Bring out the Lollipops

Funny how I get my news these days.  I was skydiving all day Saturday and Sunday (eleven jumps, all with people new to the sport), so my first inkling of the biggest news of the last few days came in the form of a text from one of my daughters: "Good morning! Happy bin Laden is dead day! Every patriotic Toby Keith song has played on my radio."  And that was how I got the news.

Later in the day, my own spouse made it clear that she thinks any rejoicing in OBL's demise is misguided.  And I've heard the same from others.  Many on Facebook have now begun posting the words of MLK: "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

While I appreciate the sentiment, I believe the mistake these people make is conflating rejoicing with hatred.  While that may have been the case on the bridge in Fallujah--and for some it may be the case here--it doesn't have to be.  The argument can be made that the Munchkins, as a species, are incapable of hatred; yet they rejoice when nothing of their nemesis but the ruby slippers is left unflattened by Dorothy's house.

I grieve at the death of one innocent.  Even more so when that death is the result of intent.  But I believe I could put a bullet between the eyes of any of OBL's ilk in perfect cold calm, without the need of hatred to drive me or to spare me regret later.  I don't pray to be released from that capability; rather, I thank God for it, and that it exists in others who protect us.

Evil exists.  To rejoice in the death of innocents is its own form of evil.  To rejoice in the death of such a one as OBL is to be rightly thankful for deliverance from a threat, a cloud, a menace, a catalyst to other dark and darker souls.

So ding dong, I say, without apology.  At least one wicked witch is dead.  Bring out the lollipops.

Outback Steakhouse, 2003-2009

A very small few of you were privy to my postings long before I new what a blog was. When I was in Afghanistan in 2002-03, I used to send out e-mails to a list of friends, who then forwarded them to their own lists. The post below is January, 2003. I dredge it up tonight because, honestly, I haven't been out to eat, all by myself, other than the dollar menu at Burger King, since late last summer. But tonight, I'm at an Outback Steakhouse near my apartment. I'm going to blame it on the effects of a Vesper, made to JB's exacting standards, and some light at the end of the tunnel. At any rate, the text below, an email sent out long ago, should make amply clear why Outback will have my business for a long time to come.

From: Doc, LTC
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2003 8:01 AM
Subject: Day 79, Outback

My friends,

Some of you, no doubt, already frequent Outback Steakhouses. Some of you, maybe not. For those that do, or those that will, I've a favor to ask. Next time you eat there, ask to speak to the manager, not just the hostess or your waiter, but the manager. When she or he comes, tell them you want to thank them on behalf of a friend of yours.

Last night, I had the best meal I've had since leaving home some 80 days ago. The best I expect to have until I get back. A steak, at least an inch and a half thick, cooked perfectly, a baked potato with real butter and sour cream, dark, soft bread with real butter, barbequed, unbattered shrimp, (not those frozen deep fried things that I've almost learned to like), a good-sized chunk of a Bloomin' Onion, with sauce, and a slice of cheesecake that, alone, had more calories in it than I've been consuming in a day here.

The line for chow stretched out to and down Disney Drive last night. There are only two fryers in the Dining Facility. The poor girl who was carrying out the Onions said at one point, "You know, I'm the most popular woman here tonight, and I didn't even have to sleep with anyone." True enough. Glad she had a sense of humor about it. We sent an armed escort from our table to meet her as she came out of the kitchen. (Of course, we're all armed, so it's a wonder gunplay didn't break out over the onions.) :-)

We've been grateful for every morale visit here, but more people went out of their way to tell the whole Outback crew THANK YOU than did for any other visitors so far--even the cheerleaders. They don't publicize this. They just do it. They know the word of mouth will get out.

I would love it if you would thank them too. Give them your business because the food is great, but be sure, the next time you go, to tell them thanks for sending people and food halfway around the world to give the troops a taste of home. It was the best treat yet.

Doc

"Doc", LtCol, USAF
CJTF-180, TALO
Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan

Update: It tastes just as good six years later and without any poorly aimed rockets sailing overhead. Outback still rocks.

