Brooding in Ramadi

Note: I wrote this on the 18th of April, but am just now posting it. Now that I have regular computer access I will try to post several times a week. I'm sorry if this blog is a bit moody, but it is lifted straight from my journal, where I try to be honest with myself...

Sometimes you wake up in the morning and wonder where you are. Sometimes, the morning wakes you up and wonders why you are here. Here in Iraq the early morning quiet, shattered in the early dawn by the whomp-whomp-whomping of a helicopter hugging the ground, falls around my bed, settles on my face like a fine layer of Ramadi dust–an early morning quiet that has given way to the revile of my roommates’ alarm clocks (all three of them) going off a total of 12 times in forty or so minutes–I am the one awakened and assaulted. When I first raised my right arm and swore in to the Navy as an Ensign on February 13, 2002 in downtown Atlanta I don’t think I could have imagined this scene. No worries, I am here now, and reality has a firm grip on my imagination. I sleep, dream, breathe and eat this place. Ramadi’s dirt is in my pores and in my lungs, and while its dust runs down my arms and legs like the muddy Mississippi in full flood as I stand in the shower, my mind cannot flush away what I live and see. I have no Gulf of Mexico in which to dump the torrents of thoughts that swirl around my synapsis. Sleep brings no relief, I dream of death–of the randomness of it all. An IED (improvised explosive device) here, a mortar round there. The beating rotors of helicopters breaks my reverie–two Blackhawks–must be another set of casualties on their way to Charlie Medical. They circle around and land into the wind, ready to leave again to pick up the remnants of democracy’s shattered dreams–of what weight then are my own? Death is only tangential for me, the war is fought on the margins of my life, a scribbled note here, a hurried line there. Brave Soldiers, Sailors and Marines go outside the wire to “bring the fight to the enemy” (and presumably peace to the innocent, whomever they may be). Sometimes the Brave die and their lost dreams bleed out and mingle with the Euphrates River which has seen civilizations come and go. Me? I am not Brave, nor am I Scared, as all the Brave are. I am Pity. Pity for myself, Pity for all those who must see this place, Pity for those who hate, those who want to break the world, interrupt the peace of a quiet Wednesday morning. Six months from now I hope to be Compassion, no longer Pity without a Purpose, Pity without the ability to Transform lives and offer Hope, Pity that does not yet understand how this place has ruined a thousand mornings, a thousand lives, a thousand years to come. I will have lived Ramadi–its story will have become my own and I will be the one to awaken the blood-red Dawn.