Rooster Tails and Paper Dolls...

So it has been a very long time since I have had anything of value to say on here, I have been very busy- jihad, boom-boom classes and trips the airport have consumed more of my time than I would like to admit.

I have just finished watching the movie Madison, talk about a really good movie. The funniest thing is that I picked it up at the P/X at a camp here in town where I was taking my boom-boom class. Who would’ve thought that while touring Iraq, I would bump into a movie that I always wanted to see as I was killing time in the cool Middle Eastern spring evening? For those of you who don’t know (there probably aren’t many of you) Madison is the town in southern Indiana located right down the Ohio River from my beloved Alma Mater HC. The movie is the story of the 1971 Gold Cup Race, which is the hydroplane championship- this is the sport’s World Series. The Madison Regatta has been held every year since like 1904. I never attended the race while in College- though thanks to the Ulster Project and the Sloan family I got the chance to see the race the summer after I graduated. I really hope to be able to attend the race again when my time in the service is over.

Sitting in my room, in a mausoleum, here in Baghdad watching that movie brought a whole lot of memories flooding back. Seeing all of the places that I passed for four years and then fell in love with during the summer of ’03, brought back so many good memories. The movie showed so the spirit of that river town that made me fall in love with it that summer, Madison really is a special town and I count myself very fortunate to have had the chance to live there for a few short months and have my entire outlook concerning that sleepy town changed. As an HC student I don’t think you ever fully appreciate that wonderful little bubble that you live in until you are sitting so very far away from it. I was given a golden opportunity to stick around for just a little longer than most and I have never made a better decision in my whole life. The friends that I made over those few short months are of a caliber rarely seen in the real world. The truly amazing part of all of this is that I remembered all of this from where I am currently located, each day here it is a struggle to keep my head up and my eyes on the horizon it would be so very simple just to lie down and succumb to the despair.

So in short if you have any love of HC (you will see a lot of old memories) or the town of Madison itself, you have probably all ready seen the film, if not find it and watch it. It really brought a little bit of home right into my room, as well as a flood of memories that brightened my day for just a few short moments and of course led to you getting a few legitimate paragraphs out of my monkey butt.

This past week I took a little mini-holiday here in Iraq- no patrols, no command decisions and no Iraq (for all intensive purposes). I went down south to the camp where the main body of my unit stays to take a boom-boom class. There are very few things that a United States soldier cannot defeat, that being said the one thing that is killing more people here than any other is the boom-boom. Explosives are tough to combat and probably account for the vast majority of fear filled moments. When someone is shooting at you, you can locate that person at shoot back- when something goes boom, you feel very helpless and you have a limited list of responses to choose from. So the question becomes how do you combat the things that you can’t see or shoot? That is exactly what I spent the last few days learning; now I have many techniques and insights to take back to my troops that I did not have before. The instructors of this class were made up of Soldiers, Sailors, Brits and Aussies- a more dedicated group of instructors I have never encountered in a military setting. The class of course required a certain level of trust (read as security clearance) - so one frustrating part is that there are things that I learned that I cannot directly teach my guys. I also made the mistake of using my catchall notebook for the class, because now it has to be kept secure and I need a new everyday notebook. I really hope that I can impart in my troops at least half of the things that I learned if I can do that I will save lives.

It was nice to spend a few days away from my unit, I didn’t have to worry about going out of the wire to fight and where we were was a larger camp and had some amenities that we don’t have here. It has the military’s version of Starbucks- so I was able to relax with a latte and read some Hemingway or talk with friends of mine. The entire time that I was there I carried a little laminated paper man named Flat Stanley in my pocket- this will transition into my next homesick memory of the week. My little cousin Breanna, who is absolutely adorable and whom I miss dearly, sent this little man to me as part of a school project. They read a book about Stanley, then made their own little Stanleys’ and sent them to relatives all over the place. The charge to the receiver of Stanley is to take him around with you for a week or so and take some pictures of you and Stanley going about your day. My Stanley so far has been on combat patrols, raids and set in on meetings that a lot of the guys I work with couldn’t get into.

So there I was a few nights ago sitting inside my room at this other camp and going over some material from class when I felt a crunch against my thigh- it was Stanley. I of course took him out of my pocket and started to think about all of the fun that I had had with Breanna and her family during my spring breaks in College. It is funny to think of where I am and how something as simple a paper figure or a film can take me back to times in my life that seem so much more important now that I look back on them. I am very lucky to be given these mental holidays and even luckier to have such special people and places to visit while I am there. War is a funny thing.

With that I leave you with a picture of the Regatta from ’03…

Peace and Love- Roadshow 6

P.S. the spray coming off of the back of the boats is a rooster tail