Taken on the way back from the range, a week before Outback arrived, 2003:

Waiting for that Bloomin' Onion, tonight, 2009:

Afghanistan: The Big Picture

The Boston Globe's Big Picture consistently provides some of the best photography I've seen on the web. This set is from Afghanistan. And though the view of the mountain range below is way too familiar, it's a vastly different land there now from when I was in country. Among the photos is one of a suicide bombing at the main gate to Bagram. None of that while I was there. One anticlimactic rocket attack--the best kind: a miss. Enjoy.

Theirs:

Mine:

Grand Slam Giveaway Revisited

Interesting story on CBS last night about Denny's Grand Slam Giveaway and other similar instances of corporate kindness. Bottom line: it pays to be nice.

But I already knew that. In January 2003, Outback came to Afghanistan. It was the best meal I had during an entire deployment, and the gratitude I felt for it was hard to describe, especially considering that the folks who prepared it had no choice but to live our lives for a few days. For them, I expect it was an adventure. For us, a taste of home and, however corny you may think it, a reminder of why we were there. I still prefer Outback when I want a salad, steak, potato, and black bread. And not needing an armed escort to get the Bloomin' Onion to the table doesn't take a thing away from how great it tastes.

By the way, pay attention to the end of the video to learn when Denny's is going to do it again. Take a friend.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Korengal Valley, Afghanistan

The difference between Afghanistan when I was there in 2002-03 and now? Then, we owned it, and were trying to figure out how to give it back to a more friendly government than the one we'd taken it from. Now, fight's on. We're trying to figure out how best to help the government we gave it to keep it.

For a sobering photo essay about the war we're now fighting in that country, pay this site a visit.

In Colorado Springs, people walk or run up the Manitou Incline for exercise.
In Afghanistan, it's how the troops get to work.
Hat tip: Lex

Mineclearing in Afghanistan

The image in my mind as I began yesterday's post is one of those I failed to capture for myself during my "visit" to Afghanistan in 2002-03. There is no living human presence in that mental picture. Rather, a straight trail stretches off into the distance, across a relatively flat landscape. The trail is lined with rocks. The rocks are painted like the fishing bobbers we used when I was a child--half red, half white. They lay on their sides. White into the trail. Red facing away. You stay on the white side. In some places, they line the roads themselves. The following is from my Thanksgiving letter, 2002, and describes a trip from Bagram to Kabul:

At the one intersection we come to, we turn southeast, taking the less populated route to Kabul. For miles as we leave the area of the base, the roads are lined with rocks every twenty feet or so. Red and white each rock is painted. White side to the road, red to the fields . . . the minefields.

Only a week before I came here, one of the drivers of one of the fuel trucks waiting outside the gate had resisted the call of nature for as long as he could. The inspection of each truck is thorough, and the line that day was long. He stepped off the road, the road we've just come along, and walked a few paces in order to relieve himself. In that field he left the contents of his bladder, a good bit of his blood, and the shards of bone and flesh that had once been one of his feet. One of his fellow truck drivers walked into that same field and carried him out. "He was my friend. He was crying out for help. What else could I do?"

That was five years ago. In looking for an image of such a trail somewhere on the net, the closest thing I could find initially was this one from from: Military Photos.Net, 6 Nov 07:

A member of Halo trust team . . . in Kohi Safi, Afghanistan on Nov. 1, 2007. Afghanistan remains one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. A mine clearance team from the Halo Trust have been working for more than a year in the small village of Kohe Safi and have removed 800 mines and 118 unexploded bombs. Throughout the country the Halo Trust alone is working to clear 90 million square meters of mine fields containing some 640,000 mines, they estimate it will take them 18 years to complete this task. A break through in mine detection not seen since World War II is due to speed things up in the coming year when Halo become the first civllian organisation to use H-STAMIDS (The Handheld Stand-Off Mine Detection System) a new combination tool with a metal detector and ground penetrating radar system. The H-STAMIDS remain classified and during recent trails in Afghanistan the device had to be returned to the US military at the end of each day. The new equipment should make mine clearance 2-3 times faster.

From that caption, I visited the site of the Halo Trust itself. Where I found this photo:
The key point, is that reaping the mines sown over 20 years of war is likely to take even longer than two decades.

I suppose the same may be true of those other mines as well.

