it.
I no longer feel fear here, I never let it affect me and it slowly left my system as I grew more accustomed to death as a way of life. While I don’t fear during firefights any longer, I am saddened after them. More and more I think of how stupid we all are. Of how much greatness mankind has been able to build for himself. Of how I can live in a world with the paintings of Botticelli, the poetry of Keats, music to make the angels weep, and enough ICBMs to undo it all.
It isn’t just here, it is everywhere. Look around you and you will see it in your daily lives. You will see the greed, the selfishness, the uncaring, unfeeling, unthinking masses of humanity teeming all around you. The same greed that causes a perfectly able person to park in the handicap spot. The lust for the power that the grade school bully can exert over his classmates, the brain-dead zombies watching someone else’s vision of reality on their evening sitcoms and “reality tv.” Theses are the same elements that left unrestrained led us to the orgy of violence that is the daily fare for so much of the world.
It is a stain on Homo Sapiens. One that we have not scrubbed off since we have descended from the trees. No, it is no new tale and so many of us have a greater disdain for violence than ever before. In some places, violent death is shocking. Yet, technology puts such destructive power at our disposal that if we don’t cleanse the stain soon we might not make it. I wonder sometimes if we really deserve to make it after all….
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Latest reply: Jan 17, 2004
Orion's secrets
Posted Jan 14, 2004
14 January 2004
I blame the night vision goggles for tonight’s reflective mood. It is not their fault they were merely doing what they were designed to do, revealing the hidden. The terrain, pitch black and invisible to mere mortals exposing itself in eerie green hue to my godlike eye. Nothing new under the moon tonight, the same rocks trees buildings that have always been there, no unwelcome visitors crashing my party. Then it happened, I looked up.
In the desert so much of the night sky is revealed even to the naked eye it is enough to make a city boy cry. This has been the only place on earth that I have been able to actually see the Milky Way, its creamy serpentine beauty arcing across the sky. Meteors, awakening from their frozen slumber to shine for the tiniest fraction of their eons long existence in brilliant brazen glory. I have been overwhelmed by the beauty and harsh purity of the landscape more times than I care to count.
I feel myself growing more spiritual by the day. Emotionally I have, in war, preformed exactly opposite as conventional wisdom says I should. I came here pensive, negative and frustrated. I will leave here relaxed, optimistic and feeling more blessed than I ever have in my life.
This is the point where the night vision makes its entrance. They function simply by taking the available light in the visible and infrared spectrums and amplifying it something like 100,000 times. All of the wavelengths are then transformed into a green vision of the world. In a land where I have seen more stars than I could have imagined looking up can be dangerous.
I look to Orion. The hunter, with his well-defined stellar body was the first constellation I could ever recognize. I can find the big dipper as well and usually that is about it. The familiar stars that make up the outline of his body were shining as brightly in the sky as ever. The goggles gave me an insight to him; his body has substance veiled from our mortal eyes. Thousands of stars fill in the rough, familiar sketch. It is almost a cliché feeling to have in such a situation, but a great feeling of perspective settled upon me.
There is so much more than my tiny little existence. It of course wasn’t the first time I had taken note of that fact, but it was the first time that the thought was comforting and not lonely. The small problems of my personal life, the fact that so many people in this city wish to kill so many other people, and will probably try it in the near future, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear proliferation, politics, women, money all slipping into the great void of space. The void that hides so much. The void filled with stars, so many that somewhere life must be harbored. Somewhere life goes on, as it does here or not like it does here. Great civilizations or tiny microbe colonies, but life nonetheless. I felt a bond with these undiscovered cousins, and a hope that the greater purity will replace this base greed that we are afflicted with.
It was such a wonderful feeling thinking how the largest adversities that loom above us fade into the insignificant paltry things they really are. You wonder if people would stop and take just one minute to discover Orion’s secret if they would finally be able to understand the futility of all the unnecessary tension we create for ourselves. Why on earth would anyone want to cause mass destruction anyway? The world is beautiful and the universe will in its due time swallow it back up again, we should enjoy it while it is ours.
The goggles continued to perform their function of revealing the hidden, of granting clarity of sight in the dark, just not in the way the manufacturer ever intended. Orion had revealed his secret to me then he showed me my own. I wondered for a minute what would the world be like if a simple pair of goggles could reveal a human’s character to others as easily as Orion’s.
How often in life would we use them? Would we fear the truth? Would we find that there really is no evil in the world? That people are all the same, scared, lost and confused and feeling insignificant in the deepest recesses of their souls? Would we finally realize that our hatred of others is really no more than a misguided hatred of self? Perhaps one doesn’t need the goggles if you just know how to look. Until then Orion and I will never look at each other the same way again.
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Latest reply: Jan 14, 2004
seargantFlipper
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