Germany vs Nepal

We had a fairly light day today, Fridays have a tendency to be late starters around camp. One of the major contributing factors to this tendency is due to the heavy drinking that goes on every thursday night, the night of the big camp bar-b-que and everyone is generally sleeping it off most of the next morning. I was thinking about the stuff I wrote yesterday as I was laying in bed waiting to fall asleep, I actually stayed up until about 0130 watching The Terminal with Tom Hanks. I was thinking about that stuff about how I don’t like holidays and how my parents act badly and all that.. Well it probably is mostly true, but more than it is true it feels true to say things like that sometimes. Like its not so important the exact factual objectivity of the statement, although it is mostly accurate, but moreso the subject feeling of stating those facts is what I think I was trying to convey. Anyway, I felt gutless and thin badmouthing people I care about on thanksgiving.

Whatever the reason be it a certain combination of actions during some part of the day, or maybe something to do with the food that I ate, or some other vast shapeless force that guides my future with invisible hands I ended up laying in bed late with my gears spinning full power. I thought about all sorts of shit; life, death, crappy stuff I’ve done but never forgiven myself for, stuff I have always wanted to do but never got around to.. one thing I thought about was how I do all these little insignificant actions totally slow and methodically during the day in an effort to enjoy what would be unpleasant or fleeting moments of my life over here. I am not totally miserable and distressed all day every day but regardless of that fact this is by no means what I would consider to be a worthwhile way to spend my time on planet earth. In a feeble attempt to make my prison cell seem like paradise I have started doing these little things, these little careful rituals out of everyday acts where I let my life slow down and focus into just exactly what I’m doing at that exact moment. Kind of like a meditation or a zen thing except not spiritual in any way. Like putting my black leather gloves on slowly after pulling out each finger (you know how they all get stuck in the palm part of the glove when you pull it off) then squeezing my hands and for a few seconds savoring the smell of leather and the soft creak of the gloves on my fists.. or how every time I get into the suburban I slowly open the feed tray to the PKM (a 7.62 russian machine gun) and then carefully reload the linked ammo to make sure the weapon is ready to fire, squeezing the feed tray cover back down until the catch spring clicks instead of slapping it down, then meticulously laying the stacks of ammo into an ‘S’ fold in the ammo box so that it feeds out perfectly (even though it bounces into a pile of fuck after 2 minutes of driving on the bumpy dirt roads).. or when I’m taping up the pins on my grenades and smokes and stuff (I throw a fair amount of these and always have to restock my working supply) I take great care in making sure the tape goes on smoothly and tightly and I leave just the right amount dog-ear’d off at the end so I can easily employ it during the stress of the moment the next time it comes. I have become more and more interested in photographing things from super up-close. I think this all may be part of some bigger picture, some master plan that my subconscious has hatched, but as of yet has not let on to my waking mind.

I also didn’t mention that a rocket landed in the green zone yesterday. It slammed down under 100 meters away from our team with a whistle followed by a loud boom. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I knew that that one was close. Not the closest that I or the other guys on the team have experienced, but close enough for my instincts to let a few hairs straighten out and a little chill run up my back. Black smoke poured up over a concrete wall, the rocket hit in the gurkha (nepalese security forces) living quarters. In the moment that we all flinched and ducked down 4 people were instantly killed and another 12 were injured. I didn’t have my camera with me, this is a fatal mistake that I find myself repeating over and over despite incidents like this where Im left with only my spotty memory to recall what it was like. The black smoke from the blast rose up in a thick billow and flames were seen to jump up over the top of the 12 foot high concrete barriers. It looked like trees and vehicles and a building were all damaged in the blast and I looked directly at the sun, just a round white lilypad in a black pond, for several minutes as the sky grew darker and darker from the rising plume. I remembered when I could see sunspots on the sun with my bare eyes during a dust storm in Afghanistan but I couldn’t see any yesterday. We departed shortly after the blast for fear that the roads may be closed down as a result and made it back to camp without incident.

It looks as though we may actually get a little down time in December. A Dubai trip is racing up in the next few days and with the new members of the team arriving it may provide the oportunity for some of us to escape the sand box for possibly as long as a week. I don’t want to jinx it all up so I’m not gonna talk about any more than to say that if it does come through it would be more than good for the well being of the guys (myself included).

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