Psychic Minefields

One feature of the Afghan landscape that is never going to leave me has to do with red and white painted rocks. I described it in one of my missives from there, half a decade ago:

I had been told before coming here that this was the most heavily mined corner of the earth. But if the engineers slides are to be trusted, that's not so. At a mere 40 mines per square mile, this land ranks behind Iraq, Egypt, Croatia, Cambodia (reported by some sources to have more amputees per capita than any other country in the world), and finally Bosnia. For Bosnia, the tally is nearly 150 mines deployed per square mile. We once feared nuclear winter as a horrible possibility. But a worse decimation of the land has already set in, in some places. Imagine standing on the edge of our national forests and looking in, but knowing that to venture there was to take your life in your hands. Imagine the Appalachian Trail not marked with discreet cairns, but with red and white painted stones every ten feet or so. Irregular stone bobbers to mark out the territory belonging to another sort of fishers of men. 150 mines per square mile. One quarter as dense as the placement of poles in De Maria's Lightning Field, if they were evenly distributed. They're not. Stroll across such a field to buy your lottery ticket and your odds of losing on the way far exceed your odds of winning if you get there at all.

In haunting images though, we frequently find the metaphors that make other, even harder to understand phenomena finally clear to us. In minefields and those who mark them and those who work to clear them, I've finally come to understand the action of personal insecurities and some of the methodologies by which we deal with them.

For a long time, I've been very close to someone with a rather baffling trait that I've been painfully aware of, but unable to understand. The things that have been most important to me, I've always tried to share--windows to my soul for the person I would most want to understand it. Sometimes there as been interest there; sometimes not. Take this blog for instance. If I were in a relationship with someone, a serious relationship, I would want to understand the things that matter most to them. I can't imagine being in a relationship with an artist, but never having been to a showing or seen her studio. A dancer, and having never seen her dance. An actress, but seldom attending her plays or viewing her movies. I seriously cannot imagine that. I think of myself as a writer. Yes, I have many other interests, but few where so much from so deep is on such open display. I don't think that person I'm speaking of could find her way to this blog without help. I doubt she's read half a dozen posts here in the last year. And those, early ones that I printed and asked her to. Eventually, I quit even that. A good friend and published author has said that he wouldn't want his significant other to read his fiction. I understand that. But this seems different. So, this lack of interest, or even studied avoidance, has been confusing to me.

Equally confusing has been a dynamic by which that person has subtly discouraged my interest in the things most important to her. It has felt as if by sharing something with me it is somehow tarnished. Only recently, through a series of epiphanies, have I finally come to believe I understand this phenomenon. What it boils down to, I think, is that my understanding and appreciating these things would allow the person I really am to impinge upon her mental construct of me. Wouldn't want that--reality endangering misconception.

The central epiphany was the realization that this person believed things about me that rather boggled my mind. Things that acquaintances found laughable and my best friends found ludicrous. Yet, a curiosity about myself that I'll touch more on below prompted me to go so far as to seek the opinion of a professional on at least one issue. Even at the cost of losing a client they concluded the issues I'd been accused of having simply weren't part of my constitution. And key here is that if they were, I wanted to know. I wanted those mines marked, removed, dismantled, disposed of.

That awareness of what someone else is seeing when they look at you can be both devastating and empowering. Devastating if your self-esteem is built predominantly on the esteem of others. In a functioning psyche, these two sources of our self-image are like a binary star system, always in play. Too much reliance on solely our own opinion of our actions can lead to maladjustment that's even criminal. But too much reliance on the opinions of others can leave us defenseless against the worst kinds of insecurities. And that truth is the other half of the reluctance to share those most important things. If my appreciating them would endanger misconceptions held dear, then equally dangerous is the chance I might not appreciate them, in which case my tastes would become not a judgment about whatever thing it was, or more accurately still, just my tastes, but about her for placing any value in the thing being considered.

