Painful Insomnia

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Tonight, I laid my head down to sleep and brought myself back to a time I hadn't forgotten. I just hadn't thought of it in a long while. I closed my eyes to darkness and found that there was a bright, searing light that caught my attention. As I opened my eyes all I could see was sand, I could feel the intense heat, the sun that saturated me to the core of my being.

They said we were in Kuwait, but I had access and knew better. No matter where we were exactly, I'd always thought that the sand would be clean and pretty. I never knew before then that the sand actually contains quite a bit of debris. Remains of lizards, sometimes dogs and other things I couldn't and didn't want to identify. The sand stretched so far that at a certain point it looked more like an ocean, the dunes like waves. It seemed as if there was no way that home could ever exist within the same time as this, as there was nothing but sand and us.

I remember using the bathroom and looking up into the open sky. The barracks we were staying in had been bombed a few months before we arrived and the roof had been blown away. Large bullet holes that pierced the concrete walls, chunks of wall missing, all remnants of a previous battle gone to hell. One in which we didn't come out so victorious from what I heard.

The barricades seemed at first to be protection from the enemy outside. The constantine wire that snagged and tore my hands through my gloves, the blood that dropped onto the sand so that a part of me was embedded within the country. I helped to put up almost a quarter mile of it myself that day. Eventually, the barricades seemed as if they grew taller, thicker, more jagged. They no longer kept them out, they locked me in and I couldn't escape them.

115 degrees in the shade some days made the idea of a "cold drink" an almost figurative term. Yet I remain in full battle rattle - kevlar, pistol belt, mask, DCU's, boots, M16 that only left my side long enough to pick up my favorite 50 and 60 caliber weapons. I lay in the sun, dug in, so still that real life looked like a picture. All the sounds of the alarms and sirens fall away as each breath is counted and timed. The butt of my weapon feeling like concrete in my left shoulder so I can get this just right. I blink, see my target and witness time stand still as my breath ceases, the squeeze so gentle I shouldn't have noticed except for the jolt in my shoulder. Target down.

Freeze when the flares light the sky, not a sound, don't move a muscle... it's an adult game of hide and go seek. You have to hear the music to survive, there's a rhythm to battle that only the trained ear can understand. A symphony of machines, grenades, bombs, rifles and any other instruments that are being played. Tracer rounds add sight to sound, the sound vibrates and shakes through the body straight to the soul. Yet I can't hear a thing but the symphony playing.

Calmer nights, the sunsets are the most beautiful I'd ever seen on this world. Calmer nights, loneliness sets in and reminds me of everyone I left at home, the way my bed felt, who all occupied it with me, the laughter of my kids, their faces, a daughter who didn't know who I was. I deployed when she was 6 months old, and by that time, she was over a year and I know she couldn't remember.

He stood there at the gate with some package, speaking Arabic. I stood watch at the main gate with my trusty friend. Using my barely passable Arabic, I told him to "Halt!" He took another step toward me almost into the gate, probably to test me. In one smooth, swift motion I locked, loaded and aimed. His eyes met mine through my sights and there began our first moments of clarity.

All the political bullshit, legal jargon, flexing and show of force crap between our governments, the true meaning of the game became clear to both of us in that very instant. I didn't care who he was, nor did he care who I was. There was no government figure that I saw, no right or wrong reason to fight. I, simply, HAD TO make it back home alive. I had a daughter who didn't know who I was.