Don't panic. As the DShK Mortars and the RPG's whistle over and around you. Don't panic. As the bullets start whizzing, deadly and invisible above your head. Don't panic. As your squad runs out of ammo thirty minutes into what would turn out to be a three hour firefight. Don't panic. When your AG gets hit with a DShK round in the bicep and torso and people around you take shrapnel. The only time you're allowed to shit your pants is in a mounted firefight because you have dysentery from the food you had to eat while on sphere of influence missions. People back home often ask, "What was your most intense combat experience?", "Do you support Bush's "war of terror"?", "What are you fighting for?" My answers in order are, "All of them", "Dont care", "My Enlisted Termination of Service (/ETS) Date".
General Petraeus himself recently ordered all gear to be taken off during sphere of influence missions; he wants us to show them we aren't afraid so they shouldn't be. Personally I don't have a problem with the hearts and minds mission objective, but putting my heart and mind at risk to 7.62 rounds puts me on edge. Fuck that, I once took a bullet to my chest with my gear on. I didn't panic, but it's never happening in a million years with it off. People here say we wouldn't have to wear the shit if the hostiles weren't retarded cave people. Thing is, Afghanistan isn't even a shitty country, the locals are some of the most moral and loyal people I've ever met. If you "prove yourself" to them they will literally die for you, the local elder walks with us on presence patrols with the children because he's confident we can protect them. That's like mad respect in Afghan terms.
8 more motherfucking days, drunk for the fifth night in a row. 8 more motherfucking days till I don my gear and shoulder my rifle, humping out on patrol for the umpteenth time, the same damn dubstep mix pumping the same damn beats from my iPod. The shit never gets old. I meant dubstep, not the patrols. I know what you've heard about how no two patrols are ever the same. Truth is there are only two types of patrol. Good patrols and bad patrols. You relate a bad patrol to someone who's been there though, and their eyes would glaze over for just a second as they relived their private nightmares, and they'd say simply "Shit happens bro".
We all have our personal hells, our stained and decrepit emotional basements. Places in our heart that we can't let go of, right up there with treasured memories of our first kiss and best fucks. Shit that keeps us up at night. After extended time spent on the front, you begin to develop a reverence for these things. They stick to you, and you hold them close. Heck, before long if you aren't careful, they grow to define your very soul. They say that through the act of telling, you can set the memories to rest, that you can chase the ghosts away. I don't believe it. Some shit never leaves you, some shit just earns the right to stay.
The night before we went out Kyle my AG took part in a chess tournament held by our CO to keep the men entertained and boost morale. The flyer for the miniature event went something like "Put your battlefield strategies to the test and win a GREAT REWARD." Kyle never knew what the reward was when he signed up for it, just that it would be great. He was determined to win it from the get go, and he was beaming during the prize presentation. It didn't matter that it was just some poorly gift wrapped standard issue MRE rations made to look like a hamper together with a print-out certificate signed by the CO. Kyle was ecstatic and I'll never forget that look of pure joy on his face that night. That's how I choose to remember him. That is how he lives on.
Every. Fucking. Moment. Could. Be. Your. Last. When I think about Afghanistan, I'm reminded of death. There is no space for pretention. Do not kid yourself. Death is certain, and death is coming. The giant, abrupt full stop when you had instead been expecting a comma. If you live expecting the full stop, you make every single word count. Death is beautiful because it forces us all to be fully and lucidly honest with ourselves. Most people do not have this privilege. Many of us go through life as if it were a long, run on, never-ending sentence, punctuated excessively with commas, very much like this one, with complete and utter disregard for the eventual certainty of the full stop.
In Afghanistan, death gave us all a brand spanking new take on perspective. When I think of perspective, I'm reminded of Drill Sergeant Matthews. Drill Sergeant Matthews carved into our heads the creed that we were going to be Fighting the Good Fight. I remember too his impeccably charming introduction on our first day of boot camp. Standing in single file in front of our bunk mirrors, we were told to look at ourselves down the wrong end of our binoculars. Those tiny, minuscule excuses for recruits, we were told, was us until the day that we earned our stripes. Till then, we were sorry little shit stains on the pride of the US Army.
Years later in Afghanistan, while clearing an area of the corpses of children killed by a homemade explosive intended for us, I realised the irony. In our tiny little heads, from our narrow limited personal perspectives, whether, Afghan or American, Insurgent or Marine, we all think we are fighting the good fight. The sad and ironic truth is, the majority of conflicts that exist between any of us can be summarised in the same way Drill Sergeant Matthews cut us all down to size; by looking down the wrong end of our binoculars.
When Kyle, my AG was taken apart by the mortar round that killed him while starring at life down the wrong end of his binoculars, he wasn't smiling. But in my head, he always will be. We all choose to look at life in different ways. I guess it helps us to move on.
The day Kyle died we were setting up a support position for our main unit. We hadn't been expecting hostile contact but being fingered for support we came loaded for bear. We were carrying three times our usual ammo, but when we got ambushed we were hit so hard that we were dry within thirty minutes. For the next two and half hours we hunkered down where we were and prayed. None of us panicked.
Just before he got blown apart, in his last moments, I remember Kyle telling me what a downright waste of a fine day it was. He'd looked up at the bright blue sky, the fluffy white marshmallow clouds. And then the mortar had hit. And Kyle was no more. And then it rained on the march back.
None of us see death coming, and life is never as predictable as a sentence on the page of a book. To this day, I try not to ask myself why it was Kyle instead of me that had to go. But I guess all I'm trying to say is, it doesn't matter where you are, or which side of the fence you're on. Heck it doesn't even matter what your conception of "The Good Fight" is. In the presence of death you suddenly realise how precious life is. I guess that it's only in the gravity of death that we can give weight to life. 8 more motherfucking days and life is precious and I wonder if General Petraeus and the people on top know this. Life is precious, and it's about time we all flipped our binoculars around and truly realised it.
