Shades of The Desert

I remember walking through our base in Iraq, during my first tour, it was named "Camp Liberty." I remember feeling the sand and gravel crunching  and shifting under my boots, so unlike the rocky terrain we have here, or even the beaches on the gulf, it felt loose, yet hard, as if weighed and packed  down by the thousands of years of war and death and the marching of foreign soldiers on top of it. In other places, it's fine and powdery and coughs up puffs while you walk through it, "moon dust" we called it. It will eventually be compacted down, too.

It's so hot and dry, it's like you're walking in a giant, endless oven. The sun constantly beats down on you, and the sweat runs down from the top of your head, under your clothes, down your back and arms and drips down from your fingers tips like drops of blood. It's like you're a sponge, and the very atmosphere in the place is squeezing you dry little by little. What few breezes you do get offer little comfort, they only assault your face with more hot air and sand that feels like dozens of tiny needles on your face. You eventually learn to not complain about it, it does little else but get sand in your teeth.

Sometimes I would get lost in thoughts about far off places, things that happened what seem like lifetimes ago, or people whose faces I can barely remember. The ubiquitous weight of my M4 rifle slung on my shoulder and the fully loaded 30 round magazine in my pocket, eight pounds at the most, are weight enough to remind me of where I am and what the stakes are.

Then we get called up on a mission, like so many times before that I've lost count. We gather around our Humvees with gear in hand: helmet, gloves, body armor, and camelbak. We start to gear up and instantly the heat and sweat and sand are forgotten. All together my gear weighs about 50lbs, it's heavy on my shoulders, but it's a welcomed, reassuring heavy, like my father's hugs when I was a child. I tighten my body armor around me and strap on my helmet, and suddenly, I'm not just a soldier, I'm a knight in a suit of armor, I'm a Spartan, a Samurai, a Conquistador. I climb into the turret of humvee like climbing onto the saddle of my warhorse. The M2 50 caliber machine gun is my lance, locked and loaded; my M4 is a sword, sheathed and ready; they are my instruments.

There is a mix of emotion: excitement ,because anything might happen; fear, because anything can happen; familiarity, not from just the missions before, but from a deep sense that this is something I've done for lifetimes. There is never a doubt in my mind that this is what I was born to do.