Thus, insecurity, I'm concluding, is the most pernicious demon of all. A fire and forget weapon. A psychic landmine with a shelf life of forever. And a good therapist, I've come to realize, is really just a mental minesweeper. His or her job: find and mark, and eventually remove and disarm those bad-ass bouncing Betties someone sowed in a person's childhood. I think that's why I've always rather enjoyed the brief bouts of therapy that have followed one misadventure or another in my life. You learn the layouts of your own minefields. Initially, just knowing what fields or trails to avoid is enough. Then you learn how to navigate through even dangerous topics and situations. Eventually, if you're brave enough and persistent enough, you learn how to remove some of those mines entirely, to render them inert. The more you do this, the safer life becomes for you and for everyone around you. You become, if you're lucky, the kind of person who can even help others navigate, mark, and de-mine their own fields.

There is much here that I am going to miss. That's sad. Yet, there is much that I am not going to miss. That's sadder still. Perhaps first on that list is the telltale click that too frequently followed my best intended acts and signaled that lifting my foot would mean losing an emotional leg. The forests of Bosnia and fields of Cambodia are comparative playgrounds to the fields in which such a relationship is played out. It becomes a life constricted by those red and white rocks. Eventually, it becomes paralyzing.

No So Bright After All

Because Buzzard asked for it, here's what may have been the funniest post I sent from Bagram, almost five years ago:

Sent: Monday, January 06, 2003 8:06 AM
Subject: Day 71, Not so bright after all

It's official. I'm starting my TDY mustache today. A little late, true, but this is more by necessity than choice.

"You guys need anything else?"

"No, sir. You're good to go." A slight pause and a chuckle. "Do you need a flashlight?"

As I walked to the shower in the darkness tonight to take out my contacts, I was amazed by how much light that tiny little sliver of a moon was putting out. I could see my shadow. I could see the shadow of the sign in the middle of the path, the one with the big square plywood base and five-foot, four-by-four post with the "No Traffic!" sign nailed to the top of it. Go outside tonight and see for yourself, but give your eyes time to adjust. Mine had had plenty of time to adjust walking back from dinner. My night vision was great, on the way to the shower hut.

"I don't think you'll need any stitches, sir. The thing about cuts in that area is that they bleed like all get out."

"Tell me about it."

"We'll just clean it up and give you some bacitracin for it. Be careful shaving though, that's right on the edge there. Let me just wipe this blood off your face."

As soon as he starts wiping with the alcohol swab, I half chuckle, "That's not blood, that's a cut."

"How about this here on the tip of your nose."

"Ow. Yeah. Cut!" Chuckles all about.

Coming out of the brightly lit shower hut, my night vision was nonexistent. I couldn't see diddly. I stopped for just a second to get my bearings. Scanned my microlight quickly over the road immediately in front of me, then started forward. I remembered the sign, off to the right of my path. Couldn't be right in front of me because I could see the chem-lights tied to the gate ahead. You get used to navigating in the dark around here. You know where everything is, and if you can see light in the distance, you silhouette things as well. I was sure I was clear of the sign, because I could see those chem-lights, a hundred yards away. . . Five-foot sign; five-foot, six-inch eyeballs. One hundred eighty pounds or so of six-foot, one-inch pure stupidity planted firmly dead center on the front edge of the wide base, which, as luck would have it, was sitting a little off kilter on a rock, tilted the other way of course, so that the five-foot, four-by-four post now becomes a lever, like stepping on a garden rake, bearing the sign that says "No traffic!" at a rather high rate of speed, straight toward five-foot nose and upper lip just slightly below five-foot, six-inch eyeballs.

That'll stop you in your tracks, let me tell you. I stood there for a few seconds, not quite sure whether I was going to keep standing or pass out. Glasses akilter. Wondering how many teeth I'd just lost. Even I had to chuckle when I thought about what that must have looked like, had anyone been watching through night-vision goggles. Then I began to feel the warm trickle down over my lips. I regained my balance, leaned forward so that the dripping blood would miss my DCUs and found my way back to the shower hut. Inside I dripped a path over to the sink where I could see my lip already swelling. The gash below my nose looked wide and deep. "Beauty," I thought. I leaned dripping over the sink, wet a towel and staunched the flow, and decided to head to the hospital to see how many stitches I'd need. When I walked in, still holding pressure on the gash below my nose, I said, "Is this where you come to apply for the dumbass award? I think I'm pretty much a shoe-in."

No stitches, it turns out. I'd laugh at myself, but it hurts to smile.

And that is why I look so damned serious in any photos taken of me that second week of January, 2003.