So we were stuck. Stuck in a shit place with shit people. Stuck risking our lives for money and bullshit. I don’t know how to get into all the little details about our last few days in the shit country of Iraq but I will paint the picture in broad strokes. We had done just about everything we could think of to find some release, find some escape, find some way of letting our brains relax and forget for a little while. Many times we would venture out into the wastes taking pictures of derelict aircraft or dilapidated buildings, smashing things and starting fires, skidding around in other peoples vehicles, everything we could think of. None of it worked. None of this shit helped out in the least. We had already agreed to not get drunk or even consume any alcohol while on the job, take the thing professional like, and a hangover in this place can make you lose your fucking mind, so we went the whole time straight (well.. pretty much). So we grabbed a few handfulls of valium to help with the flight and snatched up our shit and took off back to the states. I know what Lorcan meant when he said he was nervous about going home. It wasn’t so much nervousness though, it was just weird. You kinda close out the rest of the world when you stay in a combat zone for a long time. You slowly cut everything else off and your world simply consists of is the job. But lets not focus on the negative just yet. Here are a few photos from our precious last hours in the sandbox.

I could sit here and describe all these details to you but I can’t really do it. I remember things in flashes. You know there will be things that I remember from this night but will probably never talk about. There are probably things Noah knows about this night that he will never say. One thing I do know is that at one point I found Noah unconscious at the bottom of a stairwell with a black eye, beat to fuck, and robbed. I remember running … up the stairwell … oh fuck it.. some things are better left to your imagination.

So I don’t know how we managed to do it but we got back to our hotel and passed out in my room. I don’t know how we woke up in time but we did. I don’t remember how we got to the airport but we got there. I don’t remember boarding the plane, or picking my seat, or taking my shoes off. I don’t remember shit but somehow we fucking made it. I cranked off a few pix of the occasions, only one will be shown here.

The clouds over some part of planet earth flying out of the middle east.

Back home at last. Felt .. weird .. but only at first. Then it felt unbelievably and completely fucking BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD! I woke up early the first day back extremely early but it wasn’t because of the hangover or the jetlag and I couldn’t figure out what was happening. I drove down to Strands beach and after hopping a few fences I sat on the iceplant and watched the sunrise. I felt increasingly weird, displaced, fucked up. Thank fucking god Noah called me right at that moment… He was in Florida getting his new tattoo and he too was totally out of his head. Thank fucking god he felt weird and out of place too. So, I shrugged it off. Went for a drive around town to see the sights but even though I kinda pushed my weird feelings deep inside they were just incubating like after an alien facehugger had impregnated me with a fucking monster.

Urinal at Strands State Beach Park, Dana Point California

Strands beach just before sunrise

So I pressed on, pretending to be normal, pretending to fit in while everyone around me was loading groceries into their cars and mowing their lawns and washed their cars and tried on new clothes at the mall. My buddy Henry called me up and told me to cruise up to L.A. and get wasted with him. Sounded like just what I needed. We got totally wasted, played guitar all night, met up with Nick (another OG Ghettoee from back in the day). We ended up walking through Hollywood wasted off our asses in the middle of the night until we finally after like 100 miles of hiking made it to a Thai food place and chowed down like some motherfuckers.

Next day Henro and I chowed Egg McMuffins and walked over to the LaBrea tar pits. Lemme tell you something about tar pits, they stink. We found these concrete statues of giant sloths or something like that. I climbed up on it like Luke fucking SKywalker on the tonton. We were laughing so fucking hard I couldn’t climb on for like 10 tries.

Then after we finally took the picture and looked at it we started laughing even harder. Ok… First of all look at my fucking legs, why the hell are they all curled up like that? Next, look how straight my back is, like “equestrian”.

