November 19, 2007

  • It wont go away, no matter how many times you say goodbye.

    A man must die in order to become a hero.  The rest of us are simply survivors, ordinary people thrown into a extraordinary situation.  Some of us walk out of it, some of us don't.

    Its been three years since I flew my first combat mission to Fallujah, Iraq in 2004.  I think about it all the time, the first time I literally remember pissing my pants that isn't from an alcohol-related incident.  I keep putting it behind me but it just keeps coming back.  Its almost 10:00 am, and I've been awake for the last six hours playing all the battles and combat missions through the back of my head.  I woke up in cold sweat, another nightmare.  Funny thing about it, right before that nightmare I had this wierd dream about strippers and kicking the crap out of a Leprechaun before taking a pot of gold.

    I got up and played Call of Duty 4 (which by the way is an INSANE game) to possibly make me feel better, but the game features a Marine fighting in a fictional Middle Eastern city, which obviously the game developers tried to recreate the infamous Battle of Fallujah in 2004..... at least thats how my memories interpreted it.  The street fighting, air cover overhead, broken down buildings, the general chaos, and streets and alleyways littered with dead bodies, some of them belonging to a friend of yours.  Wait, am I talking about the game or Fallujah for real?  I don't know.  Its all the same to me.  I just know that I at least had a grenade launcher underneath my M4 instead of using that outdated M-16A2.  And my M9 seemed to do more damage in the game than it actually does in real life-- and don't ask how I know this.

    Enough of the game, I took out my pistol and started cleaning it, and put some music on while brushing down the chamber of the SigPro.  I felt my room around me transform into the bowels of a helicopter, where numerous times we sit on standby before a mission and I took that time to clean out my service pistol.  I see some blood stains on the bulkhead, possible something one of the flightline guys missed earlier when washing out the blood from the casualties we brought back just hours earlier.  I hear a knocking, and my fantasy world quickly became reality when it was actually just my dad banging on my door before letting himself in.  I hear my name being screamed at me before I snapped back into reality-- within mere seconds, I had somehow re-assembled my broken down pistol and was aiming it at my dad.  Oops.  He wasn't too pleased with that.

    I don't get zoned out often at all, but slow nights like these, partnered up with the time of the year will remind me of things forgotten.  Just months earlier I almost blew a man's head off while driving on the interstate after he tried to cut me off three times.  My life flashed, I blacked out for a second, and when I woke up I had my gun pointed towards the driver on the road.  A while back I was driving home from school and suddenly zoned out, before I realized it I was standing on the gravesite of my best friend killed in Iraq (forgot to bring liquor, sorry bro!).  It doesn't happen as often, but the nightmares will come back every so once in a while.  And most of the time, the dreams of a pot of gold and strippers doesn't come with the nightmares of being back on the ground in the fighting (I have a theory that its my subconscious telling me that gold and stippers is what I really fight for, aside from that 'freedom' crap that everyone talks about).

    Just over the weekend, we went out drinking after the Marine Corps ball while still in our uniforms.  Almost everyone was supportive of us, people lining up offering to buy drinks, shots, giving us poker chips (we were in Atlantic City, NJ), women giving us phone numbers-- we were "heroes".  At least thats what they kept telling me after I took all their drinks and giving a solid handshake.  One part of me is glad that the American General Public still supports the troops, no matter what their views of the war are.  But part of me is telling me that I don't deserve their praise or their numerous drink offers.  I'm no hero, and I don't even want to be.... and that's one thing I learned about being in war.

    A man must die in order to become a hero.  A survivor of an extraordinary event is simply a survivor.  And many more men will continue to die in order to become heroes, and others will come home and recall how proud they are to have met these martyred men.  But the point is, they're dead, and the survivor has to return home bearing the guilt of losing a man out in battle.  Just remember-- you're buying the dead the drinks, not us-- we're just drinking them in behalf of those that left us.

    Well.... that and I won't ever say "no" to free food and drinks.  And sometimes women, which again-- I am not picky.

    Naturally I woke up with mysterious bruises in an unknown location the next day after the Ball, which half an hour later I figured out I was lying in the bushes in the back of the hotel by the parking lot.  Only because some other Marine woke me up because he was 10 feet away and fell asleep in the parking lot the night before.

    Its getting better though, PTSD is an issue but it really doesn't affect my life as bad as it used to be.  I'm prepared to face these moments of insanity every once in a while in the future-- meanwhile, I'm starving.

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