24 hours back

Backbrief.
Go to the Canadian Museum of Civillization, I think around the 3rd floor, the walking tour through Canadian history. Stand in one of the outdoor areas, maybe the French Canadian village, or by the creepy tent filled with pioneers giving birth. Listen to the looped, pre-recorded ambience of birds and wildlife. You can also hear it at the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum in Niagara Falls, the disappearing man exhibit. Or check your nearest local outdoorsy museum. Not the Biodome in Montreal though, because that's probably real birds. Or parakeets, or parots. I can't tell a sparrow from Tucan Sam, frankly, but you get the idea. It's definently not the penguins though.

Sentry Shift.
This morning I sat and listened to the forest wake up, the birds and the bugs, the sun creeping up to the horizon, climbing the ridgelines and forests. I breathed in the moist morning air while cleaning my weapon, generously oiling it to keep the rust back, a never ending battle in anything but an August drought. Around me 38 of my friends slept, some out in the open, tucked into old sleeping bags wrapped in top of the line bivy bags, clenched up tight against mosquitoes, just bug bitten lips and noses sticking out into the night. Others slept under low lean-tos and hooches strung between trees, shared for warm or curled tight around their bodies, just enough to keep rain out of their boots and mouths. My friend Jake sat next to me, shaving with a canteen cup and a pocket stove.

Patrolling.
The rest of the day, and all the day before, we lay in the rain, pressed low to the ground, looking over rifles, machine guns, recoiless rifles, grenade launchers, legs crossed over each other's in a tight circle, lying in hiding from an imaginary enemy, fighting nothing but hypothermia, boredom, and sloppy drills. Cold can be dealt with, and wet is tolerable, but when you're cold and wet it takes a little bit more to keep your head in the game, to do your job, to write your orders, to effectively lead troops. So you learn when and where you can turn off your brain and just push on with your body.

Regrets.
By now I've slept with every girl I've ever had a crush on a thousand times over in my mind. I've written my combat estimates remembering the little quirks of those that I really did sleep with. I get distracted from my mission analysis day-dreaming of kissing the eyelids of sleeping beauties from the past, a long history of beautiful women and poor decision making on my part. I try to wargame my courses of action while trying to account for all the false starts and misteps that led me to this point, lying in the mud, trying to keep my map sheets dry, trying to my commander's intent and my operational tasking into a succinct mission statement, single and undersexed despite literally dozens of amazing opportunities all carelessly wasted.

Planning.
At the end of the week, Saturday to be exact, we're back in. I've watched animals pick apart rucksacks. I've watched squirrels pry apart pull taps and crows open zippers. I've seen an entire platoon's food stolen from their packs and tossed in a half eaten mess over an entire patrol base. I've been bitten at least 46 times by mosquitoes. I've snuck back through the woods to avoid an errant bear and her cubs. I've eaten a sausage and hashbrowns raton pack every meal for days on end. And then we're back and everything is in the past and everything is amazing. I just want to see humanity, to talk to people, to anyone, to buy things, food and random movies, standard items of society. And I don't want to sleep, ever, because 24 hours later, I'm boarding a truck right back, with a new load of food, water, and ammo, and the mud scrubbed off my frag vest. And I'm planning ahead, with old pictures and journal entries and anything I can find, stocking up the nostalgia and regret to keep me going for another week in the woods, lying in the rain, reminding myself all the time why backwards is never an option, but why backwards must always inform forwards.

Between Courses

She walks into the room and two thoughts come into my head at once; I want to fall in love with her, and I’m embarrassed by my ridiculous haircut. Sitting on a couch watching DVDs of old cult Saturday morning kids shows, trying to make a good impression looking like a cop sticking out like a sore thumb in the midst of skinny, shaggy haired, bearded scenster types. She isn’t classically beautiful, she isn’t even specifically pretty. But she is cute and something about her strikes me and it doesn’t hurt that I am fresh from digging trenches and patrolling through swamps and giddy from the return to world, if only for a brief week of leave. I’m suddenly self conscious, but try to hold onto my confidence; that I can strap live grenades to my body and crawl through the dirt but my heart skips beats if I stand too close, close enough that I can smell a woman, is the result of coming on two years of insanity that isolate us so thoroughly from the people for whom we sacrifice a normal life. But things are ok, after all, charm comes easily to a man with nothing to lose and a plane ticket in his pocket.

And we all go out to the bars, we all dance, and I stare at her when she’s not looking, at the lines of her neck, her back, all the parts of a woman you begin to appreciate sitting in a shell scrape with your best friend at 3 am, shivering through the freezing rain trying to stay awake telling the same old stories of conquest and loss that have kept each other awake and depressed for months and months of training. And it isn’t about sex. It’s about trying to catch a glimpse, trying to seize and hold a tiny moment of normality for as long as you can. It’s about living in a bunk bed for two years of your life and spending every second with your coworkers until you can draw all the scars on their bodies, and all the scars on their souls. I don’t want to sleep with her, I want to hold her, to hug her, to love her, to wake up next to her late in the morning, to have no idea where I am, as long as it isn’t the barracks. But it’s not going to happen. The travelling soldier routine doesn’t work much with the kind of girls you want to be with anyways, or maybe I just don’t have any game anymore. But when my friends decide to leave and she decides to stay, I tell her goodbye and lean in and whisper to her that since I’ll never see her again I can tell her that I think she’s the most beautiful girl there tonight.

And it’s ok, because I shouldn’t have, but it was liberating to say it, to voice the truth at least, to not have to carry any thoughts with me that will remain unsaid forever. But it doesn’t make me feel any better. I’ve been gone long enough now that nostalgia and homesickness, if not even for a place but maybe a lifestyle, have eroded the sense of purpose that made me sign on the dotted line in the first place. At least there is pizza, and two slices and 15 minutes on foot later I am sitting in my friend’s kitchen with my best friend and another acquaintance. So I drink water and check my e-mail while they have another drink and talk. And he tells her a story, about her, about the girl who walked into the apartment and stole my attention for the rest of the night. He tells her how they hung out the other day, how through a combination of booze and drugs they ended up in bed together, how he accidentally slept with her and regrets it because he didn’t feel like it. And maybe that was there I began to remember why I gave up so much. How a young man of 20 can regret sleeping with a beautiful woman, I don’t understand it. I’d sell my soul for a fixed address, let alone a warm body to wake up next to every now and then; but he has everything I want and to him it’s nothing but baggage.

And for a brief second, yes, I feel like beating some sense into him. To these boys who never grow up into men and play video games of my job all day, while taking for granted all the fantastic things in their lives, and the fantastic people, and the women, while I’m stuck doing the job for real in the middle of nowhere, living in a sleeping bag with a rifle and my full fighting order at arms reach, but precious little else. But I know for sure that nothing lasts forever, and one day I will get out of the field and the barracks and have a chance to grasp at the same straws. And unlike this guy, or my friends, or my father, or any one of a million assholes in the world who will never realize the value of what they have, I’ll never take anything I have for granted.