So we cruised around Hollywood, down to to Beverly Center Mall. Pretty much filled to the brim with beautiful people showing off to each other. But what the fuck did I care, at least I wasn’t getting shot at. The one kinda cool thing that happened is that when we were at the tar pits one of the tour guides showed us the coolest toy ever. It was called 20Q and it basically can guess anything on planet earth in 20 questions. It fucking got “breast milk” on our first try! So when we were at the Beverly Center I went into a toy store and grabbed one of those 20Q things. We played about 15 times at the mall bar over Long Island ice teas and came to the conclusion that the 20Q game is fucking posessed by the devil.

It got everything we could think of to include…

Ceramic Tile

Lobster

Poop

Urethra (I mean can you believe that!??!?!)

So that night we hit up a club on Melrose and basically proved exactly how ghetto we really are.

[The Adicts - Johnny Was A Soldier]

So on the way back from L.A. I felt unbelievably shitty. Like worse than I’ve ever felt before. I had no idea what was happening. It was like I was overwhelmed by some strange new emotion that I’ve never felt before. Or maybe like a combination of emotions so powerful that I could’t figure out what was in the mix. This is the part of the story where I have to talk in generalities. So basically Noah and I simultaneously self destructed. This self destruction caused us to both act like assholes to people we care about. Nobody else understood what the fuck was happening, nobody had a clue. We didn’t have a clue but at least we knew that we both were feeling it exactly the same. So I drove down to San Diego that day and basically with the help of a lot of alcohol we managed to purge most of the shit out of our systems. We kept having these like panic attacks where it felt like the whole universe was imploding into your chest. I felt like a ghost, I felt like totally alienated and in a dream world of shit. It was BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD. Everything seemed totally surreal and bizarre and fucked up even though I knew it was really me that was totally destroyed. Like drowning, like you cant breathe, like waking up and you are buried alive. It was so fucking bad. We were completely fucked up. We were completely and totally fucked up beyond all recognition. I’m totally truthful when I say that we both seriously thought about snuffing it once and for all. Ok, no bullshit, if anyone comes back from war and feels like ass and nobody understands then email me immediately. My old platoon buddies Joel and Kiwi had to watch me come apart as I ate my breakfast burrito, fellas thanks for being there for me. Everybody, Cella, Noah, Mike, all the people I met in the clouds.. that shit was fucking uncanny. Enough said about that.

So returning from San Diego I decided to booze it up back in my home town bar of Patsy’s (Irish Pub) one night with my buddy Brian. We went there to play with the little 20Q game and have a few. Well a few turned into me drinking 2 pitchers before my sister and Brad even got there. I showed them the toy and it fucking guessed some of the most amazing shit I could think of

ceiling fan

quark (like the subatomic particle)

peacock

god, I can’t even remember what the hell else. The next thing I know I was pounding Guinness beer like a freak and teaching a girl how to do the ‘Steven Segal’ dance. By the way, we got a standing ovation at the end of our dancing and some girl bought her a shot (of course I didn’t get a shot too.. cheap bitch). Bar close down time and I find myself behind Patsy’s in the alley in a piss gutter make-out session with my ghetto dance pupil. A bunch of drama later it’s the next morning and we had to climb down a mountain and take a cab back to the bar to get my truck in order for me to make my appointment at the VA clinic in San Diego by 10:30. I take Courtney Love along for the ride because she had to clean her head out of some crap and we ended up hanging out all day. Along the way I snapped a picture of this bum who had this newspaper article in his hands. He also had a trenchcoat on with a radio station advertised on the back of it in black marker. I zoomed in on the article so everyone could appriciate the coolness of it. We even chilled out at San Onofre nuclear power plant and watched the sunset next to these giant dr. frankenstien looking shit.

In retrospect (that was a subtle reference to the mirror gas truck picture – cool huh) It’s been a crazy two weeks of being home. The thought of ever going back to Iraq makes my guts turn but in all honesty only time will tell what happens. I know one thing for fucking sure though. Without Noah there is no way I would have made it through Iraq or coming back home again. I’m sure it’s mutual but I just wanted to say thanks to my boy. The new Social D album helped out a lot too.. I cant tell you how many times a day I’ve listened to Winners and Losers, it’s actually embarrasing.