Last few Weeks

Happy New Year everyone! And a belated Merry Xmas as well!

I should apologize for not writing anything for the past month. I attempted to respond to Tripp's "snapshot of life" request. I hope that you'll never see it because I thought it was awfully boring and poorly written. It's not a completely un-interesting tale, but it could easily sound like one if told wrong. And so, you'll have to read a bunch of these and I will reveal who I am and how I got into this mess bit by bit. I think it will be better that way.

Hawaii is beautiful and sad. Beautiful in the way only tropical paradises can be, and sad the way any tourist trap is pitiful. I'm sure that some of the other less populated islands retain more of their dignity. Pearl Harbor is on Oahu, the most populated of the islands. Regrettably, most of what I saw was the bar district of Waikiki. Cool if you're into that kind of thing, which most of the guys are.

Life on the boat since Hawaii has been hectic. Every so many flight hours we have to overhaul our planes. This involves a good deal of work. Even so, it's possible to get one knocked out in three days. However, that requires having all of the proper tools and replacement parts on hand and ready to go. There's nothing more frustrating for me than to spend all night working like mad, and not accomplishing job one.

In addition to that, there are several thousand other people on the ship and they all have their work and training to do. Finding quiet time to write has been difficult. What time I have had I've spent keeping in touch with the wife back home. This has not been easy. We've talked on the phone for exactly 120 minutes since I left last month, in forty-minute increments. Each conversation more difficult than the last.

I don't know why everyone is so concerned for my well-being. I'll be fine. Physically, I have thousands of Marines and Sailors protecting me and the planes I work on. Mentally, I have a wonderful woman supporting me from a million miles away. Problem: there is little I can do to return her support right now. To those of you wanting to help me get through this deployment: help Kady get through it. She needs your support more than I do. I chose to do this, as unhappy as it may make me, she didn't have much of a choice. I literally left her within three days of the wedding for a training mission and couldn't communicate with her at all for the first week and a half. I can almost count the days we've spent together since the wedding on fingers and toes. I owe her so much its absurd. Returning to her in one piece and spending the rest of my life with her is all I need to focus on to get through anything. Don't worry about me; she does enough of that for all of you…just take care of my baby while I'm gone.

Did I mention cowpox yet? Wow, you people don't know the fun you're missing out on here. Apparently, there's still some danger of exposure to Small Pox. So, they immunize us against it. How, you ask? Well, small pox is far too dangerous and virulent to use as a vaccine. Live virus will kill you; dead one won't trigger a response. Can you guess what they use? Live Cow Pox. This is something I've never heard of, but I hope no one I know ever gets it. It's been eight days since my vaccination. I have a gray/white mosquito bite looking sore on my arm the size of a pencil eraser. Of course it itches like hell and I'm not allowed to touch it (or get it wet) because it's highly contagious (spreads like poison ivy). The bad news is that my lymph node in that arm feels like it wants to pop, I have a horrible headache, and my entire body is weak and achy. I have at least another week or two of this before it should scab over. Then I wait for the scab to fall off and I have to flush that down the toilet because it's still THAT contagious. Wow, and I thought the Anthrax shot was bad. The military really knows how to put the F.U. in fun. "Merry Christmas! Here's a violently contagious biological agent!" Just want I always wanted! My body just became a biological weapon for the holidays. Can anybody top that?

Has anybody NOT already heard that we are steaming toward Sri Lanka to provide disaster relief and humanitarian aid? We received instruction to maintain "Operational Security" and not tell a soul where we were going or what we were doing. The very next morning after that order, I see this boat on FOX News on the satellite TV. in the dining room. I learned more about what we were doing from watching the news for five minutes than I did from my own command. So much for secrecy! Why they wanted to keep disaster relief secret is beyond me anyway. Of course, it's supposed to be about not giving away our position to any enemy. What enemy could we possibly encounter at sea? Terrorist Islamic jellyfish? Dolphins in league with Al-Qaeda? What next? The Iraqi Navy?

My point is that if you've been watching the news at all, I'm sure that you know more about not only what's going on in the world, but what's going on with the my unit. The news reported that we gave up a liberty port in Guam and a New Year's in Singapore (maybe) to go help out at such and such port in Sri Lanka arriving on this date to stay for so long. They made it sound like it was out of the goodness of our own hearts that we'd decided to go do this. They didn't ask for a vote. Not on this ship. I work with people who can't wait to get to Iraq or wherever and kill people. They like alcohol and prostitutes, as a rule, and wouldn't give up a night of either for anything. That's not an absolute…just the stereotype, and you know how stereotypes work.

Personally, I'm glad we're going. Although, I can't imagine what 150,000 dead people smell like, I'd much rather help people survive than help kill them. I hope we stay longer than a couple weeks. This travesty of a military engagement in the Middle East isn't going away anytime soon. It can wait. All our presence there will do is to allow some other soldiers to take a break and maybe come home. There hasn't been peace in these countries since man began recording history. How uneducated are we? To think that stepping in to blow up their countryside, kidnap their leader, and force democracy down their throats will solve anything is grossly presumptuous at best. Of course, Saddam WAS an evil dictator who tortured and subjugated his people. However, everybody knows that human suffering alone has never been enough to motivate the US to war. When did we join the fight against the Axis powers? When Hitler abused the electoral system and became the world's most famous dictator? No? But that was evil, right? Then it must have been when Hitler was committing genocide? No? How about when he started raping Europe, attacking our allies? Not even then? How about when "evil" Japan directly attacked our country? Oh yeah, that's right. We went to war because Saddam was an evil dictator who tortured and subjugated our oil.

If we were really at war with terrorism, shouldn't we also be in, say, Ireland? There are terrorists there who hate Americans, why don't we go after them? Because the closest thing to oil in Ireland is Guinness.

So, Happy New Year from somewhere in the Pacific.

note from Kady: I don't need taking care of, I think he just means that it's not as hard from him to go through this as it is for me and it was his decision, not mine.