Saga Part V

28 MAR 1045

Today is better than the last few days. The dust is down, the sun is out
and the world seems brighter. I am amazed at how affective the weather
is. Overall morale and expectations are better than they have
been. Perhaps we trust that clear skies means the Air Force can do some
damage (we heard planes all night, for the first time since the sand came
in). People seem less tense.

On the other hand, sun means heat. The tent is a greenhouse, large
enough that we aren't stifling, but still not the most pleasant of places
to sit. Outside the weather is nice, perhaps 70F, with a light
breeze. The north is grey on the horizon, that darkness will move to the
south as the sun heads west. The nights are still chill. I wore sweat
pants to sleep last night, and was cold around 0230. That people were
moving about, taking care of sending some people forward did not help (I
am a much lighter sleeper than I was at home, even than I was at Basic,
not quite as light as I have been when living in the field). I eventually
noticed that my bag had come unzipped and was flopped over the edge of my
cot. But it was too late and real sleep did not return.

The mess has changed, for whatever reason we are not getting bacon at
breakfast any more. We can get hot dogs most mornings, and sometimes we
get some sort of wurst. The wurst is pretty good, the hot dogs not worth
the effort to eat. We have, however, been getting orange juice. There
are two types, sweetened and unsweetened. I only found that out by
accident. All our juices come in boxes, so they look, pretty much,
alike. I sat, saw I had a box of orange juice, sweetened and got more;
some to take away). The next day I grabbed some of the other color
(for orange drink there are three styles of box, all with the same
content) and it was unsweetened.

Pleasure being relative, I enjoyed it a fair bit, even though I would
never buy it in the states (the rose-flavored ice-cream bar, however...)

I am not certain how the mess tent works (but it does seem better than
depicted in M*A*S*H) because some of the food is stuff we would never see
stateside. Chicken breasts (small, local purchase I suppose) curried,
with the bones in, served over rice. I think the cooks are Bangladeshi as
well as the help, with the Army staff just supervising cleanliness and
suchlike. No way to tell, without quizzing someone, and the ones who will
talk to me about it don't speak enough English to give me details.

If the weather holds I may get to see some stars, though the light
pollution is still high, We have moved to a more central part of the
layout, there are more floodlights, and the dust is still here, just reduced.

Mail we have not seen. We can send packages home, all we need is someone
willing to pay the balance of the postage. So long as we have at least
$.01 US Postage on the box it will be taken away. Letters (and film) we
can send for free, which we have been. On the average mail-run no less
than a dozen letters go out, and two seems to be the average number of
mail-runs per day, not bad for about 100 people.

I dread the day we move forward. I have come to look forward to the
chance to talk to the world. Not that what letters I write don't let me
do that, but this seems immediate. Feedback is possible, and when you all
get this it is still fresh. A letter is fresh when I write it, but by the
time it gets stateside it is at least two-weeks old, and the response will
be at least that in return. Almost a lifetime.

Because time is plastic. One of my officers was talking at breakfast, and
I heard her expanding the days between events. I don't think she did it
on purpose, but where there had only been a couple of days from an event,
she attributed things (already finished) to having begun a couple of days
after it (which is to say, today). Mission Time (the sense that
things have always been as they are now) has stretched, to swallow the
immediate past, and make it distant. What is done is so far in the past
as to not be worth measuring.

Some of that is traditional. Empty bunks belong to people one doesn't
talk about much. As for the dead, they just go away, one does not
reflect on it (not until one gets home).

Well, I have to write a letter for someone, he went forward and did not
have time to send anything home, I said I would. Strange feeling.

I have refrained from writing a last letter. I don't know if that is
magical thinking (If I don't write one, then nothing can happen to me) or
if I am not clear enough on what to say, or (which is what I tell myself)
the people I might write to know what I have to say, and anything more
would be melodramatic and pointless.

And who would I be writing it for? My hope is that only I would read such
a thing. My expectation is that only I would read such a thing (and given
that I am more useful alive than dead, moreso than any guy at the front,
the drill is for us to stay {usually} well out of harm's way) I have put
it off.

I don't know what I would do with one anyway, mail it to someone else to
deliver if I get killed? Leave it in my effects (trusting they will get
home, eventually)? Send it with a warning, "To be read only if I get
killed."? I don't think so.

Certainly I have thought about getting killed. There have been a few
times the Giant Voice has been scary enough to make me think about it, but
it is a vague worry, out of my hands. Like driving, or climbing a rock. Shit happens. Which (given the stats) is about all the risk I face.

But there are empty spaces in the tent. People who went forward, closer
to harm's sway. And I wonder.

In the meantime we do what we can to improve things here. There are
nightstands from MRE cases (I have my laptop perched on an upended ammo
crate). If we ever get to someplace we can call permanent I expect to
see people carving out a semblance of privacy, ponchos and poncho liners
hung between cots, comfort items (more than the ubiquitous cd and mp3
players) will surface from C-bags and footlockers (who knows, perhaps the
B-bags we sent forward so long ago at Ft. Lewis will arrive. That,
however, is dependant on the 223rd arriving in-theatre. Right now they
are still stateside, the elements who are present are not the Unit, so all
the stuff meant for the unit waits stateside, or portside. Mail included).

So that will have to wait until we are settled.

1600 hrs

Doing a detail, just now, I saw a silverfish. I suppose I should call it
a sandyfish. It was longer, and wider, than the silverfish I'm used to,
and had a more defined set of the spikes that come from the head and tail
(Since I am reading "Trilobite," by Richard Fortey, I may be more attuned
to such details than I was a week ago). It was also buff, with dark-grey
spots, in bands about halfway down the widest part of the body. Had it
been in the sand, not on the inside of a cargo container (sand colored as
well) I doubt I could have made it out.

I am certain that no small number of them live in the sand, and the local
birds would be more than willing to snap them up.

I am not sure if the birds, which are starting to show up in greater
numbers, are here because this is the spring, or because we are here. It
cannot be argued that we make a more hospitable place for them. There are
small creeks of run-off, rubbish bins and the detritus that people, in any
great number, leave about. I have seen pigeons; dark, with long wings and
long, broad, tails, (I think) courting with long flights, punctuated
by bursts of acrobatic wizardry. I have seen sparrows; quick moving,
flitting from place to place on the concertina wire, alert and
talkative. And the kites, making their long sweeps across the sky.

All of them, for some reason, seem larger than the birds at home, as was
the silverfish. I wonder why.