The Taste of War

Yes, three posts in three days. A new record! Back when I was a consistent blogger I would usually leave several days to a week between posts so that it had time to hang out there for people to read and comment on. Well, I guess I'm not blogging as much with that end in mind. I just for some reason now feel that I want to speak. Kind of a boring blog in that way. No pictures, just my ramblings. I’ll rectify that in future posts, but I think that in this one, I’ll just put down my thoughts.

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I think that I haven't blogged in such a long time because haven't know what to say if I were to say something. Also, much of what was on my mind I didn't want to say. To say he least, it has been a strange time in my life for the past several years, and a time with many transitions, the latest of which has taken me once again to war.

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The comment was made "I can't imagine life being normal in any way out there." In some ways it is, in most ways it's not. This post is about the taste of war.

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Of course "the taste of war" is relative to the person experiencing it. To some it is sweet and is a time of adventure and gain. To some it is bitter and it is a time that they see as a waste and can't see anything to gain in their situation. For me it is both.

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Before I digress though, let me go back to the ways it is normal out here and the ways it isn't. I sat and thought for a minute to try to think of normal, and admittedly I'm stumped actually. I was thinking that even though it is so different there are some tastes of "familiarity" that add a dash of normalcy to life. On my base we have a Pizza Hut, a Popeye's Chicken, two Dairy Queens, to Green Bean's Coffee Shops, and a few other things you can find at home. That's pretty normal, right? Well, I discovered that the thing that makes life so weird is when the normal things are different.

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When I lived in Brazil, there was a lot of "new" things that were different. For one, everything was written in Portuguese. There was a few different cultural things, to include clothing styles and such, but the weirdest thing that screamed, "You are in a strange land" came from familiar places. An example is when went to a Pizza Hut there (hmm, Pizza Hut, the common thread of chaos). After so much beans and rice I was looking forward to having a classic meal that was a "taste of home". "Yes, I would like a sausage pizza please. Yeah, you know, like a sausage pizza? What's on a sausage pizza? Tomato sauce, cheese, and sausage. Well, and some green peppers if you are feeling fancy." The waiter just eyes you like you are a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle ordering marshmallows and anchovies or something. His suggestion is to try the daily special, which is tomato sauce and corn pizza. Not bad. Just not "normal".

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Anyway, although for the most part the pizzas out here seem normal (I must say that I think one time they used goat cheese instead of cow cheese on my pizza. Either that or they danced on it in their bare feet to make it), the process to get one sure is not. When you order it can be quite the challenge to understand what they are saying since they are all from India there. My favorite though is watching a delivery. They have two main methods: mopeds or four-wheelers. The four-wheelers are tiny ones that look like a small step up from the kids little plastic four-wheeler toys (pow-pow-powerwheels!), and the mopeds look like they will tip right over with the insulated box that sits on the back to hold the pizzas. The engine is so small it makes a sound like a Jetson car or a cartoon hover scooter as it goes by.

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I guess that another way to say "normal" is "familiar", or "the way you are used to it being". It's hard to find any of that when you move from life with your family in an apartment and a regular job with weekends off and go to a life living in a wooden shed with half a dozen other people of your same gender and you can't even remember what the words "weekend" and "holiday" are supposed to mean.

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As far as Les Mis goes, I actually saw it while I was on leave. Mid-Tour Leave: A small injection of humanity in the middle of the strangeness of war. Nothing out here comes close to that. Although I appreciate his support for the troops, I admit that if he came out here for a USO concert like he did while I was in Iraq, I would only go to heckle him.

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The biggest thing that war does to eliminate the familiar is that it changes people. Some for the better, some for the worse, but it definitely strips away all facades from people and reveals true character so that even the most familiar people that you have known for a long time become completely different.

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In war you learn what you are truly capable of, for good and for bad. You are pushed past all of your own limits and you are forced to set limits you didn't have to set before. You have to defend yourself from people who wish they could kill you. Sometimes you even have to defend yourself from your friends. Sometimes you have to even put up your defenses against yourself.

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Some of the new limits I've had to set mostly involve my work. It could easily be a 24 hour a day operation if you wanted it to be. Imagine if you were one of a handful of doctors in an entire city, the only hospital was actually the emergency room, and that is where you and your fellow doctors worked. Would you ever be able to sleep?

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If ever you did want to get some sleep, the time would come when you would have to tuck yourself away in a corner, ignore the phone that was ringing off the hook, and learn to live with the fact that you are ignoring someone that is probably in a bad situation at the other end of the line and needs your help. If you truly worked as hard as you could, eventually you would have to arrive at that boundary where you realize, "I am at my breaking point. I have given all I can, and that has to be enough." That is often how I feel.

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I ponder a lot about why I am out here. It hardly seems like coincidence that I am. In fact, when I pray about it, I think I was supposed to come out here. But why? Hard to say. I still don't even fully know myself.

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I did have an interesting experience though. I have had a very hard time sleeping since my last deployment, and I often lay awake thinking for a while before I finally fall asleep. Sometimes I have small conversations with God in my pondering, and during this time is when I usually have my best or most profound realizations or ideas.

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Anyway, one night I was having a particularly hard time being here. I was homesick and wanted to be with my family, who also seemed to no be doing the best. On top of that, my best friends out here had all left, and I was missing hanging out with them. What' more is I was also sick with a bad cough.

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In all of that, I asked, "God, what am I doing here? What am I supposed to do that has brought me here?" Surprisingly a very firm response popped instantly into my head: "Stay the Course." I thought for a split second, "what? That's not an answer!" The weirdest thing is that somehow it made sense. I guess we don't always know all the reasons we are put into places and just have to have faith. I find, however, that as long as we see the blessings that come from the Lord, it makes it worth it. All that the Lord asks of us is to "Stay the Course." I can't fully put into words what that meant to me when that thought came to me, but I think another close way to say it would be "Endure to the End”.

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There certainly is a lot involved in those things. You have know where you are going. You have to know what the goal is supposed to be like so you know when you reach it. You need to know what the path is supposed to be like so you don't stray from it and get lost. You need to make waypoints and miniature goals to stay on track. And then finally, you have to move. You have to keep going. You have to be steady. You have to Stay that course, endure the forces that want to misdirect you and rip you from the path, and you have to keep enduring, all the way to the end. In our hard times and times of wondering why we are on a certain path, it is often only when we finally get a little further up ahead on the trail and have a better vantage point of the area that we just came out of that we can say, "Oh, I see now. So THAT'S why I was guided that way".

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Anyway, so that is a little bit about my taste of war. Thanks for bearing with me, and I miss and love you